History
Seljuk Turks
The Seljuk Turks were a medieval Turkic empire that emerged in the 11th century, known for their expansion across the Middle East and Asia Minor. They played a significant role in the spread of Islam and the subsequent interactions between the Islamic world and the Christian Byzantine Empire. The Seljuks also made important contributions to art, architecture, and literature during their rule.
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eBook - ePubEarly Seljuq History
A New Interpretation
- A.C.S. Peacock(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Introduction The early Seljūqs in mediaeval and modern historiography The subject of this book is the rise of a group of Turks from their origins as an obscure tribe living in the west Eurasian steppes to rulers of an empire that dominated the Middle East and Central Asia. Led by the descendants of the chief Seljūq b. Duqāq, in the first half of the eleventh century the Turks captured the established centres of civilisation of the Islamic world – the great cities of Transoxiana, Iran and Iraq – and reached far into Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Ghaznavid, Būyid and Byzantine Empires that dominated Central Asia, Iran and Iraq, and Anatolia all met defeat at the hands of the armies of Turkish nomads. 1 This book examines how this sudden transformation from tribe to empire came about, concentrating on the little-known but formative period up to the death of the second sultan, Alp Arslān, in 465/1072. The period of Seljūq rule, the eleventh and twelfth centuries, marks a turning point in demography, religion and administration in the Middle East. The demography of the region changed permanently, for the invasions of the Seljūqs were accompanied by – indeed were part of – significant migrations. Ultimately these led to the formation of Turkish populations in Anatolia, Azerbaijan and the Caucasus that exist there today. The Seljūq period also marks the reassertion of Sunni domination in the Middle East, which had been eclipsed by the rise of the Shi’ite Būyid dynasty in Iran and Iraq and the Ismā’īlī Fāṭimid Empire in Syria, Egypt and North Africa in the tenth century. It was under Seljūq rule that scholars like al-Ghazālī reconciled Sufism with orthodox Islam, and it was then that the madrasa or religious school came to prominence. Both developments were to shape the subsequent religious and intellectual history of the Middle East
eBook - ePub- Sir Percy Sykes(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
OGHRIL BEG .CHAPTER LII THE COMING OF THE Seljuk TurksWhile Apulia and Sicily were subdued by the Norman lance, a swarm of northern shepherds overspread the kingdoms of Persia; their princes of the race of Seljuk erected a splendid and solid empire from Samarcand to the confines of Greece and Egypt.—GIBBON .The Importance of the Seljuks.—The previous chapter is little more than a medley, dealing as it does with numerous short-lived dynasties which seized upon various provinces of the decrepit Caliphate and then tumbled to pieces mainly from internal dissensions. The advent of a new power, the Seljuk Turks, constitutes a notable epoch in the history of the Middle and Near East, if only because it swept away these insignificant and divided dynasties and once again united Islam under a single powerful sway, stretching from Turkestan to the Mediterranean Sea. More than this, the Seljuks, with the fervour of recent converts, revitalized Islam, just as the Norsemen revitalized Christendom, and when Europe under Norman leaders attacked the East under the impulse of the Crusades it was the light horse of the Seljuks which met the heavy horse of the Crusaders.1Their Origin.—The Seljuks were a branch of the Ghuzz Turks, from whom, however, they kept distinct. Their founder was Tukák (signifying a bow), the father of Seljuk, who with his tribe crossed from Turkestan into Transoxiana and embraced Islam with deep fervour. He and his descendants took part in the wars of the period, and speedily came into collision with Mahmud. The story runs that the great Conqueror asked Israil, the son of Seljuk, how many men followed him to battle, to which the nomad chief replied that if he despatched an arrow to his tents one hundred thousand men would prepare for war, but that if his bow were seen two hundred thousand men would join the former force. Sultan Mahmud, alarmed at this new power, imprisoned Israil, and, hoping probably to weaken the tribe by moving it away from its habitat, settled it in the district of Nisa,1
eBook - PDFA Military History of the Ottomans
From Osman to Atatürk
- Mesut Uyar Ph.D., Edward J. Erickson(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
