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Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire, also called Osmanic Empire or Osmanian EmpireOld Ottoman Turkish: دولت عالیه عثمانیه Devlet-i Âliye-yi Osmâniyye, Late Ottoman and Modern Turkish: Osmanlı Devleti or Osmanlı İmparatorluğu), was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Turkish-ruled state. The state was known as the Turkish Empire or Turkey by its contemporaries; see the other names of the Ottoman State. It was succeeded by the Republic of Turkey, which was officially proclaimed in 1923. (1299–1922) (
At the height of its power (16th – 17th century), it spanned three continents, controlling much of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar (and, in 1553, the Atlantic coast of Morocco beyond Gibraltar) in the west to the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf in the east, from the edge of Austria, Slovakia and parts of Ukraine in the north to Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen in the south. The Ottoman Empire contained 29 provinces, in addition to the tributary principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia.
The empire was at the centre of interactions between the Eastern and WesternRoman and Byzantine worlds for six centuries. The Ottoman Empire was, in many respects, an Islamic successor to earlier Mediterranean empires — namely the empires.
Rise (1299–1453)

With the demise of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rūm, Turkish Anatolia was divided into a patchwork of independent states, the so-called Ghazi emirates.
By 1300, a weakened Byzantium had seen most of its Anatolian provinces lost among some ten Ghazi principalities. One of the Ghazi emirates was led by Osman I (from which the name Ottoman is derived), son of Ertuğrul in the region of Eskişehir in western Anatolia. According to tradition, as Ertuğrul migrated across Asia Minor leading approximately four hundred horsemen, he chanced upon a battle between two armies. Having decided to intervene, he chose the side of the losing army and turned the battle in their favour to secure victory. The troops he supported happened to be those of a Seljuk Sultan who rewarded him with territory in Eskişehir. Following Ertuğrul's death in 1281, Osman became chief, or Bey, and by 1299 declared himself a sovereign ruler from the Seljuk empire.
Osman I extended the frontiers of Ottoman settlement towards the edge of the Byzantine Empire. He moved the Ottoman capital to Bursa, and shaped the early political development of the nation. Given the nickname "Kara" (Turkish for black) for his courage, Osman I was admired as a strong and dynamic ruler long after his death, as evident in the centuries-old Turkish phrase, "May he be as good as Osman." His reputation has also been burnished by the medieval Turkish story known as "Osman's Dream", a foundation myth in which the young Osman was inspired to conquest by a prescient vision of empire.
This period saw the creation of a formal Ottoman government whose institutions would remain largely unchanged for almost four centuries. The government utilized the legal entity known as the millet, under which religious and ethnic minorities were able to manage their own affairs with substantial independence from central control.
In the century after the death of Osman I, Ottoman rule began to extend over the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. After defeat in Battle of Plocnik, the Turkish victory at the Battle of Kosovo effectively marked the end of SerbianConstantinople became a crucial objective. The empire controlled nearly all of the former Byzantine lands, the Greeks gained a temporary reprieve when Tamerlane invaded Anatolia in 1402, taking Sultan Bayezid I prisoner. power in the region, and paved the way for Ottoman expansion into Europe. With the extension of Turkish dominion into the Balkans, the strategic conquest of
The capture of Bayezid I threw the Turks into disorder. The state fell into a civil war which lasted from 1402 to 1413, as Bayezid's sons fought over succession. It ended when Mehmet I emerged, and then restored the Ottoman power, after the Interregnum. His grandson, Mehmet the Conqueror, reorganized the structure of both the state and military, and demonstrated his martial prowess by capturing Constantinople (see: Istanbul (Etymology)) on 29 May 1453, at the age of 21. The city became the new capital of the Ottoman Empire, and Mehmet II assumed the title of Kayser-i Rûm (Roman Emperor). To consolidate this claim, Mehmet II aspired to gain control over the Western capital, Rome, as well; and Ottoman forces occupied parts of the Italian peninsula, starting from OtrantoApulia on July 28, 1480. But after Mehmet II's death on May 3, 1481, the campaign on Italy was canceled and the Ottoman forces retreated. and

Growth (1453–1683)

This period in Ottoman history can roughly be divided into two distinct eras: an era of territorial, economic, and cultural growth prior to 1566, followed by an era of relative military and political stagnation.

Expansion and apogee (1453–1566)

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 cemented the status of the empire as the preeminent power in southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. During this time, the Ottoman Empire entered a long period of conquest and expansion, extending its borders deep into Europe and North Africa. Conquests on land were driven by the discipline and innovation of the Ottoman military; and on the sea, the Ottoman navy established the empire as a great trading power. The state also flourished economically thanks to its control of the major overland trade routes between Europe and Asia.
The Empire prospered under the rule of a line of committed and effective sultans. Sultan Selim I (1512–1520) dramatically expanded the empire's eastern and southern frontiers by defeating Shah Ismail of the Safavid Persia, in the Battle of Chaldiran. Selim I established Ottoman rule in Egypt, and created a naval presence on the Red Sea. After this Ottoman expansion, a competition started between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottoman Empire to become the dominant power in the region.
Selim's successor, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566), further expanded upon Selim's conquests. After capturing Belgrade in 1521, Suleiman conquered the Kingdom of Hungary and established Ottoman rule in the territory of present-day Hungary and other Central European territories, after his victory in the Battle of Mohács in 1526. He then laid siege to Vienna in 1529, but failed to take the city after the onset of winter forced his retreat. During the reign of Suleiman, Transylvania, Wallachia and, intermittently, Moldavia, became tributary principalities of the Ottoman Empire, but never became parts of it. In the east, the Ottomans took Baghdad from the Persians in 1535, gaining control of Mesopotamia and naval access to the Persian Gulf.


Under Selim and Suleiman, the empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea. The exploits of the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, who commanded the Turkish navy during Suleiman's reign, led to a number of military victories over Christian navies. Among these were the conquest of Tunis and Algeria from Spain; the evacuation of Muslims and Jews from Spain to the safety of Ottoman lands (particularly Salonica, Cyprus, and Constantinople) during the Spanish Inquisition; and the capture of Nice from the Holy Roman Empire in 1543. This last conquest occurred on behalf of France as a joint venture between the forces of the French king Francis I and those of Barbarossa. France and the Ottoman Empire, united by mutual opposition to Habsburg rule in southern and central Europe, became strong allies during this period. The alliance was economic as well as military, as the sultans granted France the right of trade within the empire without levy of taxation. In fact, the Ottoman Empire was by this time a significant and accepted part of the European political sphere, and entered into a military alliance with France, England and the NetherlandsHabsburg Spain, Italy and Habsburg Austria. against


As the 16th century progressed, Ottoman naval superiority was challenged by the growing sea powers of western Europe, particularly Portugal, in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands. With the Ottomans blockading sea-lanes to the East and South, the European powers were driven to find another way to the ancient silk and spice routes, now under Ottoman control. On land, the empire was preoccupied by military campaigns in the Austria and Persia, two widely-separated theaters of war. The strain of these conflicts on the empire's resources, and the logistics of maintaining lines of supply and communication across such vast distances, ultimately rendered its sea efforts unsustainable and unsuccessful. The overriding military need for defense on the western and eastern frontiers of the empire eventually made effective long-term engagement on a global scale impossible.

Revolts and revival (1566–1683)

Suleiman's death in 1566 marked the beginning of an era of diminishing territorial gains. The rise of western European nations as naval powers and the development of alternative sea routes from Europe to Asia and the New WorldBattle of Vienna in 1683, which marked the end of Ottoman expansion into Europe. damaged the Ottoman economy. The effective military and bureaucratic structures of the previous century also came under strain during a protracted period of misrule by weak Sultans. But in spite of these difficulties, the empire remained a major expansionist power until the
European states initiated efforts at this time to curb Ottoman control of overland trade routes. Western European states began to circumvent the Ottoman trade monopoly by establishing their own naval routes to Asia. Economically, the huge influx of Spanish silver from the New World caused a sharp devaluation of the Ottoman currency and rampant inflation. This had serious negative consequences at all levels of Ottoman society. Sokullu Mehmet Pasha, who was the grand vizier of Selim II, created the projects of Suez Channel and Don-Volga Channel to save the economy but these were cancelled as well.


