Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (45 page)

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Central Eurasians Ride to a European Sea

The Third Regional Empire Period

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, large new empires were created by Central Eurasians. They comprised most of Eurasia, including Central Eurasia and nearly all of the periphery except Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan. At the same time, the Portuguese discovered the direct sea route to Asia around Africa and, followed soon after by other Western Europeans, developed the old Littoral trade routes into a distinct economic sphere, the Littoral System. The premodern world thus consisted of “continental” Eurasian empires of Central Eurasian origin and “coastal” European empires that were essentially global and based on knowledge and control of the sea routes around the world.

The Second Central Eurasian Conquest of Eurasia
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began when the continental Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire and restored its traditional maritime sphere of influence. The Turkmen, led by the Safavids, founded a new Persian Empire on the Iranian Plateau in the traditional Persian home area from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, while the Mughals conquered northern India and spread Timurid-Persian culture into South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the continental Russians defeated the Golden Horde successor states and expanded across Siberia to the Pacific in the east, the Manchus conquered China, and the Junghars established a steppe empire in Central Eurasia itself. With the construction of St. Petersburg on the Baltic and the transfer there of the Russian imperial capital, Russia became a maritime power too, with even grander ambitions, including in Central Eurasia.
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In 1498 Vasco da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean to India. In the following half century the Portuguese established trading posts from the Persian Gulf, via the Bay of Bengal, Malacca, and South China, to Japan. The Portuguese, and the Spanish as well, were still essentially medieval in most respects and, as such, followed a Central Eurasian model of the commercial imperative practically identical to the model followed by the Scythians and other early Iranians in their establishment of the Silk Road economy. The only significant difference was that the Europeans used ships and cannons instead of horses and compound bows to force the opening of trade when negotiations failed. The Central Eurasian model drove the Portuguese voyages of discovery to reach the Orient; their sometimes forcible establishment of trading rights;
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their building of “factories” (trading posts), which became fortresses and political outposts; and finally their eventual struggle with the great continental Asian powers and with other European competitors. Like the Central Eurasian nomads, the Portuguese depended heavily on local expertise—Asian pilots, cartographers, merchants, and others—throughout their expansion.
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Sailing in the other direction, the Spanish established a direct east-west trade system via the Americas and the Philippines. The European discovery and conquest of the open-sea routes to the Orient and the Americas began Western European political, military, and cultural domination of the world. By the nineteenth century the British dominated most of the new, European-created Littoral System and the open-sea trade to India and China, although no one European power was ever able to entirely eliminate the others or the traditional local coastal shipping.

The Second Central Eurasian Conquest of Eurasia

The late Renaissance conquests that established the great premodern Eurasian continental empires are not connected to the conquests of Tamerlane, which in most areas only interrupted or delayed their normal development. Upon Tamerlane’s death in 1405, the Ottomans almost immediately restored their empire and resumed their long-term expansion,
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eliminating the remnant Byzantine Empire in 1453. The relatively early chronology of the Ottoman Empire’s reestablishment vis-à-vis the other empires mirrors the out-of-synch chronology of Byzantine periods of growth, which were usually during periods of weakness elsewhere in western Eurasia. This was evidently the result, in great part, of the region’s coastal character—the Ottoman Turkish realm covered almost exactly the same eastern Mediterranean littoral territory as the old Eastern Roman Empire of a millennium earlier. The other early empires only began forming a century after Tamerlane, with the establishment of the Safavid Dynasty in Persia in 1501 by the Turkmen (who were Oghuz Turks and thus ethnolinguistically related to the Ottomans) and the simultaneous foundation of the Mughal (Moghul) Empire in Afghanistan and India by Babur and his Central Asian Turks.

While these states were in the process of being established, the focus of Eurasian power began to shift toward the sea in tandem with a great worldwide revolution that had its beginnings at the exact midpoint of the millennium: the establishment of European maritime domination over the Littoral and from there over the entire Eurasian continent. As one historian remarks, in the Ottoman and Mughal empires, “the dissolution of the core matched the emergence of the periphery.”
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The shift took place even within Europe itself. The Spanish
reconquista,
in which the last remnant of Arab rule in Spain was crushed with the capture of the Muslim capital of Granada in 1492, can be seen as a microcosmic version of the great Central Eurasian movement. Granada is not only inland, it is surrounded by mountains. The Alhambra,
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the palace and residence of the rulers, is a fortress perched on top of a high hill or plateau overlooking the great valley around it. The Spanish victory was one of the littoral over the continent: the Christians were not only successful warriors on land but skilled sailors as well. The subsequent history of European colonial exploration and empire building is marked by the success of the major Atlantic littoral states—Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, and France—to the exclusion of nearly all other contenders. There were to be no important Swedish colonies, German colonies, Austro-Hungarian colonies, Italian colonies, and so on.
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Even though all these states were seafaring nations too,
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their maritime tradition was almost exclusively local in nature. They were primarily continental powers, and remained continental, while the littoral powers expanded—first across the sea and later against their continental neighbors.

