Empire: World History - 23. The First of the Ottomans

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

How did the Ottomans seize the Balkans? Who is their first leader? How did the fourth crusade pave the way for their rise to power? Join William and Anita as they, along with Peter Frankopan, detail the birth of the Ottoman Empire, discuss its founder, Osman I, and set the scene for 1453. To get your free two week trial for Find my past, go to www.findmypast.co.uk and sign up.   LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/xempire   Twitter: @Empirepoduk   Goalhangerpodcasts.com   Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. So this is the shiny second bonus episode, if you like, of what was going to be a series about the Ottoman Empire, but then we stretched because we thought, how can you understand the Ottoman Empire unless you understand the Byzantine Empire that

it replaced? And once again, I'm very excited to say, because you love him, obviously you do, it's our inboxes full of Francopan love. We're joined by Peter Frankapan. The great Peter Frankapan. And we were talking about Byzantium. And when we left you, the Crusades had begun and begun this era of conflict between Christianity and Islam. Lum and the Seljuk Turks were pouring into Anatolia. Where do you want to take us next to, Anita? Can I take you forward a little bit more to the Fourth Crusade of 1204? Because this, you know, we've got this impression here. When you think about the Crusades in Britain, you've got Robin of Loxley and Richard the Lionheart and they're all going to fight the good fight. And if they're done down, it's because

of treachery at home. And yet there is treachery of an epic scale in 1204 that is not really talked about. where it's sort of Christian on Christian. Can you tell us what happens here? It is talked about a lot in Greece. It's talked a lot in Croatia too. So basically by about the year 1200, you've got Crusade Fatigue. So there are too many of these expeditions out to the east. And Richard of the Lionheart, you know, very good looking himself in the mirror,

goes out on a sort of year off with King of France and Frederick Barbarossa, who promptly drowns wearing his arm, trying to cross the river, because he's underestimated, you know, schoolboy era. And these expeditions are incredibly expensive. You have to tax people to high heaven, and they don't achieve anything, apart from sort of films with Anthony Andrews and sort of, you know, an idea that somehow these all chivalrous nights, rather than they're totally incompetent and useless. It inspires a lot of English football supporters going to Qatar, it has to be said.

Well, you know, it's an amazing thing, and they're all wearing the cross of St. George, which is, you know, a knight from southern, what's now southern Turkey. You know, it's sort of amazing. these ideas got brought back. Anyway, that's for another podcast. So by the 1190s, the idea that should be yet another crusade. It sounds good on paper, but in practice, people just aren't really interested. So Saladin conquers Jerusalem in 1187. There's what's called the Third Crusades. It depends how you number them, but they're typically called the Third Crusade with the Kings of England, France, and Germany, which achieves very little huge expense. And then Richard even gets

himself locked up by the police, well, by the Austrians, the same sort of thing, on the way back, a total shambrothalized in Austria. Breathalized and yeah, exactly right. And then, so less than 10 years afterwards, there's an idea, let's go again. And a couple of chances go and hire Venice to basically shut down their entire economy for two years to build enough ships for the vast numbers of people

who are bound to show up for the crack, who then don't. And the Venetians sit there with their hands on their head going, you know, you're seriously joking, and you're going to pay us for you owe us. you promised us 85,000 silver ducats, and the Crusaders, like, we've checked our pockets, we could probably, for silver marks,

we could probably give you about a third. And the Venetians who are, you know, smart business people, like, you know, are bankers here. They don't really let you write your money off if you can't pay. So the Crusaders have another whip around. They go, we found a little bit more, but we're basically not going to eat for a while. And then we should say, even that,

you're still barely at half of what we're owed. So they say, I'll tell you, we've got one idea, which is that on your way, we've got some cities on the Dalmatian coast who have been cheeky enough to say that they don't think we're as powerful as we say we are. But if you knock them over or scare the living daylights out of them, you know, we'll give you some credit for that. So the crusaders then go to the city of Zara, which is now Zadar in Croatia, and they line up to attack. And the inhabitants start hanging sheets over the walls with a cross on saying, we're Christians, you've got the wrong, you know, your miles away from the Holy Land. you've got thousands of nights of sleepless nights. Jerusalem this way.

