Episode 326 - The Rise of the Ottomans, Part 2

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 326.

The Rise of the Ottomans.

Part 2

In Part 1, we looked at the last century of narrative from an Ottoman point of view, following them from their tribal origins towards their imperial future.

In examining why they were so successful, we had to conclude that geographical and geopolitical luck certainly played a part.

By avoiding war with one another, and with no choice but to head west, the Beyliks conspired to push the Romans out of Anatolia.

The Ottomans then turned the disadvantage of facing Nicaea into the positive benefit of being placed on the opposite shore from Constantinople.

The Ottomans avoided conflict with the Latins of the Aegean and were instead welcomed into Europe by John Cantacusinos.

This allowed them to remain a frontier society, whose military could recruit nomads and mercenaries from across Anatolia while also building a settled state in Bithynia.

This advantage allowed the Ottomans to drain manpower away from the other Beyliks and establish a new, profitable European province.

Within half a century, the Ottomans had gone from being one power amongst a dozen others to being the preeminent power for a thousand miles.

No one from the Danube to the Taurus Mountains could now field an army as large as the Ottomans.

But though fortune may have played a part in their rise, it cannot be the only explanation.

So let's look at the details more closely.

My opinion is that the three key components of Ottoman success were flexibility, loyalty, and ruthlessness.

I concluded our last episode talking about the cheat code that all great empires need to jump from small power to superpower.

The example I gave was the Roman Republic's use of citizenship.

Rome would plant colonies of citizens or lure towns to their side with the offer of participation in the Republic.

This was in stark contrast to, say, Athens, where only those born in Attica could participate in the democracy, and those who left the area were no longer included.

Another example would be the Mongols, who forced people they subjugated to fight for them or face the consequences of their wrath.

In both cases, these empires found a way to double or triple the size of their armed forces without necessarily expanding their economic base by a comparable amount.

New conquests made by this giant army could then pay for its continued existence.

The Mongols are an apt example since the Ottomans may well have been one of those tribes forced into service by fear of the Great Khan.

So how did the Ottoman military machine function?

They may have begun life as a purely nomadic force, but things did not stay that way.

Historians have to work backwards with our sources.

As you can imagine, we know a lot more about the Ottomans from their time in Europe, where they encounter states who wrote narrative histories, but we know enough to be able to trace a rough sketch of their earliest operations.

What emerges is an Ottoman leadership group who operate based on ties of kinship and loyalty, as we would expect from a steppe culture, but one who is open to working with anyone regardless of religious or ethnic background.

You may have heard that the Ottomans were Ghazis, holy warriors determined to expand the lands of Islam.

But the facts we have suggest that the Ottomans, though evidently Muslims themselves, worked closely with the Romans of Anatolia.

In the earliest legends about their origins, there are Christian aristocrats who join Osman on his raids, and who only later convert to Islam.

We hear the same about those Byzantine officials who surrendered Prusa to Orhan.

Throughout their history the Ottomans had a genius for befriending befriending Christian leaders, encouraging them to join their leadership group without conversion to Islam necessarily being part of the deal, though obviously many promptly did.

The Ottomans seem to have been entirely pragmatic about life in Western Anatolia.

As one confederacy amongst many, they knew the dangers of being overrun by your rivals, and so they made recruitment into the army their number one priority.

Necessarily, this meant encouraging the Christians they encountered to join them, both landowning Romans who they negotiated with, as well as Christian slaves they captured.

Slavery was not seen as a hindrance to a military career.

In Ottoman culture, the slave of a powerful man was in many ways a more respected figure than a free man of lower status.

This flowed both from steppe culture where personal ties were key, but also the history of slave soldiers in the great Islamic empires of the Middle East.

Boys who served their masters well often became important administrators and generals.

As Ottoman history moves into a period where we can identify individuals, we quickly see that former Romans were everywhere.

Some had converted and become army commanders, others had risen from slavery to administer whole provinces, a few entered the harem as a captive and emerged as the powerful mother of the next sultan.

We can glimpse an accommodation with Christianity in all sorts of ways in early Ottoman history, in the architecture, in the use of Roman administrative practices, and in charitable institutions opening their doors to all faiths.

I should be clear that the Ottoman elite remained firmly Muslim, and former Seljuk administrators and imams migrated to Bursa.

to establish proper Islamic government, but the ethos of the Ottoman state remained that of a frontier society.