Therefore, a brief review of Ottoman history through 1453 is presented to establish a contextual framework for this chapter. The earliest Turkish political entity was known as the Go ¨ktu ¨rk Empire, which extended from China to the Caspian Sea from the sixth to eighth centuries. The Turcoman successors of the Go ¨ktu ¨rks swept into the Middle East and Persia in the seventh to the eleventh centuries and established firm control over the centers of Islamic civilization. The Turcomans were displaced by the Og ˘uz confederation, who founded the Seljuk dynasty in 1055. The Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, allowing the Seljuks and Turcomans to sweep into Anatolia. The Seljuks gradually subsumed the Turcomans into their empire but themselves were over- thrown by the Mongols in 1243. The people known as the Ottomans (or Ottoman Turks) emerged sometime in the mid-1200s as a Turkic tribal group led by the legendary Ertug ˘rul. His son, Osman I (1280–1324), established the Osmanlı dynasty (the Europeans corrupted the word Osmanlı to Ottoman) that centered on the Anatolian peninsula. The term Ottoman Empire originated with Osman, but it was his son Orhan who took the city of Bursa and then led his soldiers in 1346 across the Dardanelles into Europe, establishing the dynasty as a force to be reckoned with. The dynasty expanded under sultans such as Murad I and Bayezid I, but in 1402 Tamerlane crushed the Ottomans. Mehmed I reestablished the leadership of the house of Osman in 1413 after an internal power struggle. Murad II ruled from 1421 to 1451, and the dynasty prospered and undertook a period of great expansion in both the Balkans and in Anatolia. The Middle Eastern Military Legacy The rise of Ottoman Empire from an obscure small political entity is without doubt one of the most important phenomena of the late medieval period.
eBook - ePub- Joo-Yup Lee(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Rum Seljuqs: Evolution of a Dynasty . London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.- Peacock, Andrew Charles Spencer. Early Seljuq History: A New Interpretation . Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.
- Vásáry, István. “Two Patterns of Acculturation to Islam: The Qarakhanids versus the Ghaznavids and Seljuqs.” In The Age of the Seljuqs , edited by Edmund Herzig and Sarah Stewart, 9–28. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015.
The Ottomans: The Founders of a World Empire
The Ottomans were the Oghuz Turkic and Turkicized people of the Ottoman empire (1299–1922), which was one of the largest and most powerful empires in history. The Ottomans originated as a band of followers of Osman I (r. c. 1299–1324), a Turkmen ruler of a small principality in northwestern Anatolia, in the last decades of the thirteenth century. During its heyday in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman empire conquered much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In the process of conquest, the Ottomans mixed with and Turkicized the various indigenous elements who had long lived in Anatolia and the Balkans and developed a separate Ottoman or Rum identity, distinct from Central Eurasian Turkic peoples.The Origins and Formation of the Ottomans
The Ottomans originated as a band of the Turkmen followers of Osman I (r. c. 1299–1324), a ruler of a small principality in northwestern Anatolia, in the late thirteenth century. Osman’s ancestors, whom the fifteenth-century Ottoman chroniclers claimed to belong to the Qayi branch of the Oghuz, had come to Anatolia from Central Asia during the Seljuk or Mongol period. The warriors who coalesced around Osman included new converts made up of various elements living in the northwestern corner of Anatolia.23 In mid-thirteenth-century Anatolia, it was the non-Turkic elements who formed the majority. William of Rubruck, the Franciscan missionary who visited Anatolia on his way back from the Mongol empire in 1255, writes in his travelogue as follows: “As for Turkey, I can inform you that not one man in ten there is a Saracen; rather are they all Armenians and Greeks … ”24 Ibn Baṭūṭah (d. 1377), the Moroccan traveler who made an extensive tour around the Asian continent in the fourteenth century, also visited Anatolia in 1332, and wrote: “There are now many Christians under the protection of the Muslim Turkmens.”25 Over time, throughout their long rule, the expanding Ottomans mixed with and Turkicized the various indigenous peoples who had long resided in Anatolia and the Balkans. The Ottomans also absorbed non-Turkic elements, in part, through the recruitment system known as the devshirme. Every year, the Ottoman state collected “healthy, well-built, intelligent, and honest looking boys” mainly from the Balkans. These boys were converted to Islam, taught Turkish, and trained to serve the Ottoman empire as soldiers and administrators. They became “non-Muslim-turned-Turks.”26 In short, the modern Ottomans emerged from the mixing of ethnic Turkmens and non-Turkic elements, such as Greeks, Bulgharians, and Serbians, among others.27 As a matter of fact, the mixed ethnic nature of the Ottomans was noted by the sixteenth-century Ottoman historian Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (1541–1600). In his Künhüʾl-aḫbār, a history of the Arab caliphates, the Turkic and Chinggisid dynasties, and the Ottoman empire, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī remarks that the Ottoman elite of the sixteenth century were mostly of non-Turkic origin: “Most of the inhabitants of Rum are of confused ethnic origin. Among its notables there are few whose lineage does not go back to a convert to Islam … ”28
