Mehmed was impetuous, arrogant, and seething with resentment, but even at the age of twenty-one, he knew better than to attack the city unprepared. He marshaled a large army, built a fleet, and commissioned the construction of an immense cannon before he began the attack on Constantinople in the spring of 1453.
The Byzantines did the best they could. Some Genoese and Venetian ships and mercenaries came to their aid, though most of Europe refused Emperor Constantine’s request for help. Some Western Christians suggested that if the emperor were willing to bow to the pope, more active support might be forthcoming, but that was not a price he was willing to pay. While the Roman Church had established itself as the supreme doctrinal authority in the West, the Eastern Orthodox Church had never acknowledged that the pope was anything more than the bishop of Rome, worthy of respect but not obeisance. Given the choice between capitulating to the pope and surrendering to the Ottomans, Constantinople preferred the infidel. “Better the turban of the Muslim in the
midst of Constantinople,” the saying went, “than the miter of the Latin.” The emperor Constantine was left with his guile, intimate knowledge of the walls that had been built by the emperor Theodosius a millennium before, and prayer. Those were not enough.
Though Constantine shared the name of the city’s founder, he did not share the same luck. The Ottoman generals did what had been considered impossible and breached the iron gate that protected the Golden Horn from enemy ships. Mehmed had numbers on his side, and he exploited the thinness of the defenses and weaknesses in the fortifications. Tens of thousands of his soldiers poured into the city and overwhelmed it. Constantine ripped off his imperial insignia, charged into the onslaught, and died. He declared that he would not be remembered as the emperor who fled the greatest city in the world in the hour of its greatest need.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND “THE CONQUEROR”
THE OTTOMAN ARMY
entered the city on May 29, 1453. Because the Byzantines had refused to surrender, Mehmed gave his troops license to loot and pillage; they would have rebelled if he had not. But the city was already depopulated and all but a handful of churches and palaces were deserted. Some later Western accounts describe a horrific sacking, but there is little evidence ofthat. No matter how psychologically devastating, the physical damage was relatively mild, both to property and to people.
Mehmed made directly for Hagia Sophia. For a millennium, the church had stood as a monument to the empire, the center of Eastern Christianity. At the end of May 1453, an alien language was heard under its domes, and a conquering people replaced the old rites with theirs. The church echoed with the sound of the
shahada
, and with the Muslim call to prayer. Thereafter, Hagia Sophia would be a mosque, with the names of the first four caliphs surrounding its main dome. When Mehmed first entered, so legend has it, a soldier was attempting to pry loose the tiles in the floor. The sultan struck him with the flat of his sword, and said, “For you the treasures and the prisoners are enough. The buildings of the city fall to me.”
The sultan soon halted the pillaging. The city was to be the capital of
his empire, and he did not want to be burdened with unnecessary renovations. The place was in sorry enough shape as it was and in need of repair. In the ensuing months, the Ottomans refashioned the city, both physically and culturally. Some Byzantine nobles had escaped; others were taken captive; some were ransomed; and a few were executed. But Mehmed could not afford to have the entire city emptied of its Greek inhabitants. In order to keep it functioning, he did what he could to assure the population that their rights would be respected. He even tried to entice those who had left to return and offered to pay them restitution if their property had been damaged or destroyed.
As an added incentive, Mehmed promised that he would not interfere with religion. The Byzantine emperor had stood at the head of the Orthodox Church, and with him gone, the patriarch was the logical replacement. But at the time of the city’s fall, the reigning patriarch was abroad, and in his place, Mehmed turned to Gennadius—one of the most respected monks in the city, who was known to be fiercely independent and equally fierce in his opposition to Rome—and announced that he would be the leader of the church.
It was later said that Mehmed ordered his officials to scour Constantinople for someone worthy of the appointment. In the words of one contemporary Greek chronicler, “Gennadius was a very wise and remarkable man…. When the Sultan saw him, and had in a short time had proofs of his wisdom and prudence and virtue and also of his power as a speaker and his religious character, he was greatly impressed, and held him in great honor and respect, and gave him the right to come to him at any time, and honored him with liberty and conversation.” In January 1454, the sultan installed the new patriarch and granted him authority over the daily lives of the city’s Christian populace, “no less than that enjoyed previously under the emperors.”
