FROM 1301 TO 1401, the Ottoman dynasty experienced a remarkable transformation. In 1301, Osman first waged successful battle against the Byzantines. At the time, the Ottomans were one small Turkic principality among many. But by 1401, a century later, that small principality had followed a uniquely fortunate trajectory to become an ever-expanding sultanate knocking at Constantinople’s door. How did the Ottomans succeed? By luck and by material, economic, and social factors, surely. But above all, the policies taken by Murad I—the first sultan, who established Janissaries (the corps of converted military slaves) and fratricide as a succession policy—led to their rise. Ottoman tolerance of diversity meant creating an empire that was built upon the maintenance of hierarchies and difference, thereby ensuring the dynasty’s greatness and the subject peoples’ subordination.
A number of explanations have been put forward for the Ottomans’ early achievements. According to the Ottoman tradition and conventional history writing about the dynasty, the gazi or holy warrior spirit was the key. Historians today favour instead the confluence of a number of factors. The Ottomans were lucky. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm collapsed by 1300, just as Osman was taking his four castles. The Ilkhanate Khanate collapsed in the 1350s, just as Orhan was expanding his principality. The two main eastern threats to Ottoman survival vanished at the right time. Human agency—the ability of individuals to shape their own destiny—also played a role. The dynasty owed its success in part to Osman’s political acumen.1 He understood well whom to treat as enemies and whom as friends, and when to make friends into enemies and vice versa.
Material factors also played a role. These include the human material with which Osman had to work, the fortuitous location of his principality, and the desperate political and economic situation of the Byzantines. The Byzantine Empire at the time was split internally, its territory shrinking. This division invited outsiders into the empire’s internal politics. The independent, coastal Aegean Turkic principalities benefited from trade with Venice and Genoa. Yet their location meant they faced crusaders (including the Knights Hospitaller), corsairs, and constant war without commanding the sea. In the 1340s, they were devastated by the bubonic plague epidemic known as the Black Death.2 By contrast, Osman’s inland, nomadic principality was protected from human and epidemiological coastal depredations yet located on commercial routes at the edge of the frontier between empires.3 Osman’s Mongol overlords paid his principality little heed, as they were busy crushing only those large Turcoman principalities nearest them in eastern Anatolia. It was in this way that the Ottomans escaped the wrath of larger, more dangerous foes.
The Ottomans also benefited from the fact that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Anatolia had been transformed by a boom in international trade with Southwest and East Asia and with the Byzantine Empire. This was thanks in large part to the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, which had developed and beautified urban areas, built a network of caravanserais (inns for long-distance travellers) crisscrossing the land north to south and east to west, dug dozens of silver mines for many mints producing coins of exceedingly high purity, and expanded ports on the Mediterranean at Antalya and on the Black Sea at Sinope.4 The Ottomans established themselves at the fortuitous location astride the Constantinople-to-Konya and Constantinople-to-Iran-and-China trade routes. And they were situated at the cusp of the divide between the sown and the barren, the agricultural and the pastoral lands. Their position allowed them to move location and transition to being settled agriculturalists whenever they faced environmental disruptions on their home soil, whether flood or famine.5
Social factors also played their part in the dynasty’s rise. Osman constructed a set of alliances to increase his sphere of influence. He intermarried with local sheikhs and Christians, ably manipulating the many shifting alliances. There is also the military element. Osman constantly sent his men on raids, benefiting from the restless energies of highly motivated nomads and adventurers, thereby adding fuel to the materialist explanation. Success attracted ever more raiders bringing fame and riches, which he distributed to his ever-growing body of followers. Osman’s success attracted merchants and commoners, as he had a reputation for being just and generous. They provided a material basis for launching more raids.6 Warfare meant profit in women, slaves, wealth, and land, fuelling further expansion. After conquest, the Ottomans took slaves from the conquered population and converted them to Islam, while allowing most other subjects to carry on their lives in villages and cities, tolerating their religious differences and seeing them as a source of tax revenue.