Anyone was welcome to join the army, where loyalty and good service would always be rewarded.

As such, the traditional Islamic practice of imposing the jizya, a poll tax on Christians, was not enforced in Western Anatolia during this period.

The Turks were surrounded by a Roman population that they did not want to antagonize.

Calls for volunteers to join Ottoman raids were couched in terms of shared shared comradeship, financial rewards, and eventually offers of land.

The opening up of Thrace as a new country to exploit was crucial for Ottoman expansion and keeping the peace at home.

If the Ottomans had remained in Bithynia, then they would have had to confiscate more and more land from the Christians to reward their own supporters.

Instead, the ambitious could be shipped to Europe to make their fortunes.

Little accommodation needed to be made in Thrace.

Byzantine state and church lands could be taken immediately and dished out to Ottoman soldiers.

If I've made this frontier society sound like a positive movement, then the perspective of its victims was obviously quite different.

Ottoman policy was to terrorise their enemies into submission.

That's what they'd done to Roman Bithynia.

Kill, enslave, destroy, until your opponent surrenders.

These brutal tactics were now imposed on Thrace.

And once its cities were occupied, the campaigns of violent exploitation simply moved forward to the next field.

Philippopolis became the base from which to launch raziers against Bulgaria, while from Didimotichon the nomads poured west towards Macedonia.

These cities became the headquarters of great marcher lords, independent independent Ottoman generals whose job was to destabilize and undermine the authority of neighbouring states.

Eventually, men would defect to their banners just to avoid being captured and killed, and the frontier state would absorb their lands and begin raiding beyond them.

The sultans entrusted these commands to loyal families who'd been serving with them for a long time.

At this stage, this seems to have been a formal arrangement, that individual families families of long standing would dominate particular commands, in the same way that the Ottoman dynasty would keep the position of sultan.

More on that in a moment.

These marcher lords now had significant armies at their back.

They functioned more like vassals of the sultan than generals in a Roman-style chain of command.

These men would have thousands of slaves and private troops surrounding them.

They would recruit steppe nomads as well as traditional cavalry to launch their raids, and they would welcome volunteers to serve as infantry and baggage train attendants.

Often, poor Romans, Serbs, and Bulgarians would sign up to help terrorize their own neighbours in the hopes of rising high in this new power structure.

The taking and selling of slaves was not a by-product of Ottoman warfare, but an essential component of it.

Volunteers were not paid, and so selling the people they captured was the main way these raids turned a profit.

Christian writers were repeatedly shocked at the scale of Ottoman slave trading.

The tactic of the steppe had been brought deep into the heart of Christian Europe.

This was particularly shocking to Orthodox commentators, since, for some time,

their monarchs had an informal agreement not to sell one another's subjects into slavery another factor in Byzantine contempt for the Latins, who gladly facilitated Turkish brutality by buying slaves from them.

The increasing size of the marcher forces encouraged the Ottoman state to develop a centrally controlled professional army.

Possibly inspired by the concept of Byzantine pronoya, the state started handing out land to support full-time soldiers.

This land became known as Tumar.

The holder of Tumar land was expected to report for service when required, kitted out as a professional cavalryman, rather than a lightly armoured steprider.

Tumars were handed out as rewards for loyal service and were one of the inducements to get men to join in the annual raids.

Like Pronoya, the Tumar could be taken away from someone or reassigned on their death.

By the time we close in on 1453, the Ottomans will be able to deploy 10 or 15,000 cavalrymen.

Armies of that size had not been seen in the Balkans since the days of Basil II.

The most infamous of all Ottoman military innovations were the Janissaries.

With the rapid expansion of the Ottoman state during the 14th century, it was no longer possible for the Sultan to be surrounded by an entourage of trusted generals.

So his court began to develop methods once employed by the Caliphate, where where slave soldiers would be brought in to serve the Sultan, providing him with a group of ultra-loyal, professional bodyguards, and eventually an entire infantry corps.

Again, the Ottomans had their eye on securing a steady stream of recruits, well aware that not everyone taken on this basis would turn into first-rate soldiers.

Initially, recruits came from a sort of tax on the marcher lords, who were required to send on one-fifth of the captives acquired in enemy territory.

But when this proved insufficient, a system was introduced called the Dev Sharme,

the collection.

This meant the enslavement of the free children of Christian families.

