Dan Snow's History Hit - A Short History of the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

The Ottoman Empire was gigantic; at one point it reached the walls of Vienna to the Persian Gulf and beyond. It was established at the end of the 13th century with its centre in what is now modern Turkey. It held swathes of Europe for centuries right up to the First World War.In this episode, Professor of International History, Marc Baer and Dan rampage through that history and discover how the Ottomans weren't simply the Islamic-Asian antithesis of the Christian-European West, but in fact, a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire whose religious tolerance and cultural innovation has shaped the landscape of East and West from 1299 right through to the present day.Produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the Ottoman Empire today, the gigantic empire that one stage reached from the walls of Vienna to the Persian Gulf, even beyond in fact. It was a gigantic empire based on what we now describe as Turkey and the Middle East. It originated with the Turkoman warlord Osman in 1299, right at the end of the 13th century. And it survived right up until the end of the First World War with the escape of the last Ottoman caliph, through a gate in the walls of Istanbul, into a motor car, and off into exile. It was the end of the Ottoman Empire. Huge player in Europe, Asia, and North Africa for nearly 700 years. To talk about the Ottomans and how they've been depicted as a kind of

Islamic, Asiatic antithesis to a sort of Christian West is the professor of international history, Mark Baer. He has written a brilliant book in which he really tells a different story, redefines the Ottomans for us today. So what follows is Mark and I doing a sort of rampage through 500 years of history. It's a bit of an introduction to the Ottomans and some questions about what came after them. Here's the very brilliant Mark Ba Bear talking about the Ottomans. Enjoy.

Mark, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Mark, I was in a taxi once. I was in a taxi in European Turkey, just outside Istanbul, Constantinople. And the taxi driver shouted at me, the problem with the Greeks is they cannot accept that we are the heirs to the Eastern Empire. We are the heirs to the Romans. And I thought, this guy's crazy. The Ottomans are some kind of weird Asiatic nomadic tribe, like, you know, who just ran in and smashed everything up and then became the antithesis

to all that. And I read your book and I'm completely wrong. The taxi driver was correct. antithesis to all that. And I read your book and I'm completely wrong. The taxi driver was correct. Absolutely. The Ottomans claimed to be the inheritors of Rome, not only in terms of conquering the territories that had made up the Eastern Roman Empire, but also their vision of uniting East and West under one religion, under one ruler, under one dynasty. Let's go back to the beginning of the dynasty because I find this so interesting. Again, maybe we could just quickly de-conflict the pressure that the Eastern Empire was under, the Roman Empire in the East was under, from Islamic armies. And that's different to the Ottoman challenge that would eventually conquer that empire in the 15th

century. How did the Ottomans fit in the medieval Near East? There are a number of Turkic Muslim principalities and empires that were moving into what is today Turkey. And the Byzantine Empire was falling apart. And the Ottomans fit in by taking sides and joining one of the sides in a Byzantine civil war. The Ottomans fit in by intermarrying with the Byzantine dynasty, marrying princesses. The Ottomans fit in by intermarrying with the Byzantine dynasty, marrying princesses. The Ottomans fit in by making alliances. And there were even Muslims in Byzantine Constantinople. So the point is, is that East and West, Byzantine Empire, and also the area of Anatolia, what is today Turkey, were already linked in terms of alliances, also in terms of battles, also in terms of trade during this

time period. So Anatolia, as you say, there's the big sort of peninsula that we would now associate with Turkey. That was the tilt yard, right? That's the battlefield. Is it incredibly wealthy? What's going on with Anatolia? Why is it so important in this entire region? Well, it's not just Anatolia doesn't exist by itself. It's connecting streams of people, Just Anatolia doesn't exist by itself. It's connecting streams of people, ideas, technologies from east to west, moving from Central Asia, east as far as China, moving west into Europe. And the land of Anatolia is a bridge for that. So it's linking Europe.

It's linking Asia and the city of Constantinople. That's why it's so important. That's why the Ottomans wanted to conquer it, so that they could have their thumb on these trade routes and also these older empires. At what stage did the Ottomans emerge as regional hegemons, like a serious threat to that eastern empire? Well, already in the 14th century, the Ottomans are conquering Byzantine cities. They're moving further west. By the end of the 14th century, they've surrounded Constantinople. They have territories in the area we today call the Balkans, moving into the 14th century. So the Ottomans are, from the beginning, they're a European power and an Asian power.

