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

[)S]abac 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.




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.



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