The Rise of the Ottoman Empire
Osman I, the dynasty's eponym, led a small ghazi — holy warrior — principality on the Byzantine frontier near Bursa at the turn of the fourteenth century. The collapse of Seljuk power after the Mongol victory at Köse Dağ in 1243 had left Anatolia fragmented into a dozen Turkish beyliks, or principalities. Osman's strategic position on the Byzantine frontier gave his followers access to plunder and prestige unavailable to rivals further east, and his reputation for justice attracted both Turkish warriors and Christian converts. This combination of religious legitimacy and material reward became the template for Ottoman expansion. The capture of Bursa in 1326 gave the Ottomans their first major city and a base for administrative consolidation. Osman's son Orhan reorganized the army, creating the janissary corps — slave-soldiers recruited through the devshirme levy of Christian boys — whose discipline and loyalty to the sultan distinguished Ottoman armies from the tribal levies of rival states. Orhan also crossed into Europe, taking Gallipoli in 1354, the first permanent Ottoman foothold on European soil. Thrace fell rapidly thereafter, and by 1369 Sultan Murad I had moved his capital to Adrianople (Edirne), deep inside the Balkans, signaling that Ottoman ambition was now primarily European. The Battle of Kosovo in June 1389 was the pivotal engagement of Balkan history. A coalition of Serbian, Bosnian, and Albanian forces under Prince Lazar met the Ottoman army on the Field of Blackbirds. Both commanders died — Murad I assassinated during or after the battle, Lazar executed as a prisoner — but the Ottomans held the field and the Serbian Empire as an independent power was finished. Kosovo entered Serbian national mythology as a moment of martyrdom and sacrifice, a memory that would inflame Balkan politics through the twentieth century. For the Ottomans, it confirmed Balkan supremacy and freed Bayezid I to prosecute the conquest of remaining Anatolian beyliks. Bayezid I, called Yildirim — Thunderbolt — for his speed of movement, nearly completed the encirclement of Constantinople. He besieged the city from 1394, and only a Crusader relief expedition crushed at Nicopolis in 1396 interrupted his schedule. Bayezid was simultaneously annexing rival Turkish beyliks in Anatolia, stripping their rulers of power and provoking the fury of Timur (Tamerlane), who regarded himself as the protector of legitimate Turco-Mongol dynