The Ottoman Turks created the most effective institutions in eastern Europe during
this period, as well as the largest state. The word Ottoman was taken from Osman Bey,
the chief of a group of Turks who, in the thirteenth century, settled in northwestern
Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), a frontier region between the Byzantine Empire and the
holdings of the Seljuk Turks. They served as mercenaries for both groups, and gradually
increased their own holdings. Ottoman forces entered Europe in 1345, and dramatically
defeated a huge army of French, Burgundian, and Hungarian troops at Nicopolis in
1396. Their advance stopped briefl y while they fought Mongol forces under Timur in
the east, but began again in the fi fteenth century, and by the middle of the century they
held the entire area south of the Danube. In 1453, they took Constantinople, which they
renamed Istanbul and made the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman sultans developed
centralized institutions, created more specialized bureaucracies, and, as noted
above, expanded and modernized their army and navy.
Janissaries recruited and trained for military positions provided the initial personnel
in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Villages were organized into districts called timars ,
under the authority of a cavalry offi cer or government offi cial, who collected taxes
for the sultan and handled legal disputes. These districts were organized into a hierarchy
of larger units, with each level under the authority of a trained offi cial. As the
Ottomans expanded, they sometimes gave local leaders the control of timars , requiring
conquered peoples to pay taxes but allowing them to keep their own laws and traditions.
These traditions included religion, for the Ottomans did not regard religious
uniformity as important. They also charged non-Muslims higher taxes, so were not
eager to have all their subjects convert. Their relations with Christian and Jewish communities
(whom the Muslims viewed as related “Peoples of the Book” as they were
based on the same biblical tradition as Islam) were formalized in the millet system, in
which the head of each religious community served as an intermediary between the
sultan’s government and the people. Religious communities paid taxes just as villages
did, but they could practice their religion openly, retain their own systems of religious
law, and teach their children. Christian and Jewish leaders often held high government
offi ces, and Ottoman authorities welcomed conversos and Jews as well as Moriscos and
Muslims when they were expelled from Spain.
The Ottomans expanded southward around the Mediterranean as well as into
Europe, fi rst engaging in a series of naval wars with the Venetians and the Genoese,
and then conquering Syria and Iraq from a rival Turkic group, the Safavids, with the
same mixture of skilled infantry and heavy artillery they would later deploy against the
Hungarians. In 1517, Sultan Selim “the Grim” (ruled 1512–20) invaded the Mameluke
Empire, and within a few months had taken the entire eastern Mediterranean, Egypt,
North Africa, and the Arabian peninsula. This included all the holy places of Islam, and
to reinforce this religious authority the Ottomans moved the caliph of Cairo, the head
of Sunni Islam, to Istanbul.
Selim’s successor, Süleyman, then turned his attention back northwards, conquering
Bosnia, Croatia, Romania, Ukraine, and, as we have seen, Hungary in the 1520s.
This advance was stopped outside Vienna in Austria, but Turkish naval forces drove
the Spanish out of their North African ports and planned an invasion of Italy that
was halted by the combination of the loss of the naval Battle of Lepanto and the need
to confront a reinvigorated Safavid Empire in the east. Though it would have been
impossible to predict this at the time, the boundaries between the Ottoman Empire
and the rest of Europe stabilized in the 1570s, leaving the Ottomans as rulers of about
a third of Europe and half the shores of the Mediterranean for the next three hundred
years.
World History
