In this video we’re going to focus our attention on the Eastern Mediterranean and to the very
center of Eurasia, to the region of Anatolia, and the story of the Ottoman Empire.
By the early 13th century Anatolia, which is modern-day Turkey, was controlled by two
forces, the Byzantine Empire in the West and the Seljuq Turks in the East.
The Seljuq’s had first established the first true Turkish state in Asia Minor, but with
a fall to the Mongols in 1243.
The Mongols controlled Anatolia until the fall of the Ilkhanate in 1355, and in the
wake of these nomadic incursions into Anatolia, in the wake of the Mongol invasions in the
13th and 14th centuries, three great empires coalesced – the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia,
the Levant, North Africa and the Southeastern part of Europe; the Safavid Empire in Persia;
and the Mughal Empire in the Indian Subcontinent.
These three empires are often referred to the Gunpowder Empires because much of their
success depended on new technology, particularly gunpowder from China.
Their control over gunpowder and artillery weren’t the only reasons for the success
of these three empires, but they were integral to military conquests and to the maintenance
of these empires.
So let’s tell the story of one of the dominant empires from this era, the Ottoman Turks.
Our story begins, as so many stories do in 11th and 12th century Eurasia, with the Mongols.
The Mongols destroyed the control of both the Abbasid Empire and the Seljuq Turks over
the Middle East.
The fall of the Seljuqs in Anatolia left the region in a bit of a political vacuum.
Anatolia was divided, it was fragmented into beyliks – which were regions controlled
by nobles called beys – that were nominally under the control of the Mongols – first,
the empire itself and then the Ilkhanate, which extended from Iran to Eastern Anatolia,
and as the Mongol control weakened, the Ilkhanate faced challenges from these beys, from these
fragmented regions in Anatolia.
One of the beys, Osman the First, would found a group that went on to become known as the
Ottoman Empire.
The Ottomans would ultimately push the Mongols out of Asia Minor and then go on to conquer
not only Anatolia, but the Levant, the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean; the Northern coast
of Africa; and large parts of the coast of the Arabian Peninsula.
The Ottoman Empire grew rapidly in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
They expanded control over Anatolia and into the Balkans throughout the 15th century, and
by 1453, Mehmed the Second besieged and conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, a
huge blow to the Byzantine Empire and a coup for the Ottoman Turks.
In the 200 years after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans extended their control over much
of the Middle East and North Africa seizing control of the Eastern Mediterranean, while
land forces pushed into the Southeastern part of Europe.
By the 17th century they had conquered the Middle East, the Red Sea, and Persia Gulf
of the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, and reached their peak by 17 – sorry, excuse
me – by 1699.
Much of this expansion was built on military innovation.
They adopted gunpowder artillery, particularly cannons and small arms, and that became the
backbone of the Ottoman military and particularly Ottoman military advantage.
The result of the focus on conquest was an Ottoman society that was built in many ways,
on war and conquest and military advantage.
So for example, there was a tremendously strong military aristocracy.
The original Turkish cavalry developed into an aristocracy with much control over land
and resources resulting in an uneasy division of labor – excuse me – an uneasy division
of power, rather, between this military aristocracy, these nobles in the countryside, and the emperor,
called the sultan, of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople.
So what basically happened was that this military aristocracy, these nobles, gave Constantinople
to the sultans, who were rather like kings in the Ottoman Empire, but with a religious
connotation, as the capitol, while the military aristocracy – including beys, pashas, and
viziers – continued to grow and build up local power bases in the countryside.
The sultans recognized these nobles as a threat but also depended on them for the functioning
of their empire, relied on them to maintain their empire.
So the sultans attempted to balance the threat of this military aristocracy by creating something
known as the Janissary corps, and the Janissary corps was essentially an infantry force forcibly
conscripted, so forcibly drafted, from the Christian population of the Balkans.
These young men were not allowed to marry, were given very strict training and oversight,
and expected to be extremely loyal to the sultan.
