AT THE BEGINNING of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty faced two vastly different enemies. In 1402, a massive nomad army ravished its domains from east to west. And in 1416, a deviant dervish set off uprisings within Ottoman society. The two might seem to have little in common, but both Tamerlane and Sheikh Bedreddin drew on popular discontent with the Ottoman family’s lack of religiosity. Add to this a decade-long interregnum that was sandwiched between the two, from 1402 to 1413, and the whole thing spelled near disaster. Two of the same forces that had brought the Ottoman dynasty to power—its Turco-Mongol heritage and its Sufi, or mystical, version of Islam—threatened now to destroy it.
Bayezid I was not much of a model Muslim. Or a model ruler for that matter. He set siege to Constantinople unsuccessfully for eight years (1394–1402) from Anadolu Hisarı, his fort complex on the Asian side of the Bosporus. He had defeated the Western crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396, but he had a miserable reputation among Christians and Muslims alike. Known as an alcoholic who did not attend mosque, Bayezid I was barred from giving testimony at Bursa’s Islamic law court, an unusually censorious limit to be imposed upon a sultan.1 This meant foregoing the spiritual blessings of Muslims and the ability to use the religion to promote loyalty to the dynasty, to unite followers and supporters, and to urge them to fight against its enemies.
A story circulated that catalogues his main vice. When completing the massive Great Mosque in Bursa in the final years of the fourteenth century, Bayezid I asked the pious Sufi sheikh Emir Sultan if everything about it was in order. Emir Sultan cleverly told him that one thing was missing: he should add taverns to the mosque so that he and his boon companions would have a reason to visit. Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus also complained about Bayezid I’s drinking. Serving as his vassal and accompanying him on military campaigns in Anatolia in 1391, the Byzantine ruler complained that he could not keep up with his counterpart’s daily partying, the excessive drinking, ‘the flocks of flute players, the choruses of singers, the tribes of dancers, the clang of cymbals, and the senseless laughter after the strong wine. Is it possible for those who suffer all this not to have their minds dulled?’2
As if a divine punishment, in 1402 Timur Lenk’s armies appeared in the east. His reputation for plundering and massacre circulating before his armies arrived, Timur terrorised resisting populations by reviving the practice of constructing towers of thousands of severed heads to dishonour the defeated enemy and serve as a warning to all who would oppose him.3 Timur considered himself the inheritor of the empire of Genghis Khan. Emerging to rule the lands of the former Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia (today’s Uzbekistan) in 1370, Timur conquered the former Ilkhanid lands of Iran and Iraq further west in the 1380s. As Osman was formerly an Ilkhanid vassal, Timur reasoned that Bayezid I was supposed to be his vassal as well, but the Ottoman sultan refused to recognise Timur as overlord. That meant war when Timur—after campaigns in Central Asia and South Asia in the 1390s, including the sacks of Moscow and Delhi—returned to Anatolia at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
At the Battle of Ankara, in central Anatolia on 28 July 1402, Timur commanded an army twice as large as that of the Ottomans. Timur’s estimated 150,000 soldiers included a number of Turcoman chiefs defeated by the Ottomans and seeking revenge, and, according to a German eyewitness, dozens of elephants launching ‘Greek fire’ at the Ottoman troops.4 Bayezid I’s army was made up of Janissaries, soldiers of the Turcoman chieftains it had incorporated, and a contingent of Serbs led by his brother-in-law and vassal, Stephen Lazarević. While the Janissaries and Serbs remained loyal, much of the rest of the Ottoman army switched sides or fled, and Bayezid I was captured. Several fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman chronicles narrate that Timur imprisoned Bayezid I in an iron cage, where out of despair the sultan committed suicide by consuming poison he kept in the collet of his jewelled ring.5
English writer Christopher Marlowe increased the drama of these events by making Bayezid I and his wife Maria the slaves of Timur, who kept them in a cage and made the sultan his throne’s footstool.6 When the Ottoman sultan kills himself by bashing his head against the bars, his wife does the same, much like a Turkish Romeo and Juliet.7 Marlowe’s blood-soaked play, Tamburlaine the Great (1587), became very popular in England.8 Its villain, Timur—who declares, ‘I that am termed the scourge and wrath of God / The only fear and terror of the world’ (act 3, scene 2)—burns the Qur’an and declares himself greater than any god.
