The Grand Turk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 - The Sons of Osman
Chapter 2 - The Boy Sultan
Chapter 3 - The Conquest of Constantinople
Chapter 4 - Istanbul, Capital of the Ottoman Empire
Chapter 5 - Europe in Terror
Chapter 6 - War with Venice
Chapter 7 - The House of Felicity
Chapter 8 - A Renaissance Court in Istanbul
Chapter 9 - The Conquest of Negroponte
Chapter 10 - Victory over the White Sheep
Chapter 11 - Conquest of the Crimea and Albania
Chapter 12 - The Siege of Rhodes
Chapter 13 - The Capture of Otranto
Chapter 14 - Death of the Conqueror
Chapter 15 - The Sons of the Conqueror
Chapter 16 - The Tide of Conquest Turns
Chapter 17 - The Conqueror’s City
Notes
Glossary
The Ottoman Dynasty
Bibliography
Index
ALSO BY JOHN FREELY
The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatei Sevi
This edition first published in the United States in 2009 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
Copyright © 2009 by John Freely
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Map on p. xviii © Donald Edgar Pilcher, An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire, Brill, Leiden, 1972. Map on p. xx © John Freely, Istanbul: The Imperial City, Penguin, London, 1996
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
eISBN : 978-1-590-20449-8
http://us.penguingroup.com
To Murat and Nina Köprülü
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the generous assistance I have received from the librarians at the American Research Institute in Turkey and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. I would particularly like to thank Dr Anthony Greenwood, director of the American Research Institute in Turkey, Professor Taha Parla, director of the Boğaziçi University Library, and Hatice Ün, the assistant director. I am very grateful to Professor Heath Lowry of Princeton University and Steven Kinzer for reading my manuscript and making helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank my editor, Tatiana Wilde, who as always has been of great help to me in giving my manuscript its final form.
Turkish Spelling and Pronunciation
Throughout this book, modern Turkish spelling has been used for Turkish proper names and for things that are specifically Turkish, with a few exceptions for Turkish words that have made their way into English. Modern Turkish is rigorously logical and phonetic, and the few letters that are pronounced differently from how they are in English are indicated below. All letters have but a single sound, and none is totally silent. Turkish is very slightly accented, most often on the last syllable, but all syllables should be clearly and almost evenly accented.
Vowels are accentuated as in French or German: i.e. a as in father (the rarely used â sounds rather like ay), e as in met, i as in machine, o as in oh, u as in mute. In addition, there are three other vowels that do not occur in English: these are ı (undotted), pronounced as the u in but; ö, as in German or as the oy in annoy; and ü, as in German or as the ui in suit.
Consonants are pronounced as in English, except for the following:
c as j in jam: e.g. cami (mosque) = jahmy;
ç as ch in chat: e.g. çorba (soup) = chorba;
g as in get, never as in gem;
ğ is almost silent and tends to lengthen the preceding vowel; and
ş as in sugar: e.g. şeker (sugar) = sheker.
Prologue: Portrait of a Sultan
Half a lifetime ago, at the National Gallery in London, I first saw G entile Bellini’s portrait of the Turkish sultan Mehmet II, the Conqueror. I knew very little about the Conqueror at the time, for I had only recently moved to Istanbul, Greek Constantinople, the city Mehmet had conquered in 1453. Then in the last week of the twentieth century I saw the portrait again at an exhibition in Istanbul, where it had been painted in 1480, a year before the death of the Conqueror, who was known in his time as the Grand Turk, ruler of ‘the Glorious Empire of the Turks, the present Terrour of the World’.
When I examined Bellini’s painting in Istanbul I knew far more about Mehmet than I did when I first saw the portrait in London, for by then I had read and written much about him and his times and the city he had conquered. Mehmet’s capture of Constantinople in 1453 shocked all of Europe, for he had brought to an end the history of the Byzantine Empire, the medieval Christian continuation of the ancient Roman Empire, establishing in its place the Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks, newly risen out of Asia.
Mehmet, the seventh of his line to rule the Ottoman Turks, was barely twenty-one when he conquered Constantinople, which thenceforth, under the name of Istanbul, became the capital of his empire. At the time the Ottoman Empire comprised north-western Asia Minor, where Osman Gazi, the first Ottoman ruler, had formed a tiny principality at the end of the thirteenth century, extending into the southern Balkans, which his successors in the next five generations took in their march of conquest.
During the thirty years of his reign, 1451-81, Mehmet extended the borders of his empire more than halfway across Asia Minor, while his armies in Europe penetrated as deep as Hungary and even established a foothold in the heel of Italy. Three popes called for crusades against Mehmet, whom Pope Pius II called ‘a venomous dragon’ whose ‘bloodthirsty hordes’ threatened Christendom.
The Ottoman Empire expanded even further under Mehmet’s immediate successors, particularly Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-66), whose realm encompassed all of south-eastern Europe and stretched through the Middle East, the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. The Turks continued to occupy a large part of south-eastern Europe for four centuries after Mehmet’s death, and his dynasty ruled until 1923, when the Ottoman Empire gave way to the modern Republic of Turkey.
