From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Nor is this all. From the day of Orkhan and Murad I, the Osmanlis have been classed as raiders like the devastating hordes of Timur and Genghis Khan. Nothing could be farther from the truth. So far indeed were they from being a predatory people like the Mongols and Tartars that they were, from the days of their founder, a race of colonists and empire builders. This was the secret of their success and the explanation of the marvelous development of the Empire of the Sultans, which, as the eminent Austrian historian, Joseph Von Hammer-Purgstall, has declared “was more rapid in its rise than Rome, more enduring than that of Alexander.”

The causes which contributed to the rapid development of the Osmanlis from the four hundred warriors of Osman into the vast armies of his successors and to the achievement of such extraordinary results in so short a period of time were, as the historian Finlay points out, “in some degree similar to those which had enabled small tribes of Goths and Germans to occupy and subdue the Western Roman Empire.”[101]

But there were other contributory causes which enabled the Osmanlis so quickly to become masters of the Byzantine Empire and to make themselves a menace to the whole of Europe. Chief among these were the conflicting ambitions of numerous aspirants to the Byzantine throne and the rivalries of the petty chieftains of the Balkan Peninsula and the commercial jealousies of Venice and Genoa. All these purely secular aims made anything like joint action against the followers of the Crescent quite impossible.

It was Cantacuzenos, a traitor to his empress, the widow of Andronicus II, who introduced the Osmanlis into Europe. After usurping the Byzantine throne, he gave his daughter, Theodora, in marriage to the emir Orkhan in exchange for six thousand soldiers to aid him in his struggle against his legitimate sovereign. By his infamous betrayal of his empress and country he contributed more than any single factor to the ultimate downfall of the Byzantine Empire.

It was the despot Theodore Paleologus who invited the Osmanlis into Greece to support him in his contest with the Greeks and the Franks. It was the Serbian prince Stephen Bukcovitz who formed an alliance with the emir Bayazid to whom he gave his sister as wife and for whom he commanded a contingent in the Ottoman Army—even against his coreligionists. When the Osmanli forces, after their signal defeat by Timur at Angora, were faced with annihilation at the hands of the victorious Tartars, it was the Greeks, Genoese, and Venetians who saved them from destruction by transporting them across the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to Europe where their relentless pursuers were unable to follow them.

But these are only a few instances of the aid which the Ottoman conquerors received from the Christian nations of Europe. “In their conquest of the Balkan peninsula it is remarkable,” declares a recent writer, “that the Osmanlis never fought a battle without the help of allies of the faith and blood of those whom they were putting under the Moslem yoke.”[102] The victories of Bayazid in the region of the Danube were largely due to the coöperation of his Christian vassals. And in his invasion of Hungary he was more beholden to the Wallachians than to his famed corps of Janissaries.[103]

Yet more. For, contrary to a common opinion, he received no assistance whatever from Saracens or Persians, for the simple reason that these peoples did not join forces with the Ottomans until a much later date.

The Osmanlis did not cross the Taurus until more than a century after they had passed the Balkans and did not become “masters of Asia Minor until long after their inheritance of the Byzantine Empire was regarded in Europe as a fait accompli.”[104]

And it is equally true that “whatever they accomplished in Asia was the indirect result of their stupendous successes in Europe. From first to last the extension of Ottoman sovereignty over the Moslems of Asia was by means of a soldiery gathered and war-hardened in Europe, themselves Christian or of Christian ancestry, in whose veins ran the blood of Greek and Roman, of Goth and Hun, of Albanian and Slav.”[105]

Besides the causes just enumerated, there were others of quite a different nature that made for the phenomenal military achievements of Osmanlis in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. They were the same causes which had so greatly favored the ready submission of the peoples of Syria and northern Africa and which had so potently contributed towards the rapid diffusion of Islam in all countries which bordered the eastern and southern Mediterranean. The Byzantine Empire had long been afflicted by incompetent and decadent rulers. The tyranny and the vexations of exarchs had become intolerable. The people were overburdened with taxes and their property was in a large measure confiscated. Under such conditions the Saracens and the Ottomans came as liberators to the long-suffering, down-trodden populations. By embracing Islam, the Christians of the Orient were relieved from the oppressive taxes of Byzantium and entered again into the possession of their sequestrated property. Even when they refused to accept the Koran they recovered their lands by the payment of a moderate capitation tax and were thus enabled to live under the protection of Moslem law which took no notice of the religious controversies of rival Christian sects. This liberal policy of Islam towards its Christian subjects—a policy which safeguarded their persons and property—following as it did on the heels of the odious tyranny of the Lower Empire—was an important factor in the marvelously rapid extension of Islam and in the easy domination of the conquering Ottomans and Saracens. In Asia Minor, particularly, Mohammedanism achieved an easy triumph because it was opposed to Byzantine despotism which was the object of universal execration.