Let me start out by saying that informed people in 1400 or 1500 or 1600 would not have shared our devil-may-care attitude to southeastern Europe and the Middle East.  They knew that the Middle East was a rich, civilized area that was now and had always been economically and politically important.  It was the source of many desireable goods and resources.  It was the site of mighty empires.  And this had always been the case, going right back to classical and Biblical times.  Southeastern Europe likewise was the site of Constantinople:  a great city founded by the Christian emperor Constantine in the 4th century,
it sat upon the waterway that connected north and south and divided east and west.  As one of the crossroads of the world, it was a marketplace and strategic fortress that had, by 1400, been an imperial capital for more than 1000 years.  And, in the years around 1400, that vital region and that imperial capital were falling under the control of the Ottoman Turks.

Well before 1400, Turks started to emigrate from central Asia into more fertile and prosperous areas.    One group of Turks, the Seljuk Turks, was important in Middle Eastern and European politic from about 1050.  It was their attacks on Constantinople and their mistreatment of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem that sparked the Crusades.    In the
course of the 11th and 12th century, these Seljuk Turks took over most of the country of Anatolia which we call and turned it into a largely Islamic country.  Before this, Anatolia had been Christian, inhabited by Greeks and Armenians, and ruled from Constantinople.

In the 14th century, a new group of Turks became prominent.   They were  the Turks who were loyal to the dynasty of a leader named Osman.  What set the Ottomans apart from other Turkish dynasties bidding for the loyalty of the Turks was their location.  The Ottoman dynasty controlled the northwestern corner of Anatolia, which was right next to the great
Christian imperial capital.  It was right next to the Aegean Sea and the straits that carried so much trade.  Thus the Ottomans were ideally placed to maximize profits while carrying on a holy war against the infidels.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans made a crucial breakthrough.  Ever since Constantine, the strength of the Greek empire had been in the city of Constantinople itself.  It was a strong fortress on a vital waterway, and over a millenium, all efforts to destroy Byzantine power had failed at the walls of the city.  Enemies had seized all the European provinces, or all the Asian provinces, but their failure to take the capital saved the empire.  Now, however, after centuries of
trying, the Turks crossed the straits in force and took control of large parts of Balkans away from the Byzantines, surrounding the city.  In the 1450s, using the  assemble the largest collection of seige cannon the world had yet seen they were able
knock down the old Roman walls.

But once the Turks, under their Sultan Mehmet (or Muhammed) had taken Constantinople, they were in possession of a mighty empire, the largest kingdom in either Europe.  They expanded both east and west.  In the early 16th century, they
finished their conquest of the Balkans, and acquired the Crimea, the gateway to Russia.  In 1526, the Christian kingdom
of Hungary collapsed after its king was killed in battle, and three years later, in 1529, Vienna, the easternmost city in Germany, endured a long Turkish seige.  At the same time, the new Turkish fleet was fighting Venice, Spain, and the Knights of St. John for control of the Mediterranean.

This big Turkish push in the century after 1453 is the background to many of the things we study in the first half of this course.  No one knew how far the Turks would go.   And of course Turkish hostility, by cutting off trade, helped motivate the famous European explorers to look for alternate routes to India.

Europeans also saw a great and obvious contrast between the Grand Turk, as the Sultan was called in Christian Europe, and every other prince or king of the time.  He was a terrifying and absolute ruler whose power over his subjects was shocking and fascinating.

Let's take two essential Turkish institutions that had no real counterpart in central and western Europe.

The first of these was the harem.  The Sultan had many wives and concubines, who were slaves, or the daughters of subject rulers, who of course produced many children.  The Sultan exercised complete control over this family, and chose the best of his sons to succeed him.  When the chosen son came to the throne, he then executed all of his brothers and all
pregnant women in the harem.  As long as this custom was observed it avoided, at a price, dynastic disputes.  There were no junior lines to compete with the Sultan for power.  The harem system thus was both a sign of the Sultan's unique status and a method of family planning that contributed to the unusual centralization of his empire.

