The Turks stemmed originally from what is now Mongolia. They migrated into Transoxania (the region of the former Soviet Central Asia) and what became the Chinese province of Sinkiang or eastern Turkestan from the 8th century onwards, in the former region coming within the borders of the Islamic world. Large numbers of originally pagan Turks were brought there as slaves and employed as servile soldiers in the armies of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and the provincial dynasties which succeeded them in Persia and Afghanistan and in the lands of the Fertile Crescent. From their origins as typical steppe warriors, these Turks were mounted archers using the composite bow as their main weapon and also the lance, and they speedily achieved a reputation in the Islamic world as the martial race par excellence, hardy, brave, and loyal to their new masters.
In the early 11th century, a family of chiefs from the Oghuz or Ghuzz tribe of Turks, the Seljuks, by now Muslim, appear as auxiliaries of the local Muslim powers of Transoxania and north-eastern Persia. Under a dynamic leader, Toghril Beg, they took over power for themselves, eventually overrunning the whole of Persia and Iraq and raiding into Syria and Anatolia. Assuming the title of sultan, Toghril inaugurated the Great Seljuk Sultanate (1040-1194), relegating the caliphs essentially to a role as moral and religious heads. Other members of the family set up branches in south-eastern Persia, Syria, and central Anatolia, these after the Byzantines had been defeated at the battle of Manzikert and pushed westwards. This Seljuk sultanate of Rum, based on Konya, was to endure for two centuries until the time of the Mongol invasions, with its rulers, like the Syrian Seljuks, frequently clashing with the Frankish Crusades.
The Seljuk sultans depended both on their tribal contingents, lightly armed mounted archers and, increasingly, on a multi-ethnic standing army, many of these troops being slave soldiers, comprising Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Georgians, etc.; these professionals comprised heavily armed and armoured cavalrymen and infantrymen with swords and spears. For them a system of land grants grew up, on whose revenues the warrors, their mounts and weapons could be supported. The spread of this system through much of the northern tier of the Middle East had significant effects on land tenure and utilization, and there was probably a trend towards the pastoralization of areas of northern Persia and eastern Anatolia favourable to horse and sheep grazing—a trend which was to be accelerated by the subsequent invasions of a further wave of nomads from Inner Asia, the Mongols.
Amongst the Oghuz nomads entering Anatolia in the wake of the Seljuks of Rum was apparently the family of Othman, though the origins of the dynasty are shrouded in legend. The Ottomans or Osmanlis established themselves in north-western Anatolia, expanding at the expense of Byzantium and the Italian trading colonies of the Aegean shores. They then overran much of the Balkans, extinguishing ancient monarchies there, and forming these lands into the province of Rumelia, European Turkey. Their advance was delayed for a generation by an incursion by Timur, but in 1453 Mehmet II ‘the Conqueror’ captured Constantinople. The extinction of the Byzantine empire alarmed Christian Europe, but disunity amongst the powers and the onset of the Reformation and its attendant wars prevented any concerted effort to stem the momentum of Ottoman conquest.
The sultans of the 16th century went on to conquer further territory, and seemed unstoppable to contemporary Christians. Selim I marched into the Arab lands of Syria and Egypt (1516-17), and Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’ annexed much of Hungary and went on to besiege Vienna in 1529, with his cavalry raiding into Bohemia and Bavaria. Suleiman's reign marks a peak of Ottoman culture and power, although in the next century the Ottomans recovered Iraq from the Persians and were still able to capture Crete from the Venetians; and they only just failed at Vienna again in 1683. It was in the 18th century that there began a slow decline for the empire, and the Christian belief in Ottoman invincibility began to wane. The Habsburgs and Russia now exerted a relentless pressure on the Turks in south-eastern Europe. Greece and almost all the Balkans were lost by 1913, and Turkey's ill-judged entry into WW I on the side of the Central Powers sealed the empire's fate. The Arab lands were lost by the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and the integrity of what is modern Turkey was only secured by the military genius and political leadership of Mustafa Kemal, the later Atatürk, who finally abolished the Ottoman sultanate and caliphate in 1922 and 1924 respectively.
