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Ottoman history in world history
The Ottoman Empire was one of the greatest, most extensive, and
longest-lasting empires in the history of the world. It included most of the
territories of the eastern Roman Empire and held portions of the northern Balkans and north Black Sea coast, areas that Byzantium had never
ruled. Nor were these holdings ephemeral – the Ottoman Empire was
born before 1300 and endured until after World War I.
Thus, it began in the same century the powerful Sung state in China ended, in the era when
Genghis Khan swept across the Euro-Asiatic world and built an empire
from China to Poland while, in Europe, France and England were about
to embark on their Hundred Years War. In west Africa the great Benin
state was emerging while, in the Americas, the Aztec state in the valley of
Mexico began its expansion,
both events being nearly contemporaneous with the Ottomans’ emergence in Asia Minor. Born in medieval times, this empire of the Ottomans disappeared only very recently, within the
memory of many people still living today. My own father was nine years
old and my mother five years old when the Ottoman Empire finally disappeared from the face of the earth.
Large numbers of present-day citizens of the Ottoman successor states – such as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and
Iraq – bear Ottoman personal names given to them by their parents and
were educated and grew up in an Ottoman world. Thus, for many, this
empire is a living legacy (see chapter 10).
In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire shared the world stage
with a cluster of other powerful and wealthy states. To their far west
lay distant Elizabethan England, Habsburg Spain, and the Holy Roman
Empire as well as Valois France and the Dutch Republic. More closely
at hand and of greater significance to the Ottomans in the short run, the
city states of Venice and Genoa exerted enormous political and economic
power, thanks to their far-flung fleets and commercial networks linking
India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and west European worlds.
To the east were two great empires, then at their peak of power and wealth:
the Safevid state based in Iran and the Moghul Empire in the Indian
subcontinent. The Ottoman, Safevid, and Moghul empires reached from
Vienna in the west to the borders of China in the east and,
in the sixteenth century, all prospered under careful administrators, enriched by the trade
between Asia and Europe. The three together likely held the balance of
economic and political global power, at the very moment when Spain and
Portugal were conquering the New World and its treasure. But China,
4 The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 in the midst of Ming rule, certainly was the most powerful and wealthy
single state in the world at the time.
The Ottomans, in 1453, had destroyed the second Rome, Byzantium,
that had endured for one thousand years, from the fourth through the
fifteenth centuries. Through this act, the Ottoman state changed in status
from regional power to world empire. As destroyer, the Ottoman Empire
in some ways also was the inheritor of the Roman heritage in its eastern Byzantine form.
Indeed, Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople, explicitly laid down the claim that he was a caesar, a latter-day emperor, and his sixteenth-century successor, S ¨uleyman the Magnificent,
sought Rome as the capstone of his career. Moreover, the Ottoman rulers,
having conquered the second Rome, for the next four hundred-plus years
honored its Roman founder in the name of the capital city.
Until the end of the empire, the city’s name – the city of Constantine – Konstantiniyye/Constantinople – remained in the Ottomans’ official correspondence, their coins, and on their postage stamps, after these came into use
in the nineteenth century. In some respects, the Ottomans followed certain Byzantine administrative models. Like the Byzantines, the Ottomans
practiced a kind of caesaro-papism, the system in which the state controlled the clergy.
In the Ottoman judiciary the courts were run by judges,
members of the religious class, the ulema. The Ottoman sultans appointed these judges and thus, like their Byzantine imperial predecessors, exercised a direct control over members of the religious establishment.
In addition, to give another example of Byzantine–Ottoman continuities,
Byzantine forms of land tenure carried over into the Ottoman era. While
the Ottomans forged their own unique synthesis and were no mere imitators of their predecessors, their debt to the Byzantines was real.
Other powerful influences shaped the Ottoman polity besides the
Byzantine. As we shall see, the Ottoman Empire emerged out of the
anarchy surrounding the Turkish nomadic movements into the Middle
East after 1000 CE, population movements triggered by uncertain causes
in their central Asiatic homelands.
It was the last great Turco-Islamic state, following those of the Seljuks and of Tamerlane, born of the migration of the Turkish peoples out of central Asia westward into the Middle
East and the Balkans (see chapter 2). The shamanist beliefs of those nomads remained deeply embedded in the spiritual practices and world view
of the Ottoman dynasty.
Similarly, pre-Islamic Turkish usages remained important in Ottoman administrative circles, despite the later influx of administrative and legal practices from the Islamic world of Iran and the
eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately, the Ottoman system should be seen
as a highly effective blend of influences deriving from Byzantium, the
Turkish nomads, and the Balkan states, as well as the Islamic world.