Further decisions would provide the tools for transforming confederation into empire. The first was turning away from the Mongol practice of appanage, dividing the ruler’s dominion equally among his sons.7 The Ottomans favoured unigeniture, in which one son takes over rule of the entire principality.8 Orhan succeeded his father in a smooth transition. Osman may have granted him landholdings on the frontier, where he could act autonomously, then given him command of his army, and, finally, designated him as his successor. Or, according to the nostalgic accounts penned in very different circumstances centuries later, Orhan became leader when his brother Ala al-Din, thanks to the intervention of a council of dervishes acting as mediator, peacefully agreed to retire to a quiet life of mystical contemplation.9 Just as Mongol rulers based their authority on descent from Genghis Khan and on the personal loyalty sworn by their followers, so, too, did Ottoman authority arise from a man being a descendant of Osman surrounded by followers pledging their fealty. Not able to claim descent from Muhammad, Genghis Khan, or both, the Ottomans found themselves at a disadvantage.
In this first phase of the dynasty’s history, which lasted approximately three centuries, Ottomans believed that fortune (devlet) and power were bestowed upon the sultan. Devlet was one necessary condition for his rule. The other was saltanat (sovereignty, or sultanate). Invested with these two qualities, his duty was to promote justice, stability, obedience, a hierarchical social order, and conquest.10 In these centuries, the sultan was a normal Muslim man, to be sure, but one considered to be graced with more rank than any other person—a person who embodied the dynasty. The following chapters will have a personality-centred approach to the dynasty because this was the type of regime that existed in this period.
Orhan’s capture of the wealthy, ancient city of Bursa in northwest Anatolia in 1326 and its rich agricultural hinterlands had greatly enriched his supporters, leading to changed cultural practices. Like Osman, Orhan was depicted by later chroniclers as a migratory nomad who preferred sleeping in a tent and spending summers in the countryside on a verdant mountain where he fed his flock. But by the time of the capture of Bursa, he was less nomad warrior and more Byzantine prince. He and his court in Bursa loved their Greek wine.11
When the Ottomans fought the Byzantines at the Battle of Pelakanon on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara (today Maltepe, Istanbul) in 1329, the Byzantines retreated after their emperor Andronicus III (reigned 1328–1341) was wounded. Orhan realised that sending hundreds of mounted archers at the enemy was only one way to fight. Mounted archers depended on having sufficient pastureland and water for a large number of horses to serve as remounts. This was not sustainable in the built-up and cultivated regions into which the Ottomans were moving. This battle was the last time the Ottomans relied solely on such steppe nomad tactics. Like the Byzantines, they would have to turn to infantry tactics as well. Pelakanon would be the Byzantines’ last attempt to take back lands from the Ottomans, whose turn to an elite infantry would prove a brilliant and significant decision.12
Orhan expanded Osman’s territory from Asia into Europe. He followed his father’s practices of fighting against Muslim and Christian alike while forging alliances, including through marriage, with the ever-disunited Byzantines. The Byzantines were wracked by civil war, and Turkish mercenaries were hired to do battle on both sides of the many intra-Byzantine disputes. Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos gave his daughter Theodora in marriage to Orhan in 1346 in exchange for Ottoman troops coming to aid his side in the Byzantine civil war.13 Theodora remained a Christian and did not convert. Their son Halil was betrothed to Irene, daughter of John VI’s son, Matthew.14 Because of such marriages and other trysts, Ottoman princes were born of Byzantine as well as Armenian, Serbian, and other Christian mothers.
The Byzantine context was crucial for understanding how the Ottomans won over the Christian peoples they conquered. Owing to years of warfare, instability, and disruption, Byzantine governors and bishops lost contact with their subjects and coreligionists. Increasingly impoverished local priests had to find ways to accommodate their new overlords, the Ottomans, to ensure the survival of Christianity. This was a Sisyphean task. As they conquered Byzantine lands, the Ottomans also took over the farms, fields, flocks, cities, and towns, converting their most prominent buildings and seizing their revenues and bestowing them instead upon Muslims. Many churches became mosques, and many seminaries and monasteries became madrasas (Islamic colleges).15 As the Ottomans settled into and remade Byzantine and Armenian castles, cities, towns, and territories as their own, they converted the main church of each into the main mosque. Yet their intention was not to abolish Christianity and Judaism: they allowed other churches and synagogues to remain.