In southern Europe, a coalition of Catholic powers, led by Philip II of Spain, formed an alliance to diminish Ottoman naval strength in the Mediterranean Sea. Their victory over the Ottomans at the naval Battle of Lepanto (1571) hastened the end of the empire's primacy in the Mediterranean. In fact, Lepanto was considered by some earlier historians to signal the beginning of Ottoman decline. By the end of the 16th century, the golden era of sweeping conquest and territorial expansion was over. Nevertheless, within six months of the defeat a new Ottoman fleet of some 250 sail including eight modern galleasses had been built, with the harbours of Constantinople turning out a new ship every day at the height of the construction. In any case Lepanto was a mere "revenge attack" since Cyprus had been taken from the Venetians before the two navies engaged in 1571. In discussing with a Venentian minister, the Turkish Grand Vizier commented "In capturing Cyprus from you we have cut off one of your arms; in defeating our fleet you have merely shaved off our beard". The Sultan himself said, "the infidel has only singed my beard. It will grow again."


The Habsburg frontier in particular became a more or less permanent border until the 19th century, marked only by relatively minor battles concentrating on the possession of individual fortresses. This stalemate was partly a reflection of simple geographical limits: in the pre-mechanized age, Vienna marked the furthest point that an Ottoman army could march from Istanbul during the early-spring to late-autumn campaigning season. It also reflected the difficulties imposed on the empire by the need to maintain two separate fronts: one against the Austrians, and the other against a rival Islamic state, the Safavids of Persia (see: Ottoman wars in Near East).
On the battlefield, the Ottomans gradually fell behind the Europeans in military technology as the innovation which fed the empire's forceful expansion became stifled by growing religious and intellectual conservatism. Changes in European military tactics caused the once-feared Sipahi cavalry to lose military relevance. Discipline and unit cohesion in the army also became a problem because of relaxations in recruitment policy and the growth of the Janissary corps at the expense of other military units.
Murad IV (1612–1640), who recaptured Yerevan (1635) and Baghdad (1639) from the Safavids, is the only example in this era of a sultan who exercised strong political and military control of the empire. Notably, Murad IV was the last Ottoman emperor who led his forces from the front.
The Jelali revolts (1519–1610) and Janissary revolts (1622) caused widespread lawlessness and rebellion in Anatolia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and toppled several governments. However, the 17th century was not simply an era of stagnation and decline, but also a key period in which the Ottoman state and its structures began to adapt to new pressures and new realities, internal and external.
The Sultanate of women (1530s–1660s) was a period in which the political impact of the Imperial Harem was unchallenged, as the mothers of young sultans exercised power on behalf of their sons. Hürrem Sultan, who established herself in the early 1530s as the successor of Nurbanu, the first Valide Sultan, was described by the Venetian Baylo Andrea Giritti as 'a woman of the utmost goodness, courage and wisdom' despite the fact that she 'thwarted some while rewarding others'. The last prominent women of this period were Kösem Sultan and her daughter-in-law Turhan Hatice, whose political rivalry culminated in Kösem's murder in 1651. This period gave way to the Köprülü Era (1656–1703), during which the Empire was controlled first by the powerful members of the Imperial Harem, and later by a sequence of Grand Viziers. The relative ineffectiveness of the successive sultans and the diffusion of power to lower levels of the government have characterized the Köprülü Era.

Stagnation and reform (1699–1827)

During the stagnation period much territory in the Balkans was ceded to Austria. Certain areas of the empire, such as Egypt and Algeria, became independent in all but name, and subsequently came under the influence of Britain and France. The 18th century saw centralized authority giving way to varying degrees of provincial autonomy enjoyed by local governors and leaders. A series of wars were fought between the Russian and Ottoman empires from the 17th to the 19th century.
The long period of Ottoman stagnation is typically characterized by historians as an era of failed reforms. In the latter part of this period there were educational and technological reforms, including the establishment of higher education institutions such as Istanbul Technical University; Ottoman science and technology had been highly regarded in medieval times, as a result of Ottoman scholars' synthesis of classical learning with Islamic philosophy and mathematics, and knowledge of such Chinese advances in technology as gunpowder and the magnetic compass. By this period though the influences had become regressive and conservative. The guilds of writers denounced the printing press as "the Devil's Invention", and were responsible for a 43-year lag between its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in Europe in 1450 and its introduction to the Ottoman society with the Gutenberg press in Istanbul that was established by the Sephardic Jews of Spain in 1493. Sephardic Jews migrated to the Ottoman Empire as they escaped from the Spanish Inquisition of 1492.
The Tulip Era (or Lâle Devri in Turkish), named for Sultan Ahmed III's love of the tulip flower and its use to symbolize his peaceful reign, the empire's policy towards Europe underwent a shift. The region was peaceful between 1718 and 1730, after the Ottoman victory against Russia in the Pruth Campaign in 1712 and the subsequent Treaty of Passarowitz brought a period of pause in warfare. The empire began to improve the fortifications of cities bordering the Balkans to act as a defense against European expansionism. Other tentative reforms were also enacted: taxes were lowered; there were attempts to improve the image of the Ottoman state; and the first instances of private investment and entrepreneurship occurred.
Ottoman military reform efforts begin with Selim III (1789–1807) who made the first major attempts to modernize the army along European lines. These efforts, however, were hampered by reactionist movements, partly from the religious leadership, but primarily from the Janissary corps, who had become anarchic and ineffectual. Jealous of their privileges and firmly opposed to change created a Janissary revolt. Selim's efforts cost him his throne and his life, but were resolved in spectacular and bloody fashion by his successor, the dynamic Mahmud II, who massacred the Janissary corps in 1826.

Decline and modernization (1828–1908)

The period of Ottoman decline (loss of huge territories) is typically characterized by historians also as an era of modern times. The empire lost territory on all fronts, and there was administrative instability because of the breakdown of centralized government, despite efforts of reform and reorganization such as the Tanzimat.
The rise of nationalism swept through many countries during the 19th century, and the Ottoman Empire was not immune. A burgeoning national consciousness, together with a growing sense of ethnic nationalism, made nationalistic thought one of the most significant Western ideas imported to the Ottoman empire, as it was forced to deal with nationalism-related issues both within and beyond its borders. There was a significant increase in the number of revolutionary political parties. Uprisings in Ottoman territory had many far-reaching consequences during the 19th century and determined much of Ottoman policy during the early 20th century. Many Ottoman Turks questioned whether the policies of the state were to blame: some felt that the sources of ethnic conflict were external, and unrelated to issues of governance. While this era was not without some successes, the ability of the Ottoman state to have any effect on ethnic uprisings was seriously called into question. GreeceGreek War of Independence. Reforms did not halt the rise of nationalism in the Danubian Principalities and Serbia, which had been semi-independent for almost 6 decades; in 1875 Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Wallachia and MoldovaRusso-Turkish War of 1877-78, independence was formally granted to Serbia, Romania and Montenegro, and autonomy to Bulgaria, with the other Balkan territories remaining under Ottoman control. A Serbian Jew, Yehuda Solomon Alkalai, encouraged a return to Zion and independence for Israel during this wave of decolonialization. declared its independence from the Empire in 1829 after the end of the declared their independence from the Empire; and following the
During the Tanzimat period (from Arabic Tanzîmât, meaning "reorganization") (1839–1876), a series of constitutional reforms led to a fairly modern conscripted army, banking system reforms, and the replacement of guilds with modern factories. In 1856, the Hatt-ı Hümayun promised equality for all Ottoman citizens irrespective of their ethnicity and confession, widening the scope of the 1839 Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane. The Christian millets gained privileges; such as in 1863 the Armenian National Constitution (Ottoman Turkish:"Nizâmnâme-i Millet-i Ermeniyân") was Divan approved form of the "Code of Regulations" composed of 150 articles drafted by the "Armenian intelligentsia", and newly formed "Armenian National Assembly".[12] The reformist period peaked with the Constitution, called the Kanûn-ı Esâsî (meaning "Basic Law" in Ottoman Turkish), written by members of the Young Ottomans, which was promulgated on 23 November 1876. It established freedom of belief and equality of all citizens before the law.
The empire's First Constitutional era (or Birinci Meşrûtiyet Devri in Turkish), was short-lived; however, the idea behind it (Ottomanism), proved influential as a wide-ranging group of reformers known as the Young Ottomans, primarily educated in Western universities, believed that a constitutional monarchy would provide an answer to the empire's growing social unrest. Through a military coup in 1876, they forced Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876) to abdicate in favour of Murad V. However, Murad V was mentally ill, and was deposed within a few months. His heir-apparent Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) was invited to assume power on the condition that he would accept to declare a constitutional monarchy, which he did on 23 November 1876. However, the parliament survived for only two years. The sultan suspended, not abolished, the parliament until he was forced to reconvene it. The effectiveness of Kanûn-ı Esâsî was then largely minimized.
During this time, the Empire faced challenges in defending itself against foreign invasion and occupation. Egypt was occupied by the French in 1798. Following defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, Cyprus was loaned to the British in 1878 in exchange for Britain's favors at the Congress of Berlin. The empire ceased to enter conflicts on its own and began to forge alliances with European countries such as France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Russia. As an example, in the Crimean War the Ottomans united with the British, French, and others against Russia.
Economically, the empire had difficulty in repaying the Ottoman public debt to European banks, which caused the establishment of The Council of Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. Despite the empire's label as the "Sick man of Europe", the empire's actual weakness did not reside in its developing economy, but the cultural gap which separated it from the European powers. The empire's troubled socioeconomics during the Ottoman reformation era were, in fact, the result of an inability to deal with the new problems created by the conflict between external imperialism and rising internal nationalism.