And it's just natural that they wanted to conquer Constantinople, which was at the centre of their territory. I'd like to conquer Constantinople. But before we do, can we talk a little bit, I mean, how rags to riches is this? Like, Osman was the first identified ruler. How big was his power base when he starts to absorb neighbouring units? Well, during his reign, Osman only captured four castles. Now he owes his son Orhan from the 1320s to the 1360s, who would begin to actually conquer important Byzantine cities in Anatolia and then begin to move into European territories. was a semi-nomadic Turkic nomad and chieftain. He was a Muslim, but he surrounded himself with Christian retainers. His right-hand man was a Greek prince who for decades remained a Christian until he finally converted. So the Ottomans from the beginning incorporated Armenians, Greeks,

Turks, Mongols into their enterprise. What was it about their ideology, their style of leadership that would prove capacious enough to keep all those potentially very fractious people under one leader? Partly it was their Mongol inheritance. So the great Mongol empires were quite practical, quite tolerant. Also, it was their Islamic inheritance. And also like other Sunni Muslim powers, they tolerated Christians and Jews within their realms. And there was this practicality and this concept of tolerance that allowed them to incorporate the best elements of the people around them and to constantly improve their enterprise. By the 15th century, the mid-1400s, they are at the gates of Constantinople itself. And indeed, they capture it in 1453. This is their, I was taught as a young person, one of the great pivot points of history. How do you analyze, how do you see this passing of the torch?

It made the Ottomans into a true world empire. And this is why from the conquest, the Ottoman rulers would begin to call themselves Caesar. They literally call themselves Caesar as if they're inheriting the Roman world, the Roman past. They also called themselves Khans, which was the Mongol title. They also called themselves Sultans, which was the Islamic term for a Muslim ruler. So they're combining these different elements, Christian, pagan, Mongol, as well as Islamic, and creating something new. So how did they rise so fast? And how were they so successful? There are a couple of policies that helped them achieve this. And one was their system of creating a new elite. So the Ottomans themselves are something new. They are the leading administrators, the women in the harem, the mothers of sultans, also the leading infantry units.

They're all converts. They're converted Christians, and they're slaves. So for the first several centuries, three and a half centuries, the Ottoman system is built on slavery. It's built on bringing in Christian boys and girls, converting them, and getting them to buy into and support this dynastic undertaking. That's one of the policies that enable them to rise. I'm really struck with the Ottomans, that the traditional bigoted telling of this empire is of the other, of these Asians who threaten Christianity, Christendom, Europe. And there's a strong sense of ethnic othering, I think, in traditional telling of this story.

And yet you look at, as you say, the mothers, these people are Albanian, they're Greeks. One of the great admirals of history, Barbarossa from the 16th century is ethnically Greek. The shipbuilding talent comes from the Aegean Sea. It's a very challenging book, this, about our ideas of what it is to be European. And also, in the beginning, I say this is not a Turkish empire. People call them the Ottoman Turks,

but the Ottomans are this unique elite that are made up of different kinds of peoples. This isn't Turk versus Greek, for example. They're very much European. They're very much Asian. They're very much cosmopolitan. They're creating a new system. They're incorporating all these different people, creating something new. And this was the secret of their success. Now, if we talk about the end of the Ottoman dynasty, the empire, part of the reason for their fall will be the loss of tolerance. We will come to that, but I kind of want to talk about the sort of geographical extent maybe, because they reach Vienna, they land in Italy. There's a wonderful counterfactual here, isn't there, where the Ottomans do succeed in conquering even more of what we'd now describe as Central and Eastern Europe. Well, if you go to the island of Rhodes, it's a perfectly

maintained medieval city. And if you go there, they say, well, this is a medieval European city. Yes, it is. It's also a Ottoman ghost town, or the city of Salonika was an Ottoman town, or Sarajevo. All these places in Eastern Europe have an Ottoman imprint. The Ottomans, at the height of their power in the 16th century, are sending naval forces west to help France, and the Ottomans and the French together are launching attacks on Italy. The Ottomans are also sending weapons to Protestants in the Netherlands. They're also trying to get the Moriscos, the converted Muslims, to rebel in Spain against the Habsburgs. They're also trying to get the Moriscos, the converted Muslims, to rebel in Spain against the Habsburgs. They're also sending naval expeditions to Southeast Asia, to Indonesia. The Ottomans are conquering territory on the western coast of India.

