The Ottoman Advance: From Anatolia to the Gates of Vienna
How a small Turkish emirate in Anatolia took Constantinople, conquered the Balkans, Hungary, Egypt and Arabia, besieged Vienna twice, and was finally pushed back after 1683.
Stop 01 · c. 1299–1326
Osman's Emirate
Around 1300, Anatolia was divided among small Turkish emirates. One of them, led by Osman, was based at Söğüt, on the frontier with the Byzantine Empire, close to Constantinople. Ottoman tradition held that his father Ertuğrul had led the Kayı tribe west from Central Asia to escape the Mongols. Almost nothing certain is known of Osman's early years; the first datable event is his defeat of a Byzantine force at Bapheus in 1301 or 1302. His followers then blockaded the Byzantine city of Bursa for years, and took it on 6 April 1326, around the time of Osman's death. His son Orhan made it their capital. The dynasty took Osman's name: the Osmanlı, or Ottomans.
I OsmanOttoman miniature painting · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Around 1300, Anatolia was divided among small Turkish emirates. One of them, led by Osman, was based at Söğüt, on the frontier with the Byzantine Empire, close to Constantinople. Ottoman tradition held that his father Ertuğrul had led the Kayı tribe west from Central Asia to escape the Mongols. Almost nothing certain is known of Osman's early years; the first datable event is his defeat of a Byzantine force at Bapheus in 1301 or 1302. His followers then blockaded the Byzantine city of Bursa for years, and took it on 6 April 1326, around the time of Osman's death. His son Orhan made it their capital. The dynasty took Osman's name: the Osmanlı, or Ottomans.
Turkish mercenaries had been fighting in Byzantium's civil wars, and around 1352 were given the small fort of Tzympe. Then, on 2 March 1354, an earthquake wrecked Gallipoli, and within a month Orhan's son Süleyman Pasha occupied it, settling Turkish families there: the Ottomans' first major foothold in Europe. Within a few decades they held much of Thrace and moved their capital from Bursa to Edirne (Adrianople). On 15 June 1389, on the field of Kosovo, Sultan Murad I defeated a Serbian-led coalition under Prince Lazar. Both leaders were killed, Murad, according to tradition, by the Serbian knight Miloš Obilić. In 1396 Bayezid I crushed a crusade of French and Hungarian knights under King Sigismund at Nicopolis on the Danube.
Disaster struck in 1402. Bayezid was blockading Constantinople when the Central Asian conqueror Timur invaded Anatolia. On 28 July, near Ankara, Timur's army, reliably put at 140,000 with 32 war elephants, crushed the Ottomans and captured Sultan Bayezid I, who died in captivity months later. His sons fought a civil war until 1413, but the state recovered. In 1453 the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople with about 100,000 men and giant cannons, against fewer than 8,000 defenders on 12 miles of walls. On 29 May, after a 53-day siege, the walls were breached, and the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. Constantinople, Istanbul, became the Ottoman capital.
BattlesAnkara: Timur defeats Bayezid, 1402 · Constantinople falls, 29 May 1453
Three years after taking Constantinople, Mehmed II struck at Belgrade, the Hungarian fortress guarding the Danube road into central Europe. From 4 July 1456 his army, estimated at anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 men with some 300 cannon, besieged it. Michael Szilágyi held the castle with about 7,000 men. On 14 July John Hunyadi, captain-general of Hungary, who had strengthened the fortress at his own expense, smashed the Turkish river flotilla and fought his way in. The friar John of Capistrano had raised a large, poorly armed army of peasant crusaders, and their attack on the Ottoman lines helped turn the battle. Mehmed, wounded, withdrew on 22 July. Hunyadi died of plague in the camp three weeks later.
In the east a new rival had risen: Shah Ismail I, whose Safavid dynasty ruled Iran with the backing of the Qizilbash, Twelver Shi'i warrior-dervishes. Sultan Selim I, who had won the throne in a struggle with his brothers, blamed the Qizilbash for unrest inside Ottoman Anatolia and obtained a ruling from jurists that branded them and Ismail heretics. In 1514 he marched east. On 23 August, at Chaldiran, in north-western Iran, his army of 60,000 to 100,000, with heavy artillery, met a Safavid army of 40,000 to 80,000 that had none. Ismail was wounded and nearly captured. Selim briefly occupied the Safavid capital, Tabriz, and looted its treasury, and Kurdish chiefs switched their allegiance to the Ottomans.
Selim I then turned south, against the Mamluk sultanate that had ruled Egypt and Syria since the 13th century. On 24 August 1516, at Marj Dabiq, 44 km north of Aleppo, Ottoman firepower and the treachery of the Mamluk commander Khair Bey broke the army of Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri, who fell from his horse and died on the field. His successor, Tuman Bay, hastily gathered Bedouin troops and some cannon, but in January 1517 Selim beat him at Ridaniya and took Cairo; Tuman Bay was caught and hanged at one of the city's gates. Syria, Egypt and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina came under Ottoman rule, and the sultans became the leading rulers of the Islamic world.
Selim's son Suleiman the Magnificent took Belgrade in August 1521 and, after a six-month siege, Rhodes from the Knights Hospitaller in December 1522. On 29 August 1526, at Mohács, his army of perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 met a Hungarian army of 25,000 to 30,000, which attacked head-on. Within two hours the Hungarian lines collapsed; King Louis II drowned in a stream while fleeing, weighed down by his armour. Hungary was split, and Buda later became an Ottoman city for 145 years. In 1529 Suleiman besieged Vienna, held by some 17,000 to 21,000 men under Count Niklas Salm, but heavy rain, shortages of food and the long march from the Balkans forced him to turn back on 15 October.
At sea, Ottoman fleets dominated the eastern Mediterranean, and in 1570–1571 the Ottomans conquered Venetian Cyprus; its last stronghold, Famagusta, surrendered on 1 August 1571. Pope Pius V had assembled a Holy League of Spain, Venice and the Papacy. Its fleet, under John of Austria, sailed from Messina and on 7 October met the Ottoman fleet under Ali Pasha in the Gulf of Patras, off western Greece. Over 450 warships fought: the largest naval battle in western history since antiquity and the last major one fought almost entirely by oared galleys. Ali Pasha was killed and about 200 Ottoman galleys were captured or sunk. The Ottomans rapidly rebuilt their fleet, but the loss of trained crews blunted their naval ambitions.
BattlesLepanto, 1571 · Famagusta, surrendered 1 August 1571
In 1683 Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa besieged Vienna with a huge army, still about 150,000 strong in September according to papers found in his tent. Emperor Leopold I had fled to Passau with his court and some 60,000 Viennese, while Count Starhemberg held the walls from 14 July with about 15,000 soldiers and 8,700 volunteers. On 12 September a relief army of Austrian, German and Polish troops, led by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland, attacked from the Kahlenberg hills. Polish winged hussars led one of the largest cavalry charges in history, some 18,000 horsemen, and the Ottomans broke and fled. Kara Mustafa was executed at Belgrade on 25 December.
In the long war that followed, a Holy League of the Habsburgs, Poland–Lithuania, Venice and Russia drove the Ottomans back. Buda fell in September 1686 after a siege of nearly three months; imperial troops then massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Defeat at Zenta in 1697 forced the sultan to make peace. At the Treaty of Karlowitz, signed on 26 January 1699, the Ottomans gave up most of Hungary, with Croatia and Slavonia, and Transylvania passed under Austrian rule; Venice gained the Morea and Poland recovered Podolia. It was the empire's first major loss of territory. Over two centuries the 'sick man of Europe', as Tsar Nicholas I reportedly called it, slowly retreated from the Balkans.