Dissolution (1908–1922)

The Second Constitutional Era (or İkinci Meşrûtiyet Devri in Turkish) marks the period of the Ottoman Empire's final dissolution. This era is dominated by the politics of the Committee of Union and Progress (or İttihâd ve Terakkî Cemiyeti in Turkish), and the movement that would become known as the "Young Turks" (or Jön Türkler in Turkish). The Young Turk Revolution began on 3 July 1908 and quickly spread throughout the empire, resulting in the sultan's announcement of the restoration of the 1876 constitution and the reconvening of parliament. The constitutional era had a lapse between Countercoup (1909) and counter-revolution 31 March Incident that ended with the sultan Abdulhamid IIMehmed V deposed and sent to exile in Selanik, and replaced by his brother Reşad.
Profiting from the civil strife within the Ottoman Empire during the Young Turk Revolution, Austria-Hungary officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, having occupied it following the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878) and the Congress of Berlin (1878). Bosnia and Herzegovina was still de jure Ottoman territory until 1908. During the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan League, which was composed of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria, declared war against the Ottoman Empire, which lost most of its Balkan territories during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The wars in Libya and the Balkan peninsula posed the first major tests for the Committee of Union and Progress. However, Libya was lost following the Italo-Turkish War, which was also the first war in history where airplanes were used on the battlefield.
The new Balkan states which were formed at the end of the 19th century sought additional territories from the Ottoman provinces of Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace, on the grounds of ethnic nationalism. Initially, with Russia acting as an intermediary, agreements were concluded between Serbia and Bulgaria in March 1912, and between Greece and Bulgaria in May 1912. Montenegro subsequently concluded agreements between Serbia and Bulgaria in October 1912.
The Serbian-Bulgarian agreement specifically called for the partition of Macedonia, which was the chief casus belli of the First Balkan War. The main causes of the Second Balkan War were the disputes between the former Balkan allies over their newly gained territories; this then gave the Ottomans an opportunity to regain lost territories in Thrace. The political repercussions of the Balkan Wars led to the coup of 1913, and the subsequent rule of the Three Pashas.

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The Ottomans and their dynasty

Origins of the Ottoman Empire

Pressured out of their homes in the Asian steppes by the Mongols, the Turkish nomadic tribes converted to Islam during the eighth and ninth centuries. By the tenth century, one of the Turkish tribes, the Seljuk, had become a significant power in the Islamic world and had adopted a settled life that included Islamic orthodoxy, a central administration, and taxation. However, many other Turkish groups remained nomadic and, pursuing the gazi tradition, sought to conquer land for Islam and to acquire war booty for themselves. This led them into conflict with the Seljuk Turks, and to pacify the nomadic tribes, the Seljuks directed them to the eastern domain of the Byzantine Empire, Anatolia. The tribe known as the Ottomans arose from one of the smaller emirates established in northwestern Anatolia after 1071. The dynasty was named for Osman (1259-1326), who began to expand his kingdom into the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor, moving his capital to Bursa in 1326.


Ottoman Empire

The political and geographical entity governed by the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Their empire was centered in present-day Turkey, and extended its influence into southeastern Europe as well as the Middle East. Europe was only temporarily able to resist their advance: the turning point came at the Battle of Varna in 1444 when a European coalition army failed to stop the Turkish advance. Only Constantinople (Istanbul) remained in Byzantine hands and its conquest in 1453 seemed inevitable after Varna. The Turks subsequently established an empire in Anatolia and southeastern Europe which lasted until the early twentieth century.
Although the Ottoman Empire is not considered a European kingdom per se, Ottoman expansion had a profound impact on a continent already stunned by the calamities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Ottoman Turks must, therefore, be considered in any study of Europe in the late Middle Ages. The ease with which the Ottoman Empire achieved military victories led Western Europeans to fear that ongoing Ottoman success would collapse the political and social infrastructure of the West and bring about the downfall of Christendom. Such a momentous threat could not be ignored and the Europeans mounted crusades against the Ottomans in 1366, 1396, and 1444, but to no avail. The Ottomans continued to conquer new territories.
One of a number of Turkish tribes that migrated from the central Asian steppe, the Ottomans were initially a nomadic people who followed a primitive shamanistic religion. Contact with various settled peoples led to the introduction of Islam and under Islamic influence, the Turks acquired their greatest fighting tradition, that of the gazi warrior. Well trained and highly skilled, gazi warriors fought to conquer the infidel, acquiring land and riches in the process.
While the gazi warriors fought for Islam, the greatest military asset of the Ottoman Empire was the standing paid army of Christian soldiers, the Janissaries. Originally created in 1330 by Orhan, the janissaries were Christian captives from conquered territories. Educated in the (1319-1389) transformed the new military force into the elite personal army of the Islamic faith and trained as soldiers, the janissaries were forced to provide annual tribute in the form of military service. To counter the challenges of the gazi nobility, Murad ISultan. They were rewarded for their loyalty with grants of newly acquired land and janissaries quickly rose to fill the most important administrative offices of the Ottoman Empire.
During the early history of the Ottoman Empire, political factions within Byzantium employed the Ottoman Turks and the janissaries as mercenaries in their own struggles for imperial supremacy. In the 1340's, a usurper's request for Ottoman assistance in a revolt against the emperor provided the excuse for an Ottoman invasion of Thrace on the northern frontier of the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Thrace gave the Ottomans a foothold in Europe from which future campaigns into the Balkans and Greece were launched and Adrianople (Edirne) became the Ottoman capital in 1366. Over the next century, the Ottomans developed an empire that took in Anatolia and increasingly larger sections of Byzantine territories in Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.
Ottoman expansion into Europe was well underway in the late 14th century. Gallipoli was conquered in 1354 and a vast crusading army was crushed at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. The disaster was so great that the knights of Western Europe were discouraged of launching a new expedition against the Turks. The appearance of the Tatars under Tamerlane early in the fifteenth century temporarily delayed Turkish advances but the Ottomans soon resumed attacks on Byzantium and Eastern Europe. A Hungarian - Polish army was decimated at Varna in 1444 by Murad II and Ottoman conquests were virtually unchecked during the reign of his son, Mehmed II the Conqueror (1432-1481).
Constantinople itself was captured in 1453, sending a shock wave across Europe, and its name was changed to Istanbul. With the fall of Byzantium, a wave of Byzantine refugees fled to the Latin West, carrying with them the classical and Hellenistic knowledge that provided additional impetus to the burgeoning humanism of the Renaissance.
Athens fell in 1456 and Belgrade narrowly escaped capture when a peasant army led by the Hungarian Janos Hunyadi held off a siege in the same year, nevertheless, Serbia, Bosnia, Wallachia, and the Khanate of Crimea were all under Ottoman control by 1478. The Turks commanded the Black Sea and the northern Aegean and many p rime trade routes had been closed to European shipping. The Islamic threat loomed even larger when an Ottoman beachhead was established at Otranto in Italy in 1480.
Although the Turkish presence in Italy was short-lived, it appeared as if Rome itself must soon fall into Islamic hands. In 1529, the Ottomans had moved up the Danube and besieged Vienna. The siege was unsuccessful and the Turks began to retreat. Although the Ottomans continued to instill fear well into the 16th century, internal struggles began to deteriorate the once overwhelming military supremacy of the Ottoman Empire. The outcome of battles was no longer a foregone conclusion and Europeans began to score victories against the Turks.
Despite military success of their territorial expansion, there remained problems of organization and government within the Ottoman Empire. Murad II attempted to limit the influence of the nobility and the gazi by elevating faithful former slaves and janissaries to administrative positions. These administrators came to provide an alternative voice to that of the nobility and, as a result, Murad II and successive Sultans were able to play one faction against the other, a feature that came to typify the Ottoman Empire. The power of the janissaries often overrode a weak sultan and the elite military force occasionally acted as "king-makers".
Another weakness was that primogeniture was not used in Islam and the transference of power from a deceased sultan to his son was frequently disputed. If a sultan died without a male heir or if he left several sons, succession was violently contested. In the early period, to prevent ongoing rivalries, all male relatives of a newly crowned sultan were put to death. Later, however, the potential rivals were merely imprisoned for life. Some historians consider that this policy of imprisonment contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire as mentally unstable and politically inexperienced sultans were rescued from prison and placed upon the throne. Nevertheless, despite frequent disputes over succession, the Ottoman Empire managed to produce effective leaders in the late Middle Ages and a comprehensive government policy developed.
Despite the difficulties of succession and administrative control, the Ottomans had a number of advantages that contributed to their success, the enormous wealth of the Empire being the most significant asset. As the expanded, it acquired control of the Ottoman Empiretrade routes to the East and many European powers, such as Venice and Genoa, paid great sums for the privilege of access to these routes.
Although the atrocities of the "Infidel Turk" struck fear into the hearts of all Christians in the late Middle Ages, in actuality, the Ottomans generally allowed religious groups to continue to practice their own faiths within the conquered territories. They also tended to preserve the established feudal institutions and, in many cases, permitted the co-existence of law codes to regulate the different ethnic and religious groups. Their administrative and governmental systems were well developed and highly effective and most lands under Ottoman control were well managed during this time.

