| Post-Islamic Wars The Islamic Revolution occurred in the first half of the 7th Century AD Within the span of a generation it overran the Middle East, liberating it from a millenium-long foreign occupation. However, if one looks at the events after the liberation from foreign rule, they proved to be disappointing. Although the area remained free from foreign rule, apart from the flowering of science in the first 3 centuries of Islamic rule, the area started to show the first signs of those illnesses which will afflict it in the future. The direct Arab rule over the Caliphate lasted 24 years, from the ascent of the first Caliph after the Prophet until the last of the Arab Caliphs, the fourth in line, was assassinated. After this the Caliphate was transferred to Damascus and from there to Baghdad, which was already in the Persian sphere of influence. Within two centuries of the Islamic Revolution the unity of the Caliphate sundered. The Abbasid regime owed its rise and very existence to Persian rather than to Arab arms. The Arabian element lost its military as well as its political predominance. Of the Arab role in Islam there remained the common religion and language. There remained also the restrictions that the Caliphate should belong to someone from the Quraish clan, that of the Prophet, but when there were two or more competing Caliphates, this stipulation was meaningless and easily overcome. Even when the Caliphate was in Istanbul, the fiction of origin was maintained. After the decline of the Abbassids, the central rule of the Caliphate was completely undermined. There was the shadow Caliph in Baghdad, another in Cordoba, in a Caliphate established by one of the Umayyads who escaped the Abbassid slaughter of the House of Umayyad, in Damascus, and yet another in Egypt, that of the Fatimids. The Caliphate of the Fatimids was established in Tunisia. Soon after, they moved to Egypt, where they reigned for about 200 years. The Fatimids were Shiites, the result probably of the never-ending Persian manipulation in Egypt. It was the last occurrence of either direct or indirect Persian rule in Egypt. Nothing has remained of the Shia in Egypt, but there are plenty in former Fatimid territories in Western Asia. There are Shiites in Lebanon, and various sects connected with them, like the Alawis, Druses, Ismailis and others in adjacemt areas. So, in the 10 - 11th Centuries AD there were three Caliphates in Islam, that of Spain, of Egypt and of Baghdad. It was somewhat like Christendom with its Popes and Antipopes in Avignon in the 14th Century. To confuse the situation even more, a Turkish tribe, the Seljuk, which accepted Islam, made its appearance in the Middle East, in the beginning as mercenaries and then military governors of most Eastern cities, i.e. they became the ultimate holders of power. Their appearance was lucky for Islam, as the Seljuk succeeded in defeating the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 AD, when the Byzantines were already advancing towards Damascus and Baghdad.1 Islamic civilization was lucky at that time. Europe was just as confused, and in a constant state of war. However, in the tenth and eleventh centuries there was a resurgence both in Western Europe as well as Byzantium. That was the time when the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium threatened Islam and only the timely appearance of the Seljuk saved Islam from Byzantium. So Islam was in confusion. The West, however, had passed its nadir after the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire into primitive barbarian states. By the ninth-tenth centuries AD the West was ready to continue the expansion which had been interrupted by the rise of Islam. There were many signs of Western recovery: Growing population No plagues Improved agriculture Better cultural life Less external wars Better internal security . The last point was all-important, as without it nobody would have assented to leave family and property and embark on a Crusade. The Treuga Dei - the Truce of God, one of the major achievements of the medieval Church, which prohibited private wars under threat of excommunication, was one of the most important factors in the Crusades. There was another factor in the renewal of the West that was the creation of the feudal system. The feudal system allowed the creation of a heavily armed and armored cavalry, a defense force based territorially. The concept and equipment was borrowed from the Iranians, who used this type of cavalry, the cataphracts against the Romans and Byzantines. 2 This type of cavalry could stand up to light cavalry units, which was the greatest danger to Europe at that time, (like the Hungarians in the 10th Century, the Seljuk in the eleventh and the Mongols in the thirteenth). It was not Western Europe alone that regained its self-confidence. So did Byzantium, despite the defeat at Manzikert and the official schism with the Latin church. In the 10th Century AD Byzantium had recovered Crete from the Muslims so together with Rhodes and Cyprus, it became the key of Byzantine naval supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean, as Sicily and Malta were in the central Mediterranean.3 The Christian powers recovered and were poised on the threshold of expansion. Reconquista and Crusades The newly acquired self-confidence of Europe renewed the outward oriented expansion. There were a number of directions in which the expansion was directed. Two were directed at Islam, the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades in Palestine and the Levant. There were others too. The German 'Drang nach Osten' - 'Drive to the East' started then , and so did the expansion of Russia, which eventually reached the Pacific. These all were the new 'frontiers' of Christendom fueled by demographic forces, economic power and religious conviction. The two frontier wars of Christendom, from the point of view of this study, were the Reconquista in Spain and the Crusades to recapture the Holy Land. One of the wars was a resounding success, the second a dismal failure. The first three centuries after the conquest of Spain by the advancing Islamic army were the heyday of Islamic civilization in Spain. The remaining Christian states were huddled against the Pyrenees and the unfriendly northwestern corner of the peninsula. However, the demise of the Umayyad Caliphate in 1031 AD4 was the signal for the petty Spanish states, Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon and Portugal to start the process of moving south. Within about 250 years, the whole of the peninsula, apart from the mountainous kingdom of Granada, was in Christian hands. The decisive battle was in 1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa. There were many reasons for the unmitigated success of the Reconquista. 