God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  No Western rescue came, only some individual Italians, and the city fell on 29 May 1453. Pius II, a pope of humanist background, tried hard to inspire a crusade to retake it, assuming a less common position about the importance of saving it by contrasting the barbarism of Turkish civilisation with the fount of Greek culture inside Constantinople. But in this he was mistaken: scholars had already fled and found new homes. He acknowledged the damage done to crusading by the ‘greed’ of his predecessors, and his attempt to enlist as leader the ruthless egoist King Louis XI of France got no response.

  The capture had major effects. Mehmed’s prestige soared as he had achieved a feat which had eluded the early Arab caliphate and his own father. After Constantinople fell, Mehmed not only felt himself heir to the traditions of world rule which the Byzantines had inherited from the Roman Empire but also withdrew from humdrum affairs, observing conferences from behind a lattice, half-concealed from view, while the grand vizier presided and the heads of the great ruling bureaucracies reported on their work. He was also influenced by the Arab caliphate of the early centuries of Islam and to the devotion to jihad of the ghazis. He began to build up Constantinople, renamed Istanbul. He had encountered a city shrunken and impoverished in population and proceeded to import Muslim craftsmen and their families with wares distinctive to the Turks, creating a luxury trade that attracted Western buyers. He also built mosques and schools to create a centre of Islamic teaching. From him stemmed a long-lasting tradition of providing charitable foundations for the poor. A fortunate discovery in the district of Eyup of the tomb of an early Companion of the Prophet by Mehmed’s spiritual adviser created a centre of Muslim devotion and drew the devout to seek places nearby for their graves. The site, together with the great dome of the Fatih mosque built as a rival to Hagia Sophia, gave a Muslim counter-balance to other districts inhabited strongly by non-Muslims.

  Expansion was aided by the ghazi spirit but, once land was conquered, it was ruled with good sense and flexibility. Beyond the Danube the Ottomans had absorbed Romania by 1504; Belgrade fell in 1520; Hungary had fallen under Ottoman rule in 1529; Vienna was besieged in 1529 but not taken, exceptionally bad weather causing the attacking cavalry to lose their footing and creating problems over the positioning of cannon.

  Central control and a notable lack of corruption were the keys to success. In a movement away from the Ottoman past, a powerful monarch dominated central institutions. High religious functionaries were given responsibility under the sultan and their fidelity to him over many years sustained the state. Communities were taxed and the responsible authorities, Muslim or not, gathered it, involving them closely in the system. There was no wish to convert Jews or Christians, as the dhimmi tax on monotheists played a vital role in sustaining Ottoman finances. Tax farming and consequent creaming of profits were stopped and taxes kept at a tolerable level. Qadis inspected army units and ensured rectitude in tax collection.

  The ulama was kept under control. A chief mufti was appointed from 1433 to lead the body of qadis and scholars. Leading figures in madrasas served in a system which rewarded merit and loyalty. It was a controlled Sunnism, unwilling to allow the proliferation of groups under different schools of Islamic law disputing with each other. Leading Sufi brotherhoods were co-opted into the system, which made room for Jews fleeing from Spain and Portugal, using their administrative skills while giving them freedom of worship.

  The wealth of the sultanate opened the way for artistic patronage: a grand theatre of ceremonial based on Constantinople and the Topkapi palace at its apex overlooking the Golden Horn, inheriting the tradition of Byzantium. Here were splendid rooms and decoration, a harem and opportunities for former slaves to rise to heights of power. There were indeed struggles for control within the family, exacerbated by the tradition of polygamy and fratricide to ensure succession – non-Quranic but defended on pragmatic grounds, to maintain stability. It was a practice disliked by the population. Generation after generation, a leading claimant murdered his rivals so that the children of his predecessors, whether by wives or concubines, could not be obstacles to succession. There was even an established technique for doing so, as deaf mutes with greased bowstrings had the regular task of throttling unwanted siblings.