Ottoman Sultans

The Sultanate was inherited from father to son during the early days of the Empire. Fatih, following the struggle for power between Yildirim Bayezit's sons for the throne, enacted the ruling of the murder of other siblings once the eldest was throned, in a decree named after himself. This application, which was enforced for 250 years, was repealed at the dawn of the 17th century and replaced with the rule of the eldest family member upon the death of a sultan. However, all prospective future heirs to the throne were forced to live in the Harem's "cage" section, cut off from the rest of the world.

The sultans of the Empire were:

Osman Gazi(1299-1324/26) Orhan Gazi(1324/26-60) Murat I(1360-89) Yildirim Bayazid I (1389-1403) Mehmet I(1403-21) Murat II(1421-44 and 1446-51) Fatih Mehmet II(1444-46 and 1451-81) Beyazid II(1481-1512) Yavuz Selim I(1512-20) Suleyman I(1520-66) Selim II(1566-74) Murad III(1574-95) Mehmet III(1595-1603) Ahmed I(1603-17) Mustafa I(1617-18 and 1622-23) Genc Osman II(1618-22) Murad IV(1623-40) Ibrahim(1640-48) Avci Mehmed IV(1648-87) Suleyman II(1687-91) Ahmed II(1691-95) Avci Mehmed V(1648-87) Suleyman III(1687-91) Ahmed II(1691-95) Mustafa II(1695-1703) Ahmed III(1703-30) Mahmud I(1730-54) Osman III(1754-57) Mustafa III(1757-74) Abdulhamid I(1774-89) Selim III(1789-1807) Mustafa IV(1807-08) Mahmud II(1808-39) Abdulmecit(1839-61) Abdulaziz(1861-76) Murad V(1876) Abdulhamid II(1876-1909) Mehmed V(1909-18) Vahdettin VI(1918-22)


Osman (1259-1326)

The founder of the Ottoman Empire, Osman succeeded his father to a small territory granted by the Seljuk Turks. He followed the gazi tradition, expanding and enriching his empire. For more info on sultan Osman Gazi please Click Here.

Murad I or Murat I (1319-1389)

Succeeded his father as ruler of the Ottoman Empire in 1359, Murad I captured Thrace in 1363 and by 1369, he had conquered Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Serbia. He died at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 when a Serbian noble gained access to his tent and stabbed him. Murad I reorganized the janissaries into a standing paid army in the service of the sultan. He was succeeded by his son, Yildirim Beyazid.

Murad II or Murat II (c.1403-1451)

Succeeded his father, Mehmet I, in 1421. Murad II continued the expansionist policy of the Ottomans, capturing Salonika and embarking on a series of campaigns against Hungary. He was frustrated by the military strategy of the Hungarian leader, Janos Hunyadi. He signed the Treaty of Szeged in 1444 with a Balkan coalition under the leadership of the Polish king, Wladislaw III. He crushed a Christian army at Varna later in the same year, defeating the combined forces of Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia at Kosovo in 1448, reacquiring control of Serbia, which he had earlier relinquished in the Treaty of Szeged.

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Sultan Osman Gazi

The founder and the first sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Osman, was born in 1258 AD in Sogut, near Bursa. He was one of the three sons of Ertugrul Gazi, and his mother was Hayme Hatun. Osman Gazi was only 23 years old when he took the control of Kayi Clan in Sogut and than ascended the throne after the death of his father, ruling for 27 years until his death in 1326. After his ascension to throne, he gathered several Turcoman groups around himself and fought against Byzantines, collaborating with Alaaddin Keykubat of the Seljuks. When the Seljuk Empire remained rulerless after the exile of Alaaddin, Osman Gazi reunited them under his rule in 1299 marking the history as the foundation of the Ottoman Empire.
Osman Gazi continued his campaigns against the remaining Byzantine Empire in the area along with his brothers, sons, and close supporters. He cut the Byzantine trade routes forcing local rulers to surrender. After 1320 he got sick so his sons continued to fight, capturing many towns from the Byzantines. He died of gout at the age of 68 in Sogut and buried in Bursa.
During his rule, he married Mal Hatun first, from which he had a sun, Orhan Gazi who later became the next sultan. After Mal Hatun he married Bala Hatun from which another son, Alaaddin was born who became his Grand Vizier when grown up. He had a total of 8 sons and 1 daughter.
Osman Gazi was nicknamed as Black (Kara in Turkish), which according to an ancient Turcoman tradition signifies brave and heroic person. He was a tall man with a broad and high chest and long arms, dark tan, round face with a thin beard and long thick mustache, ram-nose, hazel eyes, thick eyebrows, had deep and fine voice, expert on horse riding, sword using, and battle strategies. He was fair, helped very much to the poor people, even giving them his own clothes if he saw a person in need.
Besides military actions, Osman Gazi also established all new measures to form a new empire, such as bringing new laws based on Seljuk laws as well, adopting taxes, minting the first Ottoman coins (Akce), and so on.

[Misafir]

