The Ottoman Empire's territorial expansion and political structure in medieval history

¶ … Ottoman Empire is among the most fascinating periods in the history of civilization, and it remains the subject of scholarly study because of the impact it had on the world, and continues to have today.

The empire began around as a medieval state in the late 13th Century around what is now known as Turkey; the region had largely been unaffected, either socially, militarily or economically by the social progress in the rest of Europe. Hence, this empire was largely frozen in time, according to www.infoplease.com.

The Ottoman Empire began modestly enough, with many small Turkish states bonding together in Asia Minor following the disintegration of the Seljuk Turks' empire.

And it is important to note that Turkey's domination over Africa's northern areas was not entirely well defined, and the Ottoman Empire did not really have permanent, clear-cut borders; rather, the empire was more of a military administration over a vast region of diverse cultures and geography.

And when it was at its peak of power and influence in the Middle East and Africa, between the years 1683 -- 1699, the Ottoman Empire controlled an area which includes these nations today:

Hungary, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, southern Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iraq, Kuwait, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, eastern and western Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, eastern Yemen, Egypt, northern Libya, Tunisia, and northern Algeria.

The early structure of political and military power in the Ottoman Empire

The successor to the thrown -- prior to the emergence of Ahmad I in 1603 -- was "habitually contested by all the sons of the deceased sultan," which is a corrupt and barbaric style of administration, but must be understood to gain a perspective into this era; in addition, it was the patriotic duty of the victor " ... To kill his rivals in order to restore order."

Turkish Military: The first place the Turks occupied in Europe was Gallipoli

According to Theodore Spandounes (Nicol, 1997), the first place that the Turks occupied in Europe was Gallipoli; and the ruler of the Turks, Orhan, " ... went on to lay siege to Constantinople" (20). When Orhan had taken Constantinople, John Paleologo (son of a deceased sultan) "then entered the palace and paid Orhan all that he had promised" (20) for the taking of Constantinople. And this was how it worked in the 14th century, as the Ottoman Empire was taking shape.

The Janissaries

The growth and expansion of Russia from the 18th Century onwards

Migration is always one of the negative products of war (McGowan, 1994), and the many wars fought by (against) the Ottoman empire sent hundreds of thousands scurrying for greener and more peaceful pastures. Migrations were in part set off by the expansion and growth of Russia in the 18th Century. Russian expansion and growth during the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries caused a tremendous upheaval in countries where Russia came marauding into previous peaceful settlements, and also where Russia and the Ottoman Empire forces clashed in bloody and long wars.

The Ottoman war against Russia in 1768, a resumption of previous wars, caused "new waves of migration" (648), and were "followed by others still later, caused by the provincial chaos which prevailed in the final two decades of the period (1792-1812)."

These late 18th Century migrations -- including the northward migration of the Serbs, and the migration of peasants into Habsburg territory driven by the "harsh Russian occupation during the war of 1736 -- 39" -- immediately affected the "Serbs, the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Tartars and the Arab villagers of the Syrian periphery," according to Bruce McGowan, former U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia.

But of all the civil upheaval and migrations occurring during that period, the "single greatest surge of migration during the eighteenth Century," McGowan writes on page 650, "was up to 200,000 Tatars emigrated out of the reach of the Russians." Many of the Tatars settled on the western shore of the black Sea, in the Dobruja province.

And meantime a "deluge" of Christians -- most likely, according to McGowan, Slavs and Greeks -- were driven towards Azov by the Russians, around 1778. The Russians had driven the Christians and Tatar nation out, and the Tatar peoples -- who once had posed a threat as a force inside Russia -- survived, according to McGowan, "only as a diaspora" (650) (diaspora: an ethnic or cultural group scattered far from their homeland).

Between 1768 and 1812, there were three wars between Russia and Turkey, causing chaos and more migrations of ethnic peoples. Russia, meantime, was occupying Rumanian provinces, and as Bucharest recovered from the worst of Russian repression during that occupation, approximately 200,000 Bulgarians crossed over into the Rumanian provinces. A good many of those refugees, McGowan suspects (650), continued into "the newly conquered Russian territories where they crossed paths with the retreating Tatars."

The second of the three Russo-Turkish wars drove many Bulgarians into Thrace and Macedonia, which was bad timing for the Bulgarians, since "the newly risen warlords of Ottoman Europe (the ayans) were locked in a [two-decade-long] struggle for dominance." Newly arrived peoples, forced out of their homeland, could not have been pleased to be in the cross-fire of brutal Ottoman warlords, to paraphrase McGowan.

