Expansion Of The Osmanli Kingdom
If the new state was to expand by conquest, its line of advance was
already foreshadowed. For the present, it could hardly break back into
Asia Minor, occupied as this was by Moslem principalities sanctioned by
the same tradition as itself, namely, the prestige of the Seljuks. To
attack these would be to sin against Islam. But in front lay a rich but
weak Christian state, the centre of the civilization to which the popular
Nicaea had desired, won, and transferred itself to, Constantinople, so did
the Osmanli state of Brusa yearn towards the same goal; and it needed no
invitation from a Greek to dispose an Ottoman sultan to push over to the
European shore.
Such an invitation, however, did in fact precede the first Osmanli
crossing in force. In 1345 John Cantacuzene solicited help of Orkhan
against the menace of Dushan, the Serb. Twelve years later came a second
invitation. Orkhan's son, Suleiman, this time ferried a large army over
the Hellespont, and, by taking and holding Gallipoli and Rodosto, secured
a passage from continent to continent, which the Ottomans would never
again let go.
Such invitations, though they neither prompted the extension of the
Osmanli realm into Europe nor sensibly precipitated it, did nevertheless
divert the course of the Ottoman arms and reprieve the Greek empire till
Timur and his Tartars could come on the scene and, all unconsciously,
secure it a further respite. But for these diversions there is little
doubt Constantinople would have passed into Ottoman hands nearly a century
earlier than the historic date of its fall. The Osmanli armies, thus led
aside to make the Serbs and not the Greeks of Europe their first
objective, became involved at once in a tangle of Balkan affairs from
which they only extricated themselves after forty years of incessant
fighting in almost every part of the peninsula except the domain of the
Greek emperor. This warfare, which in no way advanced the proper aims of
the lords of Brusa and Nicaea, not only profited the Greek emperor by
relieving him of concern about his land frontier but also used up strength
which might have made head against the Tartars. Constantinople then, as
now, was detached from the Balkans. The Osmanlis, had they possessed
themselves of it, might well have let the latter be for a long time to
come. Instead, they had to battle, with the help now of one section of the
Balkan peoples, now of another, till forced to make an end of all their
feuds and treacheries by annexations after the victories of Kosovo in 1389
and Nikopolis in 1396.
Nor was this all. They became involved also with certain peoples of the
main continent of Europe, whose interests or sympathies had been affected
by those long and sanguinary Balkan wars. There was already bad blood and
to spare between the Osmanlis on the one hand, and Hungarians, Poles, and
Italian Venetians on the other, long before any second opportunity to
attack Constantinople occurred: and the Osmanlis were in for that age-long
struggle to secure a 'scientific frontier' beyond the Danube, whence the
Adriatic on the one flank and the Euxine on the other could be commanded,
which was to make Ottoman history down to the eighteenth century and spell
ruin in the end.
It is a vulgar error to suppose that the Osmanlis set out for Europe, in
the spirit of Arab apostles, to force their creed and dominion on all the
world. Both in Asia and Europe, from first to last, their expeditions and
conquests have been inspired palpably by motives similar to those active
among the Christian powers, namely, desire for political security and the
command of commercial areas. Such wars as the Ottoman sultans, once they
were established at Constantinople, did wage again and again with knightly
orders or with Italian republics would have been undertaken, and fought
with the same persistence, by any Greek emperor who felt himself strong
enough. Even the Asiatic campaigns, which Selim I and some of his
successors, down to the end of the seventeenth century, would undertake,
were planned and carried out from similar motives. Their object was to
secure the eastern basin of the Mediterranean by the establishment of some
strong frontier against Iran, out of which had come more than once forces
threatening the destruction of Ottoman power. It does not, of course, in
any respect disprove their purpose that, in the event, this object was
never attained, and that an unsatisfactory Turco-Persian border still
illustrates at this day the failures of Selim I and Mohammed IV.