The Ottomans oversaw the conversion of both peoples and landscapes. Muslims adopted and renamed Christian sacred groves and springs, festivals, saints, tombs, shrines, and other sacred sites.16 They built caravanserais, hospitals, soup kitchens, fountains, and Sufi lodges, providing material and spiritual sustenance to the conquered Armenians and Greeks. At Hajji Bektaş’s complex in central Anatolia, the Sufis served hot stews to large numbers of guests from enormous black cauldrons.
The entire spectrum of Muslim denominations and Sufi associations coexisted in Orhan’s realm and in the neighbouring Turcoman principalities, all of which served to spread Islam. Orhan endowed a mosque complex in Bursa imitating Seljuk style that also functioned as a Sufi lodge. The earliest extant Ottoman document, witnessed by male and female members of the dynasty, is a deed written in Persian in 1324 for another dervish lodge that Orhan endowed. In it, he refers to himself as the ‘Champion of the Faith’ and to his father Osman as the ‘Glory of the Faith’.17
The Ottomans allowed deviant dervishes in Anatolia and on the frontier zone between the Muslim and Byzantine territories to proselytise among Christians. Sufis played a central role in the Ottoman military forces. The miracles of saints were repeated orally or recorded in popular books narrating their heroic deeds. One of Ibn Arabi’s main disciples preached in Bursa. Deviant dervishes even engaged in Sufi rituals in the Byzantine imperial palace in Constantinople. A Byzantine historian related Christian irritation about the noisy singing, dancing, drunken Sufis crying out odes to Muhammad at the court of Orhan’s father-in-law and ally John VI Kantakouzenos.18
The Ottomans managed their subject peoples wisely, incorporating conquered leaders as part of the machinery of their rule. They used the churches’ ecclesiastical hierarchies primarily as tax farms for cash income derived from the churches’ holdings and followers. They made the church leaders their revenue collectors, granting individuals the right to take their positions as hierarchs in return for yearly payments to the administration.19 The Ottomans also gained intermediaries in helping them rule over new populations in the more practical local bishops, who cooperated with the Ottomans in order to remain in their churches. The Ottomans integrated the church and its functionaries into their administrative structure, utilising Christians in the growing bureaucracy. Early Ottoman tax records were often recorded in Greek. So, too, were diplomatic records, as they employed Greeks as envoys and had many dealings with Byzantines and other Europeans. The Ottomans even gave some Christians land grants without compelling them to convert—all while proselytising Islam to Christian subjects.
The incorporation of the leaders of the Armenian Apostolic and Greek Orthodox churches was but one example of the way the Ottomans transformed preexisting local hierarchies into hierarchies that served their own expanding principality. Their success lay in harnessing the power of local leaders for their own political project. They did the same by marrying Christian princesses, and by allowing Christian knights to retain their arms and men and Christian nobles to retain their lands without having to convert to Islam. The Ottomans then enfolded these Christians within their political system to create new hierarchies, with the Muslim ruling elite above them and the Ottoman ruler on top. And over time, the Christian elite became Muslim.
Often, as in the case of Beardless Michael, Osman’s Greek comrade in arms who took some fifteen years to become a Muslim, the Ottomans first collaborated with the local elite and then integrated them through voluntary conversion. The local elite gradually became Ottomans (and Muslims). The Ottomans were outsiders who made themselves into insiders. They were foreigners who became local with the help of conquered local elites who eventually became the agents of their own Ottomanisation and Islamisation. Local Christians and Jews embraced, accommodated, or resisted the Ottomans. But not all became Muslim: Christians would remain the numerical majority of Ottoman subjects for several centuries.
