Suleiman The Magnificent 1520 1566 (3 page)

iish relations with the distant king of Castile. At first his dealings with Bayezid were friendly, since both were warriors of the Faith; but as their boundaries approached and the victims of each fled to the court of the other, inevitable disputes soon turned into open hostility. To avenge a first attack Bayezid collected his forces and hastened to meet his adversary, who had disdainfully turned aside to wage war on the Mamelukes and devastate Syria. It was at Ankara, the scene of Ertoghrul's exploit, that the Turks of the East and the West finally faced each other, on the twentieth of July, 1402. Bayezid fought with all his old fury. But, despising his enemy, he allowed himself to be outgeneralled; his army was outnumbered, and there was treachery among his troops, some of whom saw their former princes serving in the ranks of the enemy. By the end of the day the Ottoman army was annihilated, and the Sultan, who had fallen from his horse in an attempt to escape, was left an honorable prisoner in the hands of his rival.

If the defeated state had crumbled to pieces after this fearful disaster, it would have gone down in history merely as one of the many Eastern empires whose rapid rise had been followed by an equally sudden fall It had suffered indeed a stunning blow. Its military prestige was temporarily shattered. Asia Minor had become the prey of plundering hordes of victorious Tatars. Bayezid died in captivity in 1403, and his sons, barely escaped from the field of battle, plunged at once into furious civil war. No better proof can be given of the permanence of the work of their earlier rulers than the fact that, instead of yielding to the many difficulties by which they were beset, the Turks emerged at the end of ten years, weakened indeed and exhausted, but with their fundamental vitality still unimpaired. When Mohammed I, "the Restorer," the ablest of the sons of Bayezid, had finally triumphed over his brothers, all that

was needed was a few years of rest to enable the Turks to set forth again on the career of conquest and greatness which the Christian world had fondly imagined to be a thing of the past. Mohammed was exactly the sovereign demanded by the situation. In his earlier years he had shown himself a fearless warrior; now that at last he was firmly seated on the throne, he did his utmost to give his subjects peace, and his honorable character commanded the respect of all men. Even his reign, however, was not entirely free from war. His attempts to build a navy brought him into conflict with Venice, but the Turks were as yet not quite prepared to meet the first maritime power of the day. In 1416, outside the port of Gallipoli, the Venetian commander Loredano destroyed the Ottoman fleet, and the Sultan, unable to avenge himself, wisely made peace. It was reserved to his successors to demonstrate how completely the Turks had recuperated under his rule.

MuradJI_(i421-51), a stern soldier, was also a patron of art and a builder, pious, just, and honorable, but he was destined to spend the thirty years of his reign in almost unbroken warfare. Angered by various provocations on the part of the Greeks, he made a determined attempt to capture Constantinople, but, for the last of many times, the "New Rome," thought but a shadow of her former self, beat back all the efforts of her assailants. Foiled in this direction, Murad made a lasting peace with the Byzantine Emperor, and turned his attention to other regions, where he met with more success. In Asia he easily drove from their thrones most of the Seljuk princes who had been restored by the grace of Tamerlane, and reduced the strongest of them, the ruler of Karaman, to a position of vassalage. In Europe he began by checking the growth of Venice, which had just bought from the Greeks the city of Saloniki. The Sultan could not possibly permit the ambi-

tious republic, already too powerful in Eastern waters, to retain the most valuable port on the Aegean Sea. In 1430 a short siege delivered it into Murad's hands, from which there was no taking it away. In the next few years he was mainly engaged in a series of vigorous and generally profitable campains against Albania, Servia, Wallachia, and Hungary, during which he gradually extended his dominions at their expense. But the Turkish advance into the Balkans was destined to be strongly opposed by two worthy champions of Christendom: the Albanian chief, George Cas-triota or Skanderbeg, who kept the Ottomans out of his native land until his death in 1467; and the Hungarian national hero John Hunyadi, who fought the Moslems on a far larger scale though for a shorter time. Under his leadership the Hungarians, supported by the Poles, took the offensive against the invaders and drove them out of Servia. So completely, in fact, did the tables seem to be turned, that Murad, who appears to have had a vein of mysticism in his nature, consented to a humiliating peace, and shortly after abdicated in favor of his son Mohammed, with the idea of spending the rest of his days in seclusion at the peaceful Anatolian town of Manissa (Magnesia). But he did not remain long in retirement. The shameful violation by his Christian foes of the peace to which they had pledged their word was enough to cause him to reas-sume his authority, march against them, and overwhelm them at Varna on the Black Sea in I444. 11 The king of Hungary was slain on the battlefield; the sight of his head on a pike struck terror among his troops. The papal legate

