The rise and decline of the Ottoman Empire

Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire

Founded by the Turkish House of Ottoman, the Ottoman Empire endured from roughly 1299 to the First World War. For 620 years, the Ottoman Empire was the dominant political, cultural, and military force in the Middle East. At its peak its territory stretched from the edge of Vienna to the Red Sea, from North Africa to the Balkans (Chau, 2007).

Originally the Turks were a nomadic horseman from Central Asia who embraced Islam in the ninth century. Under the Seljuk leader Tugrul they captured Baghdad. The first major victory of the Seljuk Turks over Christians followed in 1071 when a Byzantine army was defeated near Lake Van. Subsequently the Seljuk's established a Sultanate with the capital at Konya on the site of the Greek city of Iconium. The Seljuk Sultanate survived until the early years of the fourteenth century when they were decimated by pagan Mongol hordes. Local rulers then carved out principalities for themselves.

One of these was Osman of Sogut, a settlement near modern Eskisehir in western Anatolia (Turkey). Sultan Osman I founded the Ottoman Empire in 1299 as a loose confederation of Turkish beyliks, or ethnic tribes, united by their ambition for westward conquest and expansion. His dynasty became known as the 'Osmanli' in Turkish and 'Othman' in Arabic, which was corrupted into 'Ottoman' in the languages of Western Europe. Osman died in 1326 when his army was besieging the Byzantine city of Brusa (Bursa today) which was captured by his son and successor Orhan. Brusa became the first effective capitol of an Ottoman Sultanate (Palmer, 2007).

The Rise of the Ottoman Empire

The Early Years of the Empire

In 1345 the Ottoman Turks crossed into narrow Dardanelles into Europe at the invitation of Emperor John V. Paleologue who sought their military aid against a usurper. The Ottomans quickly made vassals of the Bulgars and Serbs consolidating their Balkan gains by a decisive victory over the southern Slavs in June 1389 at Kosovo. During this period the Ottomans penetrated deeply into Europe mounting raids across the farmlands of southern Hungary. They were checked by Janos Hunyadi in Transylvania in 1442 and outside Belgrade in 1456 (Palmer, 2007).

The Siege of Constantinople in 1453

The fall of Constantinople marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the beginning of the Ottoman Empire. Founded in the 7th century BC, Constantinople had grown into the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The city grid had been laid out by Emperor Constantine I in the 4th century, and the site soon became a coveted trading center, straddling both a land route between Europe and Asia and a seaway to the Mediterranean (Weider History Group, 2007).

For centuries Constantinople was the largest metropolis in the known world, the impregnable core of a great empire, served by a deep-water port that gave access to the sea. Known as New Rome and the Queen City, it had been built to impress, its magnificent public monuments, decorated with statuary set in an elegant classical urban landscape. Its apparent invincibility and famous reputation made it a great prize. The city was also reputed to be hugely wealthy. While the Turks had no interest in its famous collection of Christian relics, the fact that many were made of solid gold and silver, decorated with huge gems and ancient cameos, was of importance. Their existence added weight to the rumor that Constantinople contained vast stores of gold, a claim which cannot have been true by 1453. By the early fifteenth century the city had lost all its provinces to Turkish occupation and was totally isolated. The Ottomans had conquered all the lands around the city of Constantinople (Herrin, 2003). By the time Mehmed II (1451-1481) rose to power in the 15th century, Ottoman desire for Constantinople had reached a fever pitch.

Mehmed II, the Ottoman Sultan historically known as Mehmed the Conqueror, led an army of 150,000 Turks which besieged Constantinople from early April to May 29th, 1453. The army defending Constantinople comprised just 8,000 soldiers, but they manned a virtually impregnable bastion, dominated by the four-mile Walls of Theodosius. Surrounded by water on three sides and buttressed by three gated land walls, the fortress city had thwarted invaders for more than a millennium. Its walls had proved resistant to traditional medieval siege technology, but Mehmed had a secret weapon. The year prior, a mercenary founder named Orban had offered his services, the construction of large bronze cannons, to both the Byzantines and the Ottomans. Mehmed was the highest bidder.

Orban forged nearly 70 cannons in time for the siege, including one 27-foot behemoth dubbed the Basilica that could fire a half-ton stone ball up to a mile. Mehmed II transported Orban's massive bronze cannons the 140 miles from Edirne to Constantinople using ox teams and brute force. The trip took six weeks. Arriving in early April, the 80,000-strong Ottoman force dug in along the land walls and raised earthworks to shield the guns. Ships transported the stone projectiles, which weighed from 200 to 1,500 pounds. The sultan set up his tent directly behind the Janissaries, his imperial bodyguard, within sight of the massive Basilica cannon. Even with this firepower advantage, it took Ottoman gunners 47 days of continuous bombardment to open a hole in the walls large enough to exploit with ground troops. On May 29, in the final assault, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX was killed, and the city fell (Weider History Group, 2007). The Byzantines lost the city they had held for 1,100 years and Mehmed II transformed the city into an Ottoman stronghold.