Osman’s nomad confederation had been small and landlocked. He conquered no cities, but agricultural lands provided the Ottomans’ livelihood. Orhan, his son and successor, expanded the urban and rural territory drastically, especially to the west, northwest, and northeast, including both coasts of the Sea of Marmara and land on the Aegean and Black Sea coasts as well. Ottoman expansion was facilitated by the fact that the Byzantines also suffered from disease and natural disaster. The spread of the Black Death in the 1340s depopulated Constantinople and other cities and coastal settlements of the Byzantine Empire.20 The 1354 earthquake that destroyed the city walls of Gallipoli and other towns outside Constantinople allowed Orhan’s forces to cross the Dardanelles and continue their advance into Europe, the first Ottoman foothold there. Orhan made his son and heir, Murad, the governor-general of his Southeastern European province. Under the leadership of Murad I, the Ottomans took Adrianople (Edirne) in Thrace in 1369 and made it the second seat of the dynasty, in addition to Bursa.
Murad I is memorialised in much later Ottoman chronicles as a gazi warrior and miracle-working saint. In European histories, he is remembered for having been cut down in battle on the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo in 1389. Despite the fact that the Serbs lost their King Lazar and the Ottomans won the battle, the event is commemorated to this day in Serbia. The Ottoman victory led to nearly five hundred years of Ottoman rule over the Serbs. But even with these conquests, Murad I made a more significant mark on Ottoman history by instituting policies that contributed to the Ottoman dynasty’s long-term staying power and success. He changed titular customs, elite recruitment, and succession practices.
Murad I organised the first Janissary (yeni çeri, literally, ‘new army’ or ‘new soldiers’) units from prisoners of war taken in battle in Christian-ruled regions. Like the deviant dervishes, the Janissaries shaved their heads, but they also sported horseshoe moustaches. The ruler needed a loyal following, and these slaves were the answer. They were deemed more trustworthy than native Turkish Muslims, who served competing principalities and might come from rival powerful families. To paraphrase one Byzantine observer, because the Ottoman ruler rewarded the circumcised and converted goatherds, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds and treated them like his own sons, they did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for him.21 So as not to lose the ‘glory to which they had been raised by chance, they sustain superhuman suffering in time of battle and consequently win the victory’. Having a diverse pool of recruits also ensured that Murad I would have linguistic and cultural knowledge of the newly incorporated territories, crucial for maintaining rule over them. With such an army, the ruler was able to conduct major battles and engage in long sieges.
At the same time, Murad I introduced into the Ottoman territories the Byzantine and Seljuk land-grant and slave-soldier systems. Rather than rely on nomad archers, Murad I used the nonhereditary land grant (timar) to fund a stable cavalry force. The ruler granted to resident cavalrymen landholders (sipahi), Christian and Muslim, the tax revenues from goods produced on the land by the peasants in exchange for having to muster and lead cavalry troops in imperial military campaigns and local policing. In the words of a later Ottoman chronicler looking back nostalgically at the dynasty’s first centuries, when a land grant fell vacant, it was granted to a brave man who was useful with a sword and had already ‘cut off heads in battles’.22
As can be seen in the coins minted in his name, Murad I was the first head of the Ottoman dynasty to style himself as sultan, the secular civil and military leader. His predecessors Osman and Orhan had claimed only to be chiefs (bey). The name ‘sultan’ symbolises the Ottoman transition from tents to towns, from nomad archers to infantry, from Osman’s introduction of the first market tax to managing long-distance trade, large heterogenous populations, agricultural and financial surpluses, and a more sophisticated administration. Accompanying all these changes was an attendant increase in the documentation of land grants, military rolls, revenues, and expenses. The Ottoman rulers continued to spend winters and summers in different places, reflecting their nomadic background. They still patronised both the deviant dervishes and the Islamic scholars from the east. But it is during the reign of Murad I that the Ottoman chieftaincy became the Ottoman sultanate. This was significant, for it marked a change of consciousness. The Ottoman leader had been a minor player with limited regional aspirations. Now he was a sovereign in his own right, with bolder claims. The dynasty began to imagine itself as an empire and to lay the foundations for future success and expansion.
Murad I’s innovation was the institutionalisation of the Collection (devşirme). The Collection was a child levy on Christian subjects of the sultan, in which one in forty eight-to-eighteen-year-old Christian boys were taken from each judicial district in Southeastern Europe and Anatolia to the seat of the sultan, which at that time was Edirne.23 There, they were circumcised and converted to Islam and trained as leading officials and palace servants or elite soldiers of the sultanate.