11 Richard Knolles, in his Generall Historie of the Turkes (London, 1603, p. 297), tells us that in the early stages of the battle, when the Christians were apparently winning, Murad "pluckt the writing out of his bosom, wherein the late league was comprised, and holding it up in his hand with his eies cast up to Heaven, said:

"Behold, thou crucified Christ, this is the league thy Christians in thy name made with me: 'which they have without cause violated. Now, if thou bee a God, as they say thou art, and as we dreame, revenge the wrong now done

Cesarini, who had urged on his Crusaders by assuring them that no promises made to the Moslems were binding, was also killed in the ensuing flight. Hunyadi with great difficulty made his escape to his native land. Once more the Sultan insisted on going into retirement, this time because he felt that he had accomplished the work that God had given him to perform; but a revolt of the Janissaries, which gave Hunyadi the opportunity to launch a fresh offensive, convinced him that it was his duty again to resume office. The Janissaries were brought to order. Hunyadi was once more utterly defeated in a second battle of Kossovo in 1448. Three years later (February 5, 1451), the Sultan Murad died.

Christian Europe, by a strange delusion which we shall see repeated later, imagined Murad's successor, Mohammed II, to be a weakling, because he had twice permitted his father to depose him. In reality, now that at the age of twenty-one he at last had the power firmly in his grasp, he was to show the world that he was greater than any of his predecessors, and far more dangerous. According to descriptions by defeated Greeks and Westerners, he was fierce, unscrupulous, and determined, passionate and debauched, faithless and cruel after a fashion unequalled even in Ottoman annals; he was also as ominously reticent in regard to his own plans as he was absolutely tireless in their execution. "If a hair of my beard knew my schemes, I should pluck it out," he once told an indiscrete official who had ventured to question him. In war he was an indefatigable and skilful leader; as a statesman he showed

unto thy mme, and me, and shew thy power upon thy perjurious people, 'who in their deeds denie thee their God?''

And Cotton Mather (Magnolia, edition of 1702, book vii, p. 117), who obviously derived the story from Knolles, adds that "immediately the Course of the Battel turn'd; the Perjurious King was kilFdj and the Turks won a most unexpected Victory."

himself sagacious and far-seeing; as a lawgiver and organizer of his empire he displayed real genius. He quoted Persian poetry as he rode into the deserted palace of the Caesars after the storming of Constantinople, and he gazed with deep appreciation on the glorious ruins of Athens. He sent to the Signory at Venice to ask for a good artist to paint his picture, and the Signory replied by despatching Gentile Bellini to the Porte, where he arrived in September 1479, and remained till the end of 1480. It seems probable that he did several portraits of the Sultan, and although the authenticity of the best known of them, which is now in the National Gallery in London, has been contested, it gives, despite its lamentable condition, an excellent idea of Mohammed's character and personality. 12 Such was the man who, like his father, was to rule for thirty years of ceaseless effort to extend his empire, and who, though he also was to suffer two significant defeats, was destined to accomplish more than any of his predecessors. Like his father, also, he directed his first enterprise against the imperial city which had defied so many attacks, and which the Ottomans ardently desired to make their capital; and Mohammed was to succeed where Murad had failed.

The siege of Constantinople, which began on April 6, 1453, and lasted fifty-three days, is perhaps the most famous and dramatic in all history. It is brilliantly described by Edward Gibbon. The Sultan had concealed his preparations with masterly cunning. He had gathered overwhelming forces and he urged them on with passionate energy. Huge mortars hurled great balls of stone against the city's ramparts; mines were exploded; desperate attacks were launched at the gate of St. Romanus and repulsed by "Greek fire." But Mohammed soon saw that

12 On Bellini's visit to Constantinople and what he did there, cf. L. Thuasne, Gentile Bellini et Sultan Mohammed II (Paris, 1888).