Today only 8 per cent of the land mass of Turkey is in Europe, separated from the Asian part of the country by the famous straits - the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus - the latter spanned by the urban mass of Istanbul, the only city in the world that stands astride two continents. Turkey’s foothold in Europe extends less than a hundred miles inland from the straits, the deepest penetration being at Edirne, where Mehmet was born in 1432. It was there that he began the meteoric career that led to the conquest of the city now known as Istanbul, where pilgrims still come to the tomb of the great hero known to the Turks as Fatih, or the Conqueror.
During the exhibition of Mehmet’s portrait in Istanbul a number of friends, both Turks and foreigners, remarked that it was a pity that there was no modern biography of the Conqueror other than that of Franz Babinger, a lengthy scholarly work published in 1953 and now somewhat outdated, and that there was a need for a new book on him and his times written for the general reader. And so that is what I have set out to do in this book, concentrating on the man himself rather than his conquests, though his brilliant military career will be described in detail along with its effect on Europe at the dawn of the Renaissance. As Lord
Acton wrote: ‘Modern history begins under stress of the Ottoman conquest.’
My biography of Mehmet the Conqueror is focused on the historic conflict between western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, echoed today particularly in the case of Turkey, which is currently facing rejection in its attempt to join the European Union. The interaction between Christian West and Muslim East is usually seen as a clash of civilisations, as it is viewed in the so-called War on Terror. The original conflict that accompanied the rise of Islam brought Graeco-Islamic science to the West, beginning the modern scientific tradition. Mehmet’s conquest of Constantinople and his invasion of the Balkans and Italy brought Christian Europe face to face with a new Muslim empire that was actually a rich mixture of peoples, religions and languages, which is still evident today in the lands that were once part of the Ottoman Empire. As Edward Said wrote: ‘Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.’
Mehmet himself is an enigmatic figure, seen by the West as a cruel tyrant, whom Pope Nicholas V called the ‘son of Satan, perdition and death’, while being revered by the Turks as a great conqueror. My book will attempt to discover what kind of man posed for Bellini’s portrait, which I am looking at as I write these lines, wondering what was going through Mehmet’s mind as he sat there in his palace in Istanbul, having conquered an ancient Christian empire and established his own Muslim realm in the marchland between East and West, changing the world for ever.
OTTOMAN CONQUESTS, 1451 - 1503
Istanbul and the Bosphorus
1
The Sons of Osman
Constantine the G reat changed the course of history in AD 330, when he shifted his capital from Italy to the Greek city of Byzantium on the Bosphorus, renaming it New Rome, though it came to be called Constantinople.
Constantine’s immediate successors established Christianity as the state religion of the empire, and during the next two centuries Greek replaced Latin as the official language. This gave rise to what later historians called the Byzantine Empire, the Hellenised Christian continuation of the Roman Empire, which took its name from the ancient city of Byzantium.
The Byzantine Empire reached its peak under Justinian (r. 527-65), whose realm extended almost entirely around the Mediterranean, including all of Italy, the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Middle East. During the next five centuries the empire was under attack on all sides, but as late as the mid-eleventh century it still controlled all of Asia Minor and the Balkans as well as southern Italy. But then in 1071 the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes was defeated by the Seljuk Turks under Sultan Alp Arslan at a battle near Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, as Asia Minor is now more generally known, while that same year the Normans took the last remaining Byzantine possessions in Italy.
After their victory at Manzikert the Turks overran Anatolia, though the Byzantines, with the help of the army of the First Crusade, reconquered the western part of Asia Minor and the coastal areas along the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The central and eastern parts of Anatolia became part of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, the Turkish word for Greeks of the Byzantine Empire, whose territory they had conquered.
The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum lasted from the second half of the eleventh century until the beginning of the fourteenth century. At their peak, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, the Seljuks controlled all of Anatolia except for Bithynia, the north-westernmost part of Asia Minor, which was virtually all that remained of the Byzantine Empire in Asia, while the Greek empire of the Comneni dynasty ruled the eastern Black Sea region from their capital at Trebizond.
The Byzantine Empire was almost destroyed during the Fourth Crusade, when Latin troops and the Venetian navy captured and sacked Constantinople in 1204. Constantinople then became capital of a Latin kingdom called Roumania, which lasted until 1261, when the city was recaptured by the Greeks under Michael VIII Palaeologus, who had survived in exile in the Bithynian city of Nicaea.
But the revived Byzantine Empire was just a small fragment of what it had been in its prime, and by the beginning of the fifteenth century it comprised little more than Bithynia, part of the Peloponnesos, and Thrace, the south-easternmost region of the Balkans up to the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, the historic straits that separate Europe and Asia.