The extent of the patriarch’s power was spelled out in a charter drawn up by the sultan’s vizier. Gennadius was more than the spiritual guide of the Greek Orthodox who had fallen under Ottoman rule. He was in many ways their king, with power to tax and judge and the authority to appoint local representatives throughout the empire. Much like the Byzantine emperor, he had more influence than the heads of other Christian churches in the East. While he ultimately answered to the sultan and to the Ottoman state, on issues ranging from birth to marriage to death, including estates, taxes, and intracommunal trade, he had
wide latitude. The Ottomans may have ruled, but Mehmed II had no interest in micromanaging the daily lives of Christian subjects. That would have required more bureaucracy and more effort. Better to find a partner and delegate the dirty work of administration to him.
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It did not seem remarkable to anyone at the time that Mehmed could be simultaneously so merciless with the nobles and the ruling class and so merciful toward most of the people and their religious leaders. But it runs contrary to the modern notion that there is no separation between church and state in Islam. That lack of separation is said to be in contrast to the wall dividing secular and religious power in the West. Yet until at least the nineteenth century, those walls did not exist in the Western world, and the entire framework has never made much sense when applied to the Muslim world.
For instance, the Byzantine Empire, which the Ottomans ended, never had separate spheres for religion and politics. The emperor was simultaneously the head of the state and the head of the church—and that formula was replicated in other parts of the Christian world, including Reformation England, where the king demanded the obedience of the archbishop of Canterbury. Throughout Byzantine history, the emperor enforced doctrine, led military campaigns, and convened tribunals to punish those who dissented from the imperial orthodoxy. As we saw, the refusal of Egyptian Coptic Christians to bow to the authority of both emperor and the patriarch in Constantinople in the sixth and seventh centuries was one reason for the ease of the Arab conquest of Egypt soon after Muhammad’s death.
In contrast, while there were occasions when Muslim rulers attempted to dictate doctrine, those times were the exception, and not the rule. In one sense, the Ottoman sultan had unlimited power over his subjects. He had power over life and death. But in other ways, he was as constrained by, and in theory just as subject to, religious law as any other Muslim. Like earlier rulers, he deferred to the scholars and judges who comprised the
ulama.
Even when the Ottoman sultan added the title of caliph in later centuries, he did not exercise total doctrinal authority. True, he could issue laws of his own whether or not those agreed with sharia (religious) law. But he still needed, and cultivated, the support of the
ulama.
The only sense in which it can be said that there is no separation between church and state in Islam is that there is no church. The possible exception is Iran. After the sixteenth century, Iran’s Shi’a mullahs
gradually coalesced into an institution that in its hierarchy and coherence resembled the Catholic Church, but without the ability to coerce errant believers. Almost everywhere else, Islam had no central, governing religious body. Throughout the history of Muslim societies, from the emergence of a clerical establishment in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate through the evolution of Sufism and other forms of individual piety, the political and doctrinal spheres were distinct and governed by different people.
The de facto separation helps explain why Mehmed could be so indifferent to the religion of his subjects. Like most imperial rulers, the Ottomans drew a distinction between the state and the people. Neither Mehmed nor any of the Ottomans evinced an interest in converting the Greek Christian population of Constantinople. To the contrary. The Ottomans provided incentives to encourage the Greeks to work with the new regime to revive the city and restore it to greatness. For their part, the Christians of Constantinople, their religious rights intact, seem to have accepted the new rulers. Greek Christian architects drew up plans to reinforce and reconstruct the decaying walls and fortifications that had in the end failed to protect the city. They designed mosques and helped Mehmed transform Hagia Sophia into a Muslim house of worship. They also built a vast new covered market, which would become the famed Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and manned many of its stalls and shops.