The main reason the Ottomans relied on this method of recruitment was that they wished to replace the local Muslim aristocracy with a new and completely loyal class of servants devoted to their patron, the sultan. In theory, according to the Ottoman ‘Laws of the Janissaries’, while Turks ‘would abuse the privilege’ if recruited as servants of the sultans, when ‘Christian children accept Islam, they become zealous in the faith and enemies of their relatives’.24 As early as the ninth century, Muslim-majority Arab empires had relied on just these types of foreign slave soldiers and commanders, usually Turks recently converted to Islam, who, despite their slave status, possessed high social rank. The Ottoman Turks employed Christians converted to Islam. In principle, these young men—torn from their parents and ancestral lands at an impressionable age and made to forget their native tongue and religion—were to be given the opportunity to rise in station. Given the best education and seeing how advancement rested on merit alone, they would be motivated to strive to reach the highest possible position. The aim was that they should remain always devoted to the dynasty and the empire that had brought them from a life of obscurity in a remote village to a privileged position at the heart of power.
The Ottoman elite was formed not only of converts to Islam, however. The Christian elite had been the first group to be incorporated into the Ottoman politico-military hierarchy. In the first centuries of Ottoman rule, Christian nobles and military gentry did not have to immediately convert in order to maintain their landholding rights and administrative and military positions.25 The Ottomans were most concerned during this period with accommodating them and making them into vassals. In the fifteenth century, Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian Christians would hold nonhereditary military land grants and maintain their religion without converting. As late as the mid-sixteenth century, Christians would hold such prebends in eastern Anatolia and Hungary.26 Yet in the sixteenth century, Christian nobles, royalty, and military aristocrats gradually converted to Islam in order to maintain their privileged economic, social, and political position.27 They viewed conversion as a means of retaining their property, position, status, and power, as a way to ally against older enemies with the new regional power, or as a path for identifying with their conquerors.
While the motivation for the Collection was clear, its legal justification was murky. According to long-standing Islamic law and custom, a Muslim ruler was not permitted to enslave Muslims nor take into captivity his own Christian subjects and forcibly convert them to Islam. Christians ruled by Muslim sovereigns were supposed to be a protected people, whose lives and property were secure. Although Muslims were to be excepted from enslavement, the Ottomans recruited Westerners and Europeans such as Bosnian Muslims through the Collection, whereas Eastern Muslims—Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, and Turks—were excluded from the levy. They recruited their Christian subjects, but excluded Roma and Sinti—‘Gypsies’ who may have been Christian or Muslim or of another religion—and Jews. From the standpoint of Islamic law, these practices were illegal.
Affirming pre-Islamic custom, the Qur’an assigned part of the booty taken in war, including captured persons, to the military leader, the Prophet Muhammad.28 The Ottoman ruler may have modelled his practice on that of the Prophet. But this would only apply to captives taken immediately after military conquest. Another possibility is that the Ottomans favoured an interpretation of the law that excluded recruiting peoples who were Christian or Jewish at the time of Muhammad in the seventh century. As much of Ottoman-ruled Southeastern Europe was not Christianised until after the seventh century, the Ottomans may have believed themselves justified in recruiting them as slaves. But this would not be true for Anatolia. There was no escaping the fact that taking boys from the subject population was a legally dubious innovation.
Whatever the justification for the Collection, hundreds of thousands of Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks, Serbs, and others were made into recruits. In 1429, Murad II was presented with a treatise that boasted that ‘every year more or less fifty thousand male and female infidels are taken from the abode of war [enemy territory] as captives; those become Muslim, and their progeny join the rank of the faithful’.29 A memoir written by a Serb Janissary who had served in the Ottoman military from 1456 to 1463 and had participated in the siege of Belgrade and an early sixteenth-century Ottoman document that served as a template for the levy both referred to the taking of children from one in every forty households.30 According to an Ottoman chronicler, by the end of the sixteenth century, more than two hundred thousand Christian youth had been made into Muslim servants of the sultan in this fashion.31 This was conversion and acculturation of Christian youth to Islam on an unprecedented scale.