1. The Reconquista was not religious in origin. The small Christian states in the north wanted revenge and their country back. The Reconquista turned into a religious enterprise with the start of the Crusades in the East. There was a papal dispensation for Spaniards, or indeed for every European, to fight in Spain, instead of traveling to the East. The Spaniards took advantage of the dispensation, but others too preferred to fight nearer home than in the East. 2. The Muslims of Spain were isolated. They received assistance from North Africa, but they were not sure whether the rule of the Berbers from North Africa was preferable to that of the Christians from the North. The main population centers in the east were far away. If Islam had been better organized, it might have come to their assistance, but in their time of need, neither the Seljuk nor the Mamelukes, nor the petty Muslim states in Central Asia had any inclination to come to their help. 3. The decisive factor in the Spanish success in the Reconquista was the policy of settlements. It was an official policy, called 'repobulacion'. It meant that behind the advancing armies there were always Spanish settlers, who took the land and built villages and towns. In their repopulation the Spaniards had a lucky factor. Since the Islamic conquest 4 - 500 years had elapsed. The Muslims had changed everything in the south. They distributed the land to their own peoples. The Visigothic families who owned those lands before the Islamic conquest had disappeared long ago. There were no claims by previously displaced Visigothic families for the return of estates. So the settlers were given land that was unencumbered, and this policy attracted further settlers. The process of settlement ensured that the Christians did not only reconquer the south of Spain; it became Spanish. This policy led eventually to the expulsion of the Moriscos and the Jews from Spain, which was, indeed, the final step on the road taken in the 11th Century. 4. There was another factor which greatly helped the Reconquista. Northern Spain had a humid-zone economy, i.e. agriculture watered by rain. The southern part of the peninsula had a terrain and agriculture that was much nearer to that of North Africa than the north of Spain. That was the reason why both the Carthaginians and the Muslims of North Africa could easily overrun the south, as the people there had more kinship to Africa than to the north of the peninsula. When the Spaniards reconquered the south, they were perfectly aware of the differences. They found a novel and creative solution. Instead of continuing the previous way of agriculture, which was based upon irrigation, they turned the whole area into grazing fields and the new fortified rural towns were centers of huge sheep flocks. This was the Mesta. In order to make the territory not only occupied but Spanish, the authorities repopulated the area with Spanish settlers from the north and changed the economic structure of the territories to prevent it falling again into the hands of the enemy. These policies accompanied the Spaniards to the Americas as well, and the fortified rural towns and the ranches of the Mesta are still found from Argentina to the SouthWest of the U.S.A.5 The Crusades were similar to the Reconquista in that that they too had a secular origin and only later received religious blessing. The Crusades originated with the Normans, who burst onto the European scene from the 9th Century onward and left their indelible mark on European history. It is an interesting subject, undoubtedly connected to the south-north advance of climatic change, that in the First Millennium AD there were wave after wave of northern tribes issuing out of Scandinavia and Northern Germany to shape European civilization. The first wave consisted of Anglo-Saxons, Goths, Burgundians, Vandals and others. In the second wave were the Danes in Normandy and England, the Norwegians in Ireland and Iceland, and the Swedes in Russia. It is one of the proofs of the debilitating effects of agriculture that exactly those primitive tribes which were the last to receive agriculture in Europe, were those which provided the future ruling elite of most European states at that time. Probably, the last of the historical roles of the Normans were the Crusades. There were a number of minor Norman barons in Normandy who were itching to put their mark on history, and get rich in the process. Their overlord, William, Duke of Normandy, the future conqueror of England, kept them under very tight rein, so they left for more promising territories where they could attempt to make their own conquest without the tutelage of Duke William. They reached Southern Italy, where they were employed by all and sundry as mercenaries. They worked for Lombard states, Byzantine cities and Italian city states. Eventually, one of them, Robert Guiscard reconquered Sicily from the Muslims. His reward was to be named Duke of Sicily by the Pope. However, the Normans were not choosy in their ambitions. Soon after Sicily, they took Bari, which was a Byzantine possession, crossed the Adriatic and had plans to take Durazo in Albania and had divers designs on the Greek mainland.6 As an interesting curiosity from those times, the Normans had a private