With the conquest of Constantinople the Ottoman's sealed their empire, connecting Asia and Africa. Following the conquest of the Byzantine capital, Mohmed II converted the Hagia Sophia (Greek for "Church of the Holy Wisdom of God"), the largest Christian cathedral of the Middle Ages, into an Imperial mosque. The Ottomans converted Constantinople to an Islamic city (Owens, 2009).

Factors that Contributed to the Empire's Success

The most memorable talent of the Ottoman Empire's expansion was its military prowess. Their early technological superiority through the intensive use of firearms put them at an advantage against opponents for nearly 300 years and the ingenuity of leaders such as Sultan Mehmet II won the important city of Constantinople, the most important stepping stone of the Empire's early expansion (Kamrava, 2005). Furthermore, their soldiers were professionals in the deepest sense, trained since childhood through the child-levy system in which the strongest and brightest Christian male children were recruited, converted, and utilized after undergoing the finest mental and physical training available in the world at the time. Swift adaptation to modern military realities characterized the empire and greatly influenced their expansion (Quataert, 2000).

While much of the Empire's expansion can be attributed to military success invasion was often unnecessary. Political tactics for expansion were sometimes more effective; Sultan Orhan received the Gallipoli peninsula through his marriage to the daughter of a pretender to the Byzantine thrown, while half the land belonging to the Turcoman ruler of Germiyan in Anatolia was acquired through Prince Bayezit's marriage. Through swift political tactics the Ottoman Empire would often come to possess an over-lordship of their former allies, in effect absorbing them into the Empire (Quataert, 2000). Newly acquired subjects rarely detested the new occupation. The economic power of the Empire improved their conditions immensely in relation to previous Christian feudalism and control was peacefully maintained through symbiotic fiscal relationships (Kamrava, 2005).

The Decline of the Ottoman Empire

As the center of gravity of the Western world moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard, a series of defeats marked the turning point of Ottoman fortunes in the East. The first came in 1571 when, in a three-hour battle, a Christian fleet composed of 208 Venetian, Spanish, Genoese, and papal galleys destroyed 90% of the Ottoman fleet of 260 ships in Greece's Bay of Lepanto. For the next hundred years, the Turks tried to regain their momentum and expand deeper into Europe. However, in 1683 they suffered a horrendous defeat at the hands of the Habsburg Army in Vienna. This defeat began the reverse of 300 years of expansion. Shortly thereafter the Empire lost most of its European territories and eventually Egypt to Napoleon. Weakened by this setback the loss of several other cities, including Athens, to the Christians followed. At this time Russia, under Peter the Great, joined the Holy Alliance against the Turks and the inevitable crushing of the Ottoman Empire by the Christian empire had begun (Smith, 1994).

The battles ebbed and flowed for another hundred years, but, as America won its freedom and the French their revolution, the Moslem empire steadily gave ground. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was imminent, and European powers started positioning themselves to claim the spoils. France sought to maintain influence in Jerusalem, Egypt, Algeria, and later, Tunisia. Its building of the Suez Canal (1859-1869) conflicted with Britain's plans to control the land and sea routes to Asia (Smith, 1994).

While jockeying for position in the Middle East, France and England joined forces during the Crimean War (1854-1856) to prevent Russian expansion from getting out of hand in the Balkans. But ten years later, while England was occupied with the conquest of India, Russia pushed the Turks out of most of Europe. However, those gains by Russia were largely lost when Britain recalled some of her troops from India and, in concert with France, denied Russia's political ambitions (Smith, 1994).

Conclusion

While the expansion of the Ottoman Empire manifested a rough geographic outline for the Middle East, its collapse has had great impact on the contemporary state of affairs in the region. The failure to modernize militarily was a product of the large-scale refusal of progressive reform as the Empire had consistently done in its earlier years. While power was being centralized in Europe's modern states, the Sultan had become a representative symbol more than the source of Ottoman political power, which had fundamentally dissolved into the hands of competing factions. This was largely due to carelessness and weak leadership on behalf of Sultans in the second half of the sixteenth century and beyond. The Empire's weakness offered the European colonial powers the ability to pick apart the Empire in what became known as the "Eastern Question," that is the issue of once the Ottoman Empire died, which colonial powers would acquire which lands. Competition formed mainly between Britain and France (Kamrava, 2005). The furthest western territories were taken by the French, as was modern day Syria after the First World War. The British claimed the lucrative regions of the central Middle East, while Italy held present day Libya (Smith, 2006). The colonization and de-colonization created the countries we see today; countries often split up against the grain of national identity due to European ignorance of population demographics.

As military and executive failure made way for European Colonialism, the Empire's internal political failures had reactions that still reverberate in today's cultural and political struggles. Local national identities began to immerge as control began to collapse (Kamrava, 2005). The economic strength and openness of the Ottoman's early period betrayed it in later years. The trade relations between east and west began to tilt in the west's favor and contributed heavily to the Empire's inability to modernize appropriately to the times. The disintegration and struggles of the Empire's government in its waning years produced an uneven political culture of rapid upheavals and radical social movements in many Middle Eastern states today. The collective public psyche of the Middle East has never quite recovered from the shift to western dominance, a sociological phenomenon that undoubtedly entered the realm of international affairs (Smith 2006).