Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (28 page)

The Sultan

Their capture of Constantinople in 1453 fixed the Ottoman Turks in western minds as the Muslim ‘other’, despite continued trade and other points of contact between east and west.
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With the eventual establishment of the Ottomans in Hungary and on the Adriatic coast, the Empire would come to define itself as Christendom’s bulwark against Islam. The rapid spread of prejudice was facilitated by the coincidence of the Ottoman advance with the invention of printing. Hostility in the west to the Ottomans overlaid and reinforced earlier resentment of the
Byzantines, extending far deeper than antagonism towards any western people and creating a sense of existential threat persisting into the later eighteenth century. Yet the Ottomans were only one of several Muslim imperial powers succeeding the Caliphates that framed the Muslim world between seventh-century expansion and the shock of the thirteenth-century Mongol invasions. The Shiite Safavid family forged a new Persian empire by 1501. The Mamalukes were originally Turkic slave soldiers who seized power in Egypt around 1250, and were the only power to inflict a serious military defeat on the Mongols, routing them in Syria in 1260. The Mamaluke empire survived until conquered by the Ottomans in 1517. The Mongols toppled the last Caliphate, based in Baghdad, in 1268, but converted to Islam soon after. Although the vast Mongol empire soon fragmented, one group re-emerged as the Mughuls in India by 1526. Thus, Spain’s rise to global imperial power under Charles V coincided with the consolidation of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughul Islamic empires, which together controlled 130 to 160 million people across the Mediterranean, Anatolia, Iran and South Asia.
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The Ottomans traced their origins to Osman, their first sultan and a tribal leader in Bithynia, a landlocked province south of the Sea of Marmara. Osman completed the transition of his people from a nomadic to a settled existence around 1320. Like the Safavids, Mughuls and Habsburgs, the Ottomans cultivated what became a dynastic monarchy, emerging to dominate all other Turkic groups after the decline of the Seljuks and Byzantines, both of whom they ultimately replaced.
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Westerners viewed the Ottomans as Muslims, not least because of their culture of holy war. Yet their rise depended on accommodation with Christians. Osman’s great-grandson, Bayezid I, named his own sons Jesus, Moses, Solomon, Muhammed and Joseph. Mehmet II signalled his desire to make Islam the unifying force for his empire by expelling 30,000 Christians from Constantinople after he took it in 1453. However, Sunni Muslims only became the largest population group following further conquests in Anatolia, Arabia and north Africa around seventy years later. They thus controlled the holy sites of Medina, Jerusalem and Mecca, but self-identification with Sunni Islam was primarily a response to the rise of Shiite Persia immediately to the east, rather than through conflict with the west. Additional gains in the Balkans between the 1460s and 1540s ensured that Christians still formed a substantial proportion of Ottoman subjects.
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The emergence of three empires in the Muslim world offers instructive comparisons for the Empire’s position amongst Christians. Unlike Christianity, which converted the Roman empire and used Roman structures to build its church, Islam developed in the seventh century as a community largely outside a formal imperial framework.
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The Caliphate was created subsequently to advance the faith, deriving its authority through descent from Muhammed by marriage, in contrast to the direct links to the divine claimed by western kings. The Caliphate became dynastic, splitting into Spanish, north African and Middle Eastern branches. Meanwhile, religious structures remained decentralized without a single priestly hierarchy equivalent to Christendom’s bishops. Spiritual authority was diffused amongst a multitude of holy men, teachers and interpreters of Koranic law, whose influence depended on their personal reputations for learning and morality.

