The Ottoman Conquest of the Byzantine Empire

The OTTOMANS, the MAMLUKS, and the MING HIST 1301 | History The Ottoman Conquest of the Byzantine Empire Mehmed, Suleyman, and Isa, the three sons of Bayezid who had managed to stay free, engaged in conflict with one another over the Ottoman lands after the Battle of Ankara in 1402. Mehmed I ruled Amasya, an area on the Black Sea coast, while Suleyman held the Ottoman holdings in Europe and Isa ruled Anatolia. Musa joined the battle as soon as he was freed from Mongol rule, and Mustafa subsequently challenged for the crown as well. Mehmed and his brothers fought a civil war in 1413, and Mehmed won. He restructured and enlarged the Ottoman Empire along with his son and successor, Murad II. Timars, or the authority to levy taxes on traders, farmers, and craftspeople within a specific region, were bestowed upon cavalry soldiers and other eminent members of the Ottoman military and administrative class. Timars were granted to men and women of all religions and ethnicities, and occasionally to women of distinction as well. Occasionally, as timariots (owners of a timar), vanquished local elites were permitted to stay in charge of their previous territories. They were funded by the taxes they collected, so the state did not have to employ tax collectors or give them a salary. Giving military personnel timars was a custom that guaranteed their allegiance. The sultan ultimately owned the property, and he had the power to cancel a timar holder's right to continue serving the state. Timariots were compelled to treat the residents of their lands properly since they may lose a timar if the population of the area decreased. The Timariote also attempted to increase the productivity of agriculture on the territories under their control. They could collect more taxes the more crops were produced. They were in charge of keeping the peace in their territory, but they were not allowed to administer penalties without the sultan's chosen judge's consent. The sultan gave the vacant timar to someone else once the timariot passed away since the timar was not inherited. As a result, the timariots were unable to establish a separate hereditary class. Conquering Constantinople was Mehmed I and Murad II's primary objective. Since the seventh century, Muslim emperors have made vain attempts to seize control of the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Mehmed and Murad both understood they had to expel the Byzantine emperors in order to reconstruct the Ottoman empire. Mehmed's opponents for the Ottoman throne received help from Manuel II, the Byzantine emperor, who tried to keep the Ottomans weak by dragging out the civil war. The Venetians and Genoese, who dominated commerce in the Aegean and Black Seas and whose ships might obstruct Ottoman efforts to control both sides of the Dardanelles, were also strong friends of the Byzantines. In 1422, Murad II attempted to lay siege to Constantinople, but the Ottomans were unable to breach the city walls due to a shortage of artillery. Murad's desire to defeat yet another pretender to the Ottoman throne took his attention away from the siege as well. The Byzantines appealed to the Christians of Europe for support in their struggle against the Ottomans, just as they had in the past. The European Roman Catholic knights answered the pope's call for a new crusade. They were vanquished by Murad in the Battle of Varna in eastern Bulgaria in 1444. Still, Constantinople did not back down. The metropolis has shrunk to a shadow of its former self. Between 500,000 and a million people had resided behind its walls at its peak, but the bubonic plague and Ottoman sieges had left just maybe 50,000 left. However, the Ottomans could not feel secure in their lands as long as Constantinople remained on the western bank of the Bosporus, controlling access to the Black Sea. Mehmed II, son of Murad II (also known as Mehmed the Conqueror and Mehmed the Great), was left to eliminate the Byzantine menace. Compared to his father, he had been more prepared. He called upon his Christian and Muslim vassals from Thrace, the Balkans, and Anatolia in 1453. He marched to the Bosporus with the vassals and a nucleus of 6,000 top professional warriors. More than a hundred recently built ships were part of the Ottoman troops, which were aimed at preventing Constantinople from being supplied and reinforced by sea. In order to create bombards, an early type of cannon, he also called upon European gunsmiths, the most significant of whom was the Hungarian named Urban. A twelve-hundred-pound granite ball could be fired almost a mile out from one gun due to its enormous size. The city of Constantinople had been protected by defensive walls since the fifth century, but the Ottoman artillery was too strong for them. Following a fifty-seven-day siege, Mehmed's army stormed into the city on May 29, 1453, when Ottoman artillery broke the walls. The final Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, who lost his life defending his city, was among the approximately twenty thousand individuals who remained to protect it. Many of the defenders around the walls left their posts during the conflict when their Genoese leader was wounded. People prayed for deliverance and took holy icons up to the walls of Constantinople. They did not, however, put up much of a fight, and the Ottomans took over the city. Many Muslim scholars thought that a hadith, which is a collection of the sayings and deeds of the prophet Muhammad, had foretold the capture of Constantinople. Following his conquest of the city, Mehmed moved eastward, absorbing the Turkish kingdom of Karaman, the location of Konya, a significant Islamic religious centre, as well as other areas of eastern Anatolia governed by Turkish tribes. He dispatched the Ottoman fleet in 1461 to subjugate Trebizond, a major Black Sea commerce hub and a breakaway province of