eBook - ePubThe History of Central Asia
The Age of Islam and the Mongols
- Christoph Baumer(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- I.B. Tauris(Publisher)
IV Turco-Muslim Dynasties in Southern Central Asia ‘Tell him that the stability of that [Malik Shah’s] regal cap is bound up with this [Nizam’s] vizierial inkstand. [. . .] If ever I close up this inkstand, that royal power will topple.’VIZIER NIZAM AL-MULK’S reply to a rebuke by his Seljuk master Malik Shah in 1092.1Between the years 1000 and ca. 1220, the Islamic part of Central Asia was completely reconfigured, ethnically, politically and linguistically. With the exception of the Ghurids, whose language was probably of eastern Iranian origin, Turkic dynasties came to rule all of Muslim Central Asia and left their mark on it as patrons of monumental architecture, the sciences and poetry. Since the Seljuks, Karakhanids and Ghaznavids ruled at more or less the same time, there were inevitably violent struggles for supremacy. Around the middle of the twelfth century, new players entered the scene to disturb this precarious balance, for in the south the Ghurids were aspiring to the status of a new major regional power, while the Qara Khitai were emerging from the north-east. But the Qara Khitai, who were of Mongol origin, were not Muslims but Buddhists, so that for the first time a non-Muslim state conquered a region of the Dar al-Islam , the world of Islam. The Qara Khitai pursued a policy of religious tolerance, but they had no intention of adopting Islam, the religion of their conquered subjects, and remained Buddhists. The Mongol western campaign of 1219–23 brought this rich political and cultural diversity to an abrupt end.1 . The Great SeljuksAs we saw earlier,2 in about 985, after a dispute with the yabghu of the Oghuz, the Oghuz military commander Seljuk (r. ca. 985– ca . 1007) fled from Yangikent to Jand, which also lay on the left bank of the Seyhun. We learn from the contemporary scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari (1008–1105) that Seljuk and his father Dukak, who was known as Timur Yaghliq, ‘the man with the iron bow’, came from the ruling Qiniq clan, to which the yabghu also belonged.3 In Jand, Seljuk converted to Islam, which allowed him to consolidate his heterogeneous followers thanks to the new faith and to undertake in the name of jihad military campaigns against his ‘infidel’ relatives in the Seyhun delta whom he could then enslave. As Kim Hodong wrote in relation to Tughlugh Temür, khan of Moghulistan, (r. 1347–63), ‘Islam provided nomadic tribal people with the consciousness of a homogenous religious community (umma ) and religious sanction for the wars for the expansion of the domain of Islam (jihad ). [. . .] In that sense, Islam became an ideology of unification as well as an ideology of expansion.’ 4 The contemporary chronicle Malik-nameh , the ‘Story of the King’, originally dedicated to Sultan Alp Arslan (r. 1063–72), mentions that Seljuk’s three sons Mikhail, Israïl and Musa (Moses), as well as two grandsons, Dawud (David) and Yusuf (Joseph), all bore biblical names.5 Although these names are Muslim, they might also suggest a Jewish or Nestorian background for Seljuk.6
eBook - PDFThe Ottoman Turks
Nomad Kingdom to World Empire
- Carl Max Kortepeter, Halil Inalcik(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Gorgias Press(Publisher)
The Turks have maintained, by and large, a hierarchical system of authority, based on special skills and nurtured in a patriarchal family system, for thousands of years. Moreover, the old Turkish elite, partly because of this authoritarian system, partly because they allowed for mobility in the system and the adoption of non-Turkish newcomers, and partly because the old Turkish families possessed at first herds and flocks and finally large estates, these family responsibilities provided the opportunity for energetic scions of a given family to become experienced leaders and managers of their own family holdings. It was thereafter only a small step to become leaders of warriors and whole countries. But must we indeed turn to the pre-Islamic history of the Turks to understand Seljuk and Ottoman history? It is the opinion of this writer that we must. See Fuad KGprilld's most impressive article, Osmanli Imparatorlugu'nun Etnik Men;ei Meseleleri, in the T. T. K. Btlleltn VH/28 (1943), pp. 219-303. Note: Kdprfllii's study has been translated and will soon be published by the State University of N .Y. press in Albany. THE ORIGINS AND NATURE OF TURKISH POWER 27 For many years. Islamic scholars have attempted to answer most questions of Turkish history by seeking answers almost exclusively within an Islamic Arab or Persian context. This Islamic approach may have been dictated by a certain bias of Western European and American historians to view most aspects of nomadism or the steppe environment as at once too barbaric and unintelligible. Turkish historians before the formation of the Turkish Republic were also strongly influenced by this bias. One must of course admit it is equally essential to understand the Islamic environment in which the Seljuks and the Osmanh thrived. But in matters of large scale political organization and in the management of a complex economy, the Turks had no real peers in the Middle East once they had broken the power of the Italian city states.
