The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (35 page)

Pierre d’Aubusson had been elected by the European powers to command the Pope’s crusade, for he had been a champion in the Christian struggle against the Turks all his life. But d’Aubusson died on 30 June 1503, aged eighty, after having been Grand Master of the Knights of St John for twenty-seven years, leaving the crusade without a commander. Later that summer the Christian world lost another leader when Pope Alexander died suddenly on 12 August, aged seventy-three, whereupon his crusade ended before it had even begun.

On 22 September 1503 Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini was elected to succeed Alexander, taking the name of Pius III in honour of his late uncle Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II. The new Pope was in failing health at the time of his election, and he passed away less than a month later. A new conclave, the shortest in the history of the papacy to that time, began on 31 October 1503 and ended the next day with the almost unanimous election of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II.

The decade-long reign of Julius II was an extremely turbulent period, in which the Pope tried to revive the temporal power of the papacy and to establish the independence of the Holy See, at a time when Italy was riven by internal wars and under attack by other European powers, most notably France and Spain. The Turks, at least, were less of a threat to Europe during that period, for in the years 1500-11 the Ottoman Empire was involved in a war with Persia.

While the war with Persia was still raging Beyazit became seriously ill in 1508, and for the next three years he was bedridden. By that time a three-sided war of succession had developed between his three surviving sons, Ahmet, Selim and Korkut, all of whom were serving as provincial governors in Anatolia. Selim knew that Beyazit planned to abdicate and leave the throne to Ahmet, the eldest, and to forestall that he took his army across to Europe in the summer of 1511 and camped near Edirne, raising the pay of his soldiers so that he drew recruits from his father’s forces.

The following spring Beyazit was forced to submit to Selim, who entered Istanbul with his army on 23 April 1512 and took control of the city. The same day Selim met with his father, whom he had not seen in twenty-six years, and he forced Beyazit to abdicate. The next day Selim was girded with the sword of Osman and became the ninth sultan in the Osmanlı dynasty, the third to rule in Istanbul.

Selim allowed Beyazit to retire to Demotika in Thrace, his birthplace. But the deposed sultan died halfway there, passing away in great agony on 26 May 1512. A number of those in his entourage believed that Beyazit had been poisoned by his Jewish physician Hamon on the orders of Sultan Selim.

Selim was forty-two when he became sultan, having served for eighteen years as provincial governor in Trabzon, the Greek Trebizond. His fierce mein and cruel manner led the Turks to call him Yavuz, or the Grim. Shortly after his accession Selim set out to deal with his rivals to the throne. During the next year he defeated and killed his brothers Ahmet and Korkut, after which he executed six of his nephews. His campaign to eliminate all possible rivals to the throne did not stop there, and on 20 December 1512 he executed three of his own sons, whom he suspected of plotting against him. This left Selim with only a single male heir to the throne, his son Süleyman, whom he was grooming as his successor.

The Christian powers of Europe enjoyed a respite from Ottoman aggression during Selim’s reign, which was distinguished by two victorious campaigns in Asia. In the first of these campaigns Selim defeated Shah Ismail of Iran at the Battle of Çaldıran on 23 August 1514, adding all of eastern Anatolia and western Persia to the Ottoman domains. In the second campaign Selim conquered the Mamluks of Egypt, capturing Cairo on 20 January 1517, thus extending the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire around the eastern Mediterranean. Tradition has it that at this time Caliph al-Mutawakkil transferred the rights of the caliphate to Selim, whose successors proudly added this to their title of ‘sultan’ right down to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Selim prepared for a campaign into Europe in the summer of 1520, probably intending to invade Hungary, though he had not divulged his plans to his pashas. The sultan led his army out from Istanbul in early August, but a day’s journey short of Edirne he became so seriously ill that the march had to be halted. Selim never recovered, and after suffering for six weeks he finally passed away on 22 September 1520. The cause of his death is suggested by the remark of an anonymous European chronicler, who noted that ‘Selim the Grim died of an infected boil and thereby Hungary was spared’.

The news of Selim’s death occasioned services of thanksgiving throughout Europe. As Paolo Giovio wrote of the reaction of Pope Leo X, who had succeeded Julius II in 1513: ‘When he heard for a surety that Selimus was dead, he commanded that the litany of common prayers be sung throughout all Rome, in which men should go barefoot.’

