Suleiman the Lawgiver and Ottoman Military Power

In 1300, the Ottoman Turks were one of many groups of Muslim warriors living on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire in western Anatolia. As the power of the Byzantine emperors weakened, the Ottoman gazis (warriors fighting on behalf of Islam) began to conquer nearby regions. During the 1350s, Turkish armies crossed the Dardanelles (or Hellespont), the narrow straight separating Anatolia from the Balkan Peninsula, and began to establish their power in southeast Europe. By 1400, the Ottomans controlled most of the Balkan Peninsula. The Turks’ most dramatic victory came in 1453. In the spring of that year, they broke through the massive walls surrounding Constantinople—the capital of the Byzantine Empire and the center of Orthodox Christianity—and captured the city (now known as Istanbul). It had taken only 150 years for the former frontier gazis to establish one of the most powerful empires in the world.

Ottoman power continued to expand for about another century or so following the capture of Constantinople. For much of this period, the Turkish state was led by Suleiman, the greatest of the Turkish sultans, who reigned from 1520 to 1556 and was known to his subjects as Kanuni, the “Lawgiver.” Under Suleiman’s leadership, the Ottoman system of governance reached a high level of efficiency and the Ottoman army and navy continued to be formidable fighting forces.

Ottoman strength rested, in part, on a form of slavery. Christian children in the Balkans were regularly conscripted by the Turks, a practice known to the Turks as the devshirme (collection), and taken to Constantinople, where they were trained to be palace officials, governmental administrators, or members of the elite Janissary corps in the army. This distinctive way of “recruiting” effective administrators and soldiers was already flourishing when Suleiman came to power and continued to work well for a couple of generations after his death.

The two documents that I would like you to read (you can read both of them by clicking here) provide us with clues to the reasons for the success of the Ottomans during the reign of Suleiman. In the first document, Suleiman describes his power in an inscription from a citadel built by the Turks at Bender in the northern Balkans in 1538. The second document is a series of excerpts from letters written by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire from 1554 to 1562. During Busbecq’s time as ambassador to Constantinople, there was much concern among Europeans about the military power of the Ottomans. In 1529, the Turks had surrounded Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and nearly captured it. The memory of this near-disaster, and the continuing military threat posed by the Turks, form part of the subtext of Busbecq’s letters.

When you are finished reading the documents, I would like you to reflect on and discuss the following: What does Suleiman reveal about his religious convictions in the inscription? How does Suleiman describe the extent of his power? According to Busbecq, in what ways did the Ottomans attempt to ensure the effectiveness of their army? In what ways did the Turkish army combine the use of new technologies with very old approaches to warfare? What does Busbecq observe about the openness of the Turks to borrowing from other cultures? What technologies that were important to the Europeans did the Turks choose not to borrow? Why? What is Busbecq’s reaction to devshirme? Do you detect any bias in Busbecq’s observations? Are there hints of exaggeration in Busbecq’s letters? Why might he have wanted to overplay Ottoman military strength? How did slavery in the Ottoman Empire compare with slavery in other parts of the world, for example, the Americas and Africa? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using travelers’ reports like that of Busbecq as sources of historical evidence? Your thoughts…