war going with the Anglo-Saxon bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperor. The latter were all refugees from the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, so they refought that war in southern Italy. The Normans won again. They were virtually invincible at that time. According to Gibbon, when the Normans engaged the Arabs at Syracuse, there were 500 Norman knights against 60,000 Arabs.7 It might be an exaggeration but undoubtedly the Normans were well-honed fighting machines. The Byzantines had to confront two enemies at the same time. One enemy was the Seljuk Turks, who defeated them at Manzikert, and the second the Norman predators It seems that the idea of the Crusades originated with Alexius Commenus , the Byzantine Emperor. He thought rightly that the Crusades could at least draw off the Seljuks and channel the energies of the Normans to Palestine, where they might probably cause less damage to Byzantium than in Albania and Greece. The Crusades started as political expansion in search of glory and booty. The feudal barons of northern France led them. This was the beginning. The religious enthusiasm came later. In the beginning, the Crusaders were lucky. The Fatimids and Seljuks were at war with one another, enabling the Crusaders to reach Jerusalem , which was duly occupied, the occupation accompanying a dreadful massacre of Muslims and Jews. For good measure, many local Christians perished too, as the Crusaders could not differentiate them from the rest.8 The Crusaders set up a model feudal kingdom, just as they would do in northern Europe. Their kingdom lasted about 200 years. However, they had no chance of holding on to their kingdom. It was a symptom of Muslim weakness that they lasted those 200 years. The Crusades were a failure, while the Reconquista was a success. What were the causes of the failure? They were the same causes that made the Reconquista a success: people. In Spain there were people to occupy every newly occupied slice of territory, in the Holy Land there were none, apart from the Norman knights and Italian merchants. The Norman knights had even left their families in Europe. The leaders of the first Crusade were mostly Norman knights from France, who wanted to conquer new territories to set up their feudal state, just like they had back in Normandy. They conquered and set up the state. When they left for the Holy Land in 1096, they were accompanied by thousands of peasants, with their wives, children and heavily laden carts. If those peasants had reached the Holy Land, they probably would do what the Spaniards did in the newly occupied Spanish territories. The People's Crusade as it was called was a failure. They did not reach the Holy Land, they perished on the way or ended up in some Middle Eastern slavepen 9 . The official crusade did next to nothing to rescue the peasants. The knights and the barons paid the price later at the Horns of Hattin. The Normans wanted to recreate in the Orient the same social and political conditions that they had at home, and to which they were accustomed in northern Europe. However, they missed the underlying principle of feudalism. The lack of understanding brought failure to their conquests in the Orient, but also in Sicily, Italy and Greece. They should have understood the basic principles, and acted accordingly, as the Spaniards seemed to have understood how to resolve their problem. Feudalism is not a socio-economic system with a military side. It is the exact opposite. Feudalism was a military organization having a socio-economic system to support it. It was created to maintain and equip military units of heavily armed and armored cavalry. The heavily armored cavalry was a Persian military innovation, designed to keep at bay the horse-riding nomads from the Eurasian steppes. They did a magnificent job. The Europeans had the same problem with the Eurasian nomads as the Iranians did, so they also adopted the system. Armored heavy cavalry and a string of fortified castles were sufficient to keep the marauding Eurasian nomads at bay. This combination worked efficiently against Avars, Bulgarians and Hungarians. It was less successful against the Mongols, who had siege equipment taken from the Chinese and the Arabs. A heavily armored knight was the equivalent of a modern tank. There was no contemporary weapon that could stop it, other than another heavily armored knight. However, an armored knight was a very expensive weapon. He had to have special horses and auxiliary services, exactly like armored vehicles in modern armies. It is estimated that every knight needed 10 - 12 people to service him and his horse. In addition, the heavy cavalry horses had to be specially bred and trained. The same went for the knights. When a Norman knight reached the battlefield with his trained horse, his own fighting expertise and special weaponry, with his assistants and sergeants, he represented a heavy investment that somehow had to be paid for. There were tournaments with attractive prizes, but they were possibly only personal bonuses. They did not cover the basic costs. In the unsettled times after the destruction of the Western Roman Empire, landed estates were handed over to aristocrats or other important people, who had to train and supply a number of armored knights and supporting personnel in return. The income from the estate paid for all that. The system had an advantage that there were no tax-collecting costs, and a disadvantage that independent and distant units did not always do what was expected from them. When the Spaniards conquered the south, they realized that because of the different climatic conditions, the manor-based socio-economic system of feudalism couldn't be transferred directly, so they initiated the Mesta. That, in addition to creating a new economic setup, created a social revolution too. Under feudalism, owning and riding a horse was the privilege of chivalry. In the Mesta, because of the great distances and the nature of the work, the shepherds had to have horses too. The ethos of the American West was born at that time, just as the ethos of Don Quixote reflected the reaction of the minor Spanish nobles, the hidalgos, to the social innovation. It is interesting to note that Don Quixote rode a horse while Sancho Panza rode a mule. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem had a landed aristocracy and not much else. They worked the estates using local Muslim or Christian peasants. These might have worked the land efficiently, they were used to the climate, but when it came to wars, of which there were plenty, they were no replacement for European peasants. Feudalism was a closed system where everybody, including the peasants had duties to perform. The European peasants knew that ultimately the knights stood between them and the horse-nomads of the steppe, so they did their part. When the European peasantry came to the conclusion that the knights had outlived their usefulness, they showed their displeasure with longbows at Crecy and Agincourt. It is true that the longbowmen were English yeomen and the knights were French, but the lesson was unmistakable. After the Hundred Years War, full body armor, an essential part of the knights' equipment, became a ceremonial dress. The local peasants in the East had no traditions of assisting heavy cavalry in battle conditions, so they were useless. The result was that the Crusaders had fewer and fewer soldiers and the Islamic armies more and more. In the end, the imbalance led to the Horns of Hattin which put an effective end to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The reason was not lack of fighting ability or religious enthusiasm, but lack of settlers. If the People's Crusade would have reached the Holy Land and others would have followed, the result might have been different. There were eight Crusades, seven of them having done nothing apart from postponing the inevitable. There were also international peace conferences, treaties, diplomatic relations and commercial contacts. All they did was to raise hope where there was none. After each war, peace treaty and international conference, the territory of the Latin Kingdom shrank until it became an enclave around Acre to be nipped off in due course by the Mameluks of Egypt. The international conferences led by Richard the Lionheart and later by Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen proved to be utterly useless. It was proven once again that only hard facts on the ground can influence events and not flowery speeches and make-believe agreements. The Reconquista and the Crusades were not isolated incidents. At about the same time, there were at least two more frontiers in Europe, with advancement along the frontiers. One of them was the German advance toward the east, and the second a Russian advance toward the north and east. The German frontier advance was a failure. It brought German settlers to Hungary, Transylvania, Poland and the Baltic, but never enough to create a permanent and continuous territory. Despite the efforts of the Teutonic Knights, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and even the Hanseatic League, they all failed to attract enough people to fill the territories. Only mass peasant colonization could have transformed the isolated German urban outposts to solidly based genuine frontiers. The second was the Russian frontier. It had withdrawn from the south because of pressure by the Polovtsi and the Mongols, but at the same time it had expanded considerably to the north and the east, where the local Finnish tribes were either assimilated or replaced by Russian settlers. This was the beginning of the drive which brought Russia eventually to the Pacific. The late Middle Ages had four large-scale extensions of Europe's frontiers. Two of them , the Reconquista and the Muscovite expansion were successful, the two others, the Crusades and the German drive to the East, were failures. The sole element, which caused the success or failure, was the settlement of homogeneous peoples in the new territories, or the lack of settlement. Having had it, led to success. Not having it led to failure. Help from the Steppes North of the Caucasus Mountains, from the Black Sea to the east of the Aral Sea, were the homelands of the Eurasian horse-nomads. Since very early days there were periodic eruptions from their homeland into one of the countries bordering the northern steppes. As that steppe was for the nomads like the sea for pirates, they could attack any of the countries bordering that "sea". The names of the erupting tribes might have been different on each occasion. So the Hsiu-nu were repulsed by the Chinese, the Huns invaded India, Iran and Western Europe, then came the Avars, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Seljuks, the Mongols and finally the Ottomans. They might have been different tribes or the same tribe under the name of the leader at the time of the raid. The names are not really important for our purposes (whatever contemporary local nationalism has to say). Their purpose was always identical. Like the Vikings, who raided the north shore of the European continent looking for booty and land to rule and settle, the Eurasian horse-nomads did exactly the same. They raided the west and south for booty, and for lands to rule and settle. In the unsettled times of the first millennium AD both Europe and the Middle East were open to the raiding tribes. In the second millennium AD, western Europe was strong enough to stop them, as for example, the German-Polish knights succeeded to stop the Mongols at Liegnitz in 1241 AD, albeit at heavy cost. The irruption of the northern nomads into the Islamic world came in two waves. Both waves arrived as mercenaries, eventually seizing power for themselves. Both of them eventually became very religious and now saw their task as being the vanguard of the Islamic world. The first wave was that of the Seljuks, who arrived as a mercenary band named after their leader, growing into a tribe and from that into a people. They entered