The Seljuks declined rapidly after they were defeated by the Mongols in 1246, and at the beginning of the following century their sultanate came to an end, with their former territory divided among a dozen or so Turkish emirates known as beyliks. The smallest and least significant of these beyliks was that of the Osmanlı, the ‘sons of Osman’, the Turkish name for the followers of Osman Gazi, whose last name means ‘warrior for the Islamic faith’. Osman was known in English as Othman, and his dynasty came to be called the Ottomans. He was the son of Ertuğrul, leader of a tribe of Oğuz Turks who at the end of the thirteenth century settled as vassals of the Seljuk sultan around Söğüt, a small town in the hills of Bithynia, just east of the Byzantine cities of Nicomedia, Nicaea and Prusa. The humble origin of the Osmanlι is described by Richard Knolles in The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1609-10), one of the first works in English on the Ottomans:Thus is Ertogrul, the Oguzian Turk, with his homely heardsmen, become a petty lord of a countrey village, and in good favour with the Sultan, whose followers, as sturdy heardsmen with their families, lived in Winter with him in Söğüt, but in Summer in tents with their cattle upon the mountains. Having thus lived certain yeares, and brought great peace with his neighbours, as well the Christians as the Turks… Ertogrul kept himself close in his house in Söğüt, as well contented there as with a kingdom.
The only contemporary Byzantine reference to Osman Gazi is by the chronicler George Pachymeres. According to Pachymeres, the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus (r. 1282-1328) sent a detachment of 2,000 men under a commander named Muzalon to drive back a force of 5,000 Turkish warriors under Osman (whom he calls Atman), who had encroached upon Byzantine territory. But Osman forced Muzalon to retreat, which attracted other Turkish warriors to join up with him, in the spirit of gaza, or holy war against the infidel, attracted also by the prospects of plunder.
With these reinforcements Osman defeated Muzalon in 1302 in a pitched battle at Baphaeus, near Nicomedia. Soon afterwards Osman captured the Byzantine town of Belakoma, Turkish Bilecik, after which he laid siege to Nicaea, whose defence walls were the most formidable fortifications in Bithynia. He then went on to pillage the surrounding countryside, causing a mass exodus of rural Greeks from Bithynia to Constantinople, after which he captured a number of unfortified towns in the region.
Osman Gazi died in 1324 and was succeeded by his son Orhan Gazi, the first Ottoman ruler to use the title of sultan, as he is referred to in an inscription. Two years after his succession Orhan captured Prusa, Turkish Bursa, which became the first Ottoman capital. He then renewed the siege of Nicaea, and in 1329 the emperor Andronicus III Palaeologus (r. 1328-41) personally led an expedition to relieve the city. Orhan routed the Byzantine army at the Battle of Pelekanon, in which the emperor was wounded, leaving his commander John Cantacuzenus to lead the defeated army back to Constantinople.
Nicaea, known to the Turks as Iznik, was finally forced to surrender in 1331, after which Orhan went on to besiege Nicomedia, Turkish Izmit, which finally surrendered six years later. That virtually completed the Ottoman conquest of Bithynia, by which time Orhan had also absorbed the neighbouring Karası beylik to the south, so that the Ottomans now controlled all of westernmost Anatolia east of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles.
Andronicus III died on 15 June 1341 and was succeeded by his nine-year-old son John V Palaeologus. John Cantacuzenus was appointed regent, and later that year his supporters proclaimed him emperor. This began a civil war that lasted until 8 February 1347, when Cantacuzenus was crowned as John VI, ruling as senior co-emperor with John V.
Me
anwhile, Orhan had signed a peace treaty in 1346 with Cantacuzenus. Cantacuzenus sealed the treaty by giving his daughter Theodora in marriage to Orhan, who wed the princess in a festive ceremony at Selymbria, in Thrace on the European shore of the Marmara forty miles west of Constantinople. Shortly after Cantacuzenus was crowned as senior co-emperor in 1347 Orhan came to meet him at Scutari, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. According to the chronicle that Cantacuzenus later wrote, he and his entourage crossed the Bosphorus in galleys to meet Orhan and his attendants, ‘and the two amused themselves for a number of days hunting and feasting’.
Cantacuzenus ruled as co-emperor until 10 December 1354, when he was deposed by the supporters of John V, after which he retired as a monk and wrote his chronicle, the Historia, one of the most important sources for the last century of Byzantine history and the rise of the Ottoman Turks.
Throughout his reign Cantacuzenus honoured the alliance he had made with Orhan. During that time Orhan thrice sent his son Süleyman with Turkish troops to aid Cantacuzenus on campaigns in Thrace. On the third of these campaigns, in 1352, Süleyman occupied a fortress on the Dardanelles called Tzympe, which he refused to return until Cantacuzenus promised to pay him 1,000 gold pieces. The emperor paid the money and Süleyman prepared to return the fortress to him, but then, on 2 March 1354, the situation changed when an earthquake destroyed the walls of Gallipoli and other towns on the European shore of the Dardanelles, which were abandoned by their Greek inhabitants. Süleyman took advantage of the disaster to occupy the towns with his troops, restoring the walls of Gallipoli in the process. A Florentine account of the earthquake and its aftermath says that the Turks then ‘received a great army of their people and laid siege to Constantinople’, but after they were unable to capture it ‘they attacked the towns and pillaged the countryside’. Cantacuzenus demanded that Gallipoli and the other towns be returned, but Süleyman insisted that he had not conquered them by force but simply occupied their abandoned ruins. Thus the Ottomans established their first permanent foothold in Europe, which Orhan was able to use as a base to make further conquests in Thrace.