Once every decade or so, this tax would be levied, requiring one province to provide a selection of boys for imperial service.

From every forty households, one boy must be handed over.

He would become the sultan's slave and be sent to live amongst Turkish Muslims in Anatolia.

There he would learn the language, become a Muslim, and train as a soldier.

We can talk about this system in more depth in the future, but it stands as the most astonishing example of the Ottoman obsession with military recruitment and utter ruthlessness.

This practice caused horror and resentment and was criticised as not in keeping with Islamic law, since Christians should have been a protected class of person.

Though in passing, I should say that in time the Janissaries become incredibly powerful figures, and many Christian and Muslim families tried to get their sons into the corps, but that's for another day.

For now, we'll leave it as the final example of the Ottoman commitment to constantly refreshing its manpower supplies,

to ensure that the army was fed by multiple streams and would remain self-supporting and pre-eminent amongst the powers of the region.

This desire to never let the well run dry puts the later Byzantines to shame.

After Manzikert, the Romans never seemed to have created a permanent system of military recruitment.

This obsession with manpower was ultimately what created and sustained the Ottoman Empire.

In 1402, the Sultan's army will be destroyed in Anatolia by the Mongol warlord Timur.

But unlike the Seljuks, the Ottomans endured.

Their provincial armies in the Balkans survived.

They also refused to break away from the central state, even sticking to the Ottoman dynasty itself to provide their next ruler.

Without such a commitment to military recruitment, it's doubtful this would have been possible.

But there are other things in the mix there.

Why did no Ottoman army try to break away from the centre, and why did they insist on fighting on behalf of, only,

Ottoman princes?

In other words, why did the Ottoman Empire hold together in a way which most steppe confederations did not?

One of the first things that struck me when reading about their rise to power was the absence of civil wars or other internal struggles, a stark contrast to the Byzantines during the same period.

There is little we can truly know know about the personalities of Osman and Orhan, but their record suggests that both were competent, charismatic, and crucially healthy.

Osman seems to have come to power as a young man and lived to be at least seventy.

Orhan would then follow his father with a reign that lasted for nearly forty years.

This century of rule by one family, during which time they rose from the edge of the steppe to be masters of Bithynia, must have been vital in establishing a political culture, one that gained wide acceptance amongst its people.

That power should reside with one man, that power should pass from father to son, and that he must be an Ottoman.

This was not the norm in steppe societies.

Usually power passed to the next senior male figure.

We've seen this with multiple nomad empires as well as the Bulgarians who were descended from this tradition.

While this system theoretically allows for a hierarchy of experience in leadership roles, in practice it leads to constant civil strife and the formation of competing cliques.

This was the norm in most of the other Beyliks, for example.

For reasons we can't entirely reconstruct, the Ottomans went a different way.

The long, successful reigns of Osman and Orhan must play a part in that.

It may also have something to do with the unfavourable circumstances of the early Ottoman position.

Other Beyliks, who were able to capture Byzantine towns and fortresses more quickly, had had to devolve power sooner than the Ottomans did.

The Meander Valley, for example, contains multiple prosperous towns, all who needed a governor.

Then once fleets were established in the Mediterranean, a whole naval class would have been created in the Beyliks along the Aegean.

Whereas the Ottomans had to remain united for decades as they slowly starved the Roman cities of Bithynia into submission.

Between those cities was largely open country, offering no pockets of defendable territory where an ambitious commander could disappear and create their own little fief to rule.

Once the marcher lords moved into Thrace, it probably helped that they were surrounded on all sides by enemy states.

This would have reinforced the sense that this was a community project, that to strike out on your own would be to encourage the Christians to isolate and destroy you.

Instead, a firm bond must be kept between the marcher lords and their sultan.

Whatever combination of factors led to this ethos developing, it was hugely valuable in the project of empire building.

The elite seemed to have accepted the Ottomans as their natural leaders, and in exchange, as we saw earlier, prominent families received the juiciest commands, which they expected to pass on to their children.

The Ottomans emerge as more like first among equals than the all-powerful distant figures they would become once they'd taken Constantinople.

Connected to this understanding of the hierarchy was the principle that Ottoman territory was indivisible.

It could not be broken up and gifted to various princes or generals, again suggesting a strong sense of political community, that this project was something that everyone's ancestors had invested in and must be preserved.

Quite how this was understood, we don't know, but the behaviour of the generation who dealt with the major civil war after the defeat to Timor makes makes this clear.