In fact, Tamerlane may not have incinerated any Qur’ans, but he just about destroyed the newly established empire. He nearly returned it to the political state it had been in under Osman: a Turcoman principality under probable Mongol suzerainty. Instead of Osman in vassalage to the Ilkhanid leader Ghazan Khan, it was now whoever came out on top among Bayezid I’s sons in vassalage to Timur.
Timur and his army spent nearly a year pillaging and looting in Anatolia as far west as the citadel of İzmir. It was allegedly Sheikh Emir Sultan and his hundreds of dervishes, rather than Bayezid I’s soldiers, who saved Bursa from Timur’s armies. Although Timur re-parcelled out the empire to the various Turcoman principalities whose lands the Ottomans had absorbed, he never crossed into Southeastern Europe. Nor did he wipe out the dynasty. Gathering the remaining Mongols in Anatolia, who had lived as nomads there since the mid-thirteenth century, Timur’s armies had returned to Central Asia by 1404, where Timur died before he could invade Ming China. After they left, Bayezid I’s four sons—Mehmed (Muhammad), Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), and Suleiman (Solomon)—would spend over a decade battling for the throne and the remaining Ottoman territories.
In the middle of the interregnum, the remaining Ottoman domains were convulsed by the greatest rebellion the empire had ever seen. The rebellion was led by deviant dervishes. In every era, radical Sufis were a potential threat to the dynasty.
To the sheikh’s supporters—including his Afro-Ottoman grandson, Halil son of Ismail, who composed a glowing biography after his deceased grandfather allegedly appeared to him in a dream—Sheikh Bedreddin was a descendant of the Seljuk dynasty, an esteemed Muslim scholar, and a miracle-working Sufi who could allegedly bring the dead back to life.9 They considered him an ascetic and a saint who came from an important gazi, or warrior, family.
Sheikh Bedreddin, born Mahmud, was half-Greek and half-Turkish. His father, Israil, was a Muslim gazi raider who captured the fortress of Simavna (the Byzantine town of Ammovounon) near Edirne and took the Christian prince’s daughter (who subsequently converted to Islam and adopted the name Melek) for his wife. They made the castle church their home, where Mahmud, the future Sheikh Bedreddin, was born around 1359, as the Ottomans were first raiding into Southeastern Europe.
After his father’s death, Mahmud began a life of Islamic learning. As a jurist in Cairo, he won the favour of the reigning Mamluk sultan Barquq. Barquq presented him with an Ethiopian slave woman, who gave birth to Ismail, the father of the author of the Sufi’s life story. In Egypt, Mahmud became famous for his Qur’anic commentaries. It was also in Egypt that he became a Sufi, after having ecstatic experiences of God. Mahmud studied with a deviant dervish master in Cairo and accepted Ibn Arabi’s concepts of the poles of the universe, the unity of being (the idea that God manifests God’s self in everything in the universe), sainthood, and the existence of perfect humans. Contravening traditional Islamic views, Mahmud argued that there was no hell or paradise, no Day of Judgement or resurrection after death, and that the world is eternal and not created.
According to the vivid biography written by his grandson, Mahmud was committed to his Sufi order and to his sheikh, whose place he would take. He continuously fasted and remained in seclusion for three months, allegedly without food or drink. He endured seven forty-day periods of seclusion, reportedly only inhaling the steam of warm milk and licking salt. Only then was he deemed ready to become the successor to his master and spiritual guide.
Homesick, he left for Rûm in 1400. As he passed through Syria and Anatolia, Muslims offered to establish Sufi lodges for him so that he would stay in their town and be their spiritual guide. In Konya, the centre of the Karaman principality, Mahmud, now known as Sheikh Bedreddin, won over the Karamanid ruler with his rapturous Sufi performance of a mystical recitation of God’s unity. The ruler took an oath of allegiance to the sheikh as his Sufi guide. Sheikh Bedreddin also won the allegiance of the rulers and much of the populace of the Germiyan and Aydın principalities, old Ottoman rivals, becoming their spiritual guide.