The Ottoman State And Government

The Ottomans inherited a rich mixture of political traditions from vastly disparate ethnic groups: Turks, Persians, Mongols, Mesopotamian and, of course, Islam. The Ottoman state, like the Turkish, Mongol, and Mesopotamian states rested on a principle of absolute authority in the monarch. The nature of Ottoman autocracy, however, is greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted in the West, particularly in world history textbooks.
The central function of the ruler or Sultan in Ottoman political theory was to guarantee justice (Adalet in Turkish) in the land. All authority hinges on the ruler's personal commitment to justice. This idea has both Turco - Persian and Islamic aspects. In Islamic political theory, the model of the just ruler was Solomon in the Hebrew histories (Süleyman is named after Solomon). The justice represented by the Solomonic ruler is a distributive justice; this is a justice of fairness and equity that comes closer to the Western notion of justice. In addition, however, adalet (justice) has Turco - Persian coordinates; in this tradition, adalet, or justice, is the protection of the helpless from the rapacity of corrupt and predatory government. In this sense, justice involves protecting the lowest members of society, the peasantry, from unfair taxation, corrupt magistracy, and inequitable courts. This, in Ottoman political theory, was the primary task of the Sultan. He personally protected his people from the excesses of government, such as predatory taxation and the corruption of local officials. For the Ottomans, the ruler could only guarantee this justice if he had absolute power. For if he was not an absolute ruler, that meant that he would be dependent on others and so subject to corruption. Absolute authority, then, was at the service of building a just government and laws rather than elevating the ruler above the law as Europeans have interpreted the Sultanate.
In order to ensure adalet , the Ottomans set up a number of practices and institutions in the central government surrounding the Sultan. The first was the establishment of a bureaucracy drawn from the Sultan's inner circle. This bureaucracy in turn controlled local governments; this would become the model of European absolutism in the seventeenth century. Other institutions and political practices were:
Observance of government : The Sultan's job was primarily to keep a watch on all the officials. In some cases, this observance of government involved the personal involvement of the Sultan. He would sometimes observe in secret the proceedings of the Divan, which was the central advisory group to the Sultan, and sometimes observe proceedings of ulama courts. For instance, at about the same time that Martin Luther was condemned to death by the Diet of Worms, Sultan Süleyman secretly observed the trial of Molla Kabiz who asserted the spiritual superiority of Jesus Christ over Muhammad. After questioning by the ulama court and refusing to recant, Molla was sentenced to death. Süleyman, however, overturned the verdict because the arguments the courts made had not disproved Molla's arguments (eventually, Molla's arguments were overcome in a later trial).
Periodically, the Sultan was required to tour local governments in disguise to ensure that magistrates and justices were operating justly. If the Sultan believed that an injustice was being committed against the people, he would interfere directly and overturn the decision. Islamic historians argue that the Ottoman Empire decline primarily because later Sultans took less and less interest in maintaining justice in their Empire. For the most part, however, the Sultan monitored local officials through a vast, complex, and elaborate system of spies who would report back to the central bureaucracy. The intelligence gathering system in the Ottoman Empire was the best in the world until the twentieth century!
Siyaset (Politics): Rooting out corruption meant nothing if nothing was done about it. Public agents and officials that abused their power and the peasantry were subjected to a special jurisdiction called the siyaset. The siyaset were a set of severe punishments imposed by the Sultan on corrupt officials; there was no way out, no cash compensation could take the place of the corporeal or, more often, capital punishments swiftly and severely meted out to corrupt officials. In the siyaset system, the most severe crimes involved illegal taxation or forced labor of the peasantry, staying in their homes without permission or billeting troops without permission, and requiring peasants against their will to provide food for them or for soldiers. Such crimes almost certainly meant the death penalty.
Public declaration of laws and taxes : In order to prevent fraudulent taxes and arbitrary laws by public officials, the Sultanic "orders" (ferman) and taxes were declared and posted in public. There was, then, always direct dissemination of central government to the people directly.
Accessibility : Perhaps the most important aspect of Ottoman centralized government was universal access to centralized authority. The highest reaches of power - with the exception of the person of the Sultan - was available to each and every citizen of the Empire. Every single member of Ottoman society could approach the Imperial Council with grievances against government officials; these official petitions were called "ard-i mahdar" and were always treated with the utmost seriousness. If the Imperial Council ruled against the officials, they would often be subjected to the siyaset .
Public opinion : The most common misconception about Islamic rulers in general and Ottoman rulers in particular was that they were removed, aloof, and uninterested in their people. While this may be physically true, it was not ideologically true. In fact, in the Ottoman state, public opinion was regarded as the only true foundation on which state authority rested. If the people ceased to support their rulers, it was argued, then the rulers would soon fall from power. The Sultanic government, then, assiduously cultivated public opinion, for it was recognized that the enemies of the Sultan were also cultivating adverse public opinion. The government did this not only through propaganda, but through policy as well. In addition to prosecuting corrupt government officials and publicly declaring taxes and laws, the Ottoman government also cultivated public opinion in its wars of conquests.
Soldiers were not allowed to mistreat peasants nor take anything from them without their permission or reimbursement. All the Ottoman wars of the conquest in the sixteenth century were assiduously planned years in advance. The government would lay up stores of supplies all along the campaign route so that the armies could feed themselves without taking anything from the general population. The Ottoman conquerors believed that no conquest could stand without the goodwill of the general population of the conquered, so military campaigns were remarkably fair and easy on the average person.
The Ottomans also paid attention to an early form of public opinion polling and were probably the first government to actively monitor public opinion through quantifiable means. The "opinion poll" that they used was the Friday prayers. In most Islamic states, one of the aspects of Friday prayer is to pray for the welfare and life of the ruler. This is an optional part of the Friday prayer, so its inclusion generally means that the members of the mosque think well of the ruler. Its omission frequently means the opposite. The Ottomans paid very strict attention to Friday prayers throughout the Empire in order to precisely gauge public sentiments.

The Structure of Government

Officially, the Sultan was the government. He enjoyed absolute power and, in theory at least, was personally involved in every governmental decision. In the Ottoman experience of government, everything representing the state government issued from the hands of the Sultan himself.
The Sultan also assumed the title of Caliph, or supreme temporal leader, of Islam. The Ottomans claimed this title for several reasons: the two major holy sites, Mecca and Medina, were part of the Empire, and the primary goal of the government was the security of Muslims around the world, particularly the security of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. As Caliph, the Sultan was responsible for Islamic orthodoxy. Almost all of the military conquests and annexations of other countries were done for one of two reasons: to guarantee the safe passage of Muslims to Mecca (the justification for invading non-Muslim territories) and the rooting out of heterodox or heretical Islamic practices and beliefs (the justification for invading or annexing Muslim territories).
Historians simply can't agree on how the Sultanate was passed from generation to generation among the Ottomans. In the early history of the Empire, the Sultanate clearly passes from father to eldest son; in 1603, at the death of Ahmed I (1603-1617), the Sultanate passed to the brother of the Sultan. Still, the Ottomans did not seem to have a hereditary system based on primogeniture (crown passes to the eldest son) or seniority (crown passes to the next oldest brother). In both Turkish and Mongol monarchical systems, the passing of the crown is a haphazard affair. Both the Turkish and Mongol peoples believed that the crown fell to the most worthy inheritor. Each individual in the hereditary line, brothers and sons, were equally entitled to the crown. This meant that successions were almost always major struggles among contending parties. The Ottomans seem to have operated in a similar system. When a Sultan passed away, the crown, it was believed, fell to the most worthy successor (almost always the eldest son). Selim I had to fight for the Sultanate, but Süleyman was the only son of Selim and so inherited the crown without a struggle. Once a Sultan had assumed the throne, all his brothers were executed as well as all their sons - had Selim I lost his bid for the crown, Süleyman would have been killed. These executions guaranteed that there would be no future wars or struggles between claimants to the throne since all the contenders but one were out of the picture.
In the seventeenth century, Ottoman Sultans began to revise this practice and simply imprisoned their brothers - this is what permitted Ahmed I to be succeeded by his brother. Western historians point to this practice as one of the central reasons why the Sultanic government failed. Since the crown was falling to individuals that had been imprisoned much if not most of their lives, the Ottoman state saw a succession of mad Sultans and the corresponding increase in power of a corrupt bureaucracy.
The fundamental qualification for the Sultanate was the individual's worthiness to fill the position. The Ottomans believed that simple succession proved that the Sultan was worthy of the crown; however, the Sultan may grow old, feeble, or corrupt and thus lose his worthiness to serve as Sultan. Selim I came to the throne by deposing his old father, Bayezid II (1481-1512), who was too old to lead the army against external threats. When Süleyman had become an old man, his two sons, Bayezid and Mustafa, his favorite son, plotted to overthrow him. Faced with this treason, the old Süleyman had to execute them both and this seems to have broken his spirit completely.
The Ottomans followed the old Turkish and Mongol tradition of considering the Sultan's lands to be a joint possession of the Sultan's family. Accordingly, the Ottoman lands were parceled out to members of the royal family when each Sultan came to power. Conquered lands were considered the private property of the Sultan.
Although the Sultan was regarded as personally responsible for every government decision, in reality the government was run by a large bureaucracy. This bureaucracy was controlled by a rigid and complex set of rules, and the Sultan himself was constrained by these rules. At the top of the bureaucracy was the Divan (couch), which served as a cabinet to the Sultan for making decisions. The most powerful member of the Sultan's government was the Grand Vizier (like a prime minister of our days) who largely oversaw all the executive functions of the government. Appointments to these positions were not arbitrary but followed strict rules.

