The Last Muslim Conquest

The Ottoman Empire and Its Wars in Europe

Gábor Ágoston

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691205380
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A monumental work of history that reveals the Ottoman dynasty's important role in the emergence of early modern Europe The Ottomans have long been viewed as despots who conquered through sheer military might, and whose dynasty was peripheral to those of Europe. The Last Muslim Conquest transforms our understanding of the Ottoman Empire, showing how Ottoman statecraft was far more pragmatic and sophisticated than previously acknowledged, and how the Ottoman dynasty was a crucial player in the power struggles of early modern Europe.In this panoramic and multifaceted book, Gábor Ágoston captures the grand sweep of Ottoman history, from the dynasty's stunning rise to power at the turn of the fourteenth century to the Siege of Vienna in 1683, which ended Ottoman incursions into central Europe. He discusses how the Ottoman wars of conquest gave rise to the imperial rivalry with the Habsburgs, and brings vividly to life the intrigues of sultans, kings, popes, and spies. Ágoston examines the subtler methods of Ottoman conquest, such as dynastic marriages and the incorporation of conquered peoples into the Ottoman administration, and argues that while the Ottoman Empire was shaped by Turkish, Iranian, and Islamic influences, it was also an integral part of Europe and was, in many ways, a European empire.Rich in narrative detail, The Last Muslim Conquest looks at Ottoman military capabilities, frontier management, law, diplomacy, and intelligence, offering new perspectives on the gradual shift in power between the Ottomans and their European rivals and reframing the old story of Ottoman decline.

PART I

Emergence

1

The Early Ottomans

Turks and the Byzantine World

The ancestors of Osman, the eponymous founder of the Ottoman dynasty, arrived in northwestern Asia Minor and settled in the former Byzantine province of Bithynia shortly before 1300. By that time, the Byzantine emperor of Constantinople had long lost control over much of Asia Minor. After the victory of the Seljuk Turks over the Byzantine army in 1071 at Manzikert, a branch of the Great Seljuks of Iran gradually extended its rule in eastern and central Asia Minor, which the newcomers called Rum, the land of the Romans or Greeks. Under the Seljuks and the rival Turkmen dynasty of the Danishmendids (whom the Seljuks eliminated only a century after Manzikert), large numbers of nomadic Turks from Transoxania arrived in Rum, whose upland pasturelands and warm coastlands offered ideal conditions for the pastoralists’ way of life.

Conversion to Islam, the religion of the winning party, seems to have been widespread from the eleventh century onward. Despite conversion and the Turkification of the population, the Seljuk sultanate of Rum remained a multiethnic and polyglot polity. Turks were living mainly along the border zones, which they called uc, while Greeks and Armenians were partly rural and partly urban, as were the Persians (Tajik) and Arabs. Relations between Greeks and Turks were close and intermarriages relatively common. Some Byzantine aristocratic families—the Komnenoi, Tornikoi, Gabrades, and Mavrozomai—became members of the Seljuk nobility. Greeks worked in the Seljuk administration, while the Byzantine emperors hired Turkish troops. The emperors also launched joint military campaigns with the Seljuks against other rivals. Fleeing Seljuk rulers and rebel princes sought refuge in Byzantium as often as they did among their Muslim brethren in Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran. At the same time, rebel Byzantine lords escaped to the Seljuk capital Konya. Despite raids and punitive campaigns, there existed a long-lasting, if uneasy, political cooperation between Byzantium and the Seljuk sultanate of Rum from 1160 until 1261. This amicable relationship was based on the friendship between the Byzantine emperors and Seljuk sultans and their respective political elites, as well as on the influence of the Orthodox Church in Seljuk domains.

The Seljuk sultanate acted as the chief guarantor of the Nicene Empire after the Latin crusaders captured Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, established a Latin empire in Constantinople, divided the former Byzantine lands among themselves, and forced the Byzantine emperors into exile in Nicaea (modern Iznik). During the Nicene era, the Seljuk sultans acknowledged the emperors in Nicaea. In contrast, the Seljuks considered the “Empire of Trebizond” in northeastern Asia Minor and the Despotate of Epirus in Albania and northwestern Greece (the other Byzantine successor states after the Fourth Crusade) only as regional polities of nonimperial dignity. The peoples of Rum under Seljuk rule shared elements of each other’s cultures. The beliefs of the Greeks in Seljuk Rum differed from those living under the Byzantine emperors. They also dressed like Turks, used Turkish weapons, and spoke a vernacular with Turkish and Persian loan words. Many Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Persians in Rum spoke at least two languages. Jelaleddin Rumi (1207–73)—the founder of the mevlevi order of dervishes, originally from Balkh in Central Asia—wrote most of his works in Persian. But he also used Turkish and Greek vocabularies when addressing his poems to the townsfolk of Konya, his chosen new home.¹

The influx of Turkish nomadic peoples—known as Turkmen or Turcoman—into western Asia Minor is closely related to the Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 1240s and 1250s. A western army of the Mongols invaded and defeated the Seljuks of Rum in 1243 at Kösedağ, northeast of Sivas. The Seljuks of Rum became the vassals of the Mongol Ilkhanids. The Ilkhanids established their empire in the vast area from present-day Afghanistan to Turkey after Hülegü Khan (r. 1256–65), the grandson of Chinggis Khan, had conquered and sacked Baghdad, ending the rule of the Abbasid caliphs (750–1258). As the Mongols occupied more and more grasslands for their horses in Asia Minor, the Turkmen tribes moved farther to the west and settled on the Seljuk-Byzantine marches. By the last decades of the thirteenth century, the Ilkhanids and their Seljuk vassals had lost control over much of Asia Minor. In the ensuing power vacuum many local Turkmen tribal chiefs, known as beg or emir, managed to establish themselves as rulers of small chiefdoms or principalities. The Ottomans, who were only one among the numerous Turco-Muslim emirates, settled in northwest Asia Minor, in the former Byzantine province of Bithynia.