No one tried to go it alone for long, they all looked to reunite the centre under an Ottoman prince.

This uniting political culture did leave one unfortunate loophole.

It was not agreed that the eldest son of the Sultan should rule.

Sultans tended to have many children, and so there were usually multiple sons vying to take over when their father died.

The other sons of Osman and Orhan managed to subsume their egos for the sake of the group, and were given commands in the army.

But when Murad took power, he had at least two of his brothers executed to ensure that he would rule alone.

This set a frightening precedent.

For the rest of Ottoman history, the sons of the sultan would spend their formative years establishing a power base for the inevitable civil war when brother would try to murder brother to secure the throne.

Now they were not all brothers from the same mother, it should be said, and this gets us into another key to Ottoman success.

As you know well, the Byzantines have been plagued by endless civil wars, dictated by an emperor leaving a son who was too young to rule alone.

Because the Romans took monogamous marriage very seriously, it was actually difficult to get the timing right.

Even if an emperor married young, he was dependent on fate to provide him with a suitable heir.

If his wife was unable to have children, or only had girls, or the boys died as infants, well,

there was little that could be done.

Marriage was a sacrament, and Byzantine emperors could not divorce their wives except in extreme circumstances.

The Ottomans did not have this problem.

There were different schools of Islamic law, but the Ottomans followed the Hanafi school.

This created a strictly patriarchal household with the father as sole head of the family.

He had no recognised queen.

Instead, he could have up to four wives who did not have to be Muslims.

Even more crucially, he could father legitimate sons from either wives or slaves.

There was no limit on how many concubines he could have.

This system ensured that there was almost always several male heirs ready to battle it out for the throne when their father died.

It also allowed the Sultans to contract several political marriages without ever having to worry about the fertility of the bride in question.

Those political marriages are the final piece of the puzzle.

As we will see next week, the Ottomans did offer the enemies they terrorized one option to save their people from suffering, and that was to become vassals of the Sultan, to join him on his campaigns and to lend your soldiers to the great project of turning the Balkans into one vast Ottoman province.

Yes, next week a special humiliation will come the way of John Palaeologos as he becomes the Sultan's vassal.

And so there you have the ultimate example of Ottoman flexibility, loyalty, and ruthlessness.

The Sultan was still open to forging personal ties with a fellow monarch, of inviting him into his tent, drinking drinking and joking with him, even rewarding him for loyal service.

But that service will be joining in the slaughter and enslavement of other Orthodox Christians.

I think it's worth finishing with two points that come up from time to time.

One is the assertion that the Ottomans are in some ways the heirs to the Roman Empire.

This idea comes from scholars who, in my opinion, are incorrectly assuming that all empires are the same, that they are all just a top-down exploitation of the masses, and so one ruler of Constantinople is much like another.

This is clearly false.

The Romans had a very specific political tradition reaching back into the Greco-Roman past and infused with Christian principles.

The Ottoman Empire is its own fascinating thing, a frontier society that just kept expanding, the bubble that never burst until the entire eastern Mediterranean had been reunited.

But its its political tradition was entirely different to that of Byzantium, an intriguing combination of steppe, frontier, and high Islamic cultures.

Second, to be self-regarding for a moment, listeners occasionally ask why I don't continue on and cover the Ottoman Empire.

And while I won't pretend to have mastered Byzantine culture, I think it is easier for me to speak about the Romans coming from a Christian society as I do.

To provide the same level of depth about the Ottomans would either require a degree of scholarship that I don't possess, or, I would argue, to be a Muslim who can speak to a largely Western audience.

I've been fascinated by the differences in Ottoman and Byzantine cultures, and a crude conclusion would be to say that Ottoman culture was far harsher than Byzantium was ever willing to be.

I would find it hard to talk about the brother killing, the mass enslavement, and the harem with the same breezy, this was good, this was bad analysis that I bring to Christian Byzantium.

My moral assumptions are dictated by the same philosophy as those of the Byzantines.

Sitting in judgment on Ottoman sultans doesn't sit so easily.

Hopefully, someone else can take on that challenge.

I am happy to cover the Ottoman story broadly, though, and that's an option for the future.

For now, it's back to the 1370s.

You know, being the emperor is a very stressful job.

Maybe being a vassal for a while will be a nice change of pace.

You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratches from the California lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.