The Islamic World to 1600
Empire Building, 1301-1402
According to custom in the Turkish emirates, Osman's followers took his name, and became known as the Osmanlis, or Ottomans. In 1301, with the victory of the Ottomans over the Byzantines at Nicaea, the former Byzantine capital, the Ottoman emirate established itself as a powerful military force. Until 1354, however, the Ottomans remained just one of several Turkish emirates in Asia Minor, albeit the strongest one. That year, the Ottomans received some help from Mother Nature when an earthquake destroyed the walls of the city of Gallipoli, on the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. The Ottomans took advantage of the destruction and chaos to occupy the strategic city. This event finally established Ottoman superiority over the other Turkish realms in Asia Minor, and they were soon absorbed into a unified Turkish state under the Ottomans.
Orhan Courtesy of www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~sami/ |
Osman had died in 1336, twenty years before the capture of Gallipoli, and was succeeded by his son, Orhan, who ruled from 1326 to 1362. Orhan chose Bursa, in the northwest corner of Asia Minor, as the Ottoman capital, and he had several Islamic monuments built there, many of which survive to this day. Orhan is also generally credited with initiating the formation of the Janissaries, the first standing army in Europe.
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Janissaries |
Orhan was succeeded by his son, Murad I (1362-89), who ushered in the first major period of expansion for the Ottomans. The conquest of Gallipoli sparked a wave of Ottoman expansion through the last half of the 14th century. The most important of these conquests was that of the Balkans, including present-day Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslavia, which gave the Ottomans a foothold in Europe. The Ottomans were able to move into the Balkans fairly easily, because of the political disorganisation of the region. Fighting among minor princes had reduced the region to virtual anarchy, and it was unable to gather a unified defence force against the Ottomans. The victory was also made easier for the Ottomans with the help of the local population. The Greeks, for example, welcomed any invader that would end their domination by Italians and other Latins. Other sectors of the population also welcomed the Ottomans, because of their relatively tolerant policies regarding the religions of their subject peoples. Despite their origins as gazi warriors bent on the conquest of non-Muslim lands, the Ottomans were remarkably lenient towards their Christian subjects. The Ottomans officially recognised the Orthodox Christian Church, for example, to which much of the Balkan population adhered, and the Ottomans also were very protective of the Balkan peasantry from exploitation by their rulers.
Because of these factors, it was mainly the Balkan aristocracy and high priests, not the general population, who resisted the Ottoman invasion. In the 1360s, Albania and Macedonia accepted Ottoman rule, and in 1372, the King of Bulgaria became an Ottoman vassal. Ottoman rule in the Balkans was firmly established in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo, in which the Ottomans defeated Stephan Dushan's Kingdom of Serbia. The Ottoman sultan, Murad I, was killed in battle at Kosovo, and he was succeeded by his son, Bayazid I, who continued to advance Ottoman rule in the Balkans. In 1395, the Ottomans killed King Shishman of Bulgaria, as part of their plan to replace local rulers with loyal Ottoman rulers. By 1400, the Ottoman Empire had earned a prestigious reputation throughout the Islamic world, for its continuous conquests of European lands. In 1402, however, much of the empire the Ottomans had spent the past century building was destroyed by the invasion of Timur.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the Timurid Empire was vast by the time it reached Asia Minor in 1402 to battle the Ottomans. That battle was in fact the last major battle of Timur's life, because he died in Samarkand in 1405 after returning from his victory in Asia Minor. Because the Ottoman was the last empire Timur attacked, he brought a wealth of experience and a veteran army with him, since his empire already included Central Asia, northern India, Persia, Iraq, and Syria. Although Timur was not eager to face the Ottomans, whose reputation as a strong military force preceded them, he was convinced to do so by a number of Turkish emirs who had been defeated by the Ottomans and pushed out of Asia Minor, seeking refuge in Timurid lands.
The Ottomans, scrambling to reorganise after hastily ending their siege of Constantinople to face the Timurids, were defeated at the Battle of Ankara in June, 1402. The empire they had built up to that point was destroyed. Sultan Bayazid I was taken prisoner and died in captivity a year later, and the remnants of the empire were divided among Bayazid's sons, who submitted to Timurid authority. At the same time, many of the territories that the Ottomans had conquered in the Balkans resumed their independent status after the Ottoman defeat.
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