Empire With the capture of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II turned the Ottoman state into the Ottoman Empire, the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire, the “third Rome.” After the traditional sack of the city, Mehmet made some minor changes, including conversion of the Haigha Sofia into a mosque, and the building of the Topkapi Palace. He also invited Greeks, Jews and Armenians back into the city, and maintained good relations with the Genoese and Venetians. After all, his empire was largely Christian. Even in Anatolia, where the population was predominantly Turkish, as a result of the long influx of refugees from the Mongol and Timurid invasions, there were substantial Greek, Kurdish and Armenian populations. Many of the troops that had participated in the siege were from his Balkan vassals. Mehmet turned himself into an emperor. Previous sultans had maintained an open court, and had behaved as first among equals with the other Turkish nobles. Mehmet surrounded himself with Janissary court officials, and enormously expanded his personal and administrative staff. Besides being a military genius, Mehmet was a lawmaker. His administrative codes were partly derived from the previous Byzantine codes. He allowed religious freedom, so long as the non-Muslims paid the poll tax which exempted them from military service, and did not cause trouble. A significant issue in governance of the Empire was the succession. The Ottomans had always chosen their wives not from the daughters of the aristocracy but from slave

women. This avoided entanglement of families and some of the problems of succession. However, the problem remained that there was generally more than one son of a suitable age and capability to succeed the sultan. This had been particularly dangerous after the death of Bayezid I during the Timurid conquest in 1402. In the resulting interregnum, three of Bayezid’s sons contended for the rulership, nearly destroying the empire. The solution had been for ambitious brothers who had been passed over to be either killed or exiled, but generally requiring a civil war. Mehmet proposed to regularise the practice. When the old Sultan died, his close advisors would choose a successor. The other brothers would be immediately strangled (shedding royal blood was forbidden.) This strategy was made more practical by the lack of family connections outside the harem.

Mehmet’s main military task was to consolidate his victory, in which he was largely successful. We will return to the military side of the story in the next session.

Strategic Environment

There were two spheres of strategic importance to the Ottomans immediately after the conquest of Constantinople: • The former Byzantine territories and dependencies in

the Balkans which had not already been taken, as well as remaining non-Ottoman territory in Anatolia and around the Black Sea.

• More distant powers comparable to the Ottoman, capable of strategic threat.

The Balkan Region at the Present Time

South Slavs As part of the great migrations of the middle of the first Milennium, many Slav tribes moved into the Balkan territories of the Roman Empire, mixing with the existing populations of Illyrians, Dacians, Greeks, Dalmatians, Thracians, and other groups. By the 13th Century, the South Slavs had assimilated the earlier populations in much of the Balkans, and were organised in a number of kingdoms: Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia.

Bulgaria In the Bulgarian region, a Turkic tribe called Bulgars invaded the South Slav areas in the seventh century, forming an elite class. The Bulgars eventually assimilated into the Slavic culture, resulting in the ethnic group now called Bulgarian. Most Bulgarians are Orthodox Christians, and their Church is an independent patriarchate established in 919 under the First Bulgarian Empire’s Simeon I. The Ottomans encountered the Second Bulgarian Empire, which had been formed about 1185. It had been actively involved during the Latin Empire at Constantinople (1204 – 1261), fighting several battles with the Crusaders. The Ottomans invaded the area beginning in 1388 and completed the conquest of Bulgaria in 1396.

Bosnia Bosnia emerged as an independent state in the early 12th Century. The people were converted to Christianity by the Roman church in the 9th Century, but the Bosnian church was only loosely controlled by Rome. A heretical sect called Bogomils originated in Bulgaria in the 10th Century. By the end of the 12th Century they were established in Bosnia. From the late 12th Century to the late 13th Century Bogomilism was eradicated in Serbia,

Bulgaria and Byzantium, and many of its followers moved to Bosnia, so the faith became concentrated there. Bogomilism was dualist, related to Manichaenism. The idea was that God created spirit, but not matter. He had two sons, one of whom, Satan, was responsible for creating matter. Spirit, therefore, was good, and matter inherently evil. In particular, they held that institutions such as the Church and the State were inherently evil. The religion spread to Europe, especially the Piedmont in Italy. It was related to the Albigensis and Cathars. All of these groups were violently suppressed in the 13th Century, leaving Bosnia as the main centre. Ottoman conquest of Bosnia began in the late 14th Century, and was essentially complete by 1482. Unlike the other South Slav groups, most of the Bogomils eventually converted to Islam, becoming today’s Bosniaks.