- Youssef M. Choueiri(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
As was true of the Seljuks, these ruling households relied heavily on secretaries – some on secretarial dynasties – and scholars whom they supported through waqf. The successor states also cast themselves as defenders of Islam, a role that the Crusades enabled the most successful among them to play. The broader history of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt can be seen as a tension between, on the one hand, the tendency of states organized along the loose lines of their Seljuk antecedents to fragment, and on the other, the material and moral resources that frontier warfare concentrated in the hands of successful commanders. One irony of this period was that the most successful of the Seljuk successor states appeared in regions in which the Seljuks had not ruled or ruled indirectly. The Seljukids of Anatolia came to power as a result of developments Toghrı ˆl-Beg, Alp Arsla ˆn, and Malik-Sha ˆh shaped but did not control. 3 For thirty years prior to Manzikert the Turkoman raided freely across much of Anatolia, though in relatively small numbers and generally fearful of being cut off from Azerbaijan. Some took up service with the Byzantines, but these were small in number and their local impact slight. While capable of raiding deep into Anatolia, the Turkoman hesitated to attack cities, and established no permanent fortified positions of their own. Following Manzikert, larger numbers of Turkoman entered and were determined to settle. These accelerated the process of Turcification and created a distinctive frontier culture that for a time owed little to orthodox Islam. During the 460s/1070s, members of a rival branch of the Seljuk family descended from Mikha ˆ ı ˆl b. Seljuk arrived in Anatolia to lead bands of Turkoman ghazis, eliminating most of the Byzantine strongholds and playing a more adept role in regional politics. A member of this family, Sulayma ˆn b. Kutlumush, took Nicea (Iznik), and established the Seljuk sultanate of Rum.
eBook - PDFTurks and Iranians. Interactions in Language and History
The Gunnar Jarring Memorial Program at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
- Éva Á. Csató, Lars Johanson, András Róna-Tas, Bo Utas, Éva Á. Csató, Lars Johanson, András Róna-Tas, Bo Utas(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Harrassowitz Verlag(Publisher)
Among the Arabs (and the Byzantines), Turk became a generic term for Eurasian steppe nomads. The ear-‐ 20 For an overview of Türk history, see P. B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples , Turcologica 9. (Wiesbaden, 1990), pp. 115–153. 21 Golden, Ethnicity , pp. 11–16. The shaping of the Turks in Medieval Eurasia © 2016, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447105378 # ISBN E-Book: 9783447194624 8 ly Turkic converts to Islam were called Türkmen to distinguish themselves from their pagan kinsmen. As more Turkic groupings Islamized by the 11th century (with some notable exceptions) and had begun to create their own Turko-‐ Islamic states in Central Eurasia, the name Türkmen came to be applied largely, but not exclusively to one grouping of Turks, the Oghuz, who lived closest to Islamic Central Eurasia and were becoming most influenced by its Irano-‐ Muslim culture. 22 One grouping of Islamized Oghuz, led by the house of Seljuk, between 1040 and by 1055 became masters of much of the Caliphal heartland, defeated the Byzantines(1071) and began the conquest of Anatolia, producing, ultimately – and several empires later, modern Turkey. It was this Islamo-‐ Turkic interaction that helped to fix the name Turk to these peoples as a whole. Ethnonyms are often unstable and capable of being applied to smaller social units (“subethnic groups and clans”) or “borrowed by alien groups”. They arise in multiple environments, in both that of the “host” and that of the “significant other” 23 – often a major neighboring state with which it is in contact and this was certainly true of the Turkic world. Internally, they were still very much aware of their differences in dialect, culture and of those who were Turkicizing, but to the outside world they were “Turks” and accepted this identity in a Mus-‐ lim milieu. All of the peoples under Türk rule took the name Türk as a political designation.