  The Western answer to this formidable power was spasmodic. The menace was understood but the defensive crusading which had evolved lacked the traditional verve. The magic of Jerusalem had long outlived the loss of the Holy Land and the liturgy recalled the Sepulchre and implied that it should be recovered. Western powers shuddered at the prospect of jihad being deployed by the Ottomans and resistance at times transcended the division between Protestant and Catholic. But Jerusalem generally had moved to the back of men’s minds, a potent name still but no longer the target for military intervention. The cross, the vow, the indulgence, the traditional weapons of crusade were now most effective when they could be combined with the needs of the nation-state.

  Revival of Crusading

  Crusades revived in three areas, with failure in one and success in the two others. Two were launched against Muslims. Portugal strove to take the North African coast from the time of the capture of the port of Ceuta in 1415 to the battle of the Three Kings in 1578, when Sebastian, nephew of Philip II of Spain and grandson of John III of Portugal, with the flower of the nobility, was defeated by Abdul Malik of the Sharifian dynasty of southern Morocco. Disputing Muslim rulers had united in jihad in response to Portugal’s crusading zeal.

  The second area of crusading against Muslims, and a successful one, lay in Granada, where they were overwhelmed. The marriage of two distant cousins, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, resolved the Christian tensions of the Iberian peninsula and put completion of Reconquista in the forefront. Under Ferdinand’s leadership, military orders combined into one brotherhood, the Santa Hermandad, producing dedicated manpower. Other troops were provided by the great nobles and specialist gunners hired for high fees from far afield, while local minerals were exploited to provide 200 artillery pieces. The four-month siege of Malaga with its massive walls roused the determination of the Muslims but their defeat was a turning point. The ten-year war mutually stimulated the ideas of crusade and jihad.

  The Genoese and Jews, sources of credit, were forced into making massive donations to Ferdinand’s campaign. An order of 1492 demanded that Jews, numbering about 200,000, should either convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Some accepted conversion – the conversos – and were subjected to the harsh rigours of the Inquisition in which the rich were tortured, convicted and forced to forfeit their wealth; most were transported away and many were robbed in transit. This massive flight of Jews brought talent to the Ottomans. Thessaloniki, captured and deserted in 1432, was transformed by an influx of Spanish Jews to become a major commercial centre.

  The third area of success stands apart from all others because it was directed against pagans rather than Muslims. When, after the fall of Acre, the Teutonic Knights left the Holy Land, they listened to the advice of their greatest Hochmeister, Hermann of Salza, who had a vision of a quasi-kingdom under the Knights’ control on the east of Germany. The first attempt to realise this failed when the King of Hungary chased them out of the territory they held in Transylvania, but Hermann’s vision came to fruition in the fourteenth century when the Order took power in heathen territory in eastern Germany and engaged in a species of perpetual crusade at the expense of the indigenous Prussians. This was a war of extermination in which the native peoples were reduced to serfdom and their language obliterated. A class of ministeriales from the German Empire were recruited and lived as fighting celibates in the manner of military orders in the Holy Land. But it was a harsh world. Captured Knights were put on bonfires in full armour and roasted like chestnuts. Here there was indeed heroism but nothing of the warrior understanding and ransoming characteristic of much of the Holy Land crusading. At the same time there were major economic gains as cogs, fat-bellied merchant ships, built up trad
e on the Baltic coast and German farmers advanced to settle under the shield of the Knights. The old traditions of crusading were maintained and warriors came out to fight in expeditions known as reysen, interspersed with feasts and hunting. It was genuinely felt to be a crusade and Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of England, exiled by Richard II, gained prestige by his service with the Teutonic Knights.

  Inner Weaknesses of the Ottomans

  Movements of thought and practice within the Islamic world were more likely to destroy the Ottoman Empire than any Western attacks. Shiism, Zoroastrianism and the Bektashi Dervish movement all had major upsetting potential and the need was felt for drastic action to suppress them. Even the young Mehmed the Conqueror, living in Edirne before his accession, fell under the influence of a Sufi order with mysterious and whirling dances founded by Haji Bektash in Anatolia in 1337. These appealed to Shiites, Sufis and Christians alike, including Janissaries. When a Bektash preacher fell victim to orthodox Sunnis and was lynched, Janissaries reacted with anger, looting in the streets. Only the need for military action elsewhere and obedience to Sultan Murad, Mehmed’s father, calmed the crisis.