But they go in and they go in and sack anyway because the Venetians say, well, this is the price you pay of doing business and getting it wrong. And then that sort of escalates above and beyond. They get that the Venetians, or the fleet rather, gets messages from arrivals for the throne in Constantinople saying, if you come and help sort us out.

If I get to the throne, I'll pay you back. And so in 1203, they reach the walls of Concertynobles. Soutenople and one of the guys trying to get hold of the throne, Alexis IV, Angeloos, so the imperial dynasty and you know, the very divided time, sort of think

Brexit or think, you know, Trump, you know, lots of people claiming things one way and then the other, huge unpopularity, no one, no agreeing with each other. Eventually Alexis IV takes the throne and he says, whoops, I'm afraid, really embarrassing guys, haven't really got all the cash.

So if you could bear with me for a little bit. And the crusaders go, look, we've all leapt home. We're on our way to Jerusalem. I've got my wife. I'm like, Baldwin of Flanders, is like super, super interested in his wife, told her to go meet him in an acre, a landing port for the Holy Ant. So she's on our way there. And so the cruise has go, look, we're having to another this. And they say, we've got this easy engines to take, you know, big cities in the middle, in the near east. Anyway, let's set them against concerted opal. And so in 12.04, they eventually break it in the city, and they go, there's some version of ballistic.

It used to be thought that they went properly ballistic, ransacked everything. There are stories of prostitutes dancing on the altar in Hagia Sofayan, the Great Cathedral. You know, clearly the great treasuries are absolutely ransacked. So gold and relics and treasures are all shipped back to Europe in some epic proportions, particularly to Venice. And then the crusaders think, well, a little bit awkward, because we're not quite sure what we should do now. And they say, well, what about if one of us becomes emperor? And the sort of wonderfully named Boniface of Montperat, who's the kind of prime joker behind the promising Venetians,

how many will come, can't really swing it. So they go, well, that guy, Baldwin, he seems quite a good guy. And even if he's like, my wife is on her way to, but okay, I'll give it a shot. And so they then divide, they carve up the empire amongst themselves. The Byzantine emperor, as he was, gets pushed out to the city of Nicaea, which people will know as the home of the Nicene Creed. It's a big city in Western Asia Minor. It sets up a court there.

Another wing sets up itself in Epirus, what's now sort of northwestern Greece and Albania, in a kind of nocial empire of Epirus. And this splintering means that there's a kind of Latin core where these guys don't know what they're doing. And the best way you can show that they don't know what they're doing is that they argue, they start arguing with each other. Bonifaz says, well, I want to be the king of Thessaloniki

because that's quite a good thing to call myself. and Baldwin is not that keen on it, but they then both have to go and fight against the Bulgarians. The Bulgarians are on the move, because the Bulgarians always on the move. They've got a second empire that they've been building. They capture Baldwin in battle and then decapitate him. And they say, well, bully for that.

So for the next 50 years, the Latin sit in Constantinople. They don't bother going to Jerusalem. They run the core of the empire, but they do it incredibly badly. They eventually always happens with Europeans. They kind of lose interest. their sons don't really want to come out and join them, unless they get proper entitles and very cute wives, which are in very short supply. And eventually by 1261, the Byzantines

in Nicaea go, I'll tell you what, lads, we'll take it from here. And then we get to the sort of the next act of the Byzantine Empire. Of course, we're back in Roman hands, or as we call them, Byzantine hands. So, Peter, we've had lots of towing and pharaohs in Byzantium. Meanwhile, in Anatolia, the Seljuks who've been built. building up their kingdom very nicely, thank you, in the middle of Anatolia, have their own problems, because in 1243, the Mongols sweep in. Yeah, so the Mongols are the great empire builders, probably the greatest empire builders in history. So from the late 1100s, Chingis Khan and then his sons are able to bring, from the plains of Mongolia,

