Great events demand explanations: how are we to understand the rise
of great empires such as those of Rome, the Inca, the Ming, Alexander,
the British, or the Ottomans? How can these world shaking events be
explained?
In brief, the Ottomans arose in the context of: Turkish nomadic invasions
that shattered central Byzantine state domination in Asia Minor;
a Mongol invasion of the Middle East that brought chaos and increased
population pressure on the frontiers; Ottoman policies of pragmatism
and flexibility that attracted a host of supporters regardless of religion
and social rank; and luck, that placed the Ottomans in the geographic
spot that controlled nomadic access to the Balkans, thus rallying additional
supporters. In this section follows the more detailed story of the
origins of the Ottoman state.
The Ottoman Empire was born around the turn of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, in the northwestern corner of the Anatolian peninsula,
also called Asia Minor (map 1). Extreme confusion – political, cultural,
religious, economic, and social – marked the era and the region. For
more than a millennium, this area had been part of the Roman Empire
and its successor state in the Eastern Mediterranean world, the Byzantine
Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Byzantium had once ruled over virtually
all of today’s Middle East (except Iran) – the region of modern-day
Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and parts of
Iraq, as well as parts of southeast Europe, north Africa, and Italy. In the
seventh century CE, however, it had lost many of those areas, mostly to
the expanding new states based in Mecca, Damascus, and Baghdad. With
some difficulty, the Byzantine state then reinvented itself and managed to
retain its Anatolian provinces. In its reduced form, the Byzantine Empire
faced three sets of enemies. From the Mediterranean, the Venetian and
Genoese merchant states fought between themselves and (usually separately)
against the Byzantines to gain strongholds and economic concessions
on the rich Aegean, Black Sea, and eastern Mediterranean trade
routes. To their north and west, the Byzantines faced expansive and powerful
land-based states, especially the Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms.
And, beginning at the turn of the first millennium, the Turkish nomads
(called Turcoman) appeared on their eastern frontiers. Turkish peoples
with their origins in central Asia, in the area around Lake Baikal, began
migrating out of these ancestral homes and, c. 1000 CE, started pouring
into the Middle East. In their Central Asiatic homes, theTurcomanway of
lifewas marked by shamanist beliefs in religion and economic dependence
on animal raising and social values that celebrated personal bravery and
considerable freedom and mobility for noble women. The Homeric-style
epic, named The Book of Dede Korkut, recounts the stories of heroic men
and women, and was written just before the Turcoman expansion into the
Middle East. This epic also shows that the Turcoman polity was highly
fragmented, with leadership by consensus rather than command. This set
of migrations – a major event in world history – created a Turkic speaking
belt of men, women, and children from the western borders of China
to Asia Minor and led to the formation of the Ottoman state. The nomadic,
politically fragmented Turcoman way of life began causing major
disturbances in the lives of the settled populations of the Iranian plateau,
who bore the brunt of the initial migrations/invasions. As the nomads
moved towards and then into the sedentarized Middle East, they converted
to Islam but retained many of their shamanist rituals and practices.
Hence, Turkish Islam as it became practiced later on varied considerably
in form from Iranian or Arab Islam. As they migrated, the Turcomans
and their animals disrupted the economy of the settled regions and the
flow of tax revenues which agriculturalists paid to their rulers. Among the
Turkish nomadic invaders was the Seljuk family. One of many leaders in
charge of smaller or larger nomadic groups drifting westward, the Seljuk
family seized control of Iran and its agricultural populations, quickly
assimilated into its prevailing Perso-Islamic civilization, and then confronted
the problem of what to do with their nomadic followers who were
disrupting the settled agricultural life of their new kingdom. A solution
to the Seljuks’ problem was to be found in Byzantine Anatolia.
The provinces of Byzantine Anatolia had two sets of features that seem
important here. First, they were productive, heavily populated agrarian
settlements and thus for the nomads appeared as very attractive targets
of plunder. In a word, the Anatolian provinces were rich. They also were
Christian. Therefore they offered doubly justified targets of warfare for
these Turkish nomads recently converted to Islam and under the influence
of popular preachers who had fused shamanist beliefs with Islam.
Was Anatolia attractive to the nomads mainly because it was rich or because
itwas Christian? Like their crusading Christian contemporaries, the
nomads’ motives were a mixture of economic, political, and religious factors.