The result was a well-disciplined and loyal fighting force at the behest of the sultan.
So you would use this Janissary corps in order to balance the threat from the countryside,
to balance the threat from the nobles.
The Janissaries quickly became the most potent force of the Ottoman military, and because
they were part of the sultan’s household, were also heavily involved in court politics
and court intrigue.
This balance of power between the military aristocracy and the sultan resulted in a golden
age of Ottoman culture, particularly seen in Constantinople.
After the Ottoman conquest took Constantinople, the capitol underwent a period of building.
The sultans restored the cities.
They added mosques – like the Sulaymaniya, converted the patriarchal church or cathedral
of Constantinople into a mosque called the Ayasofya.
They sponsored the construction of schools, hospitals, and rest houses.
Thriving bazaars and marketplaces became places to trade international goods.
Coffeehouses provided a public forum for debate and discussion.
People discussed politics; they discussed religion – it became an important part of
Islamic culture.
The artisans of Constantinople established guilds and perfected manufacturing techniques.
So the Ottoman court in Constantinople became the center of a thriving and elaborate urban
civilization that was – at its core – Turkish, but was influenced by centuries of interaction
between West and East – and the Ottoman Empire would continue for decades.
They managed to maintain their vigor well into the 17th century, but by the early 18th
century the Ottoman Empire was showing signs of decline, signs of weakness.
There are multiple reasons for this weakness, including isolation.
Increasingly, the Ottoman court became isolated from the people.
A noble, known as a vizier, was charged with leading the bureaucracy and often made the
actual decisions for the sultan so that later sultans became puppets of this central bureaucracy,
puppets of the vizier.
Other sultans would be dominated by powerful individuals within the Janissary corps.
So the sultans became more or less figureheads within the Ottoman Empire.
The lack of clear paths of succession after the death of sultans meant that civil war
and power struggles were relatively common.
The size of the empire suggests that it was at times overextended, too large, and began
a bit of retreat.
The administrative structure that held up the Ottoman Empire, which had always depended
on military expansion, began to deteriorate and weaken.
Oppressive taxation resulted in protests.
Economic upheavals challenged the authority of the Ottomans – for example, when the
Portuguese managed to circumnavigate Africa, when they managed to get around the Cape of
Good Hope at the Southern tip of Africa, gaining access to the Indian Ocean and trade with
India and China, they were able to circumvent the Ottoman’s position as the middlemen
of Europe.
The Ottomans had dominated the Silk Road and trade between Europe and Asia because of their
position in the middle.
There was no way, prior to the 15th century, of connecting – of Europe trading with Asia
or Asia trading with Europe without going through the Ottomans, and the Ottomans used
this position to their advantage, making a tremendous amount of wealth in the process.
But when Portugal established a new route to China, and when Spain – a few decades
later – established connections with the Americas, it marked the beginning of the Columbian
Exchange in the Atlantic world.
This would displace the Ottoman Empire as the middlemen, as the center of the world,
and the center of economy.
The influx of bullion from the New World destabilized the Ottoman economy resulting in inflation.
And finally, there were changes in the 18th and 19th century in military technology, which
the Janissary corps were resistant to, and this caused the Ottoman Empire to fall behind
Western nations.
As Western nations industrialized and as their armies industrialized, the Ottoman armies
remain tied to traditional, to their traditional ways of doing things.
This technological and cultural conservatism continued to cause Ottoman decline, and continued
to cause them to disregard several important changes coming out of Europe – including
industrialization – and resulted in the Ottomans becoming progressively weaker in
the 18th and 19th centuries, at least compared to their Western rivals.
The Ottoman Empire – as a result – would be divided amongst the allied powers after
World War I, and that served to change the dynamic of the Middle East in the 20th century.
But it’s important position in the center of Eurasia for most of the 15th, 16th, and
17th centuries made them a potent force in world history and one in which East and West
combined; so it’s worth studying and thinking about the role of not just the Ottoman Empire
but the Gunpowder Empires in this story of world history.
Thank you.