So in the 16th century, the Ottomans are a naval power. They're a land power. They're conquering territories east and west. They're conquering territories east and west. Moving into the 17th century, they will even conquer territories in Ukraine and in southern Poland. But then this brings us to the big question, and this is the question of great importance to us here in Britain as well, because we're part of this narrative. What went wrong? In 1550, you just said the Ottomans were so dominant in all these different fields of science. And yet, within 150, 200 years, there was talk about the Ottomans being a quote-unquote

sick man. The Ottoman Empire almost needed propping up by certain European powers. What happens there? We forget about this. In the 16th century, Henry VIII is looking to Suleiman and looking up to him and admiring him. And at court, they're dressing in Ottoman fashion. The Ottomans are the envy of the world in the 16th century. Now, part of the reason for their success was their military system, which I mentioned earlier, their system of recruitment, their slave system. This will dissolve. This will fall apart. Also, I mentioned how technology and

cultural developments had moved east to west for centuries. Now, this will change and the other European dynasties will surpass the Ottomans in military and other technological developments. So there are internal changes. There's external changes. In the 18th century, there's a new enemy that the Ottomans have to face called Russia. And so we're going to see from the 18th century to the 20th century, the decrease inans move away from their system of tolerance in which there were certainly hierarchies. Christians and Jews had less legal rights than Muslims. There was slavery and so on. But this allowed for there to be peace in the empire. There weren't massacres of Christians in the empire until the 19th century when the Ottomans moved from tolerating difference to not tolerating difference. First, trying to rally all subjects behind the Sultan in a kind of ideology of Ottomanism, that we're all

Ottoman brothers, that didn't work. Because what began to happen also was the spread of nationalism and different groups within the empire that had been part of the Ottoman enterprise for five or six centuries, like the Greeks, began to think, well, actually, we want to go our own way, and we want to rule ourselves and rule our own territory. And the rising European powers, be they Britain, be they Russia, began to support these movements, and that also spelled the end of the empire. and that also spelled the end of the empire. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit, we're talking about the Ottomans.

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Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. How did it become such a byword for sort of mismanagement into the late 18th and 19th centuries? What was dysfunctional within

Ottoman governance? Well, I don't know if I would use those words, but certainly in the 19th century, when Britain and Russia are rising, they look at the Ottoman Empire, which now, unfortunately, we see the first massacres of Armenians in the late 19th century. And so then this becomes a reason for powers such as Britain and Russia to intervene further into the empire and to try to replace it. So then this also brings forces within the empire. There will be a coup and the dynasty will be sidelined in 1908. And you'll have a group of men who believe they're trying to save the empire. And these people are not members of the dynasty. They're military leaders, and they'll run the empire, and they'll make the horrible decision to enter the First World War on the side of Germany.

The Ottomans are this kind of fascinating, multi-confessional, multi-national, geographically slightly incoherent empire. A little bit like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a little bit like maybe the British Empire as well. And they just proved that they weren't up to the challenge of nationalism, that there wasn't a strong enough identity. Were they out of place in the modern world as it sort of developed? Was there ever a world in which the Ottomans could have survived? Well, it's also a matter of chance too, because so these revolutionaries came to power in 1908, and they promised equality amongst all the subject peoples of the empire. But there was a counter-revolution the next year. And this led to these coup makers to be afraid of opposition.

And then just after that, you had the Balkan Wars. And there are two Balkan Wars which are destructive. And then just after that, you have the First World War and they side with Germany, partly because they'll go against Russia. And as we know, the First World War was an absolute cataclysm for the empire, for the subject peoples of the empire,

such as the Armenians, who are subject to genocide by their own government during the First World War. So perhaps if after 1908 there'd been time for these military leaders to re-establish parliament as they did to promote democracy, perhaps there was too short of a window of time where more subject peoples could believe that the future empire was theirs as well. Perhaps they just ran out of time. How did Ottoman rule, obviously a gigantic span that you cover, but is it a case of local elites being left alone in Syria, in North Africa, in Iraq, to kind of get on with it. Was Ottoman rule quite light touch from the imperial center? Well, we have to look at different time periods. So we could think of