THE OTTOMAN RECOVERY

By 1413 the civil war following the Ottomans’ devastating defeat by Tamerlane in 1402 was over. The victor, Mehmed I (r. 1403–1421), recaptured the territories that had been conquered by his great-grandfather Murad I, and also subjugated part of the Balkans.

Under his grandson Mehmed II (the Conqueror, r. 1451–1481) the Turks laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of what was left of the Byzantine Empire. By that time the once great city sheltered only about 20,000 people, and much of the territory inside its walls had been turned into agricultural fields. Its only defenses were its great walls, which had repeatedly defeated Byzantine enemies of old. But the days were long past when Byzantine engineers were more advanced than their enemies and the Byzantine navy ruled the Aegean and the Black Sea. This time the attackers had the advanced weapons. The Turks hired military engineers from Italy and other European countries to bombard the walls with cannons. In short order the defenses were breached, and on May 29, 1453, Mehmed entered the city. He declared it the capital of the Ottoman Empire and immediately began rebuilding and repopulating it.

Though the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, was a landmark event symbolically, it did not signify very much in practice. The Ottomans already had conquered all but a few small outliers of the shrunken Byzantine realm
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and had begun to expand beyond it into lands that had not been ruled from the city for hundreds of years. Under Mehmed II the Ottomans took Greece and most of the rest of the Balkans, and completed the conquest of Anatolia by defeating the Kingdom of Trabizond in 1461 and incorporating it into the empire. Mehmed also defeated the troublesome Ak-Koyunlu in northwestern Persia in 1473 and conquered south to the borders of Mamluk Syria. Selim I (the Grim, r. 1512–1520), who finally defeated the Mamluks (in 1516–1517), took Kurdistan, northern Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, extending Ottoman power down the Arabian coast as far as Medina and Mecca. His successor Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566) conquered most of Hungary, laid siege to Vienna (unsuccessfully), and extended Ottoman political influence, if not direct rule, across most of North Africa and into the Red Sea. The Ottomans’ advance into the western Mediterranean was finally stopped by a Christian European coalition at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Nevertheless, the Ottomans had to a large extent reconstituted the Eastern Roman Empire as it was under Heraclius before the Arab conquests.
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THE SAFAVID EMPIRE

In northern Iran, the collapse of the Timurid successors returned the Ak-Koyunlu Turkmen to power. The Ak-Koyunlu’s persecution of the aggressive Sufi order of the Safavids (Ṣafawiyya)—a sect of extremist Shiites
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also known as the Kïzïlbaš ‘red-heads’, which was predominantly Turkmen—galvanized the Safavids into a revolutionary movement. The Ottoman defeat of the Ak-Koyunlu in 1473 weakened the latter and paved the way for the Safavids, whose comitatus-like dedication to their leader,
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despite many setbacks, eventually ensured their success. In 1501 the forces of Ismâ’îl I (b. 1487, r. 1501–1524) defeated the Ak-Koyunlu and captured Tabriz. The Safavids declared their sect of Shiism to be the official religion of Persia.
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During the first decade of his rule, Shâh Ismâ’îl conquered northern and southeastern Iran, Fars (south-central Iran), and eastern Iraq (1508). The Persians defeated the Uzbeks at Marw in 1510 and killed their leader, Shaybânî Khan, in battle, though the Uzbeks prevailed in Transoxiana and the Safavids never dislodged them there. In 1514 the Ottomans defeated the Safavid forces with guns and artillery and restored eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq to the Ottoman Empire, under whose rule those regions were to remain.

Shâh Ismâ’îl’s son Shâh Tahmasp (r. 1524–1576), a strong ruler who campaigned against the Ottomans and Mughals, was followed by two weak, contentious rulers who lost much territory to the Ottomans and were unable to prevent the Uzbeks from raiding northeastern Iran. When Shâh ‘Abbâs the Great (r. 1588–1629) took the throne he immediately set about recapturing territory his predecessors had lost to the Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Portuguese.

In 1515 the Portuguese had established a colonial trading post and naval base on the island of Hormuz (Hormoz) in the Persian Gulf, and the Persians had been unable to remove them. When, a century later, the British and Dutch had become increasingly dominant in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in general, Shâh ‘Abbâs acted. In line with his attempts to strengthen the Persian economy—and state control of it, especially of the silk trade
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—he allowed the English East India Company, a quasi-governmental organization, to establish trading centers in Isfahan and Shiraz. In 1621 he gave the Dutch East India Company permission to build a trading center at the port city of Bandar ‘Abbâs on the Persian Gulf. The following year, with the help of British ships, which ferried his troops to Hormuz, Shâh ‘Abbâs defeated the Portuguese and ejected them from the island. The British were also given permission to open a trading center in the port town of Bandar ‘Abbâs, which grew quickly and became an important commercial port, though not a very large one. The British were shortly afterward defeated and largely replaced by the Dutch, who controlled the Persian Gulf trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, though they were eventually evicted by the British.