The Ottomans benefited greatly from their new location. After the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople from the Latin crusaders in 1261, the emperors in Constantinople were primarily preoccupied with regaining control over southeastern Europe, while still managing their defenses in Asia Minor against Turkmen attacks. But because of Venetian threats, Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos (r. 1282–1328) followed a more passive policy along the eastern borders. He also attempted to improve Byzantine finances by reducing the size of the army and dismantling the fleet.² In the words of the contemporary Byzantine chronicler Pachymeres, writing circa 1310, “the defenses of the eastern territory were weakened, whilst the Persians (Turks) were emboldened to invade lands which had no means of driving them off.”³

Holy Warriors and Marcher Lords

Until the late 1970s, most scholars understood the Ottoman polity as a quintessential Islamic frontier warrior state, whose raison d’être was the holy war or jihad—termed ghaza in Ottoman sources—against the “infidels” and the continuous expansion of the Ottoman emirate’s frontiers at the expense of its Christian neighbors. Formulated in the 1930s by the Austrian Ottomanist scholar Paul Wittek, the ghaza thesis served as an all-embracing elucidation of the rise, evolution, and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Wittek believed that the early Ottomans shared the chivalrous spirit of the futuwwa religious “corporations,” whose understanding and practice of Islam differed from that of the religious establishment (ulama). Situated on the frontier of Byzantium, the Ottoman ghazis were strategically positioned to wage such “holy wars.” Opportunities for glory served as a magnet for the warriors of the neighboring Turco-Muslim emirates. The ostensibly inexhaustible supply of zealous ghazi warriors under the banner of the early Ottoman rulers seemed to explain their military successes.⁴

Scholarship from the late 1970s began to question Wittek’s thesis. Critics have argued that what Wittek termed as early Ottoman ghazas were more inclusive political enterprises. In the early fourteenth century, the Muslim Turkmen emirates of Aydın, Karasi, Saruhan, and Ottoman forged alliances and launched military ventures with Christian Catalans, Byzantines, and Genoese. Catalan mercenaries, whom the Byzantines hired to fight the Turkmens, fought both against and alongside the Turks.⁵ The Byzantine emperors Andronikos III (r. 1328–41) and John VI Kantakouzenos (r. 1347–54) enlisted the help of the Muslim Turkmen emirs of Saruhan, Aydın, and Ottoman against their opponents both in the empire and beyond. Local Byzantine governors cooperated with the Ottomans, while dissatisfied Byzantine generals and soldiers joined the victorious Ottomans. In the late 1340s and early 1350s—during the war between Genoa, on the one hand, and Venice, Aragon, and Byzantium, on the other—the Genoese of Galata sought the assistance of the Ottomans. Galata was a suburb of Byzantine Constantinople north of the Golden Horn and home of a Genoese colony, established almost a century before. In the summer of 1351, the Ottomans supplied the Genoese with a thousand archers to fight against Genoa’s Christian enemy.⁶ The Genoese-Ottoman cooperation lasted until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Genoese ships helped the Ottomans on multiple occasions to maintain communication between their lands in Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, sabotaging Byzantine and Western attempts to block the crossing of Ottoman troops from Asia to Europe.⁷

The fourteenth century witnessed Ottoman campaigns against fellow Muslim Turks. The Ottomans also annexed the neighboring Turkish emirates of Karasi, Saruhan, Germiyan, and Hamid. Fifteenth-century Ottoman chroniclers portrayed the early Ottomans as ghazi warriors, often ignoring these conflicts and the Ottomans’ alliances with Christians. These chroniclers claimed that the Ottomans acquired the lands of the neighboring emirates via peaceful means, such as by purchasing it and by marriage. When they mentioned the wars between the Ottomans and their Turkish neighbors, Ottoman chroniclers tried to legitimize them by stating that the Ottomans acted in self-defense. Other chroniclers claimed that the Ottomans were forced to fight because the emirates’ hostile policies hindered the Ottomans’ holy wars against the Christians.⁸

The heterogeneous nature of the early Ottoman society was a rich source of military and administrative skills. Among the allies of Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, one finds Orthodox Greeks and recent Christian converts to Islam, such as Evrenos and Köse Mihal. Ghazi Evrenos was one of the most famous Ottoman marcher lords. Ottoman chronicles claimed that Evrenos was a Muslim Turk from the neighboring Karasi emirate. However, a recently discovered source suggests that he was of Serbian descent, the son of a certain Branko Lazar, who after his conversion to Islam was known as İsa Beg. Branko Lazar may have joined the Ottomans to extend his original patrimony at the expense of his local Christian rivals. His Serbian origin may explain why the Ottoman ruler Murad I entrusted Evrenos to lead the Ottoman army to the battlefield of Kosovo in 1389. Unlike the newcomer Ottomans, Evrenos had been familiar with the region’s geography and politics.⁹

Köse (Beardless) Mihal, a Byzantine castellan of the small fort of Harmankaya in Bithynia, which controlled strategic communication arteries along the Sakarya River basin, first fought at the side of Osman as a Greek Christian by guiding Osman’s troop...