The second Turkish institution was the army, which was based on two types of troops, each of whom fought in a distinctive way, and was supported by a different economic method.

Turkish mounted archers were supported by grants of land (timar).   This could have led to decentralization of power, but during the 15th and 16th centuries Ottoman sultans were strong enough to enforce regular redistribution of lands, so that their cavalrymen did not become landlords with local roots.
 
A second prop to Ottoman military power was their famous slave-infantry, the Janissaries.  Janissaries were recruited from the infidel population, in other words Christian population, of the Ottoman empire by requiring the people to give up a certain number of children as slaves on a regular basis.  The most promising boys were converted to Islam and trained
up to be warriors.  Since the Janissaries remained the personal property of the Sultan and were forbidden to marry while on active service, they were his most dependable followers, with no outside loyalties, and thus anxious to do his will.

Such elements and a number of others added up to a political system that by Christian standards sacrified all decency and true religion but made possible constant warfare and a mighty empire.  Indeed, this system required constant warfare.  If the Sultan's ruthless absolutism made possible his conquests, it was equally true that his military success allowed him to be ruthless and absolute.  It was only the fear they inspired that permitted the Sultans to steal the children of their subjects, and continually confiscate and redistribute the fiefs of their vassals.  Most of the later problems of the Ottoman Empire came from the fact that it eventually stopped expanding and could not maintain the old systems.

But back to the shocking Ottoman system.  Even though most of us would reject such a political system today, we should not just adopt the old prejudices of the European observers of the past.  It has to be pointed out that there is little in its essential workings that is specifically Ottoman, Turkish, or even Islamic.  Take the harem.  The harem is a royal institution that predates Muhammed by thousands of years.  It has been a mainstay of Middle Eastern politics since the time of the Sumerians and
Akkadians.  Ditto for slave armies.

These old techniques, developed in the Middle East long before anyone had ever heard of the Central Asian Turks, were used and worked for them because of the wide diversity of the populations they ruled in the Middle East.   In this crossroads area of the world, divide and rule was the most practical method.  The Ottoman Turks were not an ethnic group -- they
were an imperial elite clustered around a ruling family.  The elite included both Muslims and Christians, it included Greeks, Armenians, Persians, and Slavs as well as Turks.  This group used the time-tested methods of bureaucracy and militarism to tax and rule millions of subjects who, most of the time, were allowed to administer themselves through their religious leadership.  The Ottoman Empire was not an early version of the present national state of the Turks, which is a creation of the 1920s.  It was an ancient-style empire, unified at the top, fragmented at the bottom.

 I think that I have probably still left you with a pretty unfavorable view of the Turks in the early modern era.  Two things should be said.

First, it's not immediately clear that the politics of the Ottoman empire were less fair or more cruel, on average, than the politics of Christian ruled Europe.  We will see plenty of injustice and cruelty in Europe in later lectures.

Second, if the political institutions of the empire may have been ancient, its technological and economic workings were pretty respectable.

For instance, in its early days, the Ottoman regime was extraordinarily progressive in its promotion of agriculture.
This is most evident in regard to New World crops.  Why do we call the Thanksgiving bird a turkey?  Because the North American wild turkey was domesticated and developed in Turkey into the bird we love to eat and make fun of today -- and became the Turkey fowl.  Earlier in this century, American cigarette manufacturers bragged of their fine combination of
Virginia and Turkish tobaccos:  and the Middle Eastern motif of Camel cigarettes exploits the well known fact, at the time, that Turkish tobacco was something special.  Less well known is that American corn, maize, was introduced into eastern Europe under Turkish auspices, and Russians and Latvians and probably a lot of others use the Turkish name for a crop that
originated in Mexico.

In the 19th century, Turkey was the sick man of Europe, a degenerate backwater.  But we should remember that this was not
always so.  The Turks were for a long time a leading group:  and they got that way not only by their skill in fighting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
     Geoffrey Lewis,  Turkey
     Ira Lapidus,  A History of Islamic Societies
     Jonathon Riley-Smith,  The Atlas of the Crusades
 

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.