Lying outside the Christian political order, Muslim rulers did not challenge the Empire’s singular imperial pretensions. Charlemagne’s reign coincided with a surge of fresh Arab conquests, including Sardinia (809) and Sicily (827). From the Carolingian perspective, this was simply the kind of behaviour to be expected from ‘barbarians’. Charlemagne sent an embassy to tell the Baghdad caliph Harun al-Rashid of his coronation. After many adventures, the survivors returned with rich gifts, including an elephant called Abolabas – a traditional sign of authority in the Near East since Alexander the Great. The caliph simply regarded Charlemagne as a potentially useful ally against his Muslim rival in Spain. As with imperial-Byzantine relations, both parties were free to interpret signs as they wished. Political and geographic distance lessened the incentive to formalize relations. Otto I tried to contact the al-Andalus Caliphate in Córdoba in 953, but failed to provide suitable credentials for his envoys. The caliph was already well informed about the Empire and remained decidedly unimpressed.
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The Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh century drove a wedge between the Empire and Islamic north Africa. Together with papal hostility during the Investiture Dispute, this ensured that the emperor did not emerge as Crusader leader after the First Crusade of 1095. Conrad III joined the Second Crusade in the late 1140s under incompetent French leadership, personally contributing to the disastrous, unprovoked attack on Damascus in 1148. The young Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ fought in this crusade, as well as leading the
Third Crusade in 1190, becoming the only major ruler to participate in two crusading expeditions. Barbarossa’s prestige as emperor assisted his negotiations with Byzantium, Hungary, Serbia, Armenia, the Seljuk sultan and even Saladin. Although diplomacy failed to bring a peaceful solution, it at least secured the long route chosen through Anatolia. Barbarossa’s huge army included his son Freidrich VI of Swabia, 12 bishops 2 margraves and 26 counts.
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Barbarossa himself died en route, but though the expedition failed to recover Jerusalem, it relieved the pressure on the Crusader kingdoms and forged closer connections between crusading and the imperial office.

The illness of Barbarossa’s successor, Henry VI, prevented his personal participation, but he sent a major expeditionary force in 1197. Large numbers of Germans, Frisians and Austrians joined the next three crusading campaigns between 1199 and 1229. Frederick II led 3,000 men in June 1228, though his excommunication by the pope prevented this from being classed a full crusade. The emperor succeeded by peaceful means where others had failed with more violent methods, though he was fortunate in arriving at the Holy Land as Saladin’s realm split into three rival sultanates amidst Mongol attacks. Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil was also impressed by Frederick’s relative openness to Islam and patronage of Muslim refugees in Lucera, near Foggia in southern Italy. Most of the latter were in fact deportees, who had been forced from Sicily by Henry VI to curry favour with Christian inhabitants after his conquest of that island in 1194. Frederick stepped up these deportations after 1223 until Lucera’s population reached 60,000. The Byzantines and Normans had already used expulsion as a method of control, but Frederick’s action was unique in that he resettled the population, creating a community on his mainland possessions who depended on his patronage. Lucera provided around 3,000 elite troops who, as Muslims, had the added value of being impervious to papal excommunication and served Frederick faithfully, including on his Jerusalem expedition.
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Favoured by these circumstances, Frederick and al-Kamil concluded the Treaty of Jaffa in February 1229, giving the emperor control of Jerusalem for 10 years, 5 months and 40 days – the maximum permitted under Islamic law for the alienation of property to non-Muslims. Although he retained control of the Dome of the Rock, al-Kamil also conceded access corridors to Bethlehem and Nazareth and gave Frederick an elephant. Frederick
was crowned king of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre on 17 March 1229, the only Holy Roman emperor actually to visit the city.

Frederick’s supporters hailed it as the dawn of a new age, fanning unrealistic expectations and inevitable disappointment. The Templars and Knights of St John condemned the treaty for failing to restore their lost lands. Frederick remained nominal king of Jerusalem, but left actual government to Alice of Champagne (aunt of his second wife) as regent. The city was surrendered to the Saracens when the lease expired in 1239, and within five years the Latin kingdom was restricted to five Lebanese coastal towns. It passed to the Angevins, who had assumed the Staufers’ Mediterranean interests in 1269, but the last crusader outpost (Acre) fell to the Muslims in 1291.

Meanwhile, papal propaganda capitalized on the imperial patronage of Lucera to present Frederick as an oriental despot, complete with harem. The Lucera ‘Saracens’ served loyally, but the Staufers’ final defeat in 1268 left them no choice but to transfer allegiance to the Angevins, serving them in turn against Byzantines, Tunisians, Turks and Sicilian rebels. However, the presence of a large Muslim community proved increasingly embarrassing to the Angevins, who were seeking to displace the Empire as the papacy’s protectors. Lucera’s inhabitants were forced to convert to Christianity in August 1300 when the town was renamed Città Santa Maria.