By the opening of the fifteenth century, when, all unlooked for, a most
terrible Tartar storm was about to break upon western Asia, the Osmanli
realm had grown considerably, not only in Europe by conquest, but also in
Asia by the peaceful effect of marriages and heritages. Indeed it now
comprised scarcely less of the Anatolian peninsula than the last Seljuks
had held, that is to say, the whole of the north as far as the Halys river
beyond Angora, the central plateau to beyond Konia, and all the western
coast-lands. The only emirs not tributary were those of Karamania,
Cappadocia, and Pontus, that is of the southern and eastern fringes; and
one detached fragment of Greek power survived in the last-named country,
the kingdom of Trebizond. As for Europe, it had become the main scene of
Osmanli operations, and now contained the administrative capital,
Adrianople, though Brusu kept a sentimental primacy. Sultan Murad, who
some years after his succession in 1359 had definitely transferred the
centre of political gravity to Thrace, was nevertheless carried to the
Bithynian capital for burial, Bulgaria, Serbia, and districts of both
Bosnia and Macedonia were now integral parts of an empire which had come
to number at least as many Christian as Moslem subjects, and to depend as
much on the first as on the last. Not only had the professional Osmanli
soldiery, the Janissaries, continued to be recruited from the children of
native Christian races, but contingents of adult native warriors, who
still professed Christianity, had been invited or had offered themselves
to fight Osmanli battles--even those waged against men of the True Faith
in Asia. A considerable body of Christian Serbs had stood up in Murad's
line at the battle of Konia in 1381, before the treachery of another body
of the same race gave him the victory eight years later at Kosovo. So
little did the Osmanli state model itself on the earlier caliphial empires
and so naturally did it lean towards the Roman or Byzantine imperial type.
And just because it had come to be in Europe and of Europe, it was able to
survive the terrible disaster of Angora in 1402. Though the Osmanli army
was annihilated by Timur, and an Osmanli sultan, for the first and last
time in history, remained in the hands of the foe, the administrative
machinery of the Osmanli state was not paralysed. A new ruler was
proclaimed at Adrianople, and the European part of the realm held firm.
The moment that the Tartars began to give ground, the Osmanlis began to
recover it. In less than twenty years they stood again in Asia as they
were before Timur's attack, and secure for the time on the east, could
return to restore their prestige in the west, where the Tartar victory had
bred unrest and brought both the Hungarians and the Venetians on the
Balkan scene. Their success was once more rapid and astonishing: Salonika
passed once and for all into Ottoman hands: the Frank seigneurs and the
despots of Greece were alike humbled; and although Murad II failed to
crush the Albanian, Skanderbey, he worsted his most dangerous foe, John
Hunyadi, with the help of Wallach treachery at the second battle of
Kosovo. At his death, three years later, he left the Balkans quiet and the
field clear for his successor to proceed with the long deferred but
inevitable enterprise of attacking all that was left of Greek empire, the
district and city of Constantinople.
The doom of New Rome was fulfilled within two years. In the end it passed
easily enough into the hands of those who already had been in possession
of its proper empire for a century or more. Historians have made more of
this fall of Constantinople in 1453 than contemporary opinion seems to
have made of it. No prince in Europe was moved to any action by its peril,
except, very half-heartedly, the Doge. Venice could not feel quite
indifferent to the prospect of the main part of that empire, which, while
in Greek hands, had been her most serious commercial competitor, passing
into the stronger hands of the Osmanlis. Once in Constantinople, the
latter, long a land power only, would be bound to concern themselves with
the sea also. The Venetians made no effort worthy of their apprehensions,
though these were indeed exceedingly well founded; for, as all the world
knows, to the sea the Osmanlis did at once betake themselves. In less than
thirty years they were ranging all the eastern Mediterranean and laying
siege to Rhodes, the stronghold of one of their most dangerous
competitors, the Knights Hospitallers.
In this consequence consists the chief historic importance of the Osmanli
capture of Constantinople. For no other reason can it he called an
epoch-marking event. If it guaranteed the Empire of the East against
passing into any western hands, for example, those of Venice or Genoa, it
did not affect the balance of power between Christendom and Islam; for the
strength of the former had long ceased to reside at all in Constantinople.
The last Greek emperor died a martyr, but not a champion.
More
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