Serbia A Serbian principality was established in the 8th Century, which was conquered by the Byzantines in the mid 10th Century. The Serbs re-emerged in 1040, reaching a zenith in the first half of the 14th Century under Dusan the Mighty. Christianity came from Constantinople to the Serbs in the 9th Century, with an independent patriarchy established by Dusan in 1346. Serbia’s collapse began with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which both armies were annihilated, both the Serbian leader Lazar and the Ottoman Sultan Murad being killed. After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans returned to Serbia, ultimately taking Belgrade in 1521.

Croatia

The first Croatian states were established as vassals of the Franks in the early 9th Century. Christianity came from Rome in that same century. Venice established colonies on the Dalmatian Coast, taking control of most of Dalmatia by 1428. The Ottomans won major battles in 1493 and 1526, occupying the southern and eastern parts of the territory. The remaining territory in the northwest petitioned in 1527 to become a semi-autonomous state under the Habsburgs, which was agreed.

Surviving Roman-Era Populations In several areas of the Balkans, Slavic immigration was insufficient to dominate the local cultures, and the Slavs eventually themselves assimilated. This occurred in Greece, Albania and Romania/Moldavia.

Greece We tend to think of modern Greece as the direct descendant of Classical Greece. However, the Greek language became the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, so historically most Greek-speaking people have no lineal connection to Greece. Like most of the rest of the Balkan Peninsula, the territory of modern Greece received many Slavic migrants, although the major walled cities like Athens, Corinth and Thessalonika remained in Imperial control. In the 9th Century Constantinople recovered the region, and with the capture of Sicily by the Arabs in 824 and the Arab invasions of the Levant and Anatolia, many Greek-speaking refugees re-settled in Greece. Further, some of the Slavic people were re-settled in Anatolia. As a result,

the population assimilated Greek. However, there are still minorities who speak dialects of Romanian, Albanian, Bulgarian or Turkish. Since the area was always more or less part of the Byzantine Empire, the religion was Orthodox. Greece came under Ottoman control in the second half of the 15th Century.

Albania The Albanians are descendants of the remnants of the people who lived in the Balkans at the time of the Roman Empire, including Illyrians, Dacians and Thracians. Unfortunately, not enough is known about those ancient languages to understand the origin of modern Albanian, so it is hard to be more specific. The geography is mountainous or otherwise not very hospitable, so seems to have been a refuge for the pre-Slavic populations of the region. Independent communities of Albanians appear in the historical record from the 11th Century. The Principality of Arbernon was founded in 1190, but by and large the Albanians were organised in a number of small principalities, as one would expect in a mountainous region. Since the population was of the Roman Empire, Christianity appeared at an early date. With the separation of Roman Catholicism from Orthodox Catholicism, the people of the north went with Rome and of the south went with Constantinople.

The Ottomans invaded in 1415 and controlled most of Albania by 1431. But in 1443 a revolt broke out, led by Skanderbeg, an Albanian nobleman who had as a young man served in the Ottoman military. He was able to withstand counterattacks by the Ottomans for 25 years, in the mountains of central Albania. Skanderbeg is considered the Albanian national hero. After his death, the coalition of principalities broke up, and the Ottomans prevailed. With the Ottoman conquest, many of the Christians emigrated, but over time the advantages of conversion to Islam became more and more, so that the majority of the population, especially in the south, is Muslim. Albanians filled many senior positions in the Ottoman Empire over the centuries.

Romania While the Albanians are descended from the remnant populations of the Roman era who retained their native languages, the Romanians are descended from the remnant populations who spoke Latin, and who kept their Orthodox faith. Their region was invaded by many groups, including the Huns, Goths, Avars, Pechenegs, Slavs, Hungarians and Mongols. With the mixing and movement of people, some languages become dominant. In this case, the language was a descendant of Vulgar Latin. There were, and are, groups of Romanian-speaking people, called Vlachs, in other parts of the Balkans.

