Balkanized

The Ottoman Empire was one of the great medieval dynasties, originating around A.D. 1300 and lasting until 1922. Yet for all that history, when most English speakers hear “Ottoman,” we think of a footstool. It could be worse, of course…if we were French, we’d be thinking of a pouf.

Since those associations seem reductive, we now consider The Ottoman Empire by Halil Inalcik. Mercifully, he does not try to canvas the entire six hundred years of Ottoman history, his subtitle tells all: “The Classical Age 1300-1600.” Inalcik divides the book into four sections, the first a chronological Outline of History, followed by subject articles on the State, Economic and Social Life, and Religion and Culture. The result is in all honesty a tad dry; but it is workable for the reader (that would be me) who comes to the material with very little background. The backmatter is pure paydirt, comprising a genealogy of the Ottomans, a timeline of their history, and a (very needed) glossary of terms; in addition to the requisite footnotes and bibliography for further reading. Plus an index. Whew.

Anatolia, 1300: the Byzantine Empire (Christian) was crumbling, and it was to the Turks (Muslim) that they were losing ground. “The Turks” were not a single entity: the region was populated by several tribes and nations. Significantly, the Mongols had invaded and taken over eastern and central Anatolia, driving native Turcoman groups to the west, toward weakened Constantinople.

In about 1302, the leader of one of the frontier principalities, Osmân Gâzî, laid siege to Iznik, a city which we know as Nicaea, and which had been a Byzantine capital. Although the Byzantine emperor sent troops to defend the city, the force was inadequate and Osmân prevailed. Defeating the Byzantine imperial army — even if only two thousand troops — was a big deal, and other frontier rulers rallied around Osmân as the force opposing Christian Byzantium. From this beginning, Osmân and his sons founded the Ottoman Empire.

So far so good…we got Ottoman Turks right where we’d expect to find them, in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. So how did they get to the Balkans? Read on.

Medieval foreign relations were about as strange and convoluted as modern foreign relations. In 1346, Osmân’s son, Orhan, made an alliance with one John Cantacuzenus, who had claim to the Byzantine throne. Orhan even married John’s daughter. In 1352 Orhan’s son, Süleymân, laid siege to the fortress of Gallipoli in support of John against the Serbians and Bulgarians. On the night of March 1-2, 1354 a great earthquake broke the walls of Gallipoli, and Süleymân and his troops swarmed and took the city. From the Byzantine perspective, it was a job well done, thanks to the Ottomans for the help. Now go home. Süleymân agreed with everything but the going home part and extended the Ottoman footprint into Thrace. From that point forward the Ottoman Empire was organized into two parts, Rumelia to the north and west of Constantinople, and Anatolia to its south and east. Which, of course, left Christian Constantinople surrounded by the Muslim Ottomans. Give it a century, throw in a little gunpowder, and in 1453 Constantinople — and with it, ancient Rome — fell to the Ottomans.

Life under the Ottomans had its interesting features. Consider, for example, religious tolerance, slavery, and fratricide.

We imagine the arrival of the Muslim Ottomans as the occasion of wholesale slaughter of Christians and the suppression of Christianity. In reality, the Ottomans realized that minimizing disruption to the conquered lands was good business, and so Christians were tolerated, with two provisions. The first was a poll tax, a head tax, paid by Christians to support the state…Muslims were exempt from the tax. The second, more onerous provision, was that Christian families give up one child to be raised as a Muslim and slave in the sultan’s service. While most of these wound up in the military, there was a structured training and evaluation process that selected the brightest slaves into the civil service, through which they could advance to positions up to and including regional governors, the beylerbeyi. The use of slaves in high management positions strikes us as unusual, but Inalcik points out that it was considered simpler and safer to staff with individuals whom the sultan could “elevate…or destroy without repercussion.”

Got it.

Dynastic inheritance was also a bit different than we would expect. The right to rule did pass through the male line of the royal family, but instead of automatically falling to the first born, the Ottoman view was that any of the sultan’s sons could rule. Implicit in primogeniture is the idea that God decides the ruler by deciding birth order; for the Ottomans, He decided when the surviving sons fought it out. Which they did, with great vigor, usually until only one of the siblings was left alive…which unfortunately left the Ottoman state under perpetual threat of civil war between claimants. Mehmed the Conqueror (the guy who toppled Constantinople, that's him on the cover) issued a law making it legal for the newly-ascended sultan to murder his brothers “for the good of the state.” Even that didn’t stop the civil wars, so Mehmed III established a sort of harem for the princes, more accurately called the kafes, the cage. The princes were not allowed to leave, nor to reproduce, and were seemingly kept in constant terror: when guards came to proclaim Süleymân II sultan, he thought they were there to assassinate him and begged for a merciful end. Life as a royal prince was not an enjoyable one, it appears.

Until about 1580, the Ottoman Empire was to all appearances successful and stable, but in the course of thirty years that primacy crumbled. A driving force was the discovery of the New World: the import of Mexican silver led to drastic price inflation in Europe and the Near East and changed the exchange rates between gold and silver. As a result, the value of the Ottoman treasury was drastically reduced, “half its original value” from 1534 to 1591, Inalcik tells us. There was the belief that the social order had frayed as well, and the Ottoman response was to become increasingly orthodox, increasingly conservative. Which didn’t work out well, apparently…our author tells us that a chaotic period ensued, and when the dust settled a half century later, the Ottoman Empire was “radically different than the empire before 1600.”

Maddeningly, he does not tip his hand as to what the empire became: that’s out of scope for the author’s book, so he remains silent on the matter. You gotta love an academic.

In the end, Inalcik presents us with a volume that is more textbook than page-turner. There is value in that approach, especially since the competition seems so slim: although there are many titles on the Ottomans in print just now, a small and decidedly non-scientific sampling shows that few are truly satisfying. Most either present an uncritical paeon to the Ottomans, or they rehearse a list of facts with little indication of relative importance of events. Part of the difficulty may lie in the source material. In her introduction to Osman’s Dream, Caroline Finkle observes that the Ottoman tradition in writing its own history was descriptive rather than analytic. That approach seems to bleed through to modern histories, which are necessarily bound by their primary sources. The Ottoman Empire’s great strength is Inalcik’s ability to identify the historically important people and events and to explain their significance…which is to say, he casts Ottoman history in a form that makes sense to a Western reader.

Just for the first three hundred years, though. The rest is grist for another day’s mill, and we’re fine with that. For the moment the Curmudgeon is off to ponder what we’ve learned about the early Ottomans…with his feet up on a pouf.