[Misafir]

(1) Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans

The weaknesses of the fragmented Balkan states following the death of Stefan Uroš IV Dušan of Serbia in 1355 opened wide the door to the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula by the Ottoman Turks. The Balkan states proved no match for those militantly expansive and highly motivated Islamic invaders, who conquered most of the Balkans (except for its extreme northwestern corner) by the mid-sixteenth century. Its conquest was accomplished in two stages, separated by a decade-long interregnum in the early fifteenth century. The first stage spanned the second half of the fourteenth century, during which Thrace, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Thessaly were acquired outright and Byzantium, Serbia, Wallachia, and much of Morea were reduced to vassal clientage. The second stage, which extended over most of the fifteenth century, accomplished the destruction of Byzantium and the conquest of Constantinople; the total annexation of Serbia and Morea; the outright acquisition of Epiros, Albania, Bosnia, Hercegovina, and much of Croatia; and the imposition of vassal clientage on Moldavia.

Factors in the Ottomans’ Rise and Balkan Conquests

The Ottomans emerged from a welter of small, independent Anatolian Islamic Turkish principalities that succeeded the Seljuk Empire following its defeat by the Mongols in 1243. Most of those states were founded by Turkic tribes previously pushed out of Central Asia into Seljuk territory by the Mongols. Each of them sought to emulate the Seljuks’ former predominance, and all faced the political dilemma, common to nomad-based states, of reconciling nomadic traditions with settled, stable governing institutions. Failure to find a solution to that predicament was the bane of all previous nomad states.
As the nomad states lacked professional standing forces, their essential military foundation was continually threatened by the transitory loyalty of rank-and-file warriors, who followed a particular leader only for as long as he was successful. Nomadic traditions of inheritance, which subscribed to equal division among male heirs, worked against a ruler passing on his territorial possessions whole and to a single successor; a frequent result was civil wars among sons that weakened or destroyed the state. Moreover, the nomad warrior lifestyle worked at odds with settled agrarian and urban pursuits that generated the fiscal and economic resources on which governments depended for stability and longevity. While the rulers of the thirteenth-century Anatolian Turkish principalities primarily depended on nomad warriors for their military strength, they desired the benefits of controlling strong, settled, and organized states. Only the Ottomans ultimately succeeded.
Ottoman origins probably lay in the nomadic Turkic Kayi tribe that entered Anatolia from Iran in the early thirteenth century and became allied with the Seljuks. Their tribal leader—traditionally identified as Ertuğrul—was a Seljuk vassal and received a small piece of territory in northwestern Anatolia that abutted Byzantine lands. Although other Turkish principalities shared borders with Byzantium, only that of Emir Osman I (1281-1324), the first truly historical Ottoman ruler, lay astride the main route to Europe, passing through Byzantium’s most populous and richest Anatolian territories. Throughout his reign, Osman pursued unrelenting warfare against the Christians lying directly across his border.
Islamic precepts combined with Turkic nomad warrior traditions and geography to make Osman’s political situation unique. The concept of holy war (jihad in Arabic, gaza in Turkish) was central to militant Islam. Many Muslim warriors considered it their sacred duty to expand Islam’s worldly domain by force, buttressed by the promise that those who died in the effort received the immediate reward of everlasting paradise. A Turk warrior fighting in the name of holy war was called a gazi, but all nomad warriors, whether gazi or not, sought to enjoy the benefits—plunder and loot-of the militant lifestyle. With most of Anatolia held by Islamic principalities, holy war could be found only in the northwest fighting Christian Byzantium, and the possibilities for the richest fruits of combat could be found only in Byzantine possessions opposite Osman’s small state. A swelling number of Anatolian warriors were attracted to Osman’s standard, eager to fight for both religious glory and worldly rewards. His principality quickly acquired a multi- or non-tribal character, with loyalty to the house of Osman replacing strictly tribal allegiances.
The house of Osman was a crucial factor in the rise of the Ottoman (Osmanlı) state to preeminence among the Anatolian Turkish principalities. Beginning with Osman and ending with the death of Süleyman I the Magnificent (1520-66), it enjoyed an unprecedented succession of ten consecutive extraordinarily talented and successful rulers (sultans). No other contemporaneous Christian Balkan or Muslim West Asian state was blessed with such continuity of effective leadership. Under the house of Osman, traditional nomad attachment to successful commanders became institutionalized as dynastic loyalty, and nomadic mentality gave way to state stability.
One important key to the Ottoman sultans' success was their capitalization on the holy war concept, which provided them with a large, highly motivated military force as well as with a mass following of itinerant peasants and townspeople who flocked to their state from throughout Anatolia seeking new homes and lives in the rich lands captured from Byzantium. The Ottoman principality quickly evolved into a large, heterogeneous, and dynamic frontier society, in which all inhabitants shared an amorphously eclectic lifestyle. Popular Islamic culture held sway in the Ottoman border state. Holy war was viewed as an absolute duty to be conducted continuously against nonbelievers. None of classical Islam’s conditional restraints on defining "true" holy war were given serious consideration. For Ottoman border society, Islam itself was more oral tradition and sufism (the mystical branch of Islam, technically considered orthodox) than scholarly theology and accepted law schools. Most Ottomans, rulers and ruled alike, were connected in some way with interrelated networks of religious mystical orders (dervişes ), urban fellowships (ahis), and craft guilds (esnafs) found throughout Anatolia. The early Ottoman rulers proved extremely adept at welding their diverse followers into a loyal, unified society. They succeeded because they themselves were full-fledged members of that society. Not only were they successful military commanders, they were gazis themselves. They were members of mystical derviş orders, leaders of ahi fellowships, and closely tied to the trade guilds. (Each ruler was trained in a particular craft until well into the imperial period of Ottoman history.) Those institutions, networks provided the rulers with financial support, intelligence information, recruiting pools for additional followers, and sometimes fifth-columnists within enemy states. Endowed with stout military and broad popular support, the early Ottoman rulers possessed unique tools for expanding their small border principality into an empire. To consolidate a stable principality, the Ottoman rulers needed a capital city to serve as a political and economic center. This was accomplished when Osman’s son and successor Orhan captured Bursa from the Byzantines in 1326. Possessing a capital of his own, Orhan began acting the ruler in the accepted classical Islamic traditions of the Seljuks, building mosques, patronizing fellowships and guilds, and attracting Muslim scholars. Soon after Orhan took Bursa, the rest of Byzantine Anatolia fell into his hands, and the Ottoman state became a recognized leading power among the Anatolian Turkish principalities. By 1354 Orhan could stand on the Bosphorus shore of his lands and peer over at the towering walls and majestic domes of Constantinople on the opposite bank. His state had arrived at an important crossroads, both geographically and figuratively. He controlled the Anatolian access to the most important overland European-Asian trade routes, whose central terminus was the Byzantine capital. He also faced a choice regarding the future road for Ottoman state expansion: To move into Christian Europe or to continue on in Islamic West Asia. The fortuitous acquisition of Gallipoli on the European side of the Dardanelles Strait in 1354 settled the question in favor of continued holy war in the Balkans. A combination of factors accounted for the Ottomans rapid and vast Balkan conquests. Once again, the Islamic holy war concept lent them a motivating morale that their European foes initially could not equal. Ottoman forces repeatedly overcame unfavorable battlefield odds to defeat their more numerous European enemies. The compact formations and lumbering shock tactics of the heavily armored Europeans were no match for the more lightly armored Ottoman nomadic horse-archers, who relied on speed, fluidity, and deception in combat. Perhaps more important, the Turk warriors commitment to both holy war and their Ottoman commanders consistently gave them the combat advantage in terms of morale and unity of command (which military experts regard as utterly crucial for battlefield success). Their European enemies, on the other hand, fielded armies composed of independent-minded nobles (whose eagerness to fight for their ruler depended on the perceived advantages to themselves such action might bring) and impressed, untrained peasants (who had little to gain by risking their lives), which made high combat morale and obedience to the commander’s orders somewhat problematic on the battlefield. The armies of state