A History of the Crusades (39 page)

One of the most striking features of the Mamluk recovery in the fifteenth century is the creation under Barsbay and his successors of a successful war-fleet. Muslim war-fleets now made their strongest showing in the Mediterranean since the heyday of the Fatimids. Maritime warfare between Muslim and Christian was more a matter of piracy than piety. Cyprus, since its capture by Richard I of England in 1191, had served as a base for Christian crusaders and pirates, and especially in the early fifteenth century for Catalan pirates. But Mamluk possession of
ports on the Syrian littoral had put them in striking distance of the island and, after an Egyptian fleet had raided Cyprus in 1425, a Mamluk army ravaged the island and captured King Janus in the following year. Thereafter Cyprus became a tributary of the sultanate and its kings engaged themselves not to harbour pirates.

In the 1440s the Mamluks turned their forces against Rhodes. The sultan al-Zahir Jaqmaq (1438–53) was determined to put an end to Christian piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. He also wished indirectly to assist the Ottomans. An early attack against Rhodes in 1440 was hardly more than a desultory raid. A second expedition in 1443 frittered away its resources attacking Christian possessions on the south coast of Asia Minor. Although the third and last expedition in 1444 did actually attempt to invest the fortress of Rhodes, its troops were soon beaten off. According to a contemporary Muslim chronicler, ‘the aims of the troops were not realized, nor did they come back with any result; and for that reason their former zeal for the holy war in that quarter was dampened for a long time to come. And to God alone is the ultimate end of all things.’ In 1446 the French merchant Jacques Coeur negotiated peace between the Mamluks and the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes.

The Mamluk and Ottoman sultans had a common interest in combating Christian crusades and piracy in the eastern Mediterranean, but elsewhere they found themselves intermittently in conflict, particularly in southern and eastern Turkey where they sponsored rival Turkoman principalities. Although their struggle for supremacy in this region was for the most part fought out by proxy clients, the Mamluks did drift into direct warfare with the Ottomans in 1486–91. It was a war which the Mamluks won, in part due to their successful deployment of artillery, but such a long-sustained conflict strained the Mamluk treasury. Mamluk economic problems were aggravated by the appearance of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and Portuguese attempts to blockade the Red Sea and deprive Egypt of the revenues of the spice trade. In 1516 the Ottoman sultan Selim the Grim (1512–20), fearing that the Mamluks might make common cause with the new Safavid Shi‘ite regime in
Iran, launched a pre-emptive invasion of the Mamluk sultanate. Selim’s tame jurists declared that this war was a jihad, since the Mamluks were obstructing Selim’s fight against the Christians and Shi‘ite schismatics. The Ottoman victories at Marj Dabiq in northern Syria in 1516 and at Raydaniyya in Egypt in 1517 were largely due to Ottoman superiority in numbers and logistics, though treachery and desertions from the Mamluk ranks also played a part. The last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, was hung from the Zuweyla Gate in Cairo, and Selim, having annexed Syria and Egypt, went on to declare himself the protector of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. In the decades which followed the Ottomans were able to extend their territory to include a great deal of the North African coast.

The Ottoman Turks are first recorded as holding territory in the region of Bursa at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Ottoman beylicate (principality) was one among many beylicates which were established in Asia Minor in the wake of the break-up of the Seljuk sultanate of Rum and the withdrawal of Mongol power from the region. However, there is much that is legendary in the early story of the Ottomans and it is unclear whether the first Ottoman beys were leaders of a natural tribe, or whether the mass of their supporters were
ghazi
s who had joined the Ottomans on the edge of Byzantine territory in order to take part in the jihad and find booty or martyrdom. It is nevertheless plain that the
ghazi
ethic played a crucial role in some of the other beylicates, particularly the coastal beylicates of Aydin and Menteshe, from whose ports sea-
ghazi
s set out to ravage Christian shipping. In Anatolia, as elsewhere, Sufis played a key part in preaching the jihad, and a later Ottoman source describes one of the emirs of Aydin being initiated into the status of
ghazi
by a shaykh of the Mevlevi, or Whirling Dervishes; the shaykh presented the emir with a war-club which the latter placed on his head, before declaring: ‘With this club will I first subdue my passions and then kill all the enemies of the faith.’