the Byzantine Empire. After overthrowing the Byzantine rulers who dominated the region, he took control of much of southern Greece in Europe along with Bosnia and Albania. Additionally, he took the Black Sea port of Kaffa away from Genoese traders. Almost all of the Balkans and all of Anatolia were under Ottoman rule at the time of his death. Though historians frequently refer to Mehmed II as "the Conqueror," he was more of a builder than a destroyer. He proclaimed Constantinople to be the new capital of the Ottoman Empire, taking the place of Edirne after his conquest. He sent soldiers to clean the remains of the siege and the Ottoman attack, and he promptly appointed a mayor and other high-ranking municipal officials to create and uphold order. He did not force the European traders to leave the city; instead, he gave them permission to remain, keep their property, and carry on with their church services. All he asked for was the dismantling of the fortifications enclosing Galata, the Genoese commerce district of Constantinople, as well as the surrender of their weapons. He prohibited his Turkish men to enslave the Europeans in order to protect his new Christian people. Mehmed saw himself as the legitimate heir to the Byzantine Empire rather than as a usurper. As the successor to the former Roman imperial throne, he proclaimed himself Caesar. He installed Gennadius II as the new head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the latter accepted Mehmed's claim to be the rightful heir to the last Byzantine emperor. The true successors of the previous emperor, his nephews, were brought into Mehmed's employ and held significant positions in the empire's administration. Under Mehmed's successor, Bayezid II, one held the position of Grand Vizier, or top minister. Mehmed started a massive reconstruction effort to restore Constantinople, which is today known as Istanbul. He oversaw the empire from the newly constructed Topkapi Palace. His own harem, or household, was also located within the palace. He gave the order to save the Byzantine church of Hagia Sophia and turn it into a mosque. He erected a hospital, built a weapons foundry, and restored the city fortifications. He also gave the order to build the city's new Fatih Mosque, popularly known as the "Conqueror's Mosque." He built a number of madrasas next to the mosque where Muslim experts imparted knowledge in religion, science, and Islamic law. Mehmed was quite inquisitive. He was multilingual and accumulated a large collection of writings in Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Latin, and Persian. He attended religious scholar debates and extended an invitation to Muslim scientists to visit Istanbul. He invited Greek academics and Italian painters to Istanbul together with his collection of Greek antiquities. Several artists, like Gentile Bellini and Paolo Veronese from Italy, created portraits of him. Upon capturing more regions of the Balkans and Anatolia, such as beyliks that had escaped Ottoman rule after Bayezid I's loss at the Battle of Ankara, Mehmed transported craftsmen and POWs to Istanbul in order to reconstruct the city. Mehmed let Jews and Christians to practise their own religions in his empire, just as previous Ottoman emperors did. This structure was a precursor to the Ottoman millet system, which gave religious groups significant autonomy and permitted them to establish their own laws and authorities. Mehmed appointed a head of the Eastern Orthodox Church and created the post of hakham bashi, or "chief rabbi," to oversee the Jewish population of the Ottoman Empire. He also extended an invitation to the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church to open a house of worship in Istanbul; the Armenian church had been forbidden from entering the Byzantine capital due to its perceived heresy by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the religion of the Byzantine emperors. Additionally, Mehmed let Catholic clergy to freely travel and pray across Ottoman borders, despite the Roman Catholic Church's refusal to acknowledge his right to rule Istanbul. In his realms, Mehmed also took steps to establish control over the Islamic clerics. He appointed madrasa instructors as Ottoman state workers. In contrast to sharia, or religious law as it is interpreted by Islamic courts, he issued kanun, or laws enacted by the sultan, and collected them into a book known as the Kanun ("Book of the Law"). Kanun addressed topics like taxes and the penalty for specific offences that were frequently left out of sharia. In order to consolidate his power and seize unopposed control over the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed also employed kanun. The Ottoman state was able to establish its dominance in both the East and the West when the Byzantine Empire and the Timurid empire fell, therefore acting as a gatekeeper between the two civilizations. After the Ottomans overthrew the Byzantine Empire and took Constantinople, they took command of a portion of the Silk Roads, which carried silk, spices, and other opulent products from East Asia. After overthrowing the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517, the Ottomans gained authority of Red Sea ports in Egypt in addition to their overland route, giving them further influence over the spice trade. Ottoman ships were dealing with India by the late fifteenth century, and the rich of Istanbul decorated their residences with Chinese silks and porcelains. Additionally, the Ottomans controlled trade on the Black Sea, which the Venetians and Genoese had previously controlled. Western Europeans searched for all-water oceanic routes to South and East Asia due to the exclusion of Italian merchants from their traditional trade routes, the high taxes levied on goods that travelled overland, the reluctance of many Europeans to do business with Muslims, and the cost of overland trade.