the Islamic world in the first half of the 11th Century. They advanced so fast, that by 1055 AD they already ruled Persia and their ruler was named the Sultan of Bagdad . Eventually they conquered Syria and Palestine from the Fatimids. As the actual rulers of most of the Middle East, they defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 AD Until the middle of the 13th Century AD, when they were defeated by the Mongols, the Seljuks ruled Asia Minor as the Sultanate of Rum, with its capital at Konya (Greek Ikonia). They did not leave much of a mark on history. They were good fighters, but not much else. Wisely, they left all administrative matters to their Persian viziers. Probably their sole contribution to future history was their adoption of an early Babylonian and Hittite symbol as their own. It was the double-headed eagle, which eventually passed to Byzantium, and from there to Austria, Russia and Prussia,10 The second of the Turkish tribes who irrupted from the north were much more substantial than their Seljuk cousins, whose remnants they absorbed and whose kingdom they superseded. They were the Ottoman Turks, named after their eponymous founder, Othman. They were those who posed the greatest danger to Europe since the Islamic Revolution. This is how they looked to Europe as reported by Busbecq, the Imperial ambassador to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent.11 The Ottomans were different from the Seljuks. They did have a sense of statecraft and in addition were lucky. They had two pieces of incredible luck. The first was that in the ruling family, in about 300 years, they had ten able, energetic, just, intelligent and cruel rulers. There were not many ruling families who could boast of such a succession of able rulers. The second was that the elder son of Othman, the founder of the dynasty, Ala el-Din was a theoretician and a thinker, who left the throne to his younger brother, Orkhan, while he occupied himself to design an excellent military and administrative system. This fact, in a period when the accepted practice was for the new Sultan to send executioners to his younger brothers, was truly extraordinary. Ala ed-Din's ideas served the Ottoman empire excellently, until the Ottomans advanced and conquered new lands. Once that advance had stopped, the system proved faulty, and that was the undoing of the Ottomans. The system he created was organized around three principles, the military, the faith and the ruler, all three acting in concert. The military principles of the Ottomans might be summarized as follows : First, by comparison with its feudal European rivals, the early Ottoman state and its armies were tightly organized and centrally controlled. Second, Turkish armies were constantly reinforced by new waves of Turkish warriors from Central Asia, the 'ghazi' , who were motivated equally by religious fervor and the prospect of spoils. Third, the Turkish army, at least while it advanced, was attractive to its subjects, both Muslims and Christians, so the army had no need to protect its back against possible revolts.12 Fourth, there was a standing army which stood upon two pillars : The first pillar was the corps of 'yeni cheris' - Janissaries, slaves, collected from their Christian parents as young children, converted to Islam, educated by the state to form an elite corps of infantry. It was a form of taxation - 'devshirme' in Turkish. The Janissaries formed a celibate army corps, something between the Mamelukes , who were also a military caste manned by slaves, and the Christian fighting orders, who were also celibate. The devshirme was open only to Christian families. Contrary to popular misconception, the service was very popular with the parents, because the service assured their sons' advance in the Imperial service. Parents were known to bribe officials to pick their sons, and not others. The second pillar was the cavalry, the 'spahis'. It was financed by a land grant, the 'timar' which was similar to European feudal land, with one important difference. The 'timar' could not be inherited. It was granted for life. Of course, the children of the spahis could receive their own 'timar', if they merited it. The ghazis who distinguished themselves were also granted timars. The Islamic principle of the Ottoman Empire rested on three pillars: - the purpose of the state was the preservation and extension of Islam - The Sultan was God's agent, therefore his interests and those of Islam were one and the same - As a foundation of the first two pillars, justice and security should be granted to all subjects of the Sultan, Muslims and others together. The dynastic principle was probably the most important. The Sultan was the head of state, he sat at the tip of a pyramid. Below him was a small ruling class. The mass of the subjects were known as 'raya' - protected flock - and were organized in 'millets', which included Muslims as well as members of other religions. In effect, everybody, apart from the Sultan and his family, were slaves and all property belonged to the Sultan. This system worked very well from 1290 AD when it was adopted, until 1566 AD, the death of Suleiman the Magnificent, the last of the talented Ottoman Sultans. While the Empire expanded, it worked efficiently. By 1366 AD, the Ottomans were firmly established in Anatolia, crossed the Hellespont and moved their capital to Edirne (Adrianople). From there they very quickly conquered the Balkans. In 1389 they defeated the Serbian army at Kosovo Polje, thereby adding a chapter to Balkan mythology, and a headache for the future. In 1444 they beat off a Western crusade at Varna in Bulgaria, and in 1453 they gave the coup de grace to the decrepit Byzantine Empire. Since then, Constantinople is known as Istanbul (The Turkish form of 'ten polis' - 'the city' as the Greeks called their capital). From there the road led to Mohacs in 1526, which eliminated Hungary as an independent state, and to Vienna in 1529, which was the high point and the turning point of Turkish expansion.13 It