3.1: The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was the very model of a successful early-modern state, politically centralized, economically prosperous, and engaged in not just warfare but an enormous amount of commerce with other states. At its greatest extent, the empire extended to three continents -- stretching from the Balkans in southeastern Europe across Anatolia, Central Asia, Arabia, and North Africa.

The Turks were an interrelated group of people originating in Central Asia. They spoke various related dialects and shared a common ethnic origin. They began the transition from steppe nomads to the rulers of settled kingdoms by the 10th century, culminating with the Seljuk invasion of the 11th century. The Turks were driven by two motivations: the tradition of warfare against non-Muslims, and the straightforward interest in looting defeated enemies. They made frequent war against Byzantium, the Arab Muslims states, and each other. In the early 14th century, a Seljuk lord named Osman captured a significant chunk of territory from the Byzantines in Anatolia, and founded a dynasty named after his clan, anglicized to “Ottoman.”

The Ottomans went on to conquer vast territories, including the lands of the earlier Caliphates and parts of Europe that had never before been held by Islamic rulers, such as the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, and the Balkans. In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan (king) Mehmet II succeeded in conquering Constantinople and, with it, the remnants of Byzantium itself. He moved the Ottoman capital to Constantinople. By 1600, the city's population had reached 700,000, making it the largest city in Europe or the Middle East.

Over the course of the 16th century, relying on a newly-constructed navy, the Ottomans crippled the Venetian commercial empire and then conquered various islands in the Mediterranean and territories in North Africa. In 1517, the Ottomans defeated a rival Turkic empire, the Mamluks, in Egypt. As the first major empire to take full advantage of the gunpowder revolution, their armies excelled at using muskets and field guns at a time when most European armies still relied on pikes and bows. Ottoman armies were well-trained and well-provisioned, and they consistently bested European armies in open battle.

During the 16th century, the Ottomans also conquered the western coast of the Arabian peninsula, and with it the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Through a somewhat questionable story about a survivor of the Mongol attacks and his descendants, the Ottoman Sultans claimed the title of Caliph, or spiritual head of the entire Sunni Muslim world.

The Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520 – 1566) carried out a stunning series of expansions and conquests. His armies occupied the Balkans, then Hungary, and ultimately laid siege to Vienna in 1529, something that would have been unthinkable a century earlier. By his death in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest in the world, exceeding the territory that had been held by Byzantium even at its height.

Figure 5.9.1: The Ottoman Empire at the start of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Within the empire, non-Muslims were officially tolerated as dhimmis, protected peoples, who had to pay a special tax but were not compelled to convert to Islam. Both the Christian patriarch of the Orthodox Church and the head of the Jewish congregation of Constantinople (as well as the Armenian Christian patriarch) were official members of the Sultan’s court, with each religious leader carrying both the privilege and the responsibility of representing their respective religious communities to the Ottoman government. For example, they oversaw their own distinct educational systems and were responsible for tax collection among their communities, referred to as millets. Non-Muslims were held in a socially and legally secondary position within Ottoman society, but they still enjoyed vastly better status and treatment than did religious minorities in Christian kingdoms in Europe at the time.

Another great strength of the Ottoman state was its use of soldiers and officials. After the conquest of Christian lands formerly held by Byzantium, the core of the Ottoman armies were the Janissaries, Christians who were taken as slaves as young adolescents and trained in both war and administration back in Istanbul, after being converted to Islam. Although these men were the most powerful individuals in the empire, they were technically the slaves of the Sultan himself. Up until at least the 17th century, their children were free and did not inherit Janissary status.

The Ottomans developed an enormous and highly organized bureaucracy well before the “absolutist” monarchs of Europe tried to do the same. By the sixteenth century, the bureaucracy was divided between the highest officers, recruited from the Christian slave system, and the middle ranks, consisting of free Muslims.

The late 16th century was the height of Ottoman power. Their chronological trajectory matched Spain’s, which enjoyed its real flowering after a century of plundering the New World. While the Ottoman Empire stopped expanding by the end of the 17th century, it remained one of the most powerful states in the entire region of the Mediterranean for centuries to come.