Had Mehmed stopped with the capture of Constantinople, he would have earned his sobriquet “the Conqueror.” But he was still very young, and his ambitions were not sated. He took on his father’s old adversaries in Hungary and Serbia, and he solidified Ottoman control over much of the Balkans and the southern coast of the Black Sea. More often than not, cities surrendered, opening their gates to the sultan rather than suffer death and destruction. The Ottomans honored the flag of truce. When they promised to protect the rights of the local populace, they did.
Inevitably, after decades of leading his armies, Mehmed grew tired and ill. He did not age gracefully, and his accomplishments had not made him happy. He drank too much and became ever-more distrustful of those around him. At the risk of unfairly psychoanalyzing him from a distance of many centuries, it might be said that he did everything he could to banish the memory of his father, and he failed. Had he consulted a Sufi master, he might have learned that he could go to the ends of the earth, win every battle, and become rich beyond imagination, but
unless he bared his soul to God, he would remain restless and unfulfilled. And so he was, until he died in 1481, fat, gout-ridden, surrounded by Jewish and Persian physicians helpless to heal him, an old man at the age of forty-nine.
Though the Europeans were dismayed at the loss of the city they had done so little to help and so much to undermine, whatever affinity they felt was an illusion. In truth, the Christians of Western Europe were more alien and more hostile to Orthodox Byzantium than the Ottomans. The Ottomans and the Byzantines had been fighting for more than a hundred years, and they had also lived side by side while each attended to other enemies. Mehmed’s father had married a Byzantine-Serbian princess, which was neither the first and nor the last time that a Muslim Ottoman married a Christian woman for reasons of state. The two empires had been bound not only by marital ties, but by financial ones. For many years, before Mehmed, the Ottoman sultan paid an annual fee to the Byzantine emperor, because the Ottomans preferred a toothless Byzantium to a rival power in Constantinople guarding the vital crossroads. Later, in the nineteenth century, the powers of Europe were to make the same calculations about the Ottomans, and the empire would survive not because it was strong but because it was weak.
EUROPE AND THE OTTOMANS
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
lasted nearly five hundred years, longer than all but a handful of dynasties the world has known. Byzantium, and Rome before that, each survived more than a thousand years, but only the Ottomans could claim that the same family ruled in succession from the beginning until the end. Though there may have been some convenient rewriting of the family tree, there was an unbroken chain stretching from Osman in the fourteenth century through the last sultan, Mehmed VI, in the first decade of the twentieth. By way of comparison, European dynasties have rarely lasted more than a few hundred years and have usually ruled an area no larger than an Ottoman province. For the better part of five centuries, however, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. From the early sixteenth century until the early twentieth, it also ruled North Africa and Egypt; the Caucasus between the Black and Caspian Seas; the Crimean Peninsula and the
surrounding regions; all of the Near East from present-day Israel to the borders of Iran; and the Balkans, including Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, and parts of modern Hungary.
In the collective memory of the West, the Ottomans loom large. More than the first wave of Arab conquests, more than the Muslims of Spain or Saladin and his armies, the Ottomans were woven into the consciousness of modern Europe. At the very time that the centralized monarchies of Western and Central Europe were emerging, they faced an adversary whose size, organization, wealth, and power dwarfed anything they could muster. The lords of Spain, France, England, the German lands, and the Holy Roman Empire may have thought of themselves as titans, but against the Ottomans, they barely rated as pygmies. Acting in concert, the fleets of the Italians, the knights of Spain and France, and the foot soldiers of Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Prussia were able to stave off total defeat, but until the eighteenth century, the shadow of what they called “the perfidious Turk” clouded even the brightest of their days.
Gradually, the Ottomans lost their comparative advantage, and in the late eighteenth century, the monarchs of Europe and Russia reversed the tide. Even then, the empire shrank but did not collapse. Unlike many other regions of the globe, the core of the Ottoman Empire was never occupied or ruled by the Europeans. The empire contracted, but the central lands of Turkey and large parts of the Middle East, including Iraq and Arabia, remained under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I.