Along the way, Sheikh Bedreddin passed through many Anatolian towns where he demonstrated his alleged miracle-working powers and gained a wide following among deviant dervishes, townsmen and women, peasants, Christians, and Jews. Börklüce Mustafa, a Christian convert, became his disciple in the western Anatolian town of Tire, the former capital of the Aydın principality. A Jewish convert named Torlak Hu Kemal also began to follow him. After the sheikh allegedly appeared to the leader of the İzmiroğlu principality in a dream, he and his followers also became the Sufi’s disciples.
According to the enthusiastic biography written by Sheikh Bedreddin’s grandson, priests on the island of Chios also allegedly implored him to visit them to demonstrate his miracles, requesting that he reveal the secrets of the messiah. They gave him many presents and kissed the earth before him, inviting him to join them as a monk. They were apparently convinced he was Jesus returned. Day and night, Sheikh Bedreddin engaged in mystical recitation of God’s oneness, winning over the priests. The sheikh’s rapture reportedly converted many to Islam. Both in Bursa and Edirne, where he spent seven years in the early 1400s withdrawn into Sufi seclusion, many Muslims swore an oath of allegiance to him and became his disciples—including many women, even his own mother, Melek. When one of the priests he had converted on Chios came to visit him in Edirne, he emerged from his seclusion so as to convert the rest of the man’s family to Islam and to bless the union of the sheikh’s son and the former priest’s niece in marriage. In this way, the sheikh’s grandchildren continued the process of Christian integration with Muslims. But following this one reappearance, he returned to his pious seclusion, allegedly subsisting on the occasional boiled turnip. It is implied that his main form of subsistence was an edible marijuana paste.
It was at this time that the empire was shattered by the interregnum following Bayezid I’s ignominious death at the hands of Timur. In 1410, the sheikh allegedly appeared to Musa Çelebi, one of Bayezid I’s four sons and one of the claimants to the Ottoman throne, in a dream in the guise of his imam. The sheikh, who had not left seclusion for seven years other than to render his daily prayers in the mosque, accepted Musa’s subsequent offer to become chief military judge of the province of Southeastern Europe. Musa Çelebi would rely on the support of regional disaffected gazis who had opposed Bayezid I’s centralising tendencies and his replacement of them with his own slave servants. Musa’s choice in appointing Sheikh Bedreddin to the important office of chief military judge was shrewd, as the sheikh was himself descended from gazis.
Unfortunately for Sheikh Bedreddin, Musa Çelebi lost the contest for the sultanate. Without recounting the numerous schemes, betrayals, and crossings back and forth across the Bosporus, the sudden appearance of pretenders to the throne, or the battles among the brothers, suffice it to say that, in 1413, twenty-four-year-old Mehmed Çelebi and his army of Byzantine, Serbian, Tatar, and Turcoman forces managed to best the others and to defeat and kill Musa Çelebi in battle near Sofia. Mounting the Ottoman throne—which was a long, cushioned, golden and jewelled divan rather than a high-backed coronation chair as in England—and receiving the oath of allegiance from religious officials and viziers, the conqueror reigned as Mehmed I from 1413 to 1421. His aim was to reunite the empire as it had been under his father. He sent the sheikh and his family, including his grandson Halil son of Ismail, into house arrest in İznik.
Yet shortly thereafter, two rebellions in Sheikh Bedreddin’s name convulsed the territories the sultan held so tenuously. These rebellions were inspired by the speculative mysticism of Ibn Arabi. They sounded the grievances and fired the ecstatic dreams of the disgruntled supporters of the losing side in the Ottoman civil war—deviant dervishes, nomads, and gazis—together with those of Christians and Jews newly converted to Islam. To counter the popularity of the sheikh, Mehmed Çelebi’s court immediately commissioned a florid religious work that referred to the sultan as the divinely assisted, long-awaited redeemer, who brings justice and joy to the world.10 It did not produce the desired effect.
From İznik in 1416, the sheikh sent Börklüce Mustafa, a Christian converted to Islam and disciple, as his deputy to lead thousands of Christian and Muslim followers in rebellion in his name on the west coast of Anatolia near İzmir. At the same time, his Jewish convert to Islam and disciple Torlak Hu Kemal incited a revolt in Tire, in the same Aegean region, going on the march with thousands of harp-, drum- and tambourine-playing deviant dervishes.