is basically the entirety, almost entirety of what's now China, right the way through Central Asia. and by 1242 they reached central Hungary, then sweep down through the Dalmatian coast, and at the same time they have a spur coming through the Middle East towards Byzantium from that direction too. So the Mongols are fantastically able and adept. The problem I think is from the Celtics is that with nomad groupings or mobile groupings, retaining sole power is quite tricky

because you need to have the right all-level authority. You don't typically, these societies don't practice. primogeniture, where the sort of chainless one, the elder son always inherits, or the very capable elder son inherits, it's through agreement. So what happens, the Celtics, or quite often with these confederations, they tend to splinter because second cousins, third cousins have their own sort of ambitions, or they feel fororted, and so they can be quite fragile. So when the Mongols come, it's not so much that they snooker the Celtics or put them out of business. It's more that it's a kind of brittle world that's looking for, I suppose, electricity looking for lightning.

And the Mongols, as they come in, the big question is, are they going to be permanent or not? But the more important thing is that for the context of the particularly the near and Middle East, is that in 1258, the Mongols sack the city of Baghdad. And according to one of the Ottoman sort of creation stories that's written about 100 years later, that is the very day that Uthman or Usman is born. And Usman is the father of the Ottoman dynasty. as I said, we know absolutely zero about he's probably born at some point in the 1250s. But what he's good at doing, and probably why his name comes from the Arabic Utman, which means wise,

is that he, like the Selchukes and like all successful politicians of all kinds, is very good at striking deals. And he's very good at offering rewards to the right kinds of people at the right kind of time. So he's able to build a small sort of emirate, I suppose we call it, or small sort of little hub into something that's much bigger, sometimes by accommodation, sometimes by conquests. But one of the things that people think about Osman and his successes quite early on is the idea that they are going to build a great empire.

And so the great dream of Osman, which is sort of foundational in the kind of stories of the Ottoman empires, is that he goes to visit the house of a very powerful figure. And he says in his dream, he dreams that a tree sprouts from his navel. and from that tree creates a world that's fully shaded. And off from that shade, you find mountains, you find streams, people making building gardens, planting orchards, setting up fountains and so on. And he then reports this to the powerful person he's been to see who says to him, oh, thank God, you're the chosen one. From you are going to be the source that grows this great empire. By the way, I've got a daughter literally in the room next door.

It would be really great if you would think about connecting with her because the two of us together, we could get stuck in. And so the autumn starts to sort of mushroom into a kind of vacuum, into a void, they build into a void where they're able to deliver rewards for an interest group. And then as that acceleration starts to happen, they become more and more powerful. So they're not, they're not conquering by having more children. It's not a kind of migration of large numbers of people. It's through very careful choosing battles that you're going to win and then go through those. I'm really, I'm fascinated by this because this sort of dream of us, Maen, so suddenly you've got a people who believe in a destiny that is, preordained. You know, there's a mysticism about it. On the other hand, you've also got the Byzantines, who also believe they are given by God. You know, they've got the mother of God protecting their great wall. They are also destined and protected by the supernatural. How are they reacting to this other prophecy by another God? You know, people of the book, Elikadab, after all, these are all people of the book. And they've got their prophecy. They've got their prophecy. How is this all working out? Well, so the Roman imperial structure isn't an expansionist evangelical empire.

I mean, there are lots of evangelicals and evangelists who head out into the steps and head out, in fact, reaching China by the 630s. We find steelys or sort of monuments that record arrival of Christian missionaries. But the Roman Empire isn't in the business of trying to expand its territory to bring out about more Christians. The protection of God is to protect them from disaster rather than to give the God-given right to be on earth and so on. So the root of the Ottomans is slightly different insofar as the idea that you are, you're going to inherit and be blessed by the good Lord.

