3 Heritage and Expansion of Byzantine Empire

On the morrow of his victory, Mohammed the Conqueror took pains to make it clear that his introduction of a new heaven did not entail a new earth. As little as might be would be changed. He had displaced a Palaeologus by an Osmanli only in order that an empire long in fact Osmanli should henceforth be so also de jure. Therefore he confirmed the pre-existing Oecumenical patriarch in his functions and the Byzantine Greeks in their privileges, renewed the rights secured to Christian foreigners by the Greek emperors, and proclaimed that, for his accession to the throne, there should not be made a Moslem the more or a Christian the less. Moreover, during the thirty years left to him of life, Mohammed devoted himself to precisely those tasks which would have fallen to a Greek emperor desirous of restoring Byzantine power. He thrust back Latins wherever they were encroaching on the Greek sphere, as were the Venetians of the Morea, the Hospitallers of Rhodes, and the Genoese of the Crimea: and he rounded off the proper Byzantine holding by annexing, in Europe, all the Balkan peninsula except the impracticable Black Mountain, the Albanian highlands, and the Hungarian fortress of Belgrade; and, in Asia, what had remained independent in the Anatolian peninsula, the emirates of Karamania and Cappadocia.

Before Mohammed died in 1481 the Osmanli Turco-Grecian nation may be said to have come into its own. It was lord de facto et de jure belli of the eastern or Greek Empire, that is of all territories and seas grouped geographically round Constantinople as a centre, with only a few exceptions unredeemed, of which the most notable were the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes, and Krete, still in Latin hands. Needless to say, the Osmanlis themselves differed greatly from their imperial predecessors. Their official speech, their official creed, their family system were all foreign to Europe, and many of their ideas of government had been learned in the past from Persia and China, or were derived from the original tribal organization of the true Turks. But if they were neither more nor less Asiatics than the contemporary Russians, they were quite as much Europeans as many of the Greek emperors had been—those of the Isaurian dynasty, for instance. They had given no evidence as yet of a fanatical Moslem spirit—this was to be bred in them by subsequent experiences—and their official creed had governed their policy hardly more than does ours in India or Egypt. Mohammed the Conqueror had not only shown marked favour to Christians, whether his rayas or not, but encouraged letters and the arts in a very un-Arabian spirit. Did he not have himself portrayed by Gentile Bellini? The higher offices of state, both civil and military, were confided (and would continue so to be for a century to come) almost exclusively to men of Christian origin. Commerce was encouraged, and western traders recognized that their facilities were greater now than they had been under Greek rule. The Venetians, for example, enjoyed in perfect liberty a virtual monopoly of the Aegean and Euxine trade. The social condition of the peasantry seems to have been better than it had been under Greek seigneurs, whether in Europe or in Asia, and better than it was at the moment in feudal Christendom. The Osmanli military organization was reputed the best in the world, and its fame attracted adventurous spirits from all over Europe to learn war in the first school of the age. Ottoman armies, it is worth while to remember, were the only ones then attended by efficient medical and commissariat services, and may be said to have introduced to Europe these alleviations of the horrors of war.

Had the immediate successors of Mohammed been content—or, rather, had they been able—to remain within his boundaries, they would have robbed Ottoman history of one century of sinister brilliance, but might have postponed for many centuries the subsequent sordid decay; for the seeds of this were undoubtedly sown by the three great sultans who followed the taker of Constantinople. Their ambitions or their necessities led to a great increase of the professional army which would entail many evils in time to come. Among these were praetorianism in the capital and the great provincial towns; subjection of land and peasantry to military seigneurs, who gradually detached themselves from the central control; wars undertaken abroad for no better reason than the employment of soldiery feared at home; consequent expansion of the territorial empire beyond the administrative capacity of the central government; development of the ‘tribute-children’ system of recruiting into a scourge of the rayas and a continual offence to neighbouring states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service: lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems. To sum the matter up in other words: the omnipotence and indiscipline of the Janissaries; the contumacy of ‘Dere Beys’ (‘Lords of the Valleys,’ who maintained a feudal independence) and of provincial governors; the concentration of the official mind on things military and religious, to the exclusion of other interests; the degradation and embitterment of the Christian elements in the empire; the perpetual financial embarrassment of the government with its inevitable consequence of oppression and neglect of the governed; and the constant provocation in Christendom of a hostility which was always latent and recurrently active— all these evils, which combined to push the empire nearer and nearer to ruin from the seventeenth century onwards, can be traced to the brilliant epoch of Osmanli history associated with the names of Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent.