eBook - PDFGlobal Security Watch—Turkey
A Reference Handbook
- Mustafa Kibaroglu, Aysegul Kibaroglu(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Praeger(Publisher)
The foun- dations of a historical development referred to as Turkish-Islamic culture and civilization were laid in this period. During the rule of the Karakhanlis, there was another Turkish state, the Gazneli Sultanate (936–1187), the capital city of which was Ghazi in Afghanistan. Mahmud of Ghazna was the first to use the title of ‘‘Sultan’’ and laid the foundation for today’s Pakistan. The Ghaznelis had to retreat to India after the Dandanakan War with the Seljuks in 1040 and finally came under the sovereignty of the Seljuks. Another great Turkish state, the Seljuk State (1040–1157), was founded by Selc ¸uk Bey who was a member of the Kinik tribe of the Oghuz Turks. The borders of the state spanned from the Marmara Sea to Lake Balkhash in Central Asia and from the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and the Aral Sea to the borders of India and Yemen. The Seljuks entered into a struggle of hegemony with the two Turkish states, the Karakhanlis and the Ghaznelis, and succeeded in establishing Turkish unity. Tug ˘rul Bey, the Sultan of the Seljuks, entered Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliphate capital, and ended the domination of the Buwayhids, a Persi Shiite dynasty, in 1055. Therefore, the Caliph bestowed upon Tug ˘rul Bey the title of ‘‘Ruler of the World.’’ During the reign of Sultan Alparslan, the successor and son of Tug ˘rul Bey, the territories of the country expanded significantly. Sultan Alparslan defeated the Byzantine army which was led by Romanus Diogenes at Manzikert (Malazgirt) in 1071. This victory literally opened up the gates of Anatolia to the Turks. During the reign of Sultan Malik Shah, the Seljuk State experienced its most successful period. After Sultan Malik Shah died, the country was divided into small states. The Syrian Seljuks (1092–1117), Iraq and Khorasan Seljuks (1092–1194), Kirman Seljuks (1092–1187), and Anatolian Seljuks (1092–1194) were among the small states.
eBook - PDFA History of the Crusades, Volume 1
The First Hundred Years
- Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton, Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
They died young and left their infants in the care of military chiefs (Turkish singu-lar, atabeg ) w h o m they judged, or rendered, strong enough to be able to defend their rights; inevitably these atabegs worked above all to secure for themselves the real power and expected some day to liquidate a nominal dynasty which had become useless. T o these struggles the Turkomans, especially in Fars and Azer-baijan, were always ready to lend their weight, for they no longer had other outlets. The road to Asia Minor was blocked by their kinsmen; a stable Christian kingdom had been established in the mountains of Georgia to resist the invader; and a certain attach-ment to the soil kept them from planning great new migrations. It was doubtless in order to keep these Turkomans under tighter control that the sultans constantly bestowed Azerbaijan as an appanage or an autonomous march, but the scheme invariably boomeranged because the grantee found there an army ready for any revolt. The Kurds, including the Shanbänkärah of Fars and others, the Lurs, the bedouins, the Khafäjids of Khuzistan, all prof-ited from the disorder, as did especially the Mazyadids of Hilla, who ranged from the outskirts of Baghdad itself as far as Basra and who, under Sadaqah and his son Dubais, made life miserable for the caliphs and sultans for the first quarter of the twelfth century. Ch. ν T H E T U R K I S H INVASION Asia Minor permanently escaped any effort to incorporate it into the Selchiikid empire. The Byzantine administration had dis-appeared there, but no Moslem administration had yet established itself, for lack of native Moslems. In places the inhabitants had fled. The Turkomans were the rulers and sometimes in the rural districts were the only residents. There, truly, one was outside the classical world to such an extent that for generations the Moslem chroniclers ignored almost everything that happened in that area.