It's slightly different. But the Romans have been in business for five, six, seven hundred years by this time. So they sort of have quite a good awareness of what their limitations are, what they're good at. And they're not sitting there around the campfire or in their imperial palace, plotting the destruction of great empires far away. They're first of all keen on stability. They've got a really smart civil service, a foreign office, who can see problems coming. They're very good at gathering information about who's who. They're very good about working how to invite them to the state visits and so on. They're very good at giving titles.

They're very good at how to make marriages so you can calm people. And they're very good to know what it is that people actually want. What people really want is improve quality of life, higher living standards and more of the good stuff, silks, gold, etc. And if you can keep on providing that, then fine. The problem is for the Roman Empire, as the Ottoman start to rise, is you have the kind of equivalent of our recent, I was going to say dear departive, certainly our departed Prime Minister Liz Truss, where we have a fiscal event in the kind of late 1200s where one smart-ass emperor decides that this is the right moment to cut taxes on the rich and to start debasing the currency to make everybody live in the happily ever after. And that suddenly creates very

disgruntled, extremely pissed off population who think, well, maybe there are other answers, and maybe the fact that we seem to be in what's lurching from one crisis to the next means that maybe this is the kind of the beginning of the end, beginning of the end. And that's, I suppose, something that we can perhaps relate to today's world too. Blimey. A fiscal, I didn't know. I I had no idea. Sorry, let me be being just astonished for a second, William. So these, the Ottomans now, we have, we have first of all the first generation, after whom the TV show is named, Erturou, and Osman is his son. Tell us about those two. Well, I think just as well watching Netflix. I mean, we don't know anything about them. I mean,

so it's all projecting backwards. Of course, they're valiant, glorious, wise, clever, you know, good with kids, with pets, etc. I think, I think, nice to granny's, accent table manners. You know, I think, I think that these are,

people who are mobile are very, they're tough, they're hardy, like the Scots. You know, no airs and graces. And, but having no airs and graces doesn't mean you're not kind of sympathetic,

doesn't mean you're not clever, but also doesn't mean you are clever. But it means that you are, you're quite grizzled and you're quite determined. And the key thing is to work out, how do you unlock rewards? I mean, So as a good friend of my Nicola DiCosmo, great scholar of Inner Asia, puts it,

is that the function of all nomadic empires is to be constantly generating rewards. You need to be bringing back more and more stuff all the time. So that means that your horizons have to be constantly moving, and the size of your targets needs to be increasing. And the Ottomans' horizons are definitely expanding at this point. They're moving westwards, they're moving into Bursa, they're moving into the coastline of Bithers. Yeah, you take what you're opportunistic. You know, you take as low-hanging fruit as you can,

which offers little risk, because if you risk everything on one single battle, then you're, then you're toast. So in 1331, Nicaea, which, you know, as I mentioned, was the kind of the second home of the Byzantine emperor. It is, it is, uh, exile from Consettinople, falls the Ottomans in 3031. And that then becomes a kind of, that's a, that's a seminal moment because Nicaea is the town, is the city that controls access to to the coasts and more or less spells the kind of the end of Roman and Christian rule in Asia Minor in the East. That then is followed in the next decade by Black Death. And when Black Death comes, you have massive depopulation across all parts of the known world,

except possibly not Poland, where we'd see very little mortality from plague. But that demographic shock then plays through at the same time as Civil War and other kickoff between who's in charge of the Byzantine Empire in Corn Setonobo. And so it's a bit like a sugar cube being dissolved. It's one thing goes from worse to worse, which is really bad if you're Byzantine. But that's great if you're on the rise as the Ottomans are. So the crossover across the Hellas, across the Dardanelles into Europe by the 1360s, so about 30 years after Nicaea falls, by the 1360s you find the Ottomans deep inside the Balkan

interior in Philippopolis modern plovtiv and Adrianople modern idyllia. And they've just gone right round Constantinople. Yeah. They've just avoided it. And gone round it, why? Because it's so fortified and because it is this place that you can't get too easily or they're not interested in there or lower hanging fruit. What is the reason to just ignore it as if it's not there? A bit of both. I mean, why bother, first of all? I mean, what is it you gain? Second, if you can, you know, round up and sack smaller targets. you're generating those rewards that I mentioned. It doesn't tie up resource and manpower.