After the departure of the Mongols in the early 13th Century, the Romanian-speaking areas emerged as the principalities Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, all subject to the Hungarian kings. In the mid 14th Century, Wallachia and Moldavia gained independence from Hungary. A famous ruler of Wallachia in the mid 15th Century was Vlad III Dracu, better known as Vlad the Impaler, who was the model for Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula. By 1541, all three principalities were under the control of the Ottomans.

The Geo-Political Environment

Besides the Balkans, which had historically been part of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Ottomans had powerful neighbours which were important factors in Ottoman expansion and foreign policy. To the west, there was the Catholic Habsburg Empire. To the near north, there was the Catholic Hungarian Empire, and to the far north, the Orthodox Russian Empire. The Habsburgs and the Russians both had claims competing with the Ottoman claim to be the “Third Rome.” East lay the fragmented remnants of the various Persian Empires, which in 1500 suddenly became unified as the Safavid Persian Empire; to the south the Sunni Muslim Egyptian Empire; and to the west and on the seas the Italian maritime republics of Venice and Genoa.

Holy Roman Empire In the 8th Century, Charles, King of the Franks, extended the Frankish territory to include most of Europe from the Elbe to the Pyrenees to Rome.

In 800, Charles, known as Charlemagne, was crowned by Pope Leo III as Emperor, it being considered that he had re-established the Western Roman Empire. The new empire was called the Holy Roman Empire. The title Holy Roman Emperor persisted almost continuously until 1918. In 1452 the title was given to Frederick II of Habsburg, and it remained in his family until 1918. The Empire itself gradually broke up, but the lands of Habsburg, first established in the early 11th Century at Habsburg Castle in present-day Switzerland, increased, so that the major power to the west of the Ottoman Empire was the House of Habsburg.

Hungary Besides the Slavs, there were many other invaders in the Balkans in the thousand years from the beginning of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire: Huns, Goths, Avars, Pechenegs, Slavs, Magyars and Mongols. Of these, the only one which left a population persisting past the Middle Ages is the Magyar, who are called Hungarians by the Western Europeans. The Magyar were a nomadic people related to the Finns who originated south of the forests between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains, to the east of present-day Moscow. By the Middle Ages they lived North of the Black Sea. In the late 9th and early 10th Centuries the Magyar invaded the Carpathian Basin straddling the Danube. From this base, they raided Europe from Constantinople to Spain, until they suffered a major defeat in 955 at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire. After this they confined themselves pretty well to the Balkans. Roman Christianity penetrated Hungary from the late 10th Century, along with Western European ideas of statecraft. Saint Stephen became the first king of Hungary about 1000, and organised the kingdom along feudal lines. The Mongol invasions in 1241 and 1242 devastated Hungary. As a result the king Bela IV allowed refugees from the Mongols into the country, and constructed a system of fortifications. These allowed the Hungarians to defeat a second Mongol invasion in 1285. Hungary was a major player in the region during the rise of the Ottomans. They had absorbed Croatia by 1102. During the Ottoman advances into the Balkans, under their general John Hunyadi and his son Matthias Corvinus, who was elected king, the Hungarians fought many battles

with the Ottomans, many successfully. Hungary had adopted artillery, and had the best designers. An engineer from Hungary had designed the huge bombards that Mehmet had used in the siege of Constantinople. Hungary absorbed the northern parts of Serbia and Bosnia after the Ottoman conquest of the southern parts. Hunyadi’s armies defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Belgrade in 1456. However, after the death of Corvinus in 1490, Hungary went into a decline. The Ottomans had a decisive victory at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526, and conquered the capital Buda in 1541. The western part of the country recognised the Habsburg Emperor as King of Hungary, so was absorbed in the Austrian Empire, while the central and eastern parts came under the control of the Ottomans.

Russia

East Slav migration into the area of Western Russia began in the 6th Century, with Slavs becoming the dominant population by the 7th. In the 9th Century Vikings appeared along the Dnieper and other rivers. These Varangians traded where they had to and pillaged where they could. Rurik took control of the northern town of Novgorod in 832. His successor Oleg conquered Kiev in 882, founding Kievian Rus. Rus expanded and developed in the 10th and 11th Centuries into one of the largest and most prosperous states in Europe. Relations, not always friendly, were established with Constantinople. In 988 the ruler Vladmir the Great accepted Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople, so Rus became Christian.