At the same time Fate, rather than any sultan, must be blamed. It was impossible to forgo some further extension of the empire, and very difficult to arrest extension at any satisfactory static point. For one thing, as has been pointed out already, there were important territories in the proper Byzantine sphere still unredeemed at the death of Mohammed. Rhodes, Krete, and Cyprus, whose possession carried with it something like superior control of the Levantine trade, were in Latin hands. Austrian as well as Venetian occupation of the best harbours was virtually closing the Adriatic to the masters of the Balkans. Nor could the inner lands of the Peninsula be quite securely held while the great fortress of Belgrade, with the passage of the Danube, remained in Hungarian keeping, Furthermore, the Black Sea, which all masters of the Bosphorus have desired to make a Byzantine lake, was in dispute with the Wallachs and the Poles; and, in the reign of Mohammed’s successor, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand came up above its northern horizon—the harbinger of the Muscovite.

As for the Asiatic part of the Byzantine sphere, there was only one little corner in the south-east to be rounded off to bring all the Anatolian peninsula under the Osmanli. But that corner, the Cilician plain, promised trouble, since it was held by another Islamic power, that of the Egyptian Mamelukes, which, claiming to be at least equal to the Osmanli, possessed vitality much below its pretensions. The temptation to poach on it was strong, and any lord of Constantinople who once gave way to this, would find himself led on to assume control of all coasts of the easternmost Levant, and then to push into inland Asia in quest of a scientific frontier at their back—perilous and costly enterprise which Rome had essayed again and again and had to renounce in the end. Bayezid II took the first step by summoning the Mameluke to evacuate certain forts near Tarsus, and expelling his garrisons vi et armis. Cilicia passed to the Osmanli; but for the moment he pushed no farther. Bayezid, who was under the obligation always to lead his army in person, could make but one campaign at a time; and a need in Europe was the more pressing. In quitting Cilicia, however, he left open a new question in Ottoman politics—the Asiatic continental question—and indicated to his successor a line of least resistance on which to advance. Nor would this be his only dangerous legacy. The prolonged and repeated raids into Adriatic lands, as far north as Carniola and Carinthia, with which the rest of Bayezid’s reign was occupied, brought Ottoman militarism at last to a point, whose eventual attainment might have been foreseen any time in the past century— the point at which, strong in the possession of a new arm, artillery, it would assume control of the state.

Bayezid’s seed was harvested by Selim. First in a long series of praetorian creatures which would end only with the destroyer of the praetorians themselves three centuries later, he owed his elevation to a Janissary revolt, and all the eight bloody years of his reign were to be punctuated by Janissary tumults. To keep his creators in any sort of order and contentment he had no choice but to make war from his first year to his last. When he died, in 1520, the Ottoman Empire had been swelled to almost as wide limits in Asia and Africa as it has ever attained since his day. Syria, Armenia, great part of Kurdistan, northern Mesopotamia, part of Arabia, and last, but not least, Egypt, were forced to acknowledge Osmanli suzerainty, and for the first time an Osmanli sultan had proclaimed himself caliph. True that neither by his birth nor by the manner of his appointment did Selim satisfy the orthodox caliphial tradition; but, besides his acquisition of certain venerated relics of the Prophet, such as the Sanjak i-sherif or holy standard, and besides a yet more important acquisition—the control of the holy cities of the faith— he could base a claim on the unquestioned fact that the office was vacant, and the equally certain fact that he was the most powerful Moslem prince in the world. Purists might deny him if they dared: the vulgar Sunni mind was impressed and disposed to accept. The main importance, however, of Selim’s assumption of the caliphate was that it consecrated Osmanli militarism to a religious end—to the original programme of Islam. This was a new thing, fraught with dire possibilities from that day forward. It marked the supersession of the Byzantine or European ideal by the Asiatic in Osmanli policy, and introduced a phase of Ottoman history which has endured to our own time.