You have no risk of failure. If you can keep on taking more assets off the emperor, you're reducing his tax that he is able to benefit from, so you weaken him further still. So the throttling effect is quite a successful one. And it's not necessary that you need to knock out every single target you see. Again, I think it's how we think about modern warfare, that you send the army as a kind of line.

But leaving pockets, you know, those, could last for a very long time. But I mean, as you say, Anita, the city of God's Antenotapal has some of the most epic fortifications of any site in the world. The walls of Theodosius, in particular, and then re-fortified by another Comedian emperor in the 12th century to keep away the Second Crusaders. It's not quite an impregnable target, despite what happens in 1204, but you need to have a lot of manpower and you'd have a lot of the right kind of manpower. So I know in your next podcast you're going to talk about the fall of the city itself, But you need to have the right kind of people with the right kind of equipment.

And the Ottomans can put lots of men into the field. But siege warfare is a different thing to winning battles over land. So by the 1360s, decisions been made to just move northwards. By 1389 in the Battle of Kosovo, almost the entirety of the Serbian aristocracy is knocked out and killed. But four years later, basically what's now Bulgaria falls under Ottoman control. and often that's done through battles, but often it's done through accommodation, which is that we'll take over,

we'll maybe keep some of your people in place, we'll recognise their titles, maybe even give you tax breaks, but, you know, you now, the person who you're sending your checks to every month is going to be me, not that guy sitting in Constantinople. So with the Ottomans now becoming

the dominant power in the Balkans, I think it's time to take a break. Welcome back to Empire. So we're in the late 14th century, and am I right in thinking that we now have vampires in this story. You are. We needed more texture and excitement.

We now have vampires. We didn't have enough vampires in the first episode of series two. So we are going to start with the greatest vampire of the more because one of the people who turn up at the Ottoman capital of Borza at this point is none other than the future Dracula, Vlad the Impelor, who comes in the 1420s to Bursa. Well, I mean, we've talked about taxation. this is blood-sucking of an entirely different time. So, yes, what is the role of lad, the impaler?

Because he's quite young here. Lad, the Impaler. How does he fit in? I think most people don't want to be, you know, most people want what they know. The arrival of a massive juggernaut that's generating power and trying to redistribute everybody's land is not surprisingly not particularly welcomed. And so you've got a choice which is you stand and fight. and you end up being massacred like in Kosovo,

which is the kind of the single biggest moment in Serbian history today. I mean, that's why when the breakup Yugoslavia happened, that's why Kosovo has been such an important part of the last 30 to 40 years because of the historical legacies of huge setbacks and the loss of heartlands and so on. But so Vlad is quite effective at leading resistance in Valacia, so what's now broadly Western Romania against Ottoman incursions. But, you know, your luck always runs out at a certain,

point, either because you know, you're overwhelmed by numbers or you're sold by members of your own side, or you just have a bad day at the office. And they said, Vlad achieves a certain notoriety here for the way in which he tries to use extreme violence as a way of stopping further incursions and to try to broker a peace agreement. Extreme violence, in this case, being mass impalement of the Turks. Well, you know, I think, you know, the risk of getting all the people ringing into complaint, I think that violence and military violence is used in a different way in the pre-modern world. We will taught at school that it's on a duty to die of your country, line up by machine guns and get moaned down by the First World War.