should be pointed out that the Turks were not supermen; they suffered defeat as well as victory. That they seemed to advance all the time was because they were much better organized and resilient than their adversaries, and they had more victories than defeats. In 1456, three years after the conquest of Constantinople, they besieged Belgrade, the gateway to the Hungarian plain. The Hungarian national hero, Janos Hunyadi, defeated them. It postponed Hungary's downfall by 70 years and all church bells in Christendom were rung at twelve noon. The ringing of church bells at noon started then and has gone on since on since. The fall of Constantinople to the Turks was a terrible shock to Europe, which needed some victory to offset it. Hunyadi provided the victory, and the Papacy exploited its propaganda value. In 1529 the Turkish army invested Vienna, and was forced to withdraw, leaving more than 100,000 casualties. It was the beginning of the end and the weakness of the Ottoman system became apparent to all. There were a number of problems to which the system had no ready answers: 1. The Empire was centralized. Everything turned round the Sultan. The army was where the Sultan was. Decentralization of the army was against the dynastic principle. 2. The size of the Empire made further advances prohibitive. The Ottomans could have advanced by either dispersing the army, as did the Romans, or sending the army ahead, to live off the land, as Alexander the Great did. The first possibility was against the dynastic principle, the second was unrealistic because of the size of the armies, and the constant need for the supply of fresh ammunition. 3. No army at that time could fight all year round. When winter came, they had to be back in barracks. The spahis also had to be back at their timars to oversee their peasants. The fighting period depended on the region and the climate. In the Middle East, it was longer than in Central Europe. The Ottoman army could advance at most 15 kilometers per day. The distance from Istanbul to Vienna was nearly 1,500 kilometers. The Ottoman army started the siege on 29th September 1529. On the 15th of October the siege had to be lifted as the army had to start the return journey home. The result was that the 20,000 defenders of Vienna beat off 350,000 Turkish attackers.14 4. There was another and most important cause of the limit of the Ottoman threat. The early 16th Century was still a period when battles were waged man to man, cold steel against cold steel. However, that period was slipping away fast. When Sultan Mehmet needed siege guns against Constantinople, he had no experts to cast guns. He hired Urban, a Hungarian expert, to cast his siege guns.15 It was the most fatal weakness of the Ottomans. They had no technology, they had what they could buy. This has remained so to this very day, and there is a direct line between the Hungarian Urban and Bull, the Canadian with his supergun for Saddam Hussein. When Mustafa Kemal decided to cut loose Turkey from its Islamic past he might have had that episode in mind. Urban was from Hungary. Hungarians reached Hungary in the 10th Century AD Most of the Hungarians were of Turkish origin, just like the Ottomans. In addition, there were three waves of Turkish tribes who fled before the Mongols, and asked for asylum from their Hungarian relatives. The three waves were the Patzinaks, and then the Polovtsi, or Cumans in two waves, who reached Hungary in the 13th Century. On the map of today's Hungary one can see where the three waves of Turkish relatives were settled. The names of the villages and towns betray it. All those areas are in the central plain of Hungary, that area which the Ottomans succeeded in holding for 150 years. It is possible that the common origin helped the Ottomans there. It is certain that in Hungary they did not exercise the devshirme and no children were taken for the Janissaries. There was a gap of about three hundred years between the Hungarians arrival in Europe and the arrival of the Ottomans in Asia Minor. If the three additional Turkish waves are taken into consideration, then the gap was much less. Still, the Hungarian Urban became an expert in gun foundry, and the Turks had none. The only tangible difference was that the Hungarians belonged to the European civilization and the Ottomans to the Islamic one. The high mark of the Ottoman advance into Europe was the siege of Vienna. After that there were long wars of sieges, battles and quasi-guerrilla warfare on a very wide front, from Croatia in the West to Moldavia in the East. The war brought no results. The Turks became weaker and the Hapsburgs stronger all the time. That the occupation of Hungary lasted nearly 150 years did not reflect the balance of power in the field, but the fact that the Hapsburgs were occupied elsewhere, on matters which were more important to them, and they did not want to make too much effort to liberate Hungary and the Balkans. In addition, the Hapsburgs also had supply problems. The same distances which worked against the Ottomans when they advanced from Constantinople, worked against the Austrians when advancing from Vienna. The rich Ottoman Empire became bankrupted by the long drawn-out war.16 The whole Ottoman system, based upon rewards to soldiers divided up out of the spoils of a continuous advance, collapsed. When the war became static, there were no more advances, no more lands for additional timars and no possibility of payment to the Janissaries. As the Ottomans came to a standstill on land, so they did at sea too. Indeed, the end of the advance at sea was more catastrophic than on land. When the Turks signed a peace treaty with the Hapsburgs in 1606 AD, they did it as equals, and the peace treaty left their Hungarian and Balkan possessions in the hands of the Ottomans. At sea, Turkish power was utterly broken. This is how it came about. In 1565 a Turkish fleet attempted to break out from the Eastern Mediterranean to join up with the North African pirates to bring the war to Spain. However, Malta