The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire began in 1299 as a small state of warriors when its leader, Osman (reigned 1299–1326), broke from the Seljuk Turks. Before Osman, tribal leadership had customarily passed to the family’s eldest male. When Osman’s father died, though, Osman successfully challenged his uncle’s claim to the throne. Power thereafter would pass from father to son. Which son was not specified, and a system of “open succession” evolved. Prowess, cunning, charisma all figured in the survival of the most fit successor, and Osman was succeeded by an expansionist son, grandson, and great-grandson—Orhan, Murad I, and Bayezid I—who by the turn of the century controlled most of the Byzantines’ holdings in Asia, had secured the Ottomans’ place in Europe, and had taken the Empire east to the Euphrates.
The Ottomans spent the first decade of the fifteenth century engaged in a civil war between Bayezid I’s sons, Musa and Mehmed, in which Mehmed finally prevailed and had his brother strangled. The nature, length, and violence of that conflict made an impression on the next generations. Mehmed I’s successor, Murad II, disqualified his brothers by blinding them—a Byzantine practice the Ottomans emulated—and his successor, Mehmed II, not only eliminated his only brother (an infant) but took the precaution against civil war a crucial step farther. Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481), the Conqueror, made fratricide the law. He also—two years into his reign—rode his horse into Hagia Sofia and declared the end of the Byzantine Empire. Over the next two decades he extended Ottoman power as far west as the Adriatic and north to the Don River in Russia.
Mehmed the Conqueror’s son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) took the throne after defeating his brother Jem, who was supported militarily by the Mamluks in Egypt and later the Knights of St. John in Rhodes—all to no avail. Bayezid’s enduring contribution to the Empire was the order, following the Alhambra Decree in 1492, to evacuate Jews from Spain and give them safe haven in Ottoman lands. Toward the end of his long reign, Bayezid’s sons Selim and Ahmet first rose up against each other and then threatened their father. Backed by the Janissaries, Selim I (r. 1512–1520) compelled his father’s abdication. Selim I’s conquest of Syria, Egypt, and large chunks of the Arabian Peninsula made the Ottomans guardian of Islam’s holiest cities. Selim conspicuously did not adhere to his grandfather’s code of succession. He forced his father to abdicate and then had him poisoned. And he had all his brothers and all but one of his four sons executed. The one he spared was Suleiman.
Known as the Magnificent in Europe and as Lawgiver in the Empire, Suleiman (r. 1520–1566) was acclaimed for his military prowess, valor, vision, and erudition. He took the Empire to the height of its greatness—revising and settling the Kanun—the so-called sultanic laws that complemented the Shari‘ah; and he took the Empire to its farthest borders—west to the shores of Algeria and east to Baghdad. His last campaign was to Hungary, where he died in 1566 at the age of seventy-two.
Suleiman was survived by only one son, Selim II (r. 1566–1574), who was known as the Drunk. It was on his watch that most of the Ottoman fleet was lost at the Battle of Lepanto, and it was upon his death that the bodies of the five young sons who did not succeed him accompanied him to his grave—a spectacle up until then carried out individually and not in public.
Selim II’s peaceable and erudite successor, Murad III (r. 1574–1595), never led a military campaign but presided over construction of the most sophisticated astronomical observatory in the world and, with the help of his mother, Nurbanu, was able to strengthen the Empire’s tenuous peace with Venice. His son, Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603), was the last sultan to be trained as a provincial governor and the last to enforce the law of fratricide.
The system of succession that replaced fratricide was imperial incarceration. “The cage” was a sumptuous pound inside Topkapi Palace, whose residents were not trained for leadership and were permitted relations only with sterilized concubines. The cage did succeed in perpetuating the dynasty—indeed, for another three centuries—replacing the enlivening fear behind fratricide with the ravaging safety of confinement.
The Venetian Republic
The separateness of Venice determined from the start the city’s customs, governance, and success, which was challenged by warriors, emperors, sultans, and popes from the fifth century on. For nearly a millennium it was the axis of maritime trade between Europe and the East. This accounted for its diplomatic corps, tolerance of foreigners, peerless navy, and exotic taste.
Venice evolved into the republic par excellence: a city governed by men dedicated to preserving and enhancing its freedom, wealth, justice, and peculiar stability. By the thirteenth century Venice had a constitution, and the ruling nobility had established a “locked” governing council—la Serrata—to which they alone could belong.
Though Venice did not engage in the earliest Crusades, when the Byzantine emperor slaughtered ten thousand Venetians living in Constantinople, Venice became the launch point for the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople (1204) and gained for the Republic a relay of ports down the Dalmatian coast and across the Aegean archipelago. The League of Cambrai (1508), a military alliance of the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, and the Pope, was Europe’s successful response to Venetian expansion, accounting for the loss of many of its Adriatic ports and, at the Battle of Agnadello, many of its northern holdings.
Doge Andrea Gritti (r. 1523–1538) undertook an urban renewal project designed to restore Venetian preeminence, which was additionally bolstered by a booming publishing industry and a long era of extraordinarily gifted painters, including Veronese, Titian, and three generations of Bellinis. When the Ottomans took Cyprus in the last part of the century, Venice joined the Holy Alliance with Rome and Spain, which triumphed at Lepanto. The victory was short-lived, though, as the Republic’s allies had no will to secure the gain with another offensive, and so Venice signed a peace treaty it had no wish for.