alliances and crusades were usually hastily constructed from forces led by rulers jealous of their own positions and often in direct competition with one another, whose motives for united action were based either on personally threatening circumstances or on political and spiritual benefit. Such forces demonstrated little unity of command and battlefield cohesion. The Ottomans consistently won those campaigns that mattered. As the Ottomans victories in the Balkans multiplied, increasing numbers of Anatolian warriors flocked to their ranks, and their territorial conquests grew. In the wake of the advancing armies arrived a steady stream of settlers from the Ottomans cosmopolitan border society in Anatolia. Many came voluntarily, seeking new lives in a new land, settling in the cities and country sides of the newly won territories. Some, such as the more nomadic pastoral tribes (termed yürüks), were colonized at the sultans orders in regions depopulated by decades of warfare or to secure and protect strategic lines of communication. As Ottoman territory in the Balkans expanded, the new arrivals provided both a ready recruitment pool for the larger army needed to serve on the borders and a demographic base to ensure firm Ottoman control. The sultans of the conquest proved to be master strategists and tacticians. They were open to advice from their subordinate commanders and knew how to delegate authority, with the assurance that their orders would be obeyed. The sultans learned lessons from their own successes and mistakes as well as from those of their adversaries, and they were pragmatic and willing to break with tradition whenever there was a practical reason for doing so (such as adopting early gunpowder weapons, especially artillery, over protests from subordinates that these were “unclean” and not in the tradition of classical Islamic warfare). The Ottoman rulers’ skills also were manifest in the political sphere. Unlike their European Christian enemies, who were fragmented politically and at odds with one another, the Ottoman sultans enjoyed centralized authority that facilitated consistent political action. The state itself was their personal possession, in which their will was law (so long as it did not conflict with Islamic sacred law, the Şeriat). To counteract the traditional nomadic Turkish system of shared inheritance and to guarantee that the state’s unity would be preserved by orderly succession, the early sultans initially designated their eldest sons viceroys (vezirs) and top military commanders, thus giving them firsthand leadership experience and the opportunity to win the warriors’ allegiance. When, by the mid-fifteenth century, that system proved disruptive, a system of fratricide was institutionalized: Upon a sultan’s death, the son who received the allegiance of the key military, administrative, and religious leaders had all of his remaining brothers killed. The sultans of the conquest successfully broke the innate restraints of nomadic tradition on their authority by making use of institutions adapted from the Byzantines and Seljuks. To impose some measure of permanent control over their nomad warriors, they created a service nobility of sorts by granting tribal leaders and notables lucrative land grants for their support in territories won from the Christians. Those endowments, modeled extensively on the pronoia military grants of Byzantium, involved revenues extracted from parcels of land rather than ownership of the land itself. They were conditional upon the recipients fulfilling continued military obligations to the ruler. To further cement their independent authority, the sultans created an efficient administrative system to furnish a stable source of tax revenues. Initially staffed extensively by experienced Christian advisors from Byzantium and other Balkan states, the Ottoman central government became dominated by the sultans’ personal household slaves, over whom the rulers held the power of life and death. Thus the Ottoman government became the most effectively centralized in all of Europe from the late fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries and the envy of many rulers of Christian European states. Slaves also were key in the sultans creating their own military forces to augment (and counterbalance) the army’s nomad warriors. Following Seljuk tradition, the Ottomans formed standing professional military units of janissariesYeni-çeri (in Turkish, meaning "New Troops”) from enslaved prisoners of war, who fell under their direct personal control and were separate from the traditional nomad warrior army. As the empire expanded in the Balkans, so too did the number of Janissaries. Like the slave-administrators, the Janissaries were completely dependent on the will of their ruler—masters, rendering them the most effective standing military force in Europe until the mid-sixteenth century. Institutionalized slavery provided the Ottoman sultans with the means of breaking the limitations imposed on centralized state development by nomadic traditions through creating an invulnerable power base of their own. Slavery, combined with the sultans) alliances with derviş orders, ahi fellowships, and guilds scattered throughout their territories, formed the foundation on which they built their strong, centralized state. Also important in the Ottomans, rise was their rulers’ mastery of diplomacy, coupled with their abilities to understand the inner workings of their enemies and to use that knowledge against them. Many of their Balkan conquests were accomplished through diplomatic, rather than violent, means. The sultans played the divided Balkan Christian states one against another through a series of temporary and shifting alliances, often sealed by deft political marriages with women from the ruling houses of their Christian opponents; Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Serbian spouses proliferated in the sultans’ harems. The early sultans also realized that the Christian states were disunited internally by the growing institution of feudalism, which they came to understand, respect, and use to their advantage. The peaceful acquisition of troops and revenues was far more preferable in the sultans) eyes than their attainment by costly and disruptive warfare. Typically, the Ottomans threatened their enemies with violent military actions in hopes that their rulers would accept vassalage to the sultans, which entailed paying annual tribute and supplying military forces on demand. Only when such hopes proved unattainable, or when vassals reneged on their obligations, did the Ottomans resort to all-out warfare. Throughout the period of the conquest, Balkan Christian rulers commonly embraced Ottoman vassal status in an effort to preserve their positions and possessions. The fact that Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Bosnian rulers all eventually attempted to break their vassal pledges ultimately resulted in their military defeat and the Ottomans’ outright expropriation of their states. The sultans of the conquest also understood the religious divisions among their Christian enemies -between Orthodox and Roman Catholic and between main-stream Christians and heretics. For example, during their military operations against the Latins in Greece, Bosnia, and along the Adriatic, the Ottomans played to their own advantage on the Orthodox populations’ deep-seated distrust of Roman Catholicism following the Great Schism of 1054 and the Crusades. When Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos (1425-48) agreed to reunite the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches on papal terms at the Council of Florence in 1439, the Ottomans used the disaffection of the general Orthodox population in Byzantium to ease their way in conquering the Morea and the Byzantine capital of Constantinople itself .
A final factor aiding the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans was the international situation in Europe during the mid-fourteenth through mid-sixteenth centuries. The Balkan Christian states were weak and divided, while disruptive conditions hampered effective concerted action on the part of Western European states. The arrival of the Ottomans in Europe coincided with the ravages of the Black Plague throughout the West, which crippled the westerners’ ability to respond to the Turkish threat. Moreover, Western Europe then was experiencing an era of intense political fragmentation that undercut its medieval order. The Avignon Captivity (1303-78) and the resulting Roman Catholic Great Schism (1378-1418) undermined traditional papal authority. The Holy Roman Empire was transformed into a disunited federation of independent German states by the Golden Bull of 1356, and its Italian city-state possessions broke free of imperial control. France and England were locked in the Hundred Years WarPoland- Lithuania had its hands full with the Teutonic Knights and a rabid internal conflict between the king and the aristocracy. Only Venice and Hungary, which lay astride most of the Balkans’ northern frontier, were in a position to oppose the Ottomans’ advance. Venice, wracked by plague and demographically small, could do little more than defend its scattered Balkan coastal and offshore possessions. The Hungarians earned lasting national glory by standing against the Turks and taking the lead in three Balkan crusades, in 1396, 1444, and 1448. All three ended in defeat because of the lowered prestige of the papacy, which carried less weight in mobilizing Christian zeal for the fight, and the unwillingness of rulers in the larger Western states to participate, lest rival states prosper in their absence by attacking them at home. All told, Western Europe adopted a defensive posture regarding the Ottomans, effectively abandoning the Balkans to them until the seventeenth century.