barred the road to the west, so the Ottomans sent a fleet to capture it. The island was defended by the Order of the Knights of St. John. The attack was defeated at a cost of more than 30,000 casualties, which the Turks could ill afford.17 Six years after Malta, a Christian coalition defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto, at the entrance to the Adriatic. It effectively eliminated Turkey as a naval power In the Mediterranean. The Portuguese defeated the Ottomans in the Indian Ocean, so it can be stated that by the end of the 16th Century, the threat of the Ottoman Empire disappeared.18 The defeat in the Indian Ocean destroyed the economic power of the Turkish Empire. The mainstay of the Middle Eastern economy, and also that of Venice, was the transit trade between the Far East and Europe, especially in spices. Portuguese victory in the Indian Ocean meant that eastern spices reached Northern Europe in Portuguese ships and not through the Levant and Venice. Despite their eventual defeat, the Ottoman advance had some value for the Middle East, even if it was ephemeral. The Islamic Revolution restored to the Middle East all the territories which had belonged to the Empires of Carthage and Persia, from the line of the olives in Spain to the Indus. The nomads of the steppe restored the territorial frontiers of the old Mithridatic alliance, Greece and the Balkans, the littoral of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the steppes north of the Caspian and Aral Seas. This was the service that the horsemen of the steppes performed for Islamic civilization. The problem of the Middle East was that Islam had insufficient power to maintain those borders against the resurgent West. Defeat and its Aftermath At the beginning of the 17th Century AD, in 1606, the Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty with the Hapsburgs. The treaty was signed at Sitvatorok, on an island in the river that formed the frontier between the two Empires. The contents of the treaty are unimportant today but the circumstances are in that it was the first time that the Ottoman Empire acknowledged the equality of the Hapsburgs with itself. Until that treaty, the Hapsburg monarch was described in Turkish documents as 'King of Vienna'. In the new treaty, the Hapsburg Emperor was given the title of Padishah, the title of the Turkish Sultan himself. It was the beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire. The 17th Century started with a concession of equality, it ended with an admission of defeat. Turkey was driven out of Hungary, and the Austrians and Russians were poised to give it the coup de grace from outside. The Christian peoples of the Balkans, still under Ottoman rule, were waiting for their opportunity. Both the blows from without and the internal revolts came one after the other. Of course, as is common in such cases, internal revolts usually exploited defeat in war. It should be mentioned here that the Turkish leadership had no illusions as to what happened. They might not have brought their knowledge before the public, but the leaders knew that they had suffered defeat and did not have the power to reverse it. In the beginning it was the typical thesis of 'us' versus 'them' and the rhetorical question - why were the infidels winning the wars and why were the armies of Islam suffering defeat at their hands? It took time, but eventually the Ottomans began to see things in a more realistic light. They realized that the real reason for the debacle was their inability to keep pace with the technological and scientific advancement of Europe. They saw the gap and even had some good ideas on how to bridge it, but always came up against tradition and religion. A Turkish historian has put it thus:19 "The scientific wave broke against the dikes of literature and jurisprudence." The fate of the Turkish Empire can be compared to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Both fell because of an ideology that could not be adapted to changing conditions. Both attempted to bridge the gap by acquiring weapons and technology. Luckily for them, they always found some enterprising westerners who were willing to provide the weapons. In 1797 the ruler of Algiers ordered ships from an American shipyard to be used for piracy. Thomas Jefferson saw the danger but Congress decided otherwise and the ships were built and delivered. Spain in 1804 was providing carpenters to Tripoli to build gunboats.20 It is possible, as a form of divine justice, that the American Marines, when they went '...to the shores of Tripoli' in 1812, had to fight against the Spanish-built gunboats, and that it was the American-built ships that harassed the Spanish shores. One might wonder why the liberation of the Balkans from the Ottomans took so long. There was probably more than one reasons. European rivalry between the powers might have been one of the reasons. The Austrians were not keen to have the Russians in their backyard, and vice versa. It is also possible that the European powers may have been aware of the nature of the possible inheritance in the Balkans. It was still in the future, but when Bismarck said in 1878 that the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, he could have echoed a sentiment which many uttered before him and probably after. One cannot really determine whether the problems of the Balkans were caused by the Turks, by Islam or by the crazy quilt of the ethnic patchwork there, but as a problem it is still with Europe, and it will probably remain one for a long time to come. The Turkish advance in Europe came to a halt in the 16th Century. By the end of the following century Turkey was out of Hungary and in the process of withdrawal from Europe altogether. It was a long process; nearly 200 years passed before the Turkish Empire lost most of what was left of its European possessions. After the first World War, which for Turkey was its third war in the 20th Century, Turkey was facing final dismemberment and annihilation. The French and the English