Börklüce Mustafa appeared in the mountains on the Stylarion (Karaburun) peninsula opposite the Aegean island of Chios. He preached to other Muslims that ‘they must own no property’ and ‘decreed that, with the exception of women, everything must be shared in common—provisions, clothing, yokes of beasts, and fields’.11 He preached this faith in proto-communism not only to Muslims but also to Christians, commoner and clergy alike. He declared they were all Sufis worshipping the same God. A Cretan monk believed that the Jesus-like sheikh could walk on water, crossing from the Anatolian mainland to the island of Samos to appear next to him as a monk. Börklüce was a deviant dervish, probably a Kalenderi or Torlak. His disciples wore ‘only simple tunics, their uncovered heads shaved bald, and their feet without sandals’.12
Whether they feared his proto-communism or believed he was leading Muslims to convert to Christianity, Ottoman forces marched against Börklüce Mustafa. They were led by a Christian convert to Islam made governor, the son of the last Bulgarian ruler, Fat John III (reigned 1371–1393), whose sister had entered Murad I’s harem. But he and his soldiers were massacred by the sheikh’s many supporters on the peninsula, who, according to a Byzantine historian, revered Börklüce ‘as one greater than a prophet’.13
The Ottomans sent the governor of the neighbouring province to attack, but most of his men were also massacred by the peasant revolutionaries. Finally, Mehmed I sent his main fighting force against the sheikh, led by Grand Vizier Bayezid Pasha and twelve-year-old Prince Murad and supplemented by soldiers from several provinces. According to the same Byzantine historian, suffering huge losses, the Ottoman forces ‘mercilessly struck down everyone in sight, the old as well as infants, men, and women; in a word, they massacred everyone, regardless of age, as they advanced to the mountain defended by the dervishes’.14
After offering much resistance, the peasants and their leader were arrested, put in chains, and brought to a marketplace on the mainland. Despite being tortured, Börklüce Mustafa refused to recant his beliefs. Ottoman historians alleged that his followers changed the Islamic credo from ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammad is God’s messenger’ to ‘There is no God but God, and Börklüce Mustafa is God’s messenger’, thereby justifying his execution.15 Because he was originally a Christian, in an act of symbolic violence, they crucified him in a town long associated with Christianity and the Bible. Sitting him on a camel with his hands nailed to a wooden cross, they paraded him through the centre of Ayasoluk (today called Selçuk), two kilometres from the ancient Greek town of Ephesus, which boasts the alleged final home of Mary mother of Jesus. Because Börklüce’s disciples refused to renounce their teacher’s doctrine, they were all slaughtered before his eyes, their ‘bare necks split like pomegranates’.16 Bayezid Pasha and Prince Murad continued the bloodletting by killing all deviant dervishes they encountered.
Meanwhile, at around the same time, Sheikh Bedreddin escaped house arrest in İznik and travelled to Southeastern Europe, where he fomented rebellion among like-minded Sufis, nomads, Turcoman, and Christians in Bulgaria. Attracting Muslim and Christian men and women to his side—commoners, members of the elite, and many rivals to the Ottomans—Sheikh Bedreddin took refuge with an Ottoman enemy, the Christian prince of Wallachia. His disciples came out in rebellion in the sheikh’s name at Crazy Forest (Dobruja in today’s Bulgaria), where he visited Sufi Sarı Saltuk’s lodge, a Kalenderi deviant dervish centre. Many who gathered around him and offered him gifts had been favoured by him while he had been chief military judge.
With large-scale rebellions convulsing his domain, Sultan Mehmed I decided to act mercilessly towards the sheikh. After Ottoman forces had crucified Börklüce Mustafa and hanged Torlak Hu Kemal in Manisa, Mehmed I sent two hundred men to arrest Sheikh Bedreddin. They brought him to the Macedonian town of Siroz (Serres, Greece) soon after Mehmed I had hanged a false pretender to the throne who had marched on Edirne and had had his name read at Friday prayers in place of the sultan’s.