  At the death of Mehmed the Conqueror, his son Bayezid II (1481–1512) stemmed difficulties and neutralised the competition of his brother Zizim by paying a massive sum for the Hospitallers to keep him as a hostage until his death in 1495. A pious man, Bayezid disliked warring against fellow Muslims, welcomed victims of Ferdinand and Isabella and gave Jews and fleeing Muslims status and consideration, although he warily placed them in provincial cities, notably Thessaloniki, rather than in Istanbul. His major contribution was to build up the Ottoman navy and use it to strip away Venetian possessions in mainland Greece. However, he was complacent towards the Kizilbas, a Safavid Sufi brotherhood from Persia with the insignia of red caps, an ancient movement led by a gifted, charismatic and bloodthirsty Shaikh Ismail, who proposed to take over the Muslim world. Believing Ismail and his followers might be instruments of God to revitalise Islam, Bayezid gave permission for them to take an army across eastern Ottoman lands.

  Selim the Grim (Caliph 1512–20)

  Shocked by this, one of Bayezid’s sons called Selim, governor of Trebizond, marched into eastern provinces in 1505 as a demonstration and was reprimanded by his father. Then in 1510 he defeated a Kizilbas army led by Ismail’s brother and was again reprimanded, after which he deposed his father in 1512 and took violent action against Ismail and his followers, whom he had rightly seen as a profound menace, not least because Ismail could claim descent from the Prophet. The leaders were hunted down while others fled back to Persia. Determined to destroy the Kizilbas, Selim instructed his ministers to make peace with his Western enemies the Mamluks, Venice and Hungary and asked for support from scholars in Istanbul to have the sect proscribed as heretical. His men identified suspects on the road travelled by troops marching towards Persia. They were then driven off to the borders of the empire, where they could do least damage. In 1514 he faced an army of Shaik Ismail at Caldiran, in modern Iran.

  It was hard-fought, but the Janissary discipline held long enough to destroy the enemy. So uncertain was the fidelity of the Janissaries that, when Selim proposed to delay and seek additional advantage before battle, an adviser insisted that he should attack at once, and so he did. Shaik Ismail, although wounded, escaped and lived on till 1524 but Selim’s victory destroyed Ismail’s reputation for infallibility.

  Next, having discovered a new Mamluk move to lay down high-quality cannon for the defence of Cairo, in the spring of 1516 Selim turned to attack them. Fellow Muslims they might be, and a slave-soldiery supporting Sunni orthodoxy, but Selim was not the man for finer points of ethics. Sooner or later he believed the Mamluk leadership would find it expedient to ally with Ottoman enemies. The Mamluks had little support: there had been too many greedy and incompetent sultans damaging the agriculture of Upper Egypt by their exactions and exacerbating effects of plague. Moreover, although they still recruited soldiers from the steppes – only now Circassians rather than Turks – they led them poorly. Battles in 1516 and 1517 defeated the opposition, bribery caused the defection of the governor of Aleppo, and Egypt fell. The last Mamluk leader was crucified, and the Abbasid caliph surrendered his powers, leaving the caliphal emblems, the sword and the mantle of Muhammad, to the Topkapi museum.

  In a reign of eight years Selim had doubled the size of the Ottoman Empire and brought about the surrender to the Ottomans of the three holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Holding the sacred sites gave Ottomans further status. There was no succession problem, as relatives, siblings and nephews had been eliminated and Selim executed seven grand viziers. In 1520, after Selim succumbed, possibly to anthrax, his son Suleiman the Magnificent succeeded peacefully, rode through the streets of Istanbul and received the ceremonial sword of Osman.

