The Ottoman Turks



 It is one of history's little jokes, surely, that Turkey and the Ottoman Empire that it ruled had no part to play in the July crisis that brought the Great War. For this crisis could never have unfolded as it did if not for the profound impact that the empire of the Turks had had on the development of Eastern Europe. And no one would be affected by the war itself more profoundly than the Turks and the many peoples who, century after century, had been their unhappy subjects.

And with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, was the only reason the Hapsburg where in Bosnia at all, and there could have been no Kingdom of Serbia. There would have been no power vacuum in the Balkans. Russia and Austria-Hungary could never have been pulled into vacuum or into such dangerous conflict with each other.

To go back further, without the rise of the Ottomans the whole bitter saga of the Balkans would have been unimaginably different. The Turks ruled the peninsula for 500 years, reaching at their height westward into Italy, northward into Austria, Hungaryy, and Russia, and all the way around the Black Sea. For a time they seemed destined to conquer the whole Eastern half of Europe, if not the entire continent. When the great war began their empire, while maintaining only a toehold in Europe proper, still extended across the Middle East to the Arabian Peninsula.

When the empire reached its pinnacle, its decline began, with the life of a single man, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent(also known as Suleiman the Lawmaker). He ruled from 1520 to 1566 and led the Ottomans to their zenith both culturally and geographically. He was 10 generations removed from the Turkish-Mongol Chieftain named Osman who founded the dynasty 300 years before and give it his name. In everyone of those 10 generations, in a unbroken sequence of achievements that no other family has ever approached, the Ottoman Turks were led by yet another dynamic, heroic, conquering figure. Generation after generation, starting where Osman had 1st emerged from obscurity in what is now Eastern Turkey and from there moving outward in all directions, the dynasty took control of more and more of the world around it. The Sultans forced their way into Europe for the 1st time in 1354, and 99 years later they captured Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire. From the on Constantinople was their home.

The Ottomans continued their expansion for another century after taking Constantinople, conquering among other places all of Eastern Europe, South of the Danube. Suleiman's father, Selin I, doubled the size of the empire by winning a single battle that made him the master of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Algeria. The domain that he passed on to Suleiman included among its major cities, Alexandria, Algiers, Athens, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Smyrna. The Ottomans had become not only the political and military masters of the Islamic world but also-what put their supremacy beyond challenge-the custodians of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places associated with the Prophet Muhammad.

As its power increased, the dynasty evolved into something that was not a family in any ordinary sense of the term, but a chain of fathers and sons who never married. Instead of taking wives, the Sultans kept scores and even 100's of women who were property rather than spouses. These women lived as prisoners in a harem. They were allowed no contact with men except for the rulers who owned them and an army of custodians, many of them black Africans whose sexual organs had been removed surgically.

Suleiman, a contemporary of Henry VIII of England, took this strange heritage to a peak of vitality. Like his forebears, he was a warrior, personally leading his army in 13 campaigns. He pushed deeper into Europe, capturing Belgrade and Budapest and completing the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of Central Europe, and would have captured it too if torrents of rain had not made it impossible for him to bring his heavy guns north.

Suleiman had some 300 concubines, as well as a promising young son and heir named Mustafa, when he was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowren, who came to be known as Roxelana. She came into his harem as part of his share of the booty from a slave gathering raid into what is now Poland, and she must have been a remarkable creature.(Not surprisingly, in light of the power she aquired in Constantinople, she eventually won a 2nd new name "the witch".) Almost from the day of her arrival, Suleiman never slept with another woman. Eventually and amazingly, he did something that no Sultan had done in centuries; he married. Their love story would have been one of the great ones if it hadn't eneded up taking the dynasty and the empire in such a sordid direction.

Mustafa gave every indication of developing into yet another mighty branch on the family tree. At an early age he showed himself a bold military leader adored by his troops, a capable provincial governor, and a popular hero. But he stood in the way of the son whom Roxelana had bourne to(presumably) Suleiman, and so he was doomed. Working her wiles, Roxelana persuaded Suleiman that Mustafa was plotting against him. (Even though he wasn't) With his father looking on, Mustafa was overpowered and strangled by 5 professional executioners who's tongues had been slit and eardrums broken so that they would hear no secrets and could never speak of what they saw. And when Suleiman died some years later, master of an empire of almost increduble size and power, he was succeeded by Roxelana's son, Selin II. Nothing was ever the same again.

Selin the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after 8 years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath. His son, Murad III, was also a drunk and an opium addict as well; during a reign of 20 years he sired 103 children and apparently did little else. His heir, Mahomet III, begin his reign by ordering all fo his many brothers, the youngest of them mere children, put to death, thereby introducing that custom into Ottoman royal culture. Having done so he followed his father in devoting the rest of his life to capulation. And so it went. Every Sultan from Roxelana's son forward was a monster of degeneracy or a repulsive weakling or both.

The abruptness and premanence of the change, the sharpness of the contrast between the murdered Mustafa and his half brother Selin II, has give rise to speculation that perhap's Roxelana's son was not Suleiman's son at all.

In the post-Suleiman empire, a new breed of craven Sultans came to live in terror of being overthrown by rivals from within the dynasty. Appalling new traditions emerged, to be observed whenever one of them died. All the women of the deceased Sultan would be moved to a distant place and kept in even deeper solitude for the rest of their miserable lives. Any one happened to be pregnant would be murdered and the younger brothers and half-brothers of the new monarch were murdered as well.

The rulers erected a windowless building called the Cage in which thier heirs were confined from early childhood until they died or were put to death or, having been taught nothing about anything, were released to take their turns on the throne. The result was as inevitable as it was monstrous; an empire ruled year after year and finally century after century by utterly ignorant, utterly incompetent, sometimes half-imbecilic, half-mad men, some of whom spent decades in the Cage before their release and all of whom, after their release, were free to do absolutely anything they wanted, no matter how vicious, for as long as they remained alive. They commonly indulged their freedom to kill or maim for any reason-for playing the wrong music or for smoking, for example- or for no reason at all.

Throughout the 3 1/2 centuries from the death of Suleiman until the Great War, only one Sultan displayed some of the fire and strength of the men who built the empire. This was Murad III, who reigned from 1623 to 1640. He became Sultan when he was only 10 years old- to young to have been incapacitated by the cage-and he grew into a man of immense courage and physical power. He was the 1st Sultan since Suleiman to be a soldier, leading his army into Persia, where he savagely put down an uprising. He was also even more insanely cruel than most Sultans. In just 1 year of his reign, 1637, some 25,000 of the empire's subjects were executed, many of them by Murad's own hand. He claimed the right to kill 10 innocent people per day, and occasionally he would sit on the wall of his palace shooting randomly at passersby. At night he would make incognito visits to the taverns of Constantinople, where anyone found smoking would be executed on the spot.

Almost uniquely among the Ottomans, Murad produced no children, and on his deathbed he ordered the death of his brother and heir, Ibrahim, who had been living in the Cage from the age of 2. This order was not obeyed, Ibrahim being the last living member of the dynasty, but from that point there were few further signs of vitality in the Ottoman line. Ibrahim devoted himself to building up a harem of 280 young women. The acting on a dubious report that one of these women had become romantically involved with a eunich, so Murad had all of them drowned.

So it was not surprising that the empire rotted from within under this kind of leadership. And became an inviting target. Young General Napoleon Bonaparte 1st showed Europe just how impotent the Ottomans had become when in 1798 he invaded and almost effortlessley conquered Egypt. But he was driven out of Egypt by the British, with no help from the Turks. From this point on, the survival of the Sultans and their decaying empire depended less on themselves than on the jealousies and rivalries of the European powers.

The Ottomans hung on through the 19th century and that was only because Britain and France kept Russia from finishing them off. Even so, the 100 years leading up to 1914 brought uninterrupted losing wars; with the empire's own Turkish satraps as they tried for autonomy in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere; with Arab Chieftans seeking independence; with Persia; with the Christian peoples of the Balkans; and-four times between 1806 and 1878 with Russia hungering for Constantinople.

In 1830 the French seized control of Algeria in North Africa. At about the same time the British began building a power base in Arabi and the Persian Gulf. In 1853 Russia, tempted by what appeared to be easy pickings, invaded the Ottoman provinces nsouth of the Danube. The Ottoman presence in Europe might have come to an end then if not for the Crimean War, in which Britain and France intervened to stop the Russians.

Now Britain, fearful that its postion in the eastern Mediteranean and control of India might be lost if Russia broke through to the south, saved the Ottomans from destruction yet again in 1878. But by that time several European coutries, Britain included, were feasting on the Turkish empire's extremites. Austria-Hungary took possession of Bosnia and Herzehovina, literally preparing the ground for the Sarajevo assassination. France, with British support took Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa. Britain took Egypt and Cypus, and finally even Italy reached across the Mediteranean to grab Tripoli(today's Libya), along with islands in the Aregean and Mediterranean. Germany meanwhile, having arrived too late to share in the plunder, focused on building ties with the Turks. They began work on a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway and Kaiser Wilhelm II paid a state visit to Constantinople and Jerusalem.

In 1908, the year when Autria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a group of would be reformers called the Young Turks(Their leader and army officer named Enver Pasha) seized control of the government in Constaninople and introduced a constitution. In 1912 the 1st Balkan War drove the Turks almost entirely out of the Balkans. This, and the failure of the Constantinople regime to deliver the reforms expected of it or to stop the disintegration of the empire, gravely damaged the prestige of the ruling faction, which was replaced by nationalist extremist(once again led by Enver). Some of it was regained the following year, however, when the 2nd Balkan War led to Turkey's recovery of the city of Adrianople on the European mainland. The Sultan was at least as ridiculous a figure as the sorriest of his predeceddors. No one even pretended that he matter.

In January 1914, Evner Pasha left the army to become minister of war, and in July he took his empire into a secret defensive alliance with Germany. Astonishingly in light of all the humiliations it had experienced, the Ottoman Empire of July 1914 was still bigger geographically than France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary combined. It still ruled Arabia, which soon would emerge as the world's greatest source of oil; If war did erupt no one knew if the empire would enter it or, if so, on which side. It would be a coveted ally- or a rich, probably easy conquest.