The inevitable process was continued in the next reign. Almost all the military glories of Suleiman—known to contemporary Europe as ‘the Magnificent’ and often held by historians the greatest of Osmanli sultans— made for weakening, not strengthening, the empire. His earliest operations indeed, the captures of Rhodes from the Knights and of Belgrade and Šabac from the Hungarians, expressed a legitimate Byzantine policy; and the siege of Malta, one of his latest ventures, might also be defended as a measure taken in the true interests of Byzantine commerce. But the most brilliant and momentous of his achievements bred evils for which military prestige and the material profits to be gained from the oppression of an irreconcilable population were inadequate compensation. This was the conquest of Hungary. It would result in Buda and its kingdom remaining Ottoman territory for a century and a half, and in the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia abiding under the Ottoman shadow even longer, and passing for all time out of the central European into the Balkan sphere; but also it would result in the Osmanli power finding itself on a weak frontier face to face at last with a really strong Christian race, the Germanic, before which, since it could not advance, it would have ultimately to withdraw; and in the rousing of Europe to a sense of its common danger from Moslem activity. Suleiman’s failure to take Vienna more than made good the panic which had followed on his victory at Mohacs. It was felt that the Moslem, now that he had failed against the bulwark of central Europe, was to go no farther, and that the hour of revenge was near.

[Illustration: The Ottoman Empire (Except the Arabian and African provinces)]

It was nearer than perhaps was expected. Ottoman capacity to administer the overgrown empire in Europe and Asia was strained already almost to breaking-point, and it was in recognition of this fact that Suleiman made the great effort to reorganize his imperial system, which has earned him his honourable title of El Kanun, the Regulator. But if he could reset and cleanse the wheels of the administrative machine, he could not increase its capacity. New blood was beginning to fail for the governing class just as the demands on it became greater. No longer could it be manned exclusively from the Christian born. Two centuries of recruiting in the Balkans and West Asia had sapped their resources. Even the Janissaries were not now all ‘tribute-children’. Their own sons, free men Moslem born, began to be admitted to the ranks. This change was a vital infringement of the old principle of Osmanli rule, that all the higher administrative and military functions should be vested in slaves of the imperial household, directly dependent on the sultan himself; and once breached, this principle could not but give way more and more. The descendants of imperial slaves, free-born Moslems, but barred from the glory and profits of their fathers’ function, had gradually become a very numerous class of country gentlemen distributed over all parts of the empire, and a very malcontent one. Though it was still subservient, its dissatisfaction at exclusion from the central administration was soon to show itself partly in assaults on the time-honoured system, partly in assumption of local jurisdiction, which would develop into provincial independence.

The overgrowth of his empire further compelled Suleiman to divide the standing army, in order that more than one imperial force might take the field at a time. Unable to lead all his armies in person, he elected, in the latter part of his reign, to lead none, and for the first time left the Janissaries to march without a sultan to war. Remaining himself at the centre, he initiated a fashion which would encourage Osmanli sultans to lapse into half-hidden beings, whom their subjects would gradually invest with religious character. Under these conditions the ruler, the governing class (its power grew with this devolution), the dominant population of the state, and the state itself all grew more fanatically Moslem.

In the early years of the seventeenth century, Ahmed I being on the throne, the Ottoman Empire embraced the widest territorial area which it was ever to cover at any one moment. In what may be called the proper Byzantine field, Cyprus had been recovered and Krete alone stood out. Outside that field, Hungary on the north and Yemen (since Selim’s conquest in 1516) on the south were the frontier provinces, and the Ottoman flag had been carried not only to the Persian Gulf but also far upon the Iranian plateau, in the long wars of Murad III, which culminated in 1588 with the occupation of Tabriz and half Azerbaijan.