On page 682 McGowan discusses the primitive peasant conditions in Rumania in the 18th Century, in part due to the "harsh Russian occupation in the late 1730s" -- who required far more work out of peasants than the Ottoman's 12 days of servitude:

'In winter they [peasants under Ottoman in Rumania] retire to cells underground, easily kept warm by means of a little fire made of dried dung and some branches of trees." Each family -- men, women, children -- "are all heaped together; and their respective beds consist of one piece of coarse woolen cloth ... "

The Janissary Corps

The military corps within the Ottomans was the Janissary Corps, which "dated back to the late fourteenth century when Ottoman power was shifting from Asia Minor to the Balkans" (Palmer, 1992). The corps was created by Sultan Murad I, "as a slave bodyguard." And fifty years later, the Devsirme corps was introduced, Palmer explains, and served "as the chief source from which the Janissary Corps was raised." Christian peasant fathers were required once in five years to tell local Ottoman officials how many sons they had; one in five of their boys were taken (at age six or seven) by the Sultan's officers and obliged to become Muslims.

"The Janissaries were a highly visible check on the sultan's personal authority" (Imber, 2002). As an armed force, they "were also in a position to defend their own interests and secure their own political ends." They could also be "decisive in the accession and deposition of sultans, in the conduct of campaigns and in extracting money from the Treasury" (322).

'The old fiction [is that] the janissaries won for the Balkan people the sympathies of Western Europe" (Gibbons, 1968); but, Gibbons continues, "there is no historical basis for the assertion that the Osmanlis conquered the Balkan states by use of the janissaries."

The Ottoman failure to reform the inefficient system of government they were using

One of the problems encountered by the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) involved the so called "cotton famine" -- which was not a "famine" at all, but points to the sluggish nature of the Turkish economic system in the 19th Century. The American Civil War was looming in 1857, and there were serious worries in Europe (England and Turkey in particular) that the war would curtail the free flow of cotton out of the U.S. To Europe.

By 1806, "the average share of U.S. cotton in total British cotton imports was 53.1%" (Kurmus, 1987), and twenty years later that rose to 74.5%; by 1850, the U.S. cotton reaching England accounted for 81.1% of imports.

The amount of cotton furnished to England by America is pertinent, because Turkey had previously been the main cotton supplier to England, but began to fail in its ability to raise quality cotton and export it. Indeed, cotton previously had been imported into England from Turkey, as far back as 1586, and in fact until 1780, Kurmus writes (161), "almost all cotton imported into England" came from Turkey.

Besides cotton wool, Turkey had also supplied England with considerable cotton yarn; in fact, in 1725, 146,340 pounds of cotton yard was sold to England by Turkey, and during the period 1783-93, Turkey exported 252,000 bales of cotton wool and about 16,500 bales of cotton yarn to France, according to Kurmus (161).

These numbers are significant because they show that the Ottoman Empire (Turkey in this case) had a good thing going economically, and could compete on the world market with other nations when it came to products like cotton.

However, at the dawn of the 19th Century, there came a "fall in the quantity of cotton imported into England from Turkey" (162). Two reasons for the fall in quantity were apparent: one, cotton from America (grown largely by black slaves in the southern U.S. states, a fact over which the Civil War would eventually be fought) was "better in quality and cheaper in price"; and two, the British Levant Company (responsible for importing Turkish produce) was prohibited by English law from buying Turkish cotton unless "it was exchanged in payment for British goods exported to Turkey."

And so it came to pass that cotton was so expensive, and the Turkish government was so inept, that a great product was no longer feasible as far as trading with England. And here is another example of Turkey (Ottoman) not having an efficient system of government and hence not keeping up with the economic realities of the emerging European market.

The fact is that the Ottoman hard and fast rule for taxing local growers for their produce was still the ancient tax, the tithe. "Under the existing tax system," according to a report from Turkish agents who were trying to explain their plight to the British, "it [is] unrealistic to expect a considerable increase in the output of cotton. The tithe on cotton should be abolished altogether," (163), the agents' report explained.

Meantime, the British (through training and advocacy), and Americans (by providing "good-quality American [cotton] seed for native seed), tried to help Turkey jumpstart it's potentially massive cotton production abilities; this was done partly to make more cotton available in Europe, and also partly because the threat of a Civil War in the U.S. was imminent, and that would most certainly mean a dearth of cotton coming out of the American south.

So, the Turkish government was persuaded to take action to re-kindle the flagging cotton industry, but giving free land to cotton growers, by not taxing that land for five years, by exempting tools and machinery used in cotton growing from import duty, and free seed would be given to growers -- along with training and literature on proper growing and harvesting techniques.

That all sounded very good; but, as Kurmus writes on page 164, "reports by the agents of the Association produced serious doubts about the credibility of the intentions of the Turkish government to encourage cotton growing. It was alleged that the abolition of tithes and other exemptions had not in fact taken place but existed only in paper." The allegations were investigated, and found to be true.