Sultan Mehmed I asked for a fatwa, a legal opinion from a competent authority, concerning the legitimacy of executing Sheikh Bedreddin. The Islamic expert he called upon was the Persian scholar Mevlana Haydar. Ottoman court culture in that era was heavily influenced by deviant dervishes and Persian Muslims. The inscriptions in Mehmed I’s beautiful Green Mosque in Bursa, named after its stunning blue-green tilework designed by artists from Tabriz (in modern-day Iran), include references to Ali, more common in Shi’i Islam, and Persian poetry, along with the sayings of Muhammad rather than Qur’anic verses.17
According to the fatwa Mevlana Haydar gave, killing the sheikh was deemed lawful, but taking his property was not.18 This was the penalty in Islamic law for a rebel. He was sentenced to hang for the crime of sedition, an affront to the sultan’s authority. What mattered was loyalty, not theology. His was not the first Ottoman ‘blasphemy’ trial, because he was not given the punishment for an apostate, which required execution and confiscation of property.
To produce the greatest spectacle, Sheikh Bedreddin was hanged stark naked from a tree. As narrated by a twentieth-century Turkish poet, ‘The slippery rope wrapped like a nimble snake around his thin neck beneath his long white beard’.19 ‘Swinging on a bare branch, wet with rain’, his corpse was left to rot in the marketplace of Siroz in 1416.20 It was rumoured that his disciples took the corpse down and buried it in a secret location. Disciples of Sheikh Bedreddin remained in Southeastern Europe, ready to outrage conservative Muslims or hatch another rebellion.21
Ottoman chroniclers deprecated his followers by claiming that ‘although these Sufis say “we are dervishes of God”, they are not dervishes’.22 ‘Although the rotten Sufi’s tongue says “God”, his heart says “gold and silver and silver coin”’.23 They justified the bloodbath by asserting that Sheikh Bedreddin and his disciples had been motivated by evil: ‘Satan, the accursed, whispered evil doubts and sins in his ear and won him over’.24 Börklüce Mustafa’s bare-headed deviant dervishes were alleged to have seduced the commoners to engage in unlawful acts, just as Torlak Hu Kemal and his Torlaks were said to have called the people to sedition and to have given permission for animal pleasures. The sheikh had supposedly issued fatwas permitting wine drinking, ecstatic whirling, lascivious dancing to music, and pederasty.25
In reality, what had frightened the dynasty the most, causing its supporters to exaggerate the sins of Sheikh Bedreddin and his disciples, was the fact that the sheikh had managed to foment several popular, nonsectarian peasant rebellions—the only premodern movements in Ottoman history that brought together Christians, Jews, and Muslims in a common cause against the empire. In the words of a modern Turkish communist poet,
The ten thousand heretic comrades of Börklüce Mustafa—
Turkish peasants from Aydın,
Greek sailors from Chios,
and Jewish artisans—
plunged like ten thousand axes into the enemy forest.
Their standards red and green,
Their shields inlaid, their ranks of bronze helmets
were broken to smithereens;
as day turned to evening in the driving rain,
of the ten thousand only two thousand remained.
Ten thousand sacrificed eight thousand
to be able to sing with one voice
and to pull the nets all together from the sea,
all together to forge the iron like lace,
to plough the earth all together,
to be able to eat honey-filled figs all together,
and to be able to say:
everywhere,
all together
we will share everything but the cheek of the beloved!26
All that the Ottomans had constructed over the past century had been threatened by the uprisings of Sheikh Bedreddin and his disciples. Turning away from earlier foundational visions and the groups that propelled the rise of the dynasty to power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, namely the gazi ‘holy warriors’, caused tensions that increased support for rebellions. These rebellions illustrated the clash between interpretations of Islam and what happens when the electrifying ideas of Ibn Arabi are acted upon. That Börklüce Mustafa was originally a Christian and Torlak Hu Kemal a Jew demonstrates the unexpected outcomes of Islamic conversion.27
Everything the Ottomans had built since their founding had been shattered by the steppe cavalry archers of the nomad conqueror Timur and betrayed by those Ottoman subjects opposed to Bayezid I who deserted the sultan to join them. At the time, Ottoman failures seemed to suggest that the reliance on slave soldiers and not gazis had been a fatal error. But after Timur, sedentary gunpowder empires, including that of the reborn Ottomans, would gradually rise to power, making a standing army vital.28
The determining factors in the continued existence of the empire were the powerful interests that wanted it put back together. Along with the remaining members of the dynasty itself who had been spared by Timur, these included those who held land grants (cavalry and Christian families in Southeastern Europe) and the servants of the sultan who had been recruited through the Collection (Janissaries and administrators). Given their interest in reviving the dynasty, it seemed unlikely that such leading figures would return the revitalised empire to its mystical and warrior roots. They would instead attempt to rein in the centrifugal force of the deviant dervishes, who in 1416 had proven themselves too much of a threat to the survival of the empire.
