The provinces of Byzantine Anatolia had two sets of features that seem
important here. First, they were productive, heavily populated agrarian
settlements and thus for the nomads appeared as very attractive targets
of plunder. In a word, the Anatolian provinces were rich. They also were
Christian. Therefore they offered doubly justified targets of warfare for
these Turkish nomads recently converted to Islam and under the influence of popular preachers who had fused shamanist beliefs with Islam.
Was Anatolia attractive to the nomads mainly because it was rich or because it was Christian? Like their crusading Christian contemporaries, the
nomads’ motives were a mixture of economic, political, and religious factors. The lands of Anatolia were rich and they were inhabited by (mainly) farmers of another, Christian, faith. For the vast numbers of nomads already in the Middle East, pressured by waves of nomads behind them in central Asia, these were powerful incentives. And so, not long after their entry into Iran, the Turcoman nomads began plundering and raiding the
eastern provinces of Byzantium, pulled there by economics, politics, and
faith, and pushed there by the centralizing Seljuk rulers of Iran.
After enduring the raids for several decades, the central Byzantine state moved
to crush the new threat. In 1071, however, the imperial army under the
Emperor Romanus Diogenus decisively was crushed at the epochal battle
of Manzikert, not far from Lake Van, by the combined military forces of
the Turkish nomads temporarily allied with the army of the Seljuk Sultan
Alp Arslan. This spelled the ruin of the imperial border defense system
in the east, and Turkish nomads, now nearly unchecked, flooded into
Byzantium.
For the next several centuries, until the mid-fifteenth century, the history of Anatolia, east and west, can be understood through the metaphor
of islands of sedentarized life under Byzantine imperial and feudal lords
struggling to exist in a flood tide of Turkish nomads whose leaders, in
turn, came to form their own small states. In the short run, Turcoman
principalities rose and fell and Byzantine control ebbed and flowed.
Anatolia became a patchwork quilt of tiny Turcoman and Byzantine principalities and statelets, expanding and contracting. At times, Byzantine leaders, imperial and feudal, resisted more or less successfully. But inexorably, in the long run, Byzantine Christian, predominantly Greekspeaking, Anatolia underwent a profound transformation and over time became Turkish speaking and Muslim. This general atmosphere of confusion, indeed chaos, played a crucial role in the emergence of the Ottoman
From its origins to 1683 17
state.
In the midst of the Turcoman invasions, the beleaguered Byzantines
also were fighting against the Italian merchant states, losing to them
chunks of land and other economic assets such as trade monopolies.
Between 1204 and 1261, moreover, Constantinople became the capital
of the erstwhile Crusaders, who instead of marching to Palestine, seized
and sacked the riches of the imperial city and established their short-lived
Latin Christian empire. Historians agree that the 1204 sack of the city
struck a blow from which Constantinople never recovered.
The specific context in which the Ottoman state emerged also is linked
to the rise of the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, its rapid expansion east and west, and its push into the Middle East during the thirteenth century. As the Mongol state expanded, it often accelerated the
movement of Turkish nomads, who fled before it into areas that could
support their numbers and their livestock. In the middle of the thirteenth
century a Mongol general warred on a Seljuk state which had been established at Konya in central Anatolia. This Mongol victory wrecked the relatively large Seljuk sultanate there, which, before the Ottomans,
had been the most successful state founded in post-Byzantine Anatolia,
and triggered the rise of a number of small Turcoman principalities in
its stead.
The Mongol presence also prompted the flight of Turcoman
nomads who sought pasture lands in the west. These were the border
regions of the collapsing Seljuk state on the one hand and the crumbling
Byzantine world on the other. This was a changing world, full of Serb
and Bulgarian, Genoese and Venetian invaders and of Turkish Muslim
nomads and Byzantine Greek Christian peasants. In these Anatolian highlands to the south and east of Byzantine Constantinople, the Ottoman
Empire was born.