And how did the Turkish government respond? Did they come out with a progressive attitude and new plans? Quite the contrary: "The reaction of the Turkish government was very harsh." And so, the continuing story of how the failure to reform the inefficient system led to one downfall after another for the Ottoman Empire.

Did attitudes of many of the powers in the west (including Russia in the east) before the first world war cause the collapse of the ottoman Empire, or was the collapse caused by the Ottomans themselves?

The collapse was most certainly caused -- with perhaps a few exceptions -- by the Ottomans themselves. First, it should be noted that, as for the continuing hostility that many European nations feel towards Turkey, "Old memories of Ottoman military successes against the European states clearly are at work" (Quataert, 2000). It is not fair, perhaps, that Europeans see Turkey as the only Ottoman successor state, because there are many.

In the Balkans, for example, a Muslim issue comes into play, very much a part of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and its successor states, and symptomatic of the failure of the Empire to reform itself in time to avoid its own fall: "Present day political frontiers follow old Ottoman provincial administrative boundaries," Quataert writes (196). But, he writes, "few administrative practices or structures" from the old Ottoman Empire actually transferred to the post-Ottoman states in the Balkans, simply because, "following independence, almost all of the Muslim administrative classes fled or were expelled."

Expelling Muslim administrative classes based on race and ethnicity, shows a sign of the failure of the Ottoman administration philosophies, and is not related to the attitudes of powers in the west.

The origin and decline of the Ottoman state

"How was it that this state, now looking so weak [around the period of WWI] and decrepit, so old-fashioned, still so oriental after many westernizing reforms, had once been so enormously successful? (Kafadar, 1995). This is the state, Kafadar writes, that "once ruled, without major unrest, over a huge population with a dizzying variety of religions, languages, and traditions" (34), and how could it have even survived as long as it did? To answer that question with any degree of accuracy, Kafadar writes at great length about the existing historical records on the Ottoman Empire; the origins and the accuracy of those accounts, and indeed also the decline and fall of the Empire..

'The opening of the Ottoman archives to scholars [in the 1940s] changed the course of Ottoman studies" (42), Kafadar asserts. Both the quality and the quantity of the archival materials (kept hard and fast by a "meticulous bureaucracy" in Turkey), have coincided so well "with the rising prestige of social and economic history worldwide that the question of Ottoman 'origins' like questions of origins in general, started to look awfully dated ... "

One thing that is interesting in Kafadar's book is his quotes from scholars who have determined that the Empire did not started out of the promotion of the Turkish race, but rather Turkish "ideology." And, his sources indicate "no Moslem fanaticism in the military activities" of the early Ottoman leadership. The goal of the original Ottoman leaders, historians now suggest, "was not the spread of Islam or the destruction of Christianity but simply plunder." Simply plunder, as though that is a simple explanation, but historians are just that, historians, and they don't always have 20-20 eyesight when it comes to historical hindsight.

'Why, then, did the Ottoman Empire, which had survived so many challenges to its existence, finally fall in the aftermath of the First World War?" (Palmer, 1992) As long as the Empire was expanding, Constantinople served as the "natural base for the penetration of the Balkan peninsula and the Danube Basin" (267). But as the Ottoman lands began to shrink, the city "became a dangerously exposed foothold on an alien continent."

And the military that once ruled so mightily, no longer to maintain and protect the vast territory that once seemed to easy to defend. Even though Kafadar's view was that the Empire was not built to promote Islam, Palmer maintains that "the relationship between the Sultanate and Islam" -- the essentially "religious basis of the Ottoman State" -- gave the Empire "both its strength and its weakness."

Conclusion

It would be wrong to call the Ottoman Empire "a purely Islamic state," according to Edhem Eldem, professor of history at Bogazici University in Istanbul (NPR, 2004). "It was a state that claimed some kind of attachment, some kind of allegiance to Islam, but combined it with other forms of heritage from the Byzantine tradition ... "

The Ottomans were mostly about "empire building, turning their state into the Mediterranean's greatest power," added reporter Mike Shuster of Public Radio. The real turning point for the Ottoman military came when the Ottomans launched (and lost) an assault against Vienna, in 1686. While the Ottoman military had a near-disastrous battle (of Lepanto) near the western coast of Greece in 1571, and were smashed by the Venetians -- hundreds of ships on both sides were involved, and thousands died -- the real downfall of the Ottoman military came in 1686. "This time they were defeated decisively," Shuster added. "By the end of the century they had signed a peace treaty with a coalition of their European adversaries. They would never be as powerful again."