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Page 1 of 2 The Ottoman Empire
You are going to learn...
- How the Islamic Ottomans who were so powerful 500 years ago that they forced the Christian Europeans looking for trade routes to the east to discover America in the west.
- How the Ottomans inadvertently created the opportunity for the English to beat the French and the Spanish in the race for building the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
- The Muslim Ottoman Turks at the zenith of their power some 500 years ago controlled the Mediterranean Sea and would attack any Christian Ship who tried to pass through, destined for trade with India and China. They adversely affected the whole of Christian Europe for more than 300 years.
- England was better off than their enemies, notably Spain and France who were directly involved with the many battles to keep the Turks out of Europe whereas England could spend a greater percentage of their resources developing their future Empire in America and India.
- Indeed England developed some interesting bedfellows in their limited actions against the Turks, notably at one time the Russians. Until the English crushed Napoleon in 1815, the French were always on the opposite side.
- When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in 1918 at the end of the First World War, the three powers who took the remaining Ottoman territory outside Turkey were the Russians, the French and the English
2000 to 4000 years ago
Early inhabitants, early rulers.
The Land we now call Turkey was influenced by the ancient Greeks and ruled by the Romans at the height of their empires. 1000 years before Greek culture (500-336BC) became dominant in the area the Mycenaeans (1600-1100) occupied Greece and put the city of Troy (in present day Turkey) into the history books when they (lead by King Agamemnon) attacked the fortified city of Troy with "the Trojan Horse" to get back Princess Helen who had eloped with the Trojan Prince Paris(1184BC). The remains of the famous city of Troy is in modern day Turkey, at Hissarlik just South of the Dardanelles. The Dardanelles (also known as the Hellespont) is the narrow, easily defended, exit from the Mediterranean en route to the Bosporus and the Black sea.
The men accredited with bringing together the warring Greek city states of Athens, Corinth and Sparta were the Kings of Macedonia, Philip 2nd (359 BC) and his famous son Alexander the Great (336BC). Alexander also brought the whole of Turkey under his control along with all the countries east to Persia (Iran).
Before the Mycenaeans the Hittite race of Biblical Old Testament fame lived in Turkey (Anatolia) and some 1000 years before Alexander the Great, attacked and controlled a similar sized territory including: Iraq (Babylon, Mesopotamia) and Syria. The Hittites military successes were largly due to them being the first to use horse drawn chariots in battle.
2000 years ago
The Byzantium period, Christianity and Islam
The huge Roman Empire which included Britain in the west included also the whole of Turkey with their eastern headquarters in present day Istanbul then called by the Romanised Greek name Byzantium. Hence the Byzantium Empire and Byzantium art. (300 AD to 1453 AD)
The apostle's of Jesus made many visits through Roman Byzantium notably Paul and Luke and Paul's evangelical letters to the Colossae (a town in central south west Turkey) may be read in the Biblical texts. The Roman Emperor Constantine, the first Emperor to become a Christian, really put Turkey on the map when he changed the name of Byzantium to Constantinople, (AD 320 ) a town soon to have a population of half a million. He also made Constantinople the HQ of the Roman Empire's eastern division.
When Rome and Roman Milan collapsed in about AD 476 Constantinople remained as the centre for Roman rule in Turkey, Greece, The Balkans and the Middle East. Simultaneously Constantinople became the centre of the Eastern branch of the Christian Church with Rome and the Popes remaining the head of the western section. Over the next 500 years the two branches of the Church grew apart over silly things (like what type of bread to serve at Communion), and the Churches officially split about 1000 years ago.
The Romans in Constantinople certainly did not have it all their own way and had to continuously defend themselves from attacks by German tribes from the north and Persians from the East. Fortunately the City of Constantinople(on the Golden Horn) is easy to defend. On three sides it has a huge mote, the sea, and the western side only requires a straight high wall with both ends ending by the sea. Even better to the south are the Dardanelles only a mile wide in some places and thus an easy place to destroy enemy ships and likewise from the north an equally narrow sea channel from the Black Sea, the Bosporus.
With the rise of the new religion Islam around 600 AD with centres in Medina and Mecca, in the country now called Saudi Arabia, and Jerusalem in present day Israel, and because Islamic followers were taught to fight and eliminate followers of other religions, a key target for them would of course have been the local centre of Christianity in Roman ruled Constantinople. However even under the best Arabic Islamic Muslim military leaders (e.g. Saladin) the eastern Romans managed to defend Constantinople.
1000 years ago
Arrival of the Turks
About 1200 years ago we can start a new chapter with the arrival of perhaps the then best fighters in the world, from the East, the Turkish Mongols.
Who were the Turks, were did they come from and how did they manage to rise to control the biggest area in Europe other than the Romans, together with the Middle East and the whole of North Africa and control the whole of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea?