Mehmed I resurrected most of the territories of the empire prior to being crushed by his own horse in an accident in Edirne in 1421. According to two Ottoman chroniclers, several days after his death, his viziers came up with a macabre ruse to calm the palace and make his Janissary commanders believe the sultan was still alive until they were able to put a new ruler on the throne. The sultan’s Persian physician propped up Mehmed I’s corpse and had a page stand behind it, using the deceased’s own hand to stroke his beard. Continuing the ploy, the physician begged the assembled to leave and let the sultan recover his health. Convinced or not, thus chastised, they left the (deceased) sultan in peace.29
They hid Mehmed I’s corpse for forty-one days until his nineteen-year-old son and designated successor Murad II (reigned 1421–1444, 1446–1451) could be enthroned in Bursa.30 He expanded the empire further, but only after defeating two Mustafas. The first Mustafa was Mehmed I’s brother, who had proclaimed himself sultan in Edirne. During battle between the opposing armies of nephew and uncle near Bursa, Mustafa fled but was captured and killed. Then Murad II had to contend with the army of his thirteen-year-old brother, Mustafa, who besieged Bursa. After the two sides fought outside İznik, Murad II’s forces captured his younger brother and strangled him.
Murad II reconquered Thessalonike in 1430 after an eight-year siege. The Ottomans sacked the city, converted churches to mosques, and enslaved much of the population. Despite taking the Byzantines’ second city and dominating Southeastern Europe and Northwest Asia, however, Murad II’s territory was split in two at its centre by Byzantine Constantinople, which controlled the Bosporus straits. He also faced powerful enemies to the west, especially the Kingdom of Hungary, and to the east, including the Turcoman principality of Karaman. Should the Hungarians and Karamanids launch a simultaneous, two-pronged military invasion while the Byzantines and their Venetian allies blockaded the narrow waterway, hindering the sultan’s armies from crossing between Europe and Asia, it could spell the end of the Ottoman dynasty. Such a nightmare scenario was almost realised by the Crusade of Varna of 1444, a Crusade not fought in the Middle East, but in Southeastern Europe. The battle was one of the major turning points in fifteenth-century European and Asian history.
No matter that each side formulated this as a ‘holy war’ against ‘infidels’, the Crusade or gaza was not simply a battle between Muslims and Christians. The crusaders had Muslim allies and the Ottomans had Christian support. The main crusader protagonists were Pope Eugenius IV, the Byzantine emperor John VIII, and the king of Hungary Vladislav I (who was also Władysław III of Poland), along with others such as the Burgundian Knights aiming to retaliate for the debacle at Nicopolis half a century earlier. Venice’s rival, the Genoese, based in their enclave in Pera—the walled, hilly district marked by the well-known stone tower built in the mid-fourteenth century, facing Constantinople across the Golden Horn—and assisted the Ottomans, who faced formidable enemies.
Murad II’s opponents had a military advantage. The Kingdom of Hungary, led in the field by King Vladislav and the ruler of Transylvania, John Hunyadi, were able to deploy more troops than the Ottomans. More significant was their technological edge. The Hungarians employed the wagenburg tactic, a ‘mobile fortification, with cannon mounted on carts’, and utilised armour that Ottoman weapons could not penetrate.31 In one skirmish, Ottoman infantry shot John Hunyadi’s horse out from under him, and he ‘crashed to the ground with his horse and weapons, like a dog falling off the roof of a bazaar’.32 But because he was ‘clad in pure iron’, the Ottomans could not kill him, and he was able to escape. In many battles, whether the Ottomans used arrows or arquebuses, the Hungarians were able to retreat to their wagenburgs, firing cannons and arquebuses in return. The Ottomans succeeded in stopping the Hungarians at Zlatitsa Pass in Bulgaria, but could not defeat them.
