The Ottoman Empire
Document the early history of the Ottomans is scarce. After semilegendary accounts, Ertugrul, khan of the Kayi tribe of the Oguz Turks, took service with the Sultan of Rum at the head of a force Gazi numbering “400 tents.” He was given field – if he could take, and keep it – in Bithynia, facing the Byzantine strongholds at Bursa, Nicomedia (Izmit) and Nicaea. Leadership then passed Ertugrul son Osman I (r. about 1284-1324), founder of the Ottoman dynasty – in the West better known as the Ottomans. This dynasty was to endure for six centuries by the rule of the Sultans thirty-six (see Table 2, Appendix A).
Osman I. small amirate gazis attracted from other amirates, the looting of new conquests required to maintain their way of life maintained. Such growth gave the Ottoman state a military stature that was out of proportion to their size. The acquisition of the title Sultan Osman I organized a politically centralized administration assumed that the activities of gazis to its needs and facilitated rapid territorial expansion. Bursa fell in the last year of his reign. His successor, Orhan (r. 1324-1360), crossed the Dardanelles in force and established a permanent European base at Gallipoli in 1354th Murad I (reigned 1360-1389) in the notes include most of Thrace (Rumelia, or “Roman land,” by the Turks), encircling Constantinople, and moved the seat of the Ottoman government to Adrianople (Edirne) in Europe. In 1389 the Ottoman gazis the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo defeated, but at the cost of Murad’s life. The steady stream of Ottoman victories in the Balkans continued under Bayezid I (reigned 1389-1402). Bulgaria was subdued in 1393 and in 1396 a French-led force of crusaders that had crossed the Danube, from Hungary was annihilated at Nicopolis (see Figure 5).
In Anatolia, where Ottoman policy to keep consolidating the sultan’s been directed on the Gazi amirates by conquest, usurpation, and purchase, the Ottomans had defected from the forces of the Mongol leader Timur (Tamerlane), faced many of the Turkish gazis. Timur crushed Ottoman forces near Ankara in 1402 and captured Bayezid I. The unfortunate sultan died in captivity the next year, so that four heirs, who remained for a decade for control of the competition, which the Ottoman Anatolia. By the 1420s, however, Ottoman power had been implemented to the extent that fresh campaigns in Greece revived.
Aside from scattered outposts in Greece, all that remained of the Byzantine Empire was its capital, Constantinople. Cut off from the country since 1365, the city, despite a longer truce with the Turks, was supplied and reinforced by Venetian merchants who controlled its commerce by sea. On more and Sultan in 1444, Mehmet II (r. 1444-1446, 1451-1481) now on to conquer the city. The military campaign season of 1453 with the fifty-day siege of Constantinople, in which Mehmet II warships brought by land greased on runners in the Bosphorus inflow as the Golden Horn known to the chain barrage and fortresses that the entrance to Constantinople harborblocked bypass had begun. 29 May fought the Turks her way through the gates of the city and the siege brought to a successful conclusion.
As an isolated military action, the taking of Constantinople no decisive influence on European security, but to the Ottoman dynasty was the conquest of the capital, the supreme symbolic importance. Mehmet II regarded himself as the direct successor of the Byzantine emperor. He made the imperial capital, Constantinople, as had it been under the Byzantine emperors, and set about rebuilding the city. The cathedral of Hagia Sophia, converted into a mosque, and Constantinople – the Turks called Istanbul (from the Greek word eis tin polin, “the city”) – as a center of Sunni Islam replaced Baghdad. The city also remained the ecclesiastical center of the Greek Orthodox Church, of which Mehmet II proclaimed himself the protector and for which he appointed a new patriarch after the custom of the Byzantine emperor.
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