eBook - ePubThe Rum Seljuqs
Evolution of a Dynasty
- Songul Mecit(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The sources separate the Seljuq family members from their followers, attributing the misdeeds to the second and portraying the first especially Tu ğ rul Bey, as ruler-like. The Seljuq followers are in the passages concerning the early history of the Seljuqs characterized as the tribe, kinsmen, and O ğ uz but they are later described as Turkomans and disregarded by our authors. The geographer al-Idrisi distinguishes between the Turkish leaders and their followers, stating: ‘Their princes are warlike, provident, firm, just, and are distinguished by excellent qualities; the nation is cruel, wild, coarse, and ignorant.’ 46 The Arab and Persian authors, living a settled way of life, view the nomadic Turks who are feared but praised as military people free of decadence. 47 Ibn Hass ū l, the former Buyid bureaucrat, writes in his epistle for Tu ğ rul Bey that the Turks are lion-like and proud people, who are not willing to work in the household like slaves but have ‘single minded desire to acchieve military command’. 48 Ibn Hass ū l thus seeks the favour of Tu ğ rul by glorifying all Turks, which suggests that Tu ğ rul did not distinguish between himself and his kinsmen and followers. It is evident that the epistle must have been written in a way to please Tu ğ rul because the author states in his work that it would later be translated for Tu ğ rul by al-Kunduri. 49 In this way Ibn Hass ū l gives us the important information that Tu ğ rul’s vizier al-Kunduri spoke Turkish. It can thus be deduced that the first Seljuqs did not regard themselves as despotic rulers but as chiefs of their followers, sharing the same way of life with them. A passage in the work of ‘Im ā d al-D ī n al-I ṣ fah ā n ī points also in this direction: They [the Seljuqs] are utterly destitute [ muta ṣ a‘lik ū n ] despite the vastness of their territories. They do not care whether they die or perish. Access to their routes with swords and arrows is difficult
eBook - PDFA Global History of War
From Assyria to the Twenty-First Century
- Gérard Chaliand(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
However, in the sixteenth century, the naval superiority of western European states increased. The contemporary Turkish historian Halil Inalcik identifies 1590 as the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline. The Seljuk sultanate of Anatolia, defeated by the Mongols (1234), became a vassal of the Persian ilkhanate. This led the Turkoman to migrate into western Anatolia. The Byzantine Empire, which had been briefly controlled by the Latins after the sack of Constantinople (1204), returned to Greek rule (1261). Nomad incursions into Byzantine Anatolia became more frequent with the development of ghazi ideology. The small Ottoman state expanded significantly when the Ottomans reached Gallipoli (1352) 158 | The Ottomans and conquered Adrianople (1361). The Turks of Anatolia were invited to join the Ottomans and were sent to Europe to strengthen Ottoman domination. The Ottoman invasion of Europe occurred at a time of European fragmentation, with western principalities constantly making and breaking alliances. The Ottomans profited from this political insta-bility. They had originally entered Thrace as allies of the Byzantines against the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Christendom was not only divided between Greeks and Latins, but also fragmented within religious com-munities by competing regional interests. The Ottomans practiced the usual Islamic policy of religious toler-ance and readily accepted the enlistment of the Balkan Christian troops in their ranks. In time, religious conversions occurred, particularly in Albania, Thrace, and Bosnia. With the disintegration of the Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms and the Ottoman victory in Kosovo in 1389, the Ottomans became the principal power south of the Danube. They also subjugated the rival Turkish principalities of Anatolia, including the Karamans, Germyans, and Hamidili. The real architect of the Ottoman power was Sultan Bayezid.
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