a particular group such as the Kurds. So the Kurds in southeastern Anatolia would face the expanding Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. And some of these Kurdish leaders threw in their lot with the Ottomans, others resisted, and they were crushed. But those that remained then were given tremendous autonomy in southeastern, what is today, southeastern Anatolia, northern Iraq. So long as they fought against the Ottoman enemies in Iran, so long as they put down troublemakers within their regions, then the central government was able to allow them this autonomy. Now, in the 19th century, when there was a centralization drive, again, the Kurds faced the choice of either being even more subsumed into the state system

or resisting it. And there was resistance, and resistance was violently put down. Some of those Kurds that remained, some of those Kurdish powers then were turned against the Ottomans' own subject groups, such as the Armenians, but they fought together at the end of empire, Kurds and Turks and other Muslims, to save the empire. So that gives you an idea of how it was for one group in one region. The successor states, what does the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in what we now call the Middle East and the deeply troubled 100 years that have followed, does it make you nostalgic? I mean, obviously not in every way, but does it make you nostalgic in some ways for this model of governance where a kind of regional super state is somehow preferable

to kind of smaller nation states that have sprung up in its place? I wouldn't say that. I mean, the Ottoman system until the 19th century was based on slavery. It was also based on an unequal system where different people had different legal rights based on their religion. That was changed. And in the middle of the 19th century, in theory, there was legal equality. There was a parliament towards the end of the Ottoman century, so in 1876, but it was closed in 1878. It was revived in 1908. So there were these brief moments of democracy and equality, but I wouldn't promote this system. There are people in Turkey who say, well, let us rule over Palestine and Jerusalem, because when we ruled over there, that area,

there was peace. Well, that's not entirely true. But I don't think anyone in any of the successor states of the Ottomans, there's about 22 states, would want the dynasty to return. I think people in all these different countries want to rule themselves in democratic ways. Now, you said your cab driver said that Turkey is the inheritor of the Ottomans, which is the inheritor of the Romans. Now, people in Turkey claim

that they're the inheritors of the Ottomans when it fits their purposes, of course. But what I would be interested in seeing is people in Greece and people in seeing is people in Greece and people in Bulgaria and people in Palestine and Israel and Egypt and these places also saying we're the inheritors of the Ottomans. Some do, but most don't. But in my book, I try to show how the Ottomans are so much a part of all these different areas. I don't want only the Turks to claim the Ottomans when so many

of the rest of us can as well. What is their greatest legacy? If other people are looking to claim that, is it architectural, religious? What does the modern world owe to the Ottomans today? That's a great question. I mean, we have to think of different points of view. So some Turks today look to the Ottomans as being this great, powerful Muslim dynasty that ruled the world and that built these incredibly beautiful mosques. They just reconverted Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. It was a museum. grateful to the Ottomans because they allowed our ancestors to flee and to take refuge in this land and to flourish as Jews again. But you could ask, perhaps some Armenians will say, well, the legacy of the Ottoman Empire is, of course, they committed genocide against us. And the

successor state, the Turkish Republic, denies it even happened. So we've faced a double genocide. So there are many different perspectives on the Ottoman legacy. For me, living in Britain, living in London, I like to think about how the Ottomans shaped European history and how they took part in the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery and the Age of Enlightenment. I like to think about a European history that includes people, I like to think about a European history that includes people, whether they're Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. I like to see a Europe that certainly moves further east than Vienna. On that last point, you talk about how they took part in the Renaissance,

and all too often the Turks are said to be the kind of the dark spur to the Renaissance by creating so much disorder in the east that sort of learning fled to the west, clutching manuscripts, scholars, to get away from the Ottomans. How do you interpret the Ottoman relationship with the Renaissance, what we call the Renaissance? Well, I think of a ruler like Mehmed II, Mehmed the Conqueror, the one who conquered Constantinople. And if you go to the V&A, the Victoria and Albert Museum here in London, and you go to the Renaissance rooms, And if you go to the V&A, the Victoria and Albert Museum here in London, and you go to the Renaissance rooms, there's his portrait. Because he had his portrait made by an Italian Renaissance painter, he also had medallions struck. The artist who struck those medallions dressed Mehmed II in the same outfit as he dressed the Byzantine emperor in his medallions. You look at the portrait, you realize this is just another Renaissance prince that was engaging in all the activities that other Renaissance princes engage in.

Amazing. Thank you very much indeed. What's your book called? The book is called The Ottomans, Khans, Caesars and Caliphs. Thank you. This is a wonderful example of rewriting history, is what historians should be doing. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. Thank you. This is a wonderful example of rewriting history. It's what historians should be doing. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. Thank you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone. you