Murad II realised peace was necessary.33 With the assistance of his Serbian wife, Mara, the daughter of his vassal George Branković, Murad II concluded a ten-year truce with Hungary in summer 1444.
John VIII, the Byzantine emperor, did not give up hope to save his kingdom from the Ottomans, however. Promising a simultaneous Hungarian attack from the west (despite the truce), and a blockade of the Bosporus straits, which would hinder the sultan’s advance from Europe, the emperor spurred the Karamanids to attack from the east that same year.34 Although the Karamanids launched an offensive, their leader capitulated without battling Murad II’s forces.35
Believing that the Ottoman Empire was secure in the west and east, with a European truce and Asian peace restored, the forty-one-year-old sultan surprised his court by abdicating the throne, the first Ottoman leader to do so.36 To this day, we are not sure why he made this decision. Twenty-three years earlier, he had chosen to have his accession ceremony in the Grand Mosque of Bursa, where he girded the sword of, or was invested with the cloak of, a Sufi sheikh, as if becoming initiated as his disciple.37 Perhaps, tiring of the trappings of power in this world, he wished to retire to contemplate the afterlife in a dervish lodge. Murad II also had a reputation for being a heavy wine drinker. The oldest extant line written in Turkish by an Ottoman ruler—‘Cupbearer bring, bring here again [what is left over from] yesterday’s wine’—reads like the pleading of an alcoholic.38 As he went off to spend his days in mystical retreat, or in his cups, Ottoman rule passed to his twelve-year-old son, Mehmed II (reigned 1444–1446, 1451–1481), who was enthroned in Edirne.
But the peace was short-lived. Due to pressure from Polish knights and the papal legate, who absolved him of having to honour his commitment, the Hungarian king quickly abjured his agreement with the sultan and resumed the war.39
Viziers implored Murad II, who was in Anatolia at the time, to return to the throne in Edirne to perform his duty as gazi. He grudgingly agreed.40 Fearing imminent Hungarian occupation, the Ottomans felled large trees to block the probable path of the Hungarian army and dug a moat around Edirne, evacuating the countryside and ordering civilians to take refuge in the citadel.41 Such scenes of impending doom spurred the appearance of an apocalyptic Muslim scholar in the city preaching faith in Jesus. To quell this internal upheaval, Ottoman authorities executed him and tortured his many followers.42
To participate in the campaign against the Hungarian army with the Anatolian army, Murad II had to cross the straits. But by October 1444, the Venetians and others had blockaded the Bosporus. The only way to overcome this was to place Ottoman artillery on both shores, ‘so that cannon on either side should be able to kiss each other’, providing cover for the sultan and his army to cross safely to the European side.43 Part of his army managed to cross further south of Constantinople at Gallipoli and set up the battlements on the European shore. The sultan used Genoese cannoneers to set up artillery on the Asian bank. The Byzantines launched two giant ships loaded with arquebuses into the Bosporus, but Ottoman cannon balls burst into one of the ships, turning its hull to matchsticks and sinking it, and tore a huge hole in the other.44 Crossing on Genoese boats procured for the occasion, the sultan and his troops landed safely in Europe.
Prince Mehmed, although ‘still a fresh rose’, impudently demanded to lead the campaign against the Hungarians while his father defended Edirne, the seat of the sultan.45 Murad II admonished him to do as he told him, and to defend Edirne and say his prayers.46
As tens of thousands of Hungarian soldiers swept across Southeastern Europe, the Ottoman defenders, male and female, were praised for their manliness—firing their cannons, arquebuses, lances, and arrows from their castles—but because the Hungarians wore armour of steel, Ottoman swords, axes, clubs, and maces were useless.47 As Hungarian forces burned Ottoman citadels, some defenders threw themselves to their deaths. At one castle, the victorious Hungarians threw the Ottoman defenders from the castle into the moat, and any that survived were cut down by arrows before they could stand.48 The Hungarians moved ever closer to their goal of seizing Edirne.