But I can promise you, for most of human history, no one went into battle thinking this was a great way to die. Even on Crusades, you know, people who wrote about it, said, well, they've gone straight to heaven. But I can promise you lots of people who did that weren't as convinced, perhaps, as we might be. But I think that in Vlad's case, and it's a sense that the world is changing very dramatically, against your beliefs, Christianity, against your way of life, this new one that's emerging from the steps and via what the rump of the Byzantine Empire except for Constantinople, suddenly presents quite existential threats about, about, you know, what does God intend for us? Is it the apocalypse? Are we going to have a second coming? And shouldn't we fight to try to

preserve ourselves while we still can stay safe? But, you know, that all goes wrong. I mean, before Vlad, in 1396, an attempt of a crusade gets going. And they're butchered at Nicopolis, in the Balkans. Necopolis, the Hungarian armies wiped out. Yeah. So at that point, it looks, you know, the only way the Ottomans get stopped is with a big push by the West to group together,

stand up to a big enemy and coordinate. And I suppose if one was being cynical, nobody really bothered. And perhaps even today, just by appearance of the contrary, Ukraine, you know, we're very good at sending messages support and a bit of, you know, weaponry, but actually leading in is a different story.

So in 1399, the emperor Manuel II, Palliologus, Pallelago is a sort of late Byzantadiracy, thinks, right, well, to hell with this, I can't just send out letters asking for help. I'm going to go and see people all over Europe and try and convince them to send what we need to hold onto the Great, to Sikon to Noble to push back the Muslim, Ottoman infidels

who are going to tear down not just our world, but trust us after you. They're going to come from Vienna. they're going to come from Milan, they're going to come north. He goes to England. He comes for Christmas in 1400 at Eltham Palace. You've got to be patient, Will you? I'd say, yes, but first, before he comes to our blessed aisles,

he goes to places that are important too. Where else? Where else could be as important as Eltham? Tell me one place that's better than England. He goes to Milan, he goes to see the King of France. And as you write this in preempt, yeah, he comes to England, arrives in 1400. He hangs out with Henry IV,

goes jousting with him and sort of English commentators are sort of they get slightly sort of peeved, they think that the Byzantines look down on them because they think the English have got terrible

fashion sense. How could that be true? How could that be true? Impossible. But one of the, one of the most, I don't know whether it's moving, but one of the most telling comments

is an English contemporary account who says, this magnificent man with his retinue and amazing kit and, you know, extraordinary dynasty and legacy going back, whatever,

is reduced to having to come round the cities of the countries of Europe begging for help. And as night follows day, over the course of the next 30, 40 years, as things become worse and worse and worse, no one sends help, no one sends support, no one sends money, the sag eventually as we come towards the gallops towards 1453, it's this great Christian city that's sort of left to hang out to dry. The achievements of Justinian, the achievements of the great Macedonians, nice to keep on the focus, they're all condemned to the dust. and in fact taking us in a circle to where we started,

that's why later historians, Gibbon and onwards, and before and afterwards, talk about the Byzantile empire in catastrophic terms, because from their point of view, the Byzanty's the great losers in history, because they're the ones who surrendered a concert to him, or gave it up. In fact, the last emperor has killed on his way out,

trying to defend the city's last scene charging at the Ottoman lines. But I think the idea that Rome came to an end, you know, a thousand years earlier, is much more convenient for Western historians because they think that that's the legacy we really want to claim. Commodus and Russell Crow and Gladiator and Augustus, not these guys who become Christian

and therefore adulterate. They're sort of watering down what it means to be Roman, to be brave. Because they figured the only reason why the fact is that's out of tempera must have fallen is because these guys were overcomplicated and too busy praying rather than the nitty-gritty-a-fighting. But that's absolutely not the case at all. I mean, just before we actually get to that sort of final climax, if just circling back to 1402,

where, you know, the Zelensky figure is going around just begging for help and not getting it. And there's, you know, there are those wonderful descriptions of him and his retinue and white robes looking like a choir of angels appearing and saying, help us, please help us, as if they're their heavenly host. I mean, that Henry the Fourth meeting, there's a beautiful description of them looking divine and yet completely astonishingly beggaredly in front of a court that is not nearly as good as them. You know, so all of that is going on. So you've got, you're sort of creeping up to 1402, and they are feeling so much the pressure. So just as it just seems as if everything is going to implode, this tense nervous headache is turning into a migraine appears on the horizon. Timor, the analgesic for all kinds of terrible headaches.