St. Vladmir, presented by the Ukranian government on the

1000th anniversary of the conversion of Russia. On the campus of The University of Queensland.

Ultimately Kievian Rus collapsed, the final blow being the massacre of Kiev by the Mongols in 1237-40. Some outlying settlements survived, including in particular Vladmir, whose area included Moscow. From the early 14th Century, Muscovy (the principality surrounding Moscow) grew in influence and gradually absorbed the other principalities. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Grand Duke Ivan III (The Great) claimed succession to the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 1547, his grandson, the Grand Duke Ivan IV (The Terrible), assumed the title Tsar (Caesar) of all the Russias. In 1571, Ottoman allies, the Crimean Tatars, attacked Russia, burning Moscow. The next year, however, when they returned with an even stronger army, they were met by the Russian army at Molodi, south of Moscow, and thoroughly defeated, only a small fraction of the Tatar army surviving. This was the last attempt by the Ottomans to conquer Russia. Ivan died in 1584, and his son Feodor in 1598, ending the Rurikid Dynasty. After 15 years of turmoil, the Tsardom was taken by Michael I Romanov. His dynasty persisted until 1917.

Persia In the mid-15th Century, the former Seljuk Empire, which had supplanted the Abbasid Caliphate and incidentally several earlier Persian Empires, had succumbed to the chaos following the Mongol and Timurid invasions, so had fragmented into numerous small principalities and kingdoms. But in 1500, Ismail, the 12-year old exiled son of a displaced ruler of a small principality in Azerbaijan, assembled a force of 7000 Turkmen, and very quickly conquered all of the former Seljuk Empire from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, beginning the Safavid Persian Empire. The Ottomans invaded Persia in 1514, winning some victories, ultimately gaining eastern Anatolia and most of Mesopotamia. For the next 200 years war with Persia was about as much a constant for the Ottomans as it had been for the Byzantines. An important factor in their rivalry was that the Safavids adopted Shi’a Islam, while the Ottomans followed Sunni Islam.

Egypt Egypt had never been part of the Seljuk Empire, although it had been part of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. It was ruled by a slave military force called Mamluks, who had usurped the Ayyubid Dynasty founded by Saladin in 1171. The Mamluks were something like the Ottoman Janissaries. Egypt was very wealthy, as it controlled several important trade routes. Egypt was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517, although it always retained some autonomy.

Venice and Genoa Most of the commerce through Constantinople was in the hands of the Italian maritime republics Venice and Genoa. Venice had been founded in the fifth century by refugees from the Hun invasion, and had developed as a semi-autonomous city under Byzantine overlordship until the 9th Century, when it became independent. In the 10th Century Venice established a string of naval bases and trading posts along the Dalmatian coast, suppressing Slav pirates and achieving control of the Adriatic Sea. In the 11th Century Venice was granted trading concessions by the Byzantines. As a major naval power, Venice transported many of the Crusaders in the various crusades in the 12th and 13th Centuries, and participated in the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Subsequently Venice took control of Crete, several islands in the Agean, parts of Greece, and ultimately Cyprus. Venetian troops participated in the defence of Constantinople in 1453. They mostly escaped after the fall of the city. However, because of the importance of commerce to the Ottoman treasury, Venice retained many of its trading rights.

Venetian Territories about 1500

Genoa Genoa began to become prominent in the 11th Century, when in alliance and competition with Pisa, it cleared the western Mediterranean of Arab pirates, opening the region to commerce. Genoa participated in the Crusades, gaining important trading rights. Venetian participation in the Fourth Crusade capture of Constantinople in 1204 reduced Genoa’s position in the Eastern Mediterranean, but by helping the Byzantines to recover Constantinople in 1261, Genoa gained the dominant position, gaining a fortress in Constantinople, Galata, and the rights to establish a string of trading colonies on the Black Sea coast, especially Caffa in the Crimea. Although Genoese troops participated in the defence of Constantinople in 1453, and Constantinople was resupplied from Galata, Galata was nominally neutral and was not attacked by the Ottomans. Most of Genoa’s trading rights remained in place after the conquest, even though the government passed to the Ottomans.