The early Ottomans were a minority, a military ruling class, in the extensive lands which they had acquired. Their fellow tribesmen had to be supplemented by more professional and reliable troops. Land grants were made to Turks in Anatolia and the Balkans and also to members of the Slav and Bulgarian landed classes of the conquered lands, with the obligation to provide troops and horses when called upon to campaign; these were the sipahi or feudal cavalrymen. The Christian manpower of the Balkans was tapped by the institution of the devshirme or periodic ‘collection’ of Christian boys who were taken to Istanbul for training in the palace school, inevitably becoming Muslims if only for advancement purposes, and who then followed careers either in the palace service and civilian bureaucracy or as soldiers. Hence many Ottoman viziers were of non-Turkish ethnic origin, including Greeks, Albanians, and even Italians. The soldiers formed the celebrated corps of the janissaries (Turkish Yeni cheri, ‘new troops’). These infantrymen took to the use of handguns in the form of arquebuses and, later, the more manageable early forms of musket. By their discipline and esprit de corps in battle they terrified their Christian opponents during their heyday of the 15th and 16th centuries. The Ottomans also adopted the use of static cannon, at first cast on the spot for sieges but later mounted on mobile gun carriages, probably as early as the first quarter of the 15th century, although it was only later that technical advances made an effective Ottoman field artillery possible. In this development of artillery and other weapons like mortars, bombs, and grenades, the Ottomans relied heavily on Christian experts, at first from occupied provinces like Serbia and Bosnia but later from further afield such as Hungary, Germany, and Italy; reliance on outsiders in the technical arms was to remain a permanent feature of Ottoman military practice.
But the Ottomans eventually failed to keep pace with the development in military techniques and weaponry which occurred in Europe, and suffered from incompetent high command, ineffective artillery, and ignorance of modern formations and tactics; valour and enthusiasm were no longer enough. The janissaries declined into an indisciplined and reactionary element in the capital, reluctant to go out on campaigns, and hostile to any new ideas. Attempts at military reform, mainly short-lived, were made in the 18th century, again with the help of foreign specialists. Thus the corps of bombardiers was trained on European lines by a renegade French officer, the Comte de Bonneval. In 1793 Sultan Selim II created his nizam-i jedid, ‘new order’ of trained troops with modern weapons parallel to the older, forces and with foreign advisers who also supervised arsenals, dockyards, and fortifications, only for it to be swept away in a traditionalist reaction of 1807 which also led to the sultan's overthrow and death. It was not until 1826 that Mahmut II felt strong enough bloodily to suppress the janissaries, and from 1839 onwards the empire entered on the Tanzimat (‘new organizations’) reform era in the spheres of administrative and legal structures, in considerable part a response to pressure from powers like Britain and France who hoped to revitalize what had become the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ against Russian ambitions. These reforms had a mixed success, but there was real progress in the military sphere. In the 1830s the sultan turned to Prussia and Austria for help in training a new army which would have western-type discipline, drill, and uniforms together with a corps of competent officers; the youthful Helmuth von Moltke ‘the Elder’ was one of these advisers, and the Turkish army henceforth acquired a long-lasting strong Germanic tradition. The Ottoman army acquitted itself creditably in the wars in the Balkans, Crimea, etc. of the later 19th century. But no amount of increased efficiency could save an empire which was multi-ethnic and multi-religious but yet still dominated by Muslims who felt a supreme contempt for all non-Muslims, and which had become an anachronism in an age of newly discovered nationalisms.
Bibliography
- Bosworth, C. E., in Cambridge History of Iran, vol.
5 . The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (ed. J. A. Boyle) (Cambridge, 1968). - Cahen, C., Pre-Ottoman Turkey (London, 1968).
- Cook, M. A. (ed.), A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730 (Cambridge, 1976).
- Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961).
- Shaw, S. J., and Kural, Ezel, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,
2 vols. (Cambridge, 1976-7)
— C. E. Bosworth