Now, tell us about Timor and tell us why he was so important. He's the ibuprofen of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the great success point of view. So he's the sort of the constructor of the great success estates of the built by the Chingis Khan and the Chingassids. Timor is the kind of the probably equal level of empire builder to the great Chingers Khan himself. And pressure from the east is obviously very good news if you're Byzantine because you want as much, you want your opponent to your new or competitor to be as distraction as exposed as possible. And in 1402, there's a battle at anchorer where Timor and his men absolutely give a,

proper thumping to the Ottomans. And that opens opportunities. It probably buys time. 150,000 in Timor's army, elephant spewing Greek fire. And the Sultan bears it ends up in a cage. Yeah, the cage, I believe, a Greek fire, that's fine. That's just kind of the type of napfer that the Greeks have worked out how to use this kind of projectiles. And the numbers, I think, are all, you know, take it to take it with a pinch of salt. But I mean, clearly it's a substantial army. and what Timor was interested in doing is making the Ottomans who are a big target

submit to him. You know, that's what you want. You don't necessarily need to conquer the lands, but you need to know that you're the boss and that the Ottomans are going to be in your pocket. Take the knee. Yeah, and pretty much after 402, immediately afterwards, Timor thinks, right, job done in the West,

these guys are a bunch of jokers, that are not a real threat. Now's my time to work, to turn Eastwoods in towards China into what's then the Ming dynasty. and in fact then dies in 1405, so without quite completing his dreams, that pressure that comes onto the Ottomans from the eastern side is quite helpful for the Byzantines as the Romans

in concert and open, insofar as it gives opportunities, potentially including alliances with Timor directly. And Timor, after all, it's not coincidences, he ends up being written about by people like Shakespeare. He becomes considered here in the West, a kind of salvation figure that will save us from the great perils. For those who haven't joined those particular dogs,

that's Tamerlane the Great. Not one of his greatest plays, that is, that is Timor. That is, yeah, all about that man. It's not one of his greatest place. But on the other hand, I was quite surprised that. I was in Cambridge the other day,

came from the train station. There's the Tamerlane Hotel next to the, next to the train station. And I'm sort of quite pleased by that in a way. Yeah, you can check in, but you can never leave. That's it.

Central Asian style. That's it. The Genghis Khan Hotel. Don't go there. Don't go there, Bina. To smash the glass. Stick to Oxford. So, you know,

I think that reshuffling of the decks in other parts of the world, we forget how interconnected these worlds all are. And, you know, again, going back to my Byzantan, my field of vision sitting in contact with Nepal in the periods I particularly work on, you know, does really include sources from Iceland, from Portugal and Spain, from North Africa, from sub-Saharan Africa, right the way through the Himalayas, into South Asia and even into China now. You know, we're finding lots of artefacts made in the Byzantir world, lots of exchange.

So there's kind of globalised connections. And of course, up to Scandinavia and down into Ethiopia and, in fact, even further south. So these kind of ways in which the jigsaw is constantly moving means that, you know, you're never quite a master of your destiny. What the Byzantans do very well, and in fact what Timur does quite well, what the Morgals do quite well, is to be constantly balancing different powers. You know, I spend a long time in Central Asia today. And there, you know, in a neighborhood where you've got Russia in the north, China and the east,

India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, to the south, Iran. You know, you're in quite a complicated neighbourhood. And that requires you to be exactly the same thing that the Byzantines did, which is to gather information, to be multilingual, to be highly adaptable, to be able to measure threats and risks carefully. And, you know, I suppose the starting point with the Byzantines is, you know, when they are lucky and they ran out of steam in 1453 eventually, or maybe they could have even made it through that if it wasn't for a particular set of circumstances that I think you'll talk about in the next episode. Is it possible that in fact, Constantinople had hung on, and perhaps

things could have turned out differently. A bit like the Ottomans very, very nearly unlocked the gates of Vienna twice, in fact. And if that had happened, maybe things would have looked slightly different. So, in fact, in a new book that I've just finished, the way in which the Ottomans moved into Europe and put Vienna under pressure was hugely influential in what it did for the Reformation, hugely influential in the spread of Martin Luther's ideas, and hugely influential in stopping military conflict between European powers. So these kind of jigsaw pieces that are reacting to each other are really important and fascinating to be looking at and studying. So just before we leave this, just let's have a vision of the world in 1450.