Ferhat Pasha, the commanding Ottoman general, kept Selim’s death a secret so that Süleyman, the deceased sultan’s only surviving son, who was serving as provincial governor in Manisa, could rush to Istanbul to take control of the government and ensure his succession to the throne.

Süleyman was nearly twenty-six when he came to the throne. Foreign observers found him to be more pleasant than his grim father, and they were hopeful that his reign would bring better relations between the Ottomans and Christians. As the Venetian Bartolomeo Contarini wrote just before Süleyman’s accession: ‘He is said to be a wise lord, and all men hope for good from his reign.’

Soon after his accession Süleyman and his grand vezir Piri Pasha began making preparations for a campaign into Europe. Süleyman’s objective was Belgrade, the gateway to all the lands along the middle Danube, which he captured on 29 August 1521. When word of the fall of Belgrade reached Venice, the doge, Antonio Grimani, wrote to his envoy in England, ‘This news is lamentable, and of importance to all Christians.’

The following year Süleyman launched an expedition against Rhodes, which his great-grandfather Mehmet had failed to take in 1480. Süleyman began the siege of Rhodes on 28 June 1522, when his fleet of 700 ships crossed the strait from Marmaris carrying a force of some 100,000 troops, vastly outnumbering the knights and their allies. The defenders fought on valiantly for nearly six months, but then on 22 December the Grand Master, Philip Villiers de L’Isle Adam, finally agreed to surrender, on condition that he and his men would be allowed to leave the island unharmed, along with all the Rhodians who chose to accompany them.

Süleyman honoured the terms of the surrender, and on 1 January the Grand Master and his 180 surviving knights sailed away from Rhodes, along with 4,000 Rhodians. The Knights of St John had held Rhodes for 223 years, blocking Turkish expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, which was now open to Süleyman. The knights retired first to Crete, and then in 1530 they moved to Malta, where they constructed a mighty fortress that became a bulwark against Turkish expansion into the western Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the balance of power had shifted with the rise of the Habsburgs. Charles V, grandson of Maximilian I, had through his inheritances become the most powerful ruler in western Europe, his possessions in Spain, the Netherlands and Germany hemming in France. The French king, Francis I, believed that his territories were threatened and that Charles wanted ‘to be master everywhere’. Francis was captured after his army was defeated by the forces of Charles V at Pavia in 1525. While in captivity Francis wrote secretly to Süleyman, suggesting that the sultan attack Hungary.

Süleyman agreed to the proposal and invaded Hungary the following year, with the Ottoman army under the command of the grand vezir Ibrahim Pasha. The campaign climaxed on 29 August 1526 at the Battle of Mohacs, when the Ottomans utterly defeated the Hungarians in a battle that lasted less than two hours. King Lewis II and most of the Hungarian soldiers died in the battle, and the few who survived were executed immediately afterwards by Süleyman, who had ordered that no prisoners be taken.

After his victory at Mohacs, Süleyman led his army back to Istanbul, where he remained for six months before starting off on his next campaign into Europe, with Ibrahim Pasha once again in command. The goal of the expedition was Vienna, which the Ottoman forces besieged unsuccessfully. After suffering heavy losses Süleyman was forced to raise the siege on 15 October 1529, so as to march his army back to Istanbul before the winter began. Early in 1532 Süleyman mounted another expedition against Vienna under Ibrahim Pasha, but his army penetrated only as far as the Austrian frontier.

Süleyman’s failure to capture Vienna was the only major setback he suffered in more than four decades of campaigning in Europe, while at the same time his buccaneering fleets were the terror of the Mediterranean, capturing most of the Venetian-held islands in the Aegean. Süleyman mounted a powerful expedition against Malta in 1565, but the Knights of St John defended the island with their usual valour, and the Ottoman forces were compelled to withdraw, having lost some 35,000 men, including their commander Dragut Pasha. The defeat at Malta marked the limit of Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean, just as their failure at Vienna was the high-water mark of their penetration into Europe, both occurring during the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, as he was known in Europe.