The First Stage of Conquest, 1354-1402

Once Orhan decided to pursue holy war against the Christians in Europe, Anatolian Turks were settled in and around Gallipoli to secure it as a springboard for military operations in Thrace against the Byzantines and Bulgarians. Most of eastern Thrace was overrun by Ottoman forces within a decade and permanently brought under Orhan’s control by means of heavy Turkish colonization. The initial Thracian conquests placed the Ottomans strategically astride all of the major overland communication routes linking Constantinople to the Balkans’ frontiers, facilitating their expanded military operations. ln addition, control of the highways in Thrace isolated Byzantium from direct overland contact with any of its potential allies in the Balkans or in Western Europe. Byzantine Emperor John V was forced to sign an unfavorable treaty with Orhan in 1356 that recognized his Thracian losses. Soon after Orhan’s death in 1360, his successor Murad I (1360-89) captured Adrianople, the most important Byzantine military, administrative, and economic center in Thrace. By transferring his capital from Bursa, in Anatolia, to that newly won European city, which he renamed Edirne, Murad signaled his intentions to continue Ottoman expansion in Europe. Before the fall of Adrianople, most Europeans regarded the Ottoman presence in Thrace as merely the latest unpleasant episode in a long string of chaotic events in the southern Balkans. After Murad designated Edirne as his capital, they realized that the Ottomans intended to remain in Europe at Christendom’s expense. The Balkan states immediately menaced by the Ottomans' conquests in Thrace -Byzantium, Bulgaria, and Serbia— were ill-prepared to deal with the threat. Byzantium’s territory was fragmented mostly among the capital at Constantinople and its Thracian environs, the city of Thessaloniki and its immediate surroundings, and the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese. Contact between Constantinople and the two other regions was possible only by means of a tenuous sea route through the Dardanelles kept open by the fickle Genoese. None of Byzantium’s components possessed the resources to defeat the Turks on its own, and concerted action on their part was impossible. The survival of Constantinople itself depended on its legendary defense walls, the lack of an Ottoman navy, and the willingness of the Turks to honor provisions in the 1356 treaty permitting the city to be provisioned. Bulgaria under Tsar Ivan Aleksandur was in decline. To consolidate his authority over as much territory as possible, he divided the state into three appanages held by his sons. That policy proved only partially successful. In the 1340s a bolyar named Balik tore Dobrudzha away from Aleksandur’s control. (Dobrudzha later received its lasting name from a Turkish corruption of the name of Balik’s brother and successor, Dobrotitsa [ca. 1366-85].) Bulgaria’s cohesion was shattered further in the 1350s by a rivalry between the holder of Vidin, Ivan Stratsimir, Ivan Aleksandur’s sole surviving son by his first wife, and Ivan Shishman, the product of Aleksandur’s second marriage and the tsar’s designated successor. The disunity caused by the half-brothers) antagonisms was magnified during the 1350s and 1360s in the religious sphere by the ascendancy of Hesychism within the Bulgarian Turnovo Orthodox Patriarchate. Intolerant of mainstream Orthodox practices, heretics, and Jews, the Hesychasts, led by the fanatical monk Teodosii, initiated disruptive persecutions that caused popular unrest and a wave of emigrations precisely when the Ottoman threat to Bulgaria reached serious proportions. In addition to internal problems, Bulgaria was further crippled by Hungarian attack. In1365 Hungarian King Louis I invaded and seized Vidin province, whose ruler Stratsimir was taken captive. Despite the concurrent loss of most Bulgarian Thracian holdings to the Turks, Ivan Aleksandur became fixated on the Hungarians in Vidin. He formed a coalition against them with Dobrudzhan ruler Dobrotitsa and Voievod Vladislav I Vlaicu of Wallachia. Although the Hungarians were repulsed and Stratsimir was restored to his throne, Bulgaria emerged more intensely divided than previously. Stratsimir proclaimed himself tsar of an "Empire" of Vidin in 1370, and Dobrotitsa received de facto recognition as independent despot in Dobrudzha. Bulgaria’s efforts were squandered to little domestic purpose and against the wrong enemy. Given Serbia’s preeminence in the Balkans under Car Stefan Dušan, its rapid dissolution following his death in 1355 was dramatic. The powerful regional Serb nobles demonstrated little respect for his successor, Stefan Uroš V. Young, weak, and perhaps mentally handicapped, Uroš was incapable of ruling as his father had. The separatist-minded bojars were quick to take advantage of the situation, and Serbia fragmented. First to throw off Serbian control were the Greek provinces of Thessaly and Epiros as well as Dušan’s former Albanian holdings. A series of small independent principalities arose in western and southern Macedonia, while the Hungarians encroached deeper into Serb lands in the north. Uros held only the core Serbian lands, whose nobles, although more powerful than their prince, generally remained loyal. These core lands consisted of: The western lands, including Montenegro ( Zeta); the southern lands, held by Jovan Uglješa in Serres, encompassing all of eastern Macedonia; and the central Serbian lands, stretching from the Danube south into central Macedonia, coruled by Uroš and the powerful noble Vukasin Mrnjavcevic, who held Prilep in Macedonia. Far from preserving Serb unity, Uroš’s loosely amalgamated domains were wracked by constant civil war among the regional nobles, leaving Serbia vulnerable to the rising Ottoman threat. By 1370 Murad controlled most all of Thrace, bringing him into direct contact with Bulgaria and the southeastern Serbian lands ruled by Uglješa. Uglješa, the most powerful Serb regional ruler, unsuccessfully attempted to forge an anti-Ottoman alliance of Balkan states in 1371. Byzantium, vulnerable to the Turks because of its food supply situation, refused to cooperate. Bulgaria, following Ivan Aleksandur’s death early that year, lay officially divided into the "Empire" of Vidin, ruled by Stratsimir (1370-96), and Aleksandur’s direct successor Tsar Ivan Shishman (1371-95), who ruled central Bulgaria from Turnovo. Young, his hold on the throne unsteady, threatened by Stratsimir, and probably pressured by the Turks, Shishman could not afford to participate in Uglješa’s scheme. Of the regional Serb bojars, only Vukašin, protector of Uroš and Uglješa’s brother, joined in the effort. The others either failed to recognize the Ottoman danger or refused to participate lest competitors attacked while they were in the field. Uglješa and Vukasin, accompanied by the latter’s son Marko, led their forces into Western Thrace in September 1371, advancing to the Maritsa River near the village of Ormenion (Chernomen), northwest of Edirne. There Murad launched a surprise attack with his outnumbered troops and annihilated the Serbian army. Both Uglješa and Vukašin perished in the carnage. So overwhelming was the Ottoman victory that the Turks referred to the battle as the Rout (or Destruction) of the Serbs. What little unity Serbia possessed collapsed after the catastrophe at Ormenion. Uroš died before the year was out, ending the Nemanja dynasty, and large areas of central Serbia broke away as independent principalities, reducing it to half of its former size. No future ruler ever again officially held the office of car, and no single bojar enjoyed enough power or respect to gain recognition as a unifying leader. Vukasin’s son Marko, who survived the slaughter, proclaimed himself Serbian "king" (kralj) but was unable to make good on his claim outside of his lands around Prilep in central Macedonia. Serbia slipped into accelerated fragmentation and internecine warfare among the proliferating regional princes. In the aftermath of the Ormenion battle, Ottoman raids into Serbia and Bulgaria intensified. The enormity of the Turks’ victory and the incessant Turkish raids into his lands convinced Turnovo Bulgarian Tsar Shishman of the necessity for coming to terms with the Ottomans. By 1376 at the latest, Shishman accepted vassal status under Murad and sent his sister as the sultan’s “wife” to the harem at Edirne. The arrangement did not prevent Ottoman raiders from continuing to plunder inside of Shishman’s borders. As for Byzantium, Emperor John V definitively accepted Ottoman vassalage soon after the battle, opening the door to Murad’s direct interference in Byzantine domestic politics. The Bulgarians and Serbs enjoyed a brief respite during the 1370s and into the 1380s when matters in Anatolia and increased meddling in Byzantium’s political affairs kept Murad preoccupied. In Serbia, the lull permitted the northern Serb ‘’bojar’’ Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic (1371-89), with the support of powerful Macedonian and Montenegrin nobles and the backing of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate of Pec, to consolidate control over much of the core Serbian lands. Most of the Serb regional rulers in Macedonia, including Marko, accepted vassalage under Murad to preserve their positions, and many of them led Serb forces in the sultan’s army operating in Anatolia against his Turkish rivals. By the mid-1380s Murad’s attention once again focused on the Balkans. With his Bulgarian vassal Shishman preoccupied by a war with Wallachian Voievod Dan I (ca. 1383-86), in 1385 Murad took Sofia, the last remaining Bulgarian possession south of the Balkan Mountains, opening the way toward strategically located Nis, the northern terminus of the important Vardar-Morava highway. Murad captured Nis in 1386, perhaps forcing Lazar of Serbia to accept Ottoman vassalage soon afterward. While he pushed deeper into the north—central Balkans, Murad also had forces moving west along the ‘’Via Ingatia’’ into Macedonia, forcing vassal status on regional rulers who until that time had escaped that fate. One contingent reached the Albanian Adriatic coast in 1385. Another took and occupied Thessaloniki in 1387. The danger to the continued independence of the Balkan Christian states grew alarmingly apparent. When Anatolian affairs forced Murad to leave the Balkans in 1387, his Serbian and Bulgarian vassals attempted to sever their ties to him. Lazar formed a coalition with Tvrtko I of Bosnia and Stratsimir of Vidin. After he refused an Ottoman demand that he live up