What's going on in Byzantium? What's going on with the Ottoman Turks? We last saw the poor Beers-It, the Sultan Beers-it, in a cage captured by Timor after the Battle of Ankara, banging his head against the bars of his cage, a captive. He can't even stand up. How do we go from there to imminent Ottoman capture of Constantinople? Well, you know, every film needs a Luke Skywalker. You know, every clash of empires needs their hero to enter from stage left.

And just before 1450 in the Ottoman world, it's Mehmed who becomes known as the conqueror. Who's a kid? He's what, 19 when he comes to power. Yeah, but Michael O'Ur, who's early 18 when he scored that goal against the Argentina, the World Cup in 1998. And that's exactly the same. Yes, you're right. No, you're right. Of course you're right. Look, ages something slightly different. I mean, it's interesting with Mechhfad. I mean, historians were very reluctant to talk about sort of the great man or great women's school of history, you know, it's on the shoulders of one person for very obvious reasons. But the world that Mechhavit finds itself at the top of as a young, ambitious, clever, sophisticated,

well-educated young man is one where he has been trained to how to think about other people's strategic weaknesses and what his strengths are. And you know, you can know yourself quite well if you've had the right kind of upbringing. But clearly the institutions that he's sitting on top of are highly invested behind that kind of leadership for it to work. So the military structure, the economy, the religious authorities, there's a full armed death star. I know that's mixing my Luke Skywalker's with the goodies, the baddies. But, you know, the Ottomans are all ready to go. But they're in search of a, they're in search of a inspirational, brilliant leader. And he is the right man at the right time for the right job.

I mean, as I said, would it have mattered if they just carried on bypassing Constantinople for decades, centuries? It couldn't have been a free port, free city. I mean, the truth is that the gains that were offered by Concentadopon by this time are pretty modest. It's economically shriveled, a much lower population than in its peak. It's no longer an important trade hub as it once was. It's gone from, what, a million in the 12th century to about 50,000.

Well, I'd probably have it a half a million, probably half that size in the 12th century, and I'd probably have it, yeah, about 50,000, I suppose. But what that doesn't tell you is that what has also happened in that period is that more trade has started to come up through the Red Sea and to reach Europe through different means. The 1450s are a hugely significant moment in Iberian exploration of the coasts of Africa that opens up gold, opens up new goods, new products, and sets a scene for slavery that then becomes institutional and transatlantic and mass million. So I think that that world of Constantinople is a shadow, but only a shadow of the past in the same way that, you know, London isn't an imperial capital as it once was, but that there's no shame in that.

But Mechmed is the key part in working out how to finally solve the problem of taking control of Consentanyahu, which is symbolically hugely significant that the great city of Rome finally falls and to Mechmeh himself. Well, I mean, you have, if Mehmet is the key, Constantinople is the lock, you have absolutely. beautifully teed us up for the next episode. Peter Frankopan, that was A Tour de Force, and we are so very grateful, really, so grateful. And thank you very much. And when the new book comes out, we've got dibs on you. Peter, thank you so, so much. Thanks having me, guys. Well, that is quite brilliant. And unfortunately, that's all we have time for today on the Empire Pod. So what have these very lovely people got to look forward to next week, Willie? It's one of the great stories of history. It's the moment that the Ottomans capture Constantinople,

and as I say, it's also my favourite history worth. Why did you blow the ending again? It is the one where the butler did it. It's the one where they all died at the end. It's the one. It was the lead pipe. The children got away with it because, you know, so you do it every time.

Anyway, yes. So we will see you then. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And it's goodbye from me. William Turimple. Thank you.