When we look at the family histories of some prominent men in the empire, we realise that some Christians may have been eager to enrol their children in the Collection as a way of attaining higher status. Apparently, they calculated that if their sons were to rise to grand vizier—the chief minister and advisor to the sultan, carrying out military and administrative duties—the family and village would be rewarded and protected. But it is hard to ignore the emotional anguish of these children’s parents and imagine that the child levy was just another tax that Ottoman subjects agreed to pay in return for peace and security. It was in fact a harsh measure, which most Christian families sought to avoid.32 Typical is a sermon concerning ‘the carrying off of the children’ by the Ottomans from 1395. Isidore Glabas, the metropolitan of Thessalonike, cried out that he went nearly mad upon seeing ‘a child, whom he had begotten and raised… carried off by the hands of foreigners, suddenly and by force, and forced to change over to alien customs and to become a vessel of barbaric garb, speech, impiety, and other contaminations, all in a moment’.33 Christians feared and hated the practice. The Ottomans recognised this fact. They added pledges to many capitulation agreements with the rulers of principalities that had surrendered not to enslave their children and make Muslims of them, nor to enrol them in the Janissaries. A sixteenth-century Ottoman miniature depicts a crowd watching boys being registered to be taken away from a Southeastern European town by Ottoman officials. The unknown Muslim artist, who may have been a Collection recruit, included an upset woman and a young child clinging to her.
According to modern international legal concepts, the Collection was an act of genocide. Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’ including ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.34 As brutal as it was, this was Murad I’s answer to the question of how to create loyal soldiers and administrators.
Murad I also solved the problem of dynastic succession in a cruel way. As noted earlier, in the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, rulers had followed Mongol practice by dividing the lands of the empire among their sons. The Ottomans retained an echo of this custom. Beginning with Murad I, the sultan sent his sons and their mothers to provincial governates in the annexed former capitals of their rivals in Anatolia, where they reproduced in miniature the royal court. The sons remained under the sultan’s control, however, rather than establishing independent rule, as in the Turco-Mongol tradition. But in a stark break from this tradition, Murad I established the pitiless sultanic practice of murdering all one’s brothers and uncles—and often all one’s male relatives, no matter their age—upon coming to power. Fratricide was meant to ensure that the ruler had no familial rivals. The practice was codified in the mid-fifteenth century in the Ottoman law code attributed to Mehmed II. It stated, ‘To whichever of my sons the Sultanate shall be granted, he should kill his brothers to ensure the good order of the world. The majority of the religious class has declared this permissible’.35
The practice was justified on the grounds that it was preferable to harm an individual than to harm the public.36 According to this logic, if a sultan did not murder his male relatives, power would be fragmented and political authority would be weakened, leading to social disorder. In the opinion of the most influential sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist, just as an army cannot have two commanders in chief, two lions cannot share a single den, and two swords cannot be placed in a single scabbard, two sultans cannot rule the same territory. Since the emperor was the head and the empire his body, it was not appropriate for this body to be two-headed. Therefore, to prevent the dangerous situation where several sovereigns existed in the same kingdom, legitimate candidates to the throne had to be eliminated.37 The practice of fratricide was intended as a means to safeguard the peace and unity of the dynasty and its empire. Rather than perceiving a sultan who murdered his male relatives, including infants, as a murderer of the innocents, Ottoman religious scholars and chroniclers depicted him as their redeemer, cutting off the many-headed hydra of division.38
The sultan’s sons would be groomed to rule by training as governors and army commanders in the provinces until the father’s demise, at which time they would race to the capital. The victorious one assured his rule either by having slain his brothers in battle or by executing them after his enthronement. Such an arrangement was little different from the internecine warfare to obtain the thrones of Western Europe at the time, such as the Wars of the Roses in England. The difference with the Ottomans was that the bloodshed was systematised and legalised.
