Barbaroslar Episode 24 English Subtitles – Kayi Family

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The Ottoman Empire Part 5

Introduction
The era from 1300 until the later seventeenth century saw the remarkable
expansion of the Ottoman state from a tiny, scarcely visible, chiefdom
to an empire with vast territories. These dominions stretched from the
Arabian peninsula and the cataracts of the Nile in the south, to Basra
near the Persian Gulf and the Iranian plateau in the east, along the North
African coast nearly to Gibraltar in the west, and to the Ukranian steppe
and the walls of Vienna in the north.

The period begins with an Ottoman
dot on the map and ends with a world empire and its dominions along
the Black, Aegean, Mediterranean, Caspian, and Red Seas.
Origins of the Ottoman state
Great events demand explanations: how are we to understand the rise
of great empires such as those of Rome, the Inca, the Ming, Alexander,
the British, or the Ottomans? How can these world shaking events be
explained?

In brief, the Ottomans arose in the context of: Turkish nomadic invasions that shattered central Byzantine state domination in Asia Minor;
a Mongol invasion of the Middle East that brought chaos and increased
population pressure on the frontiers; Ottoman policies of pragmatism
and flexibility that attracted a host of supporters regardless of religion
and social rank; and luck, that placed the Ottomans in the geographic
spot that controlled nomadic access to the Balkans, thus rallying additional supporters. In this section follows the more detailed story of the
origins of the Ottoman state.

The Ottoman Empire was born around the turn of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, in the northwestern corner of the Anatolian peninsula, also called Asia Minor (map 1). Extreme confusion – political, cultural, religious, economic, and social – marked the era and the region. For
more than a millennium, this area had been part of the Roman Empire

and its successor state in the Eastern Mediterranean world, the Byzantine
Empire, ruled from Constantinople. Byzantium had once ruled over virtually all of today’s Middle East (except Iran) – the region of modern-day Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and parts of
Iraq, as well as parts of southeast Europe, north Africa, and Italy. In the
seventh century CE, however, it had lost many of those areas, mostly to
the expanding new states based in Mecca, Damascus, and Baghdad. With
some difficulty, the Byzantine state then reinvented itself and managed to
retain its Anatolian provinces.

In its reduced form, the Byzantine Empire
faced three sets of enemies. From the Mediterranean, the Venetian and
Genoese merchant states fought between themselves and (usually separately) against the Byzantines to gain strongholds and economic concessions on the rich Aegean, Black Sea, and eastern Mediterranean trade
routes. To their north and west, the Byzantines faced expansive and powerful land-based states, especially the Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms.
And, beginning at the turn of the first millennium, the Turkish nomads
(called Turcoman) appeared on their eastern frontiers. Turkish peoples
with their origins in central Asia, in the area around Lake Baikal, began
migrating out of these ancestral homes and, c.

1000 CE, started pouring into the Middle East. In their Central Asiatic homes, the Turcoman way of
life was marked by shamanist beliefs in religion and economic dependence
on animal raising and social values that celebrated personal bravery and
considerable freedom and mobility for noble women. The Homeric-style
epic, named The Book of Dede Korkut, recounts the stories of heroic men
and women, and was written just before the Turcoman expansion into the
Middle East.

This epic also shows that the Turcoman polity was highly
fragmented, with leadership by consensus rather than command. This set
of migrations – a major event in world history – created a Turkic speaking belt of men, women, and children from the western borders of China
to Asia Minor and led to the formation of the Ottoman state. The nomadic, politically fragmented Turcoman way of life began causing major
disturbances in the lives of the settled populations of the Iranian plateau,
who bore the brunt of the initial migrations/invasions. As the nomads
moved towards and then into the sedentarized Middle East, they converted to Islam but retained many of their shamanist rituals and practices.

Hence, Turkish Islam as it became practiced later on varied considerably
in form from Iranian or Arab Islam. As they migrated, the Turcomans
and their animals disrupted the economy of the settled regions and the
flow of tax revenues which agriculturalists paid to their rulers. Among the
Turkish nomadic invaders was the Seljuk family.