Bursa fell to Orkhan, the Ottoman bey, in 1326, but for a long time after that the Ottoman capital was wherever the bey’s tent was pitched. Whether they were tribesmen or
ghazi
s, the men who fought for the early Ottoman beys fought in the confidence that God smiled on their struggles. According to Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was a captive of the Turks in 1354, ‘these infamous people, hated by God and infamous, boast of having got the better of the Romans [i.e. Byzantines] by their love of God … They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil … and not only do they commit these crimes, but even—what an aberration—they believe that God approves of them.’

Ottoman expansion in north-west Anatolia was rapid under Orkhan (
c
.1324–60) and Orkhan was the first Ottoman to style himself sultan. His territorial expansion was at the expense of both the Byzantines and the rival beylicates. The maritime beylicate of Aydin was at first perceived in the West as posing a greater danger than the Ottomans, and consequently in 1344 a crusader naval league chose as its target Umur of Aydin’s port of Smyrna. Meanwhile Turkish raiders, only some of whom were in the service of the Ottomans, had crossed the Dardanelles and were operating in the Plain of Adrianople as early as the 1340s. An earthquake at Gallipoli in 1354 or 1355 allowed the Ottomans to occupy that harbour and gave them their first base west of the Dardanelles. Gallipoli was subsequently lost to a crusade led by Amadeus of Savoy, but the Ottoman occupation of Adrianople in 1369 restored their position in Europe and during the reign of Murad I (1362–89) Thrace and Macedonia were conquered.

Although it pleased the Janissaries to describe themselves as ‘the heaven-chosen soldiers of Islam’, the importance of the medieval Janissaries should not be exaggerated. Originally the Janissary (more correctly Yeni Cheri, or New Troops) regiment was recruited from Christian youths captured in the Balkan wars, but, as this source proved inadequate, there was a switch to
devshirme
from the late fourteenth century onwards. Under the
devshirme
system, boys aged between 8 and 15 years from
Christian villages within the Ottoman empire were forcibly conscripted and taken away to be trained as military slaves. The best of the young men recruited in this manner went into the service of the palace, where they would be trained for high office. The Janissaries were in a sense the rejects in the
devshirme
system. Throughout the fifteenth century they were primarily a regiment of infantry archers and, although some troops were provided with handguns as early as the 1440s, it was not until the late sixteenth century that most Janissaries were equipped with muskets. There was also a parallel and larger, though less well-disciplined, body of free-born infantry, known as the
yaya
. The élite of the Ottoman army, however, was furnished by
sipahi
s, freeborn cavalry who did military service in return for assignments of
timar
: that is estates on which they had the right to collect revenue.
Akinji
s, or light cavalry raiders who fought for a share of the booty, helped to swell Ottoman ranks.

Murad I’s campaigning in Europe and the advance of his armies to the Danube provoked the formation of a coalition of Christian principalities in the Balkans. However, their combined armies went down to defeat at the battle of Kosovo (1389). Although Murad was killed in the battle, his son, Bayezid I (1389–1402) also known as Yilderim or the Thunderbolt, smoothly took command and reaped the fruits of victory. Victory at Kosovo confirmed the Turkish conquest of Bulgaria, and in the long run sealed the fate of Serbia. In the immediate aftermath, however, Bayezid offered the Serbs easy terms, so that he could deal with a revolt of the Qaraman Turkomans in Anatolia. The Ottomans claimed that the Qaramans, in waging war against them, were impeding the jihad and assisting the infidels. In the years that followed, Bayezid made use of dubiously loyal European vassals to campaign in Asia and vice versa, and seven beylicates in Asia Minor were precariously annexed.

Communications between the sultanate’s eastern and western fronts would always be vulnerable as long as the Christians continued to hold Constantinople. In 1394 Bayazid gave orders that the city should be blockaded. Although the joint French and Hungarian crusade of 1396 aimed among other things to
bring relief to Constantinople, it ended in disaster on the battlefield of Nicopolis, as will be seen, and the city’s salvation was to come from a quite different source. Bayezid’s aggressive policy of annexation in Anatolia had brought him up against clients of Tamerlane and provoked the Turco-Mongol warlord to intervene. Much of the army that Bayezid brought to face Tamerlane outside Ankara in 1402 consisted of reluctant tributaries and they lost little time in going over to Tamerlane. Bayezid was taken in the battle and was soon to die in captivity. In the aftermath of the battle, Tamerlane re-established the Turkoman beylicates and the Ottoman empire was further weakened as Bayezid’s sons, Suleyman, Isa, Mehmed, and Musa, fought amongst themselves for the succession. This war ended with the victory of Mehmed I (1413–21).