During the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo on 15 June 1389, a Serb had approached Murad I, feigning a desire to kiss the sultan’s hand in obeisance. Bowing while holding his battle helmet before him in one hand, the Serbian assassin had hidden his dagger in his other hand behind his back. Murad I’s commanders quickly erected a tent around the fallen sultan’s corpse. They captured the Serbian king Lazar and his son, Stephen, and brought them to the same tent. After showing them the corpse of Murad I, they thrashed them without mercy, ‘as if they were curs’. They beheaded King Lazar but spared Stephen to serve as an Ottoman vassal. Murad I’s only sons, Bayezid and Yakub, had also taken part in the battle, each leading a wing of the army. Bayezid I (reigned 1389–1402) received the oath of allegiance in his father’s place in the same tent, now piling up with corpses of dead kings. Another body would fall there. The new sultan’s men, without revealing Murad I’s death, called Yakub to the same tent. Saying, ‘Come, your father wants you’, they killed the superfluous son, as Murad I had stipulated.39
Bayezid I became the first Ottoman ruler to have his brother murdered upon his becoming head of the dynasty. He was also the first to call himself not only sultan, but the sultan of Rûm—the sultan of Rome. He had cast his eyes on the Roman realm of Byzantium. By 1390, his troops had annexed the entire west coast of Anatolia, expanded maritime trade with Venice and Genoa, and made the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople his vassal. He insisted that an Islamic magistrate be appointed to adjudicate disputes among the Muslims residing in Constantinople so that they would not be forced to appear before a Christian judge.40 In 1394, after conquering Black Sea ports, Macedonia, Albania, Thessaly, the Bulgarian capital, and Thessalonike, Bayezid I began the first Ottoman siege of Constantinople, the ancient walled Byzantine capital surrounded on three sides by water. By that point, the Ottomans were capable of building siege towers to scale high walls, mining tunnels to collapse them, and enforcing blockades to cut off the enemy even by sea.41 Walls were tumbling from above and below.
Bayezid I’s fortunes rose higher when he led tens of thousands of Ottoman fighters to victory over a similar number of crusaders led by King Sigismund of Hungary at Nicopolis (today Nikopol, Bulgaria) on the banks of the Danube in September 1396. Although Bayezid I still relied heavily on lightly armed cavalry, the ‘servants’ of the sultan, his Collection recruits, made all the difference. The Ottomans drew the overconfident Christian knights into a trap and encircled them. The Ottomans then pounced upon their heavily armed English, Flemish, French, Hungarian, and Italian opponents ‘with much clamour and blaring of trumpets’.42 It was no contest. The Janissaries felled the crusaders’ horses and ‘slaughtered’ the dismounted French and Hungarian knights, hacking them to death with axes and flanged maces. A contingent of Serbian cavalry led by Bayezid I’s brother-in-law and vassal, Stephen Lazarević—whose sister Maria had been made the sultan’s wife after her father, King Lazar, was slain in the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds—finished off those crusaders who fled, sealing the victory with their arrows and swords. Sinking like stones, some crusaders drowned after throwing themselves into the mighty river to escape. Ottoman swords beheaded thousands of captured knights, one by one. The young men were spared, only to be enslaved. The ransoming of these captives led to the first diplomatic relations between the Ottomans and France. One of the last Crusades launched against the Ottomans had failed.
With the dynasty’s western frontier secured, Bayezid I turned east. The move would have fatal consequences. In 1402, at the height of his power and territorial expansion, having defeated Turcoman principalities, including the Karamanids at Konya, and pushed his forces into the Black Sea region at Sivas, Malatya in eastern Anatolia, and Erzincan in northeastern Anatolia, with his army and administration racing ahead in top gear, Bayezid I faced an unexpected yet fatal threat from the east: Tamerlane, a Central Asian Turkish general and sultan who claimed Mongol descent and whom Turks know as Timur Lenk (Timur the Lame), because he limped. His appearance on the Anatolian stage takes us into the next phase of Ottoman history. In the preceding hundred years, thanks to various interrelated forces ranging from luck to wise decisions to thoroughgoing policies, the Ottoman dynasty under Osman I, Orhan I, Murad I, and Bayezid I had gone from success to success. But now it would almost cease to exist.