Disaster and Recovery as Proof of the State’s Maturity; “Classical” Ottoman Institutions
The brief reign ofBayezid I (1389-1402), nicknamed in Turkish Yildirim (Thunderbolt), marked a dramatic point in Ottoman history. Making swift use of the military machine built by his predecessors, the energetic sultan put an end to medieval Bulgarian statehood with the conquests of Tarnovo (1393) and Vidin (1396), and humiliated the king of Hungary, Sigismund of Luxemburg, who in vain tried to stop the Ottoman advance in the Balkans.
In 1396, the Hungarian army, strengthened by Western Crusaders, suffered a crushing defeat at Nikopolis. Almost at the same time, Bayezid annexed several Turkish principalities in western Anatolia and forced their native dynasties into exile. Last but not least, he initiated a blockade of Constantinople, hoping to starve the city into surrender. All these successes were nullified by the invasion of Tamerlane. In 1402, the Central Asian conqueror crushed Ottoman forces in the battle of Ankara. Bayezid was taken prisoner and died in captivity, while his state was divided among his sons on the condition of their swearing allegiance to the victor.Bayezid's adventurous policy gained him little praise in historiography. Although his attempts to build a centralized state by eliminating local dynasties and terminating local autonomies brought short-term results, in the long run they alarmed Ottoman neighbors and upset many Ottoman subjects, who deserted to Tamerlane and welcomed his invasion with relief. Not unlike the French king Louis XIV three centuries later, trying to satisfy his insatiable appetite, Bayezid brought his state on the verge of collapse and largely wasted the political capital and military strength accumulated by his ancestors.
The fact that the Ottoman state was not erased from the map as a result of the Battle of Ankara demonstrates that, apart from the members of the Ottoman dynasty, there already existed by that time a set of larger social strata, including administrators, warriors, and Muslim clergymen (ulema), who shared a long-term interest in keeping this state alive.
By 1413, the Ottoman state was reunited by one of Bayezid's sons, and by the mid-fifteenth century the Ottomans recovered most of the territories that had been lost following the defeat of 1402. The last desperate effort to stop the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, organized under the auspices of the pope, ended in disaster in 1444 when Vladislaus, the young king of Hungary and Poland, perished at the hands of the Turks in the Battle of Varna. This victory paved the road for the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, effected on May 29, 1453, by Sultan Mehmed II (14511481). During his remaining 28 years of rule, Mehmed the Conqueror completed his conquest by capturing and subjecting Morea (Peloponnesus), Albania, Bosnia, Moldavia, Crimea, Trebizond, and the emirate of Karaman in southern Anatolia.Apart from charismatic leadership and religious fervor, the main factors contributing to Ottoman military successes in the first three centuries were the highly centralized system of income distribution which supported the Ottoman cavalry (the so-called timar system), and the introduction of salaried infantry troops known as janissaries (Tur. yeni geri, i.e., “new troops”). Most of the lands in Ottoman core provinces belonged to the sultan (miri, i.e., “the emir's [lands]”) who distributed their incomes as timars to cavalry soldiers (sipahis). The latter enjoyed usufruct, but not property rights and did not have jurisdiction over peasants. Timar grants were revocable in the case of desertion, and their inheritance was subject to state control. In short, unlike in Western feudalism, the Ottoman state maintained a relatively tight control over its military class and was able to ensure massive participation in campaigns and discipline in the field, at least until the late sixteenth century.[1824]
The janissary corps, founded in the 1360s and recruited from slaves (Tur. kuls), initially constituted a small formation of imperial bodyguards and found many analogies in other Muslim states.
Yet, with its numerical rise to about 3,000 in 1450 and approximately 13,000 by the end of the fifteenth century, it became a formidable formation that was instrumental in Ottoman military triumphs, both in field battles and, especially, in the sieges of enemy fortresses. Initially equipped with swords, axes, and bows, they gradually adopted arquebuses as their trademark weapon, and in the sixteenth century their mastery of the use of firearms resolved many a battle in the Ottomans' favor.[1825] The discipline in the corps was maintained by the enforcement of living in barracks and refraining from family life as long as a soldier was fit for combat, although these rules were not always enforceable. Nonetheless, constant training and esprit de corps made of the janissaries a professional army with no peers in contemporary Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans also swiftly adopted artillery, the use of which by the Ottoman army is already attested in the late fourteenth century. Heavy guns, initially produced and operated by foreign specialists of Hungarian, Italian, and German origin, played a crucial role in the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453) and in the triumph over the Safavids at Qaldiran (1514).[1826]One aspect of Ottoman dynastic policy that provoked awe mixed with disgust among foreign observers was the custom of fratricide: the right of the ruling sultan to execute all his brothers and other male dynasty members except for his own sons and grandsons. Codified only under Mehmed II (1451-1481), or even later,[1827] this rule was already in use much earlier, beginning with the murder of his uncle by the dynasty founder Osman.[1828] Judging by the Orkhon inscriptions, dated as early as the eighth century ce, and by social practice widespread among neighboring Turkic peoples, to mention only the Crimean Tatars, agnatic seniority was the principal mode of succession among the ancient Turks. The preference for primogeniture, demonstrated by the Ottoman dynasty, marks an abrupt departure from this custom. The change was introduced to guarantee higher centralization of power, even though it did not entirely eliminate the danger of civil wars, as was proven by fratricidal conflicts between the sons of Mehmed II after his death (1481-1482), and between the sons of Süleyman (1559) during their father's reign.