Rudolf I took the crusader vow in 1275, but was prevented by domestic events from honouring it. His successors also faced more immediate problems, while crusading increasingly appeared a risky and hopeless enterprise. Nonetheless, direct participation in the Second and Third Crusades had left a lasting impression on the Empire’s inhabitants during the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
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Prior to becoming emperor, Sigismund led an unsuccessful crusade to save his own kingdom of Hungary from Turkish invasion in 1396. His successor Albert II also regarded Hungary’s defence as a crusade, preferring to fight and die there than consolidate his authority in the Empire.
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The Ottoman advance through the Balkans after 1453 transformed what had been crusades with distant geographical goals organized by individual emperors into a collective defence of the Empire. This reinforced the wider process of imperial reform, encouraging a more collective form of power-sharing and responsibility in the Empire’s governance (see
pp. 396–408
). The Ottomans took Belgrade in 1521,
invading Hungary again the following year. Within four years they had conquered around half of that kingdom. Within another three they were at the gates of Vienna, threatening the Habsburgs and the Empire directly. The pace of events fused with traditions brought by the Habsburgs to reinvigorate the ideal of the emperor as Christendom’s defender. The Habsburgs had become kings of Spain as Iberia was freed from Muslim Moorish rule. Begun in the eleventh century, this
Reconquista
had stalled around 1270, but revived in 1455 in response to papal crusading appeals, gathering pace after 1482 to culminate in the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492. Charles V carried this success story with him, as well as Spain’s Mediterranean interests, when he became emperor in 1519. Seven years later, his brother Ferdinand assumed Hungary’s own traditions when he inherited that kingdom from King Louis II, who died in battle against the victorious Turks at Mohács in August 1526.
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Spain continued to oppose the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, scoring the notable naval victory at Lepanto in 1571, but the Empire carried the main burden of defending central Europe.

The ideological clash was sharpened by the Ottomans’ assumption of Byzantine imperial traditions, setting them apart from previous Muslim empires and reviving the two-emperor problem in new form. The Ottomans already combined Romano-Byzantine traditions with Turkic and Islamic ones before 1453, but became self-consciously imperial after taking Constantinople that year.
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They moved their capital from Adrianople (Edirne) to Constantinople, taking up residence in the former Byzantine imperial palace. Shari’a civil law and Ottoman secular fiscal and administrative practice were all combined with Byzantine Caesaropapism, entrenching the ruler as legislator and inhibiting the transition to the rule of law ultimately made in the Empire.
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Byzantine infrastructure was retained in modified form. Mehmet II adopted the title
Kaysar
and presented himself as the successor to ancient Rome and Alexander the Great, claiming he would unite east and west under Islam. Latin and Greek scholars were commissioned to write official histories incorporating mythic Byzantine emperors from Solomon onwards in tales of Muhammed.
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The adoption of imperial imagery and rhetoric was complex. In part, it was about presenting the sultan to his new Christian subjects in ways already familiar to them. It was also encouraged by the Venetian
and Genoese merchants, long-standing intermediaries between the Latin and Greek worlds, who continued trading after the latter passed under Ottoman rule. It also stemmed from westerners who tended to apply their own political language when dealing with the Ottomans.

Following the rapid conquest of Mamaluke Egypt (1514–17) and victory over Persia, the new sultan Süleyman I turned west again in 1521. Having plucked the Red Apple of Constantinople, Ottoman aspirations increasingly focused on the Golden Apple of Vienna, heightened by the coincidence of the growth of their imperial power with that of the Habsburgs. Charles V refused to be diverted by the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529, going ahead with his own imperial coronation by Pope Clement VII in Bologna in 1530.
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Süleyman was forced to retire, having waited in vain for Charles to meet him in battle. The sultan masked the anticlimax by staging a triumphal homeward journey, hoping to outshine Charles’s recent coronation. A huge crown was commissioned from Venetian craftsmen, costing 115,000 ducats, equivalent to a tenth of Castile’s annual revenue. The design mixed Charles’s crown with a papal tiara, but added a fourth diadem deliberately to upstage the sultan’s western rivals. The success of this PR stunt is demonstrated by Süleyman’s lasting fame in the west as ‘the Magnificent’.