OTTOMAN TURKS

A militant dynasty of Anatolian Turks who created an Islamic state in the Balkans, the Near East, and North Africa, threatening western Europe and assuming leadership of the Muslim world. This empire, which arose in the later Middle Ages, survived until modern times, when it disintegrated into nation states.

Rise to Power. The Ottoman state, founded in Bithynia c. 1299, was one of many petty principalities that sprang up in the ruin of the Seljuk Sultanate of Konya after that state was forced to become a vassal of the Mongol Il-Khans (see seljuks). Weakened by the Turcoman invasions of Asia Minor and by the Fourth Crusade (1202–04), the Byzantine Empire could not prevent the

Islamic expansion westward. The Ottoman state was created by warriors, who refused to become peaceful citizens, on the Byzantine-Islamic frontier. Its location and the vigor of its ruling family helped the principality to grow rapidly at Byzantine expense, and by 1353 it had reached the European side of the Hellespont. In 1389 the power of Serbia was broken at the battle of Kosovo, and in 1396 Western Europe's attempt to meet the swiftly growing threat failed with the ill-fated Crusade of Nicopolis. The fortress city of Constantinople on the Bosphorus became a free enclave in the Ottoman state. At the same time, by marriage and political pressure, the Anatolian Turkish principalities were being absorbed. Reasons for this astonishing expansion must be sought in the comparative weakness of the Balkan Byzantine successor-states, the military and political efficiency of the Ottomans, and the post-Crusade hostility of the Greeks and Slavs to the Franks and the Latin Church. Given a choice of domination by Western Europe or the sultan, popular sentiment favored the sultan.

Ottoman civilization, which arose on the frontier between Byzantine civilization and the Persian-Islamic Seljuk culture, borrowed freely from both in its formative stage and took its final form only around the beginning of the 16th century a.d. The defeat of Sultan Bayazid by timur (Tamerlane) in 1402 was only a temporary setback to Ottoman expansion. In 1453 Constantinople was taken after a heroic defense, to become the Ottoman capital.

Subject Peoples. While the ruling class were Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians were governed through their bishops and clergy subject to the patriarch of Constantinople, appointed by the sultan. The Greek clergy thus had far more real power than they had had in the Byzantine period, particularly over the Slavs in Ottoman territory. Jews and Armenians also were governed as separate communities through their own clergy, and this arrangement (see dhimmi) seems to have been highly acceptable to the subject peoples until the 18th and 19th centuries, when internal Ottoman decline brought oppressive fiscality and interference.

Religious practice at the folk level in Anatolia and the Balkans, among Christians and Muslims, was strikingly similar, and equally distant from either orthodox Christianity or orthodox Islam; this situation together with the tax benefits of conversion explains why many subjects became Muslims despite the absence of forced conversion.

The talents of the subject peoples were channeled into the ruling class by the peculiar system of devshirme. Promising Balkan Christian boys were taken in levies, nominally converted to Islam, and educated as the sultan's private property. The ablest of them could rise to the highest offices of the state, frequently benefiting their Christian relatives, and forming an elite dependent on neither birth nor wealth. The rest were enrolled in the Janissaries, the sultan's private army. The Muslims opposed their own exclusion from the fruits of power, hence the devshirme was discontinued c. 1700.

Consolidation and Decline. State theory depended on an absolute autocracy, hereditary in the male Ottoman line, and the first ten sultans were long-lived, able soldierstatesmen. The last of these, Süleyman I, "The Magnificent," (1520–66) took Hungary, invaded Austria, and besieged imperial Vienna. Since each Ottoman prince was a candidate for the throne, state security demanded that the successful candidate put his brothers to death. In theory the sultan was subject to the Law of Islam, but since he controlled the conditions by which it was interpreted he was bound only insofar as he chose.

With the rise of the dynasty of the safavids in Western Iran in 1502, its theocratic Islamic heresy, preached by the Safavi brotherhood (shĪ’ites) had a deep appeal for the Turcomans of Anatolia. Largely in self-defense, the Ottomans became officially, militantly, sunnites. This was intensified after 1517, when the kingdom of the Mamelukes in Syria and Egypt was annexed. Soon North Africa, except for Morocco, came under Ottoman rule. Without continuing the shadowy ’abbĀsid caliphate of Cairo, the sultans could truly claim to be the leaders of Sunnite Islam. Western Christendom, torn by wars and heresies, was kept from being overrun only by the fact that the Ottomans were also at war with Persia.

The internal decline of the Ottomans coincided with the growth and transformation of Europe; but, blinded largely by its own early military success, the still medieval Ottoman state found no reason to transform itself as Europe was doing. With a more formidable West in the 17th century and several defeats from Western armies, together with an aggressively expanding Russia entertaining Balkan ambitions in the 18th, xenophobia and anti-Christian fanaticism grew in Ottoman society, estranging the subject peoples. The sultans sought alliances with Europe against Russia, but had to pay a heavy price in concessions and capitulations, chiefly to England and France. Whereas it had been once the terror and fascination of Europe, the empire became the "sick man" of Europe.

The spread of nationalist ideologies among the Balkan peoples in the 19th century, abetted by foreign powers, led to continual losses of territory; in World War I even the predominantly Moslem Arabs rebelled. Tardy and inconclusive efforts at internal modernization from 1839 to 1922 led to no lasting gains. Finally, in a rejection of the whole imperial system, a revolt headed by Kamal Ataturk in 1922 put an end to the Ottoman state and set up a national Turkish republic in Anatolia.

See Also: turkey, the catholic church in.

Bibliography: p. wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London 1938). g. j. s.-l. eversley and v. chirol, The Turkish Empire (1288–1922) (London 1923). h. a. r. gibb and h. bowen, Islamic Society and the West (New York 1950). b. lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London 1961). j. h. kramers et al., Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. m. t. houtsma et al., 4 v. (Leiden 1913–38) 3:965–1024.

[j. a. williams]