  Suleiman the Magnificent: Achievement and Flaws

  Suleiman’s reign (1520–66) saw the apogee of Ottoman power but also the roots of its decline. He knew the condition of Western Christendom well and had understood that Charles V and Francis I of France were fatally embroiled with each other and would not unite against him. After Charles’s victory over him, Francis conveyed to Suleiman that he was open to offers of a discreet alliance and would welcome a move by Suleiman to attack Hungary and Turkey and weaken the Habsburg interest. Suleiman took the hint and at Mohacs, between Buda and Belgrade, in 1526 killed King Louis of Hungary and his nobility. Despite their being thousands strong, he took no prisoners. With his backing corsairs came to dominate the North African coast and raided widely, benefiting from the use of a safe harbour in Toulon and overcoming the resistance of the Genoese admiral Roger Doria. In consequence Muslims were in the ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

  His subjects remembered Suleiman as a lawgiver, codifying customary law on issues not covered by the Islamic Sharia code and doing justice to Jews by refuting blood libels directed against them and to Christians by liberating them from serfdom on lands he controlled. He was a poet of high calibre, echoing Mehmed II’s combination of courage in battle with wide-ranging cultural interests. But there were moments which inspired fear in his non-Muslim subjects, as when in 1521 and 1537, in conflict with Christian powers, he considered killing Christians and destroying their churches.

  Suleiman’s forces ended a long-standing irritation with the great siege of Rhodes, the Hospitaller fortress, in 1522–3 when he avoided sea attack and concentrated instead on mining. The Sultan commanded in person. Heavily outnumbered, Grand Master Villiers de L’Isle Adam held out to the last possible moment, aided by a Venetian engineer who slipped into the island as a volunteer, aiding the defences against mining with a subterranean listening device that set bells ringing at the least vibration, so that enemy mines could be detected and destroyed. The effects of gunpowder were also mitigated by spiral vents inserted in walls. But Suleiman was too strong and could afford to keep his besiegers in action during the winter. The Grand Master accepted the vote of the garrison that Rhodes should surrender. Suleiman gave the Grand Master the honours of war, for himself, any Knights and any Rhodians who wished to leave, without ransom, and they took ship for Italy on 1 January 1523.

  A remarkable reign ended in a defeat. The Hospitallers, in exile in Italy, still harboured the hope of a return to their offensive position in Rhodes, harassing Anatolia once again, but in the end felt obliged to accept an offer by the Western Emperor Charles V of the barren and unpromising island of Malta. As Suleiman moved to destroy another irritation and make an end of Hospitaller harassment, he assembled a host for attack, although on this occasion he did not command in person. He faced the Grand Master de la Valette, a man of iron resolution who had survived capture and a year’s service as a galley slave and who in office proceeded to outmanoeuvre a Janissary attack by insisting on a defence of Fort St Elmo, their preferred landing point, at heroic sacrifice. The delay was crucial and a long fight continued in which the laws of war were certainly trample
d on. When the besiegers cut the heads off Knights’ corpses and fired them at their enemy from cannon, de la Valette responded by executing his Muslim prisoners and firing their heads back again. Somehow he held out from May to September, when Spanish relief arrived. The feat was welcomed as much in Protestant England as in Catholic Europe and bells were rung in celebration at the order of Queen Elizabeth. The harbour of Valletta in Malta celebrates the Grand Master’s achievement. Meanwhile, Suleiman was engaged in warfare in Hungary, where he died and was thus unable to deal with the aftermath of the Hospitaller victory.

  There was a sense in which the heroism of the Hospitallers acted as a conscience to the quarrelling kingdoms of Catholic Europe. At Lepanto in 1571, a fleet under the command of an illegitimate son of Emperor Charles V, Don John of Austria, surprised a Turkish fleet in winter quarters in the Gulf of Corinth and inflicted a shattering defeat. The galleys of the Knights were placed on an exposed flank in the attack, and deliberately so, because they could be relied on to fight to the end – as they did – and set an example for a much larger, miscellaneous and less reliable body of ships.

  Lepanto gave a boost to the morale of the West, although the finances of the Ottomans were still equal to replacing ships lost – and yet a point of saturation was now approaching for defence expenditure, for the area controlled by the Ottomans was immense and the costs of sustaining and policing so much territory very high. Maintenance of ships and crews was costly, needing dockyards and arsenals for constant work and replacement as vessels succumbed to wood-boring insects. Campaigning sustained morale and kept Janissaries in fettle but it all cost a great deal: inflation caused by the immense inflow of gold and silver to Spain from the New World had a major damaging effect on both the West and the Ottoman Empire.