Under Mehmed and his son Murad II (1421–51) the Ottoman recovery proceeded apace. Although a renewed attempt to take Constantinople in 1422 failed, the Turks had regained all and more than they had lost in 1402. As early as 1432 the Burgundian spy Bertrandon de la Brocquière noted that if the Ottoman sultan ‘wished to exercise the power and revenue that he had, given the slight amount of resistance he would encounter from Christendom, he could conquer a large part of it’. The Hungarian general John Hunyadi won some striking victories against the Turks in 1441 and 1442, but the Varna Crusade of 1444, a Hungarian attempt at joint operations with a western fleet in Black Sea, was unsuccessful and proved to be the last offensive crusade aimed at stemming the Ottoman advance in the Balkans.

In 1451 Mehmed II, who succeeded Murad II, put in hand preparations for the siege of Constantinople. Artillery played a crucial role in that siege. The Ottomans may have been using cannons as early as the 1380s. From the 1420s onwards cannons were regularly used in siege warfare. Guns were captured from Christians in the European wars and more guns were cast by Christian renegades who entered the service of the Turks. Urbanus, a Christian renegade from Transylvania and an expert gun founder, was one of the main architects of the Muslim triumph at Constantinople in 1453.

‘Sultan Mehmed conquered Constantinople with the help of God. It was an abode of idols … He converted its churches of beautiful decoration into Islamic colleges and mosques.’ Mehmed’s conquest of the city had confirmed traditional Islamic prophecies about its fall to the Muslims. But the conquest of the ancient capital of the eastern Roman empire allowed Mehmed to present himself as heir not only to the heroes of the Islamic past but also to Alexander and Caesar. A contemporary Italian observer recorded that Mehmed ‘declares that he will advance from East to West as in former times the westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.’

The conquest of Constantinople had given the sultan possession of a major dockyard and arsenal. The behaviour of the Ottoman fleet during the siege of Constantinople had been cautious and inglorious. After 1453 Ottoman fleets were more aggressive and successful. The Black Sea was turned into a Turkish lake and Mehmed’s army and fleet conducted combined operations in the Aegean and elsewhere. By 1460 the Ottoman conquest of the last outpost of the Byzantine empire in the Peloponnese had been completed. In 1480 the Ottoman fleet set out against Rhodes. In the words of Lionel Butler, Mehmed II ‘was eager to add Rhodes to his collection of famous Greek cities of the Ancient World which he had conquered: Constantinople, Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Trebizond’. Its conquest would also have given Mehmed a key strategic point in the eastern Mediterranean, but the Turkish onslaught was beaten off. Mehmed planned to try again in 1481 and doubtless he also planned to reinforce a Turkish expeditionary force which had landed in Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, but he died in 1481. The Turkish troops stranded in Italy surrendered in September of that year.

Bayezid II (1481–1512) pursued a less aggressive policy with regard to the West. This was in large part due to the fact that he had to defend his throne against his brother, Jem. Defeated in 1481, Jem fled to Rhodes in 1482 and from there he went to France. Under surveillance in Europe, Jem remained a powerful pawn in the hands of Christendom until his death in 1495.

Bayazid made some gains in the Balkans, but he faced greater problems on the eastern front, first with the Mamluk sultanate and then, from 1501 onwards, with the rise in Iran of Shah Isma‘il, the first of the Safavid shahs.

Shah Isma‘il’s Twelver Shi‘ite following seem to have regarded him as the Mahdi and they believed that he was infallible and invincible. The legend of Isma‘il’s invincibility was destroyed in 1514 at the Battle of Chaldiran, when an army under the command of Selim the Grim defeated Isma‘il’s undisciplined following of Turkoman tribal warriors. Even after Chaldiran, Shi‘ism was still seen as threatening the Sunni Ottoman regime, but it was dangerous for Selim to conduct further campaigns against Isma‘il as long as the Mamluk sultanate was a potential threat to his southern flank. The Ottoman occupation of Mamluk lands in 1516–17 unified the lands of the eastern Mediterranean under a single Muslim ruler, and thereafter Constantinople annually collected vast amounts of revenue from Egypt in particular.