On 10 November 1444, the two sides met in battle at Varna on the coast of the Black Sea. The Hungarians took to the field blaring trumpets, as the Ottomans went into battle accompanied by thundering kettledrums.49 Murad II and his Janissaries and infantry soldiers took up a position at the centre rear, stationed on a mountain, his Southeastern European cavalry to his left and his Anatolian cavalry to his right.50
The battle began with a loud clamour. One ‘could hear stabbing, and, above all, blows ringing out from both the armies’, as ‘arrows began to fly like grasshoppers from out of the grass’.51 The Hungarians decimated the Anatolian wing of the cavalry and killed their commander. Because the Hungarians were ‘clad from head to toe in iron’, Ottoman swords could not make a dent in them, so those on the Southeastern European wing used their axes, maces, and clubs to bash their opponents, but after fighting for a while, they fled the battlefield.52 Without cavalry, Murad II and his Janissaries were left alone at the centre to fight. Battling with few men, including his palace pages, it was a bloodbath, where ‘heads and legs, fingers and fingernails, axes and hammers, arrows and lances, shields and weapons poured on the battlefield like a carpenter’s chippings’.53
According to a Greek chronicler, Hungarian king Vladislav was killed ‘as a result of his stupidity’.54 Ignoring the ruler of Transylvania Hunyadi’s advice to wait for reinforcements, the king waded into battle, where a Janissary knocked him off his horse with a mace and other Janissaries hacked him to pieces with their axes.55 They ‘cut off his head and hoisted it on a lance’.56 Hungarian knights fell all around him ‘like autumn leaves’.57 The Southeastern European Ottoman cavalry then returned to rout the Christian knights. Thousands of crusaders were annihilated. The anonymous Ottoman author of the account of the battle proclaimed:
So lie his slaughtered enemies,
Each one’s body lies there headless.
The valleys are so full of them
That no one can find a way through.
Corpses are so swimming in blood
That whoever sees them goes out of his mind.58
The victorious Ottomans executed captives over the age of twenty by sword and enslaved the ‘fresh-faced lads’.59 Murad II kept some captured Hungarian knights alive, sending them to Muslim rulers—the Mamluks, the khan of the Crimea, and the Karamanids—to be paraded in humiliation.60 A group of these captive knights caused a great tumult in Cairo, as they were mounted on horseback and outfitted with armour ‘and bowl-like helmets on their heads’.61 Some of them allegedly converted to Islam.62
With the victory, Ottoman control of Southeastern Europe was total. The Ottomans ruled as far west as the borderlands of Serbia and Albania and as far north as the Danube. Murad II then again retired, placing Mehmed back on the throne. But a Janissary rebellion in Edirne in 1446 precipitated Murad’s final years in power. Murad II again took his throne away from his son.
Newly back in power, Murad II was approached by the disciples of a militant Shi’i Sufi, Sheikh Junayd (died 1460). Sheikh Junayd was a descendant of Safi al-Din (died 1334), a contemporary of Osman, who had been exiled from Ardabil (in northwestern Iran) by the Turcoman Karakoyunlu ruler Jahanshah (died 1467). The Sufi sought refuge in Ottoman domains, requesting Murad II grant him a landholding. He was refused based on the premise that ‘two emperors cannot sit on the same throne’.63 So instead, Junayd built a following among Ottoman Turcoman rivals in central and eastern Anatolia after being granted protection for a short period by the Karamanids at Konya. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, his grandson, Ismail, would establish the Ottoman’s greatest military and religious rival, the Safavid dynasty based in Iran, which fomented massive revolts in Ottoman territories.
The appearance of another Sufi was an omen of misfortune. One day in 1451, while Murad II was riding his horse in the environs of Edirne, a dervish blocked his path as he crossed a bridge. The Sufi told him his death was near; he must repent and ask God’s forgiveness. When the sultan returned to the palace after the ride, he followed the Sufi’s instructions, then complained, ‘I have a headache’. He lay in bed three days and then passed away. His viziers kept the news secret and hid the corpse for nearly two weeks until nineteen-year-old Mehmed II arrived in Edirne, where he could again accede to the throne.64 Complying with the custom of fratricide, he had his only brother, one-year-old Little Ahmed, put to death.65 Not wishing to be demoted a third time, he aimed high. This time he wished to do what many Arab and Turkish rulers before him had failed to do over the course of the previous seven hundred years: he wished to conquer Constantinople.