already exercised their claims on Turkish provinces in the Middle East, and there were still the Greeks and the Italians, who claimed a major part of Anatolia. The Greeks might have wanted to turn the clock back two and a half millennia, and restore the territories of the former Greek cities, like Smyrna and Miletus. The Italians put in a claim for Cilicia. These claims, if executed, would have left Turkey with a rump state in the north of Anatolia. The Turks could not accept this. Luckily, they had a genuine war hero, Mustafa Kemal, the commander of the Turkish army that defended the peninsula of Gallipoli against the English and French. Kemal Ataturk saved Anatolia and created a genuine nation-state that replaced the Empire. It meant that by abolishing the Sultanate, the Caliphate of all Muslim people was abolished too. It also meant modernization and secularization. The Turkish revolution has undoubtedly saved Turkey as a nation. Whether that revolution has accomplished its other aims is still unclear. However, as Ottoman Turkey ruled the Middle East, secularization effectively removed the Middle East from its rule. The Ottoman Empire has ruled the Middle East as the Sultan was the Caliph of all Believers. With the deposition of the last Sultan , there was no more Caliphate, no more rule over the Middle East. It was not the first time that the Ottomans were thinking along lines, which were eventually effected by Mustafa Kemal. They had seen the problems but the dangers too. In 1862, Ali Pasha, at that time foreign minister of the Ottoman Empire, wrote a letter to the Turkish ambassador in Paris, in which he commented on the latest developments in Italian unification: "Italy, which is inhabited by a single race speaking the same language and professing the same religion, experiences so many difficulties in its unification. For the moment, all it has achieved is anarchy and disorder. Judge, what would happen in Turkey if free scope would be given to all the different national aspirations...It would need a century and a torrent of blood to establish even a fairly stable state of affairs."21 Until they renounced the Caliphate, the Ottomans ruled the Middle East, except for Morocco in the West and Iran in the East. They accepted Islam in its Sunni form, they were in permanent conflict with Shiite Iran, but all those conflicts are outside our scope. In the Middle East proper, the Ottomans ruled since the beginning of the 16th Century. It was a loose overlordship. There were Turkish garrisons in the region, but effective rule was always in the hands of local notables. Turkish rule in the Middle East was in contrast to their rule in the Balkans. It was a foreign rule, but as the Ottomans were themselves Muslims, and the Turkish Sultan was the Caliph of all believers, the peoples of the Middle East did not see them as foreigners. After all, in the territories of the 'hydraulic societies' people were used to being ruled from the outside. Egypt was ruled for three millennia before Gamal Abdel Nasser by Ethiopians, Libyans, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Seljuks , Kurds, Mamelukes who were really Circassian and Georgians from the Caucasus, Ottoman Turks, Albanians and English. Gamal Abdel Nasser was the first Egyptian ruler of Egypt in three thousand years. The people of the Middle East lived their own lives without too much involvement in the affairs of the Empire. Every Friday a prayer was said in the local Mosques for the Caliph and occasionally the latest 'fathname'22 was read in the Mosque, announcing victory. (Fathname was a letter from the Sultan announcing the latest victory). The believers in the Middle East were proud and praised the Sultan. That the Sultan was Turkish had no adverse significance. But gradually the Middle East became again territory occupied by the West. In North Africa, Algeria was occupied in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, Egypt in 1882, Morocco lost its independence in the 20th Century, and Libya was occupied by Italy in 1912. In the Balkans there was a series of wars, starting with the revolt of the Greeks and ending with the two Balkan wars, which preceded the first World War. Even the first World War was directly triggered by an ethnic conflict in the Balkans, which was left behind by the withdrawing Turks. After the first World War, Western Asia became a dependency of the West. Syria and Lebanon became French protectorates, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf became an English protectorate. The West ruled the Middle East, directly or indirectly. As far as the self-esteem of the peoples in the region was concerned, the clock was turned back 1,300 years. There were differences between the two periods of occupation. The main cause of the first occupation was demographic pressure, which manifested itself in colonization. The second western occupation had geographical roots, access roads between Europe and the East, and oil reserves. In addition there are a number of notable variations: 1. This time the West did not colonize the East. Colonization is done by the East in the West in a covert way. One can perceive the immigration into Europe as a form of colonization. 2. The technological and scientific gap is incomparably larger in the second period of occupation than in the first. 3. In the first period of occupation, there was an irredentist power in the East, which gave overt and covert support to local resistance. That power was Iran, under different names. Iran is still there and as anti-Western as ever before, but the scientific and technological gap between Iran and the West is too big for it to be an effective irredentist power. If the peoples of the Middle East want to be free of western domination, as obviously they so desire, they can hope for outside help from some future power that will be in conflict with the West. If the predictions of Prof. Huntington and Caspar Weinberger will come true then the Far-Eastern challengers will have loyal assistance in the Middle East. Notes: |