Origins
Turks can't call themselves Europeans, they developed from the roaming nomads of Mongolia ( part of the old USSR). Turks are related to the present day Finnish and Hungarians as well as those who now inhabit Mongolia and Turkmenistan. Mongolian roaming warriors developed amazing skills with bows and arrows and horses and a devastating combination of the two, creating the worlds best cavalry. They controlled the greatest land area in all history from Korea in the east to Poland in the west and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean sea.
1200 years ago (800 AD) a roaming detachment arrived in Persia (Iran) and met, fought and lost to a superior force of Islamic Arabs. However the Arabs were highly impressed with the skills of this Cavalry from Mongolia and invited them to join their army. There followed a period of stability for the fighting Mongolian nomads who readily absorbed the Islamic faith and superior Arabic culture and some ended up taking the top brass positions in the Arabic armies. When the Arabic Empire collapsed the ethnic Mongolians took over the territories of Persia, Iraq and Syria and ran them very effectively.
At about the same time there were a number of free roaming private bandit armies made up from under employed Mongolian/Arabic Cavalry who wandered unopposed into Roman ruled Armenia and Anatolia (around Ankara in present day Turkey) and settled. In 1071, the Roman General headquartered in Constantinople/Byzantium Romanus 4th sent out a force to clear out these new settlers but failed to crush these superb Muslim cavalry men. Although they were bandits they did not attempt to act as local rulers but lived at peace with the Romanised locals who found them less oppressive than their previous Roman rulers from Constantinople.
The Crusades
This attack by Muslims into Christian territory and the loss of Jerusalem to the Turks was the catalyst for the call (in 1095) by the head of the Roman Christian church, Pope Urban 2nd , for a holy war to retrieve lost Christian territory and particularly Jerusalem. By 1099 the Crusaders had recaptured Jerusalem. This was the start of 400 years of very expensive holy wars in which the English although not the most active of the Christian countries played many key but expensive roles. (The most famous being Norman English King Richard the 1st 1189-1199. "Few English Kings have played so small a part in the affairs of England and so large a part in the affairs of Europe".)
Crusader Mercenaries
Knights of St John of Jerusalem
During the early Crusades the Roman Church set up a hospital in Jerusalem to look after wounded Christian Crusaders, called the "Hospital of St John of Jerusalem". When the Turkish Muslims then fighting for the Arab Muslims made it too hot to stay in Jerusalem they left and took up residence in Cyprus. Here they changed from "Doctors" to formidable Mercenaries on hire to Crusading countries who needed a trained religiously fanatical army. For more than 500 years the Knights of St John were a continuous Christian presence in the Mediterranean and a continuous thorn in the side of the Muslim Turks. For the Knights to survive they built almost impregnable castles which were regularly attacked by the Turks. To survive the Knights had to retreat westwards to Rhodes and then to Malta
The well known St Johns Ambulance grew from the famous Knights of St John of Jerusalem.
750 years ago
The commencement of the Ottoman Empire
About 200 years after the initial Turkish settlement in Bursa in eastern Anatolia a new and even more ferocious group arrived in Romanised Turkey and the result was very different. The new leader, Osman was one of the grandsons of the famous Mongolian ruler and empire builder Genghis Kahn. (1163 to 1227. The man who created the biggest land empire ever.) Osman invaded and settled in Anatolia in 1281 creating the beginnings of Ottoman Empire. To the Christian countries in the west of Europe the occupation of Jerusalem was bad enough so when the Ottomans took the first step across the Dardanelles from Turkey into Balkan Europe (1354) with the conquest of Gallipoli mild panic followed. Gallipoli is in a strategic position on the north coast(European) of the Dardanelles and controls the sea passage through to Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul then the centre of the Roman Empire and the centre of the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church and an impregnable fortress. A little later (1389) the ruthless and skilled Ottoman Cavalries won a decisive battle in Kosova beating the combined armies from Serbia and Bosnia. Thus the Ottomans controlled the majority of the Balkans and their Empire stretched from the Danube, not far from Vienna to the Euphrates, Baghdad in modern Iraq.
The Osman dynasty which ruled this huge Islamic Ottoman Empire remained strong as suitable sons could be chosen by their fathers from as many as 500 or more, as at that time the Sultans could have as many wives as they liked, who regularly numbered 1000 or more. If the Sultan thought there could be rivalry between the brothers for the succession or even by their proud and ambitious mothers he would simply murder all but his chosen successor!! After Osman the next major contributor was Sultan Mehmed 2nd (1451-1481) who is credited with making the Ottomans into a world power as he finally conquered Constantinople and turned the Black Sea (the fastest route from Turkey to Europe and southern Russia) into an Ottoman lake.
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