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Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will he be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!"
[video=youtube;PdyhVf5EDRg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdyhVf5EDRg[/video]
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From the annexation of Constantinople on the Golden Horn to the Battle of Lepanto, the Ottoman Empire and its ruling House of Osman had taken a leap of expansionism that shook and shattered Christendom to its very core.
Under crimson banners that sparkled with golden crescents, the armies of the
Padishahs reached the banks of the Danube and the sandy beaches of Malta and the dunes of Mecca, holiest of the holy cities of Islam.
Yet this gargantuan empire of the Osman Turks, where only 14 of 48
grand viziers[1] were ethnically speaking Turkish, had begun to show a certain degree of weariness despite its immense successes. The empire’s threat still hung heavily over the rulers of Vienna and Venice, but since the clash of the Ottoman and Christian League’s naval formations off Lepanto in 1571, the High Porte had steered unto the path of stagnation that would characterize it through the 1600s.
Ottoman troops wave their banners over the ruins of one of Constantinople’s guard towers during the fall of the city in 1453
Although staggering to keep the pace with her Catholic rivals in the Mediterranean, the Turks still instilled fear to the hearts of the Habsburgs and Poles – a fear that had helped the Huguenots in France several times by anchoring large Austrian formations on the Hungarian border when they could have wrought havoc in Flanders or Lorraine.
In 1566
Suleiman the Magnificent reached the Danube, shortly before his death, with a huge army determined to finally take Vienna which he had failed at doing some 30 years earlier. Even though this second attempt also ended in defeat, the territorial expansionism of the Ottomans did not stall completely. In 1571 Cyprus fell, a high water mark for the Turk navy only months before the disastrous engagement at Lepanto.
At the turn of the 15th century a massive popular revolt broke out in Ottoman Greece against a renewed round of recruitment to the janissary class. Reaching its zenith in 1597, the uprising never penetrated the Corinthian isthmus and remained confined to continental Europe in the Peloponnese, but on Crete – in a show of national and religious solidarity never seen before – the Cretans overthrew the Venetian government on the island and joined forces with their brothers in arms on the Morea[2].
This renewal of a ‘Peloponnesian League’ (a name shortly used by the rebels themselves) did, however, little to hold back the furious onslaught which the Porte sent against her ungrateful subjects. Over the course of half a decade, the Turks stomped out the fire of the uprising and strangled the nascent Greek Orthodox identity in its cradle.
Extent of the Ottoman domains in 1650. Note Transylvania, although part of the part empire, was enjoying de facto independence despite its vassalage status.
Thus the empire emerged in the 16th century with a surprisingly strengthened position in the Mediterranean. Christian discontent had been subdued brutally and Venice had lost an important base of operations in the Greek archipelago as Crete had been annexed into the empire alongside the rest of the dissident League.
Further north in Hungary, split between Austria and the Turks since the Battle of Mohács in 1526, the Ottoman goal gradually changed from taking the rest of the Habsburg Magyar provinces (known as Royal Hungary) for themselves to a simple hope for a maintenance of the status quo. As a result the Principality of Transylvania remained de facto independent of both empires whilst still paying homage and tribute to Constantinople. Under the command of the
Bocskay family, the principality faced a large Hungarian immigration from both the Habsburg and Ottoman domains, although Austrian Érsekújvár still held a large and very loyal Hungarian population.
Whilst the Transylvanian princes managed to keep their vassalage status with the Porte intact, vice versa, Constantinople reacted very harshly to the increasingly rebellious attitude of the Wallachian fiefdom, dispatching armed forces to Bucharest in the late 1630s that deposed the Romanian rulers and imposed an Ottoman governor in their place.
Although the Ottomans avoided any further escalation with the larger Christian kingdoms after Lepanto, they did both lose and gain territory on account other than already mentioned. The third of the ‘Danube Principalities’, Moldavia, successfully wrested themselves loose of Turkish suzerainty and, under the protection of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, continued the raids of the late Wallachian principality. On the Adriatic coast, however, the Porte made up for its loss of the bridge connecting Bulgaria to its Crimean possessions by taking and incorporating the small state of Ragusa which had served as a haven for Slavic, Greek and Italian intrigues against the empire.
List of successive sultans, or Padishahs, of the Ottoman Empire – showing name, birth and death.
However, even though the western borders of the House of Osman’s domains settled down in eerie foreboding of coming conflicts, the east was far less dormant.
The reason for this is simple.
Persia.
Boasting a colourful as well as turbulent history, Persia had finally been united under the rule of the Shi’ite Safavid dynasty in 1501.
Funded on and thriving through their adoption of the Shia version of Islam, the Safavids found few allies amongst the predominantly Sunni Middle East where the Ottomans held almost complete hegemony.
It cannot then be hard to imagine how threatened the new Persian dynasty in Isfahan felt when the armies of the Padishah marched into Egypt and Mesopotamia in the first decades of the 15th century and cemented Turkish influence and lordship from Baghdad to Cairo.
The uncertain air of latent hostility soon escalated into open conflict in the mid 1500s, resulting in Turkish conquest of Azerbaijan and the expulsion of the Safavids from their former capital of Tabrix. However, Mesopotamia remained a disputed battleground between the two great Muslim branches and the Shia movement caught hold of the north-western part of the Fertile Crescent.
Under the guidance of
shahanshah Abbas I, the Shia dynasty relocated to central Persia and established a new capital in the form of the city of Isfahan wherefrom Abbas waged new wars against the Turks, ultimately leading to the Persian conquest of the Luristan region.
His campaigns in modern Iraq brought the Safavid armies to the banks of the Tigris and into the suburbs of Baghdad, however, the city’s citadel withstood the onslaught and the shah had to retreat in the face of a resurgent Ottoman offensive.
Following the Persian retreat from Mesopotamia a sort of peace descended on the border between the two rivalling Muslim empires, yet Isfahan did not sit idly by as the Ottomans used the breathing space from the eastern conflict to renew their presence in Europe.
With untold blessings and prayers from the holy city of Qum following them, the cavalry armies of the Shia Twelvers[3] rushed eastwards and fought many battles with the Uzbek Khanates and the Afghan tribes and conquered much land and many cities.
Map of Safavid Persia in 1650
As such the High Porte faced a stronger and stronger Persia on its eastern flank, but whilst the Safavids accumulated wealth and power, the Christian nemesis of Austria waned as a result of her untold wars with the Protestants.
However, intern strife had begun to take hold of the bulging Ottoman state apparatus and cliques fought each behind the Sultan’s back. The janissaries, who had developed into an oriental praetorian guard, sought extension of their privileges at the expense of the authority of the monarchy.
Purges of the corps only postponed the inevitable confrontation between the two sides and by the 1660s several coups had already been performed by the janissaries lowering the empire’s stability noticeably.
[1]This is actually historically correct.
[2]Greece formed, surprisingly, out of the two Greek provinces in Morea and Crete joined shortly after.
[3]A way to describe the adherents to the greatest branch of Shia Islam.
So there you are, I’m going to leave for the Danish West Country in a few hours time where internet availability is sparse… take this update as the Christmas edition