Süleyman died a year after the failure of his forces to capture Malta, passing away on the night of 5/6 September 1566 while leading his army in another invasion of Hungary. The Ottoman Empire had reached its peak during his reign, the longest and most illustrious in the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Süleyman was succeeded by his son Selim II, nicknamed ‘the Sot’, the first in a succession of weak and inactive sultans, some of them insane, who ruled during the long decline of the Ottoman Empire that began in the late sixteenth century. During Selim’s reign (1566-74) the sultan left the direction of the government largely to his capable grand vezir, Sokollu Mehmet Pasha, who had been the last to hold that post under Süleyman. After the Ottomans were defeated by a Christian fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in October 1571 Sokollu Mehmet rebuilt the Turkish navy during the following winter, and used it to conquer Cyprus in 1573 and to take Tunis from the Spaniards the following year.

Despite the evident decline in the empire the Ottoman forces still won occasional victories, most notably Murat IV’s capture of Erivan in 1635 and Baghdad in 1638, as well as the final conquest of Crete in 1669, during the reign of Mehmet IV (1648-87). Mehmet IV mounted an expedition against Vienna in the spring of 1683 under the grand vezir Kara Mustafa Pasha, who had persuaded the sultan that when he took the city ‘all the Christians would obey the Ottomans’. But after besieging the city for two months the Ottoman army was routed by a Christian force and fled in disorder, a defeat that cost Mustafa Pasha his head and Sultan Mehmet his throne, for he was deposed in 1687 as a result of the disorder that followed the disastrous attempt to take Vienna.

The Ottoman defeat at Vienna encouraged the Christian powers of Europe to form a Holy League for another crusade against the Turks. Emissaries from Austria, Poland and Venice met in March 1684, with the support of Pope Innocent XI, and the following year they invaded the Ottoman dominions on several fronts, beginning a war that would last for thirty years.

The crusade mounted by the Holy League was the first in a series of wars between the European powers and the Turks that would continue up to the end of the Ottoman Empire, which lost successive chunks of territory in the peace treaties that followed each of these conflicts. The Treaty of Karlowitz, signed on 26 January 1699, ended the war with the Holy League, in which the Christian powers were victorious on both land and sea against the Ottomans, who ceded Hungary to the Austrians and Athens and the Morea to the Venetians. The Ottomans recovered their lost territory in Greece within fifteen years, but most of Hungary was lost to the empire for ever.

The Treaty of Passarowitz, which ended another war with the Christian powers on 21 July 1718, cost the Ottomans all their remaining territory in Hungary, along with much of Serbia, Bosnia and Wallachia. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, signed on 21 July 1774, ended a war in which Russia conquered Moldavia, Wallachia and the Crimea. By that time the decay of the Ottoman Empire was such that the Western powers began to refer to Turkey as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, as they prepared to divide up its remaining territory. In the Treaty of London, signed in 1827, Britain, France and Russia agreed to intervene in the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, leading to the foundation of the modern Greek Kingdom six years later.

Meanwhile, Mehmet Ali, the Turkish viceroy of Egypt, set out to establish his independence from Sultan Mahmut II, sending an army under his son Ibrahim Pasha to invade Ottoman territory in the summer of 1831. Within a year Ibrahim conquered Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, taking Damascus on 18 June 1832. Ibrahim then led his troops across the Anatolian plateau, defeating two Ottoman armies, and on 12 February 1833 he took Kütahya, only 150 miles from Istanbul. Sultan Mahmut was so frightened by this that he called on the Russians for help. Tsar Nicholas I sent a fleet to Istanbul, and on 20 February they landed troops on the Asian shore of the upper Bosphorus at Hünkâr Iskelesi. This led Ibrahim to come to terms with Sultan Mahmut, and he signed a peace treaty in Kütahya that gave Mehmet Ali control of Egypt, Syria, Arabia and Crete. Ibrahim thereupon evacuated his troops from Anatolia.

Representatives of Tsar Nicholas and Sultan Mahmut signed a treaty at Hünkâr Iskelesi on 8 July 1833 in which Russia and the Ottoman Empire agreed to an eight-year non-aggression pact, wherein the sultan agreed to close the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles to the ships of any countries that were in conflict with the two signatories. This agreement alarmed the British and French, who saw the prospect of the tsar taking control of the straits, and thenceforth they were determined to protect the Ottoman Empire and defend it against Russian encroachment.