The lands of Anatolia were rich and they were inhabited by (mainly)
farmers of another, Christian, faith. For the vast numbers of nomads already
in the Middle East, pressured by waves of nomads behind them in
central Asia, these were powerful incentives. And so, not long after their
entry into Iran, the Turcoman nomads began plundering and raiding the
eastern provinces of Byzantium, pulled there by economics, politics, and
faith, and pushed there by the centralizing Seljuk rulers of Iran. After
enduring the raids for several decades, the central Byzantine state moved
to crush the new threat. In 1071, however, the imperial army under the
Emperor Romanus Diogenus decisively was crushed at the epochal battle
of Manzikert, not far from Lake Van, by the combined military forces of
the Turkish nomads temporarily allied with the army of the Seljuk Sultan
Alp Arslan. This spelled the ruin of the imperial border defense system
in the east, and Turkish nomads, now nearly unchecked, flooded into
Byzantium.
For the next several centuries, until the mid-fifteenth century, the history
of Anatolia, east and west, can be understood through the metaphor
of islands of sedentarized life under Byzantine imperial and feudal lords
struggling to exist in a flood tide of Turkish nomads whose leaders, in
turn, came to form their own small states. In the short run, Turcoman
principalities rose and fell and Byzantine control ebbed and flowed.
Anatolia became a patchwork quilt of tiny Turcoman and Byzantine principalities
and statelets, expanding and contracting. At times, Byzantine
leaders, imperial and feudal, resisted more or less successfully. But inexorably,
in the long run, Byzantine Christian, predominantly Greekspeaking,
Anatolia underwent a profound transformation and over time
becameTurkish speaking and Muslim. This general atmosphere of confusion,
indeed chaos, played a crucial role in the emergence of the Ottoman
state. In the midst of the Turcoman invasions, the beleaguered Byzantines
also were fighting against the Italian merchant states, losing to them
chunks of land and other economic assets such as trade monopolies.
Between 1204 and 1261, moreover, Constantinople became the capital
of the erstwhile Crusaders, who instead of marching to Palestine, seized
and sacked the riches of the imperial city and established their short-lived
Latin Christian empire. Historians agree that the 1204 sack of the city
struck a blow from which Constantinople never recovered.
The specific context in which the Ottoman state emerged also is linked
to the rise of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, its rapid expansion
east and west, and its push into the Middle East during the thirteenth
century. As the Mongol state expanded, it often accelerated the
movement of Turkish nomads, who fled before it into areas that could
support their numbers and their livestock. In the middle of the thirteenth
century a Mongol general warred on a Seljuk state which had been established
at Konya in central Anatolia. This Mongol victory wrecked
the relatively large Seljuk sultanate there, which, before the Ottomans,
had been the most successful state founded in post-Byzantine Anatolia,
and triggered the rise of a number of small Turcoman principalities in
its stead. The Mongol presence also prompted the flight of Turcoman
nomads who sought pasture lands in the west. These were the border
regions of the collapsing Seljuk state on the one hand and the crumbling
Byzantine world on the other. This was a changing world, full of Serb
and Bulgarian, Genoese and Venetian invaders and of Turkish Muslim
nomads and Byzantine Greek Christian peasants. In these Anatolian highlands
to the south and east of Byzantine Constantinople, the Ottoman
Empire was born.
Historians who are Ottoman specialists like to argue about which was
the most important single variable explaining the rise of this extraordinary
empire. The question is a fair one since the founder of the dynasty after
whom it was named, Osman, was just one of many leaders and not the
most powerful, among the various and sundry Turcoman groups on the
frontier. Looking down on this world in the year 1300, it would have
been impossible to predict that his would be among the most successful
states in history. At the time, Osman was in charge of some 40,000 tents
of Turcoman nomads. Some of his Turkish-speaking rivals in other parts
of the frontier were vastly more successful and commanded 70,000 and
100,000 tents (with two to five persons per tent). There were scores
of other Turcoman principalities. All were part of a larger process in
which Turcoman nomads of the Anatolian highlands pressed upon and
finally occupied the valleys and the coastal plains. Alone among these,
the dynasty of Osman triumphed while the others soon disappeared. ...
The emerging Ottoman dynasty, that traced descent through the
male line, was Turkish in origins, emerging in a highly heterogeneous
zone populated by Christians and Muslims, Turkish and Greek speakers.
Muslims and Christians alike from Anatolia and beyond flocked to the
Ottoman standard for the economic benefits to be won. The Ottoman
rulers also attracted some followers because of their self-appointed role as
gazi
s, warriors for the faith fighting against the Christians. But the power
of this appeal to religion must be questioned since, at the very same moment,
the Ottomans were recruiting large numbers of Greek Christian
military commanders and rank-and-file soldiery into their growing military
force. Thus, many Christians as well as Muslims followed the
Ottomans not for God but for gold and glory – for the riches to be gained,
the positions and power to be won. ... "