all his efforts would be unavailing without command of the inner harbor of the Golden Horn to the northeast of the city; and the mouth of the Golden Horn was blocked by a boom of iron chains which all the power of the Turkish navy had been unable to break. What could not be achieved by sea must of necessity be accomplished by land. On the night of May 19, some seventy Turkish ships were hauled, with sails unfurled, on greased ways which had been prepared during the preceding four weeks, across the tip of the promontory of Pera and launched where the Christians were unable to oppose them. From that moment onward, the result was a foregone conclusion. On May 29, five Turkish columns simultaneously launched furious attacks; the Genoese John Giustiniani, "whose arms and counsel were the firmest ramparts of the city/ 5 was wounded and fled; Constantine Palaeologus, the last of the Greek Emperors, was slain in the ensuing confusion by an unknown hand, and after his death the defence collapsed. Shortly after midday the Sultan made his formal entry into St. Sophia, and gazed with wonder and delight at what he saw. We are told that as he walked up the central aisle, he found one of his soldiers digging out the polished stones from the flooring; but Mohammed promptly cut him down with his scimitar. "I have given the captives and the movables to my followers," he declared, "but the buildings are mine." A moment later an imam ascended the pulpit and made the declaration of Islam. Justinian's Holy Temple of the Incarnate Word had become a mosque. The Eastern Empire had come to an unhonored end.

The real greatness of the new "Kaisar-i-Rum" (Emperor of Rome) was proved quite as much by the use which he made of his victory as by the ways in which he won it. A few days of merciless pillaging followed the surrender. Such was the custom of the time, and it was inevitable that

it should be officially sanctioned. There were sacrilege, murder, and rape. All sorts of precious relics of classical and Byzantine art were destroyed. Bronze columns and imperial tombs were smashed and made over into cannon, cannon balls, bullets, and coins. "One hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; ten volumes might be purchased for a single ducat." 13 But Mohammed seized the earliest possible opportunity to put an end to these desecrations. He was determined to convert his prize, the historic metropolis of Christian Orthodoxy, into the capital of Islam (Istambul) and of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the basilicas and monasteries were made over into mosques, like St. Sophia; and the Sultan set a seal on what he had already done there by the erection of the first of the four minarets by which it is flanked today. As the buildings thus made available proved inadequate for the accommodation of the Faithful, the succeeding age witnessed the construction of an enormous number of Moslem almshouses, schools, and places of worship. Constantinople began to renew its architectural youth under the inspiration of its first Turkish master. But though Mohammed was determined to leave no doubt that he regarded himself as the champion of Islam, his attitude towards his Christian subjects was almost unbelievably tolerant, if measured by the standards of contemporaneous Europe. The Patriarchate was vacant at the time the city was taken, but three days later Mohammed ordered that a new incumbent be elected and consecrated according to the ancient rites. A few days afterwards he received him in solemn audience, and formally presented him with the jewelled cross, the emblem of his dignity, after the manner of his Byzantine predecessors. "Be Patriarch," he de-

13 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, VII, 198. These estimates are unquestionably much exaggerated. Most of the best manuscripts had been taken to Italy long before. Much greater damage had been done to the city when the crusaders took it in 1204.

dared, "and may Heaven protect thee: count on the continuance of my good will, and enjoy all the rights and privileges of thine office." As long as good order was maintained, the Christian worship was freely permitted in those churches which had not been converted into mosques; and Easter continued to be celebrated, with traditional magnificence, in the Christian quarter of the city. And there are plenty of other evidences that Mohammed had no fears of the presence of a large element of Christian Europeans in his new capital. Many of the inhabitants o£ the Balkan states which he subsequently conquered were deliberately transported to Constantinople and established there, and the city's population soon exceeded the figure of its late Byzantine days. Particularly characteristic was his policy towards the Genoese, who had maintained themselves for centuries in the suburb of Galata as a semi-independent colony, with laws and franchises of their own, and had not seldom made serious difficulties for the Palaeologi. When he learned of the troubles they had caused, the Sultan threatened them with wholesale slaughter. However, on their payment of an enormous bribe he relented, and solemnly swore that all their ancient privileges should be maintained, provided they continued to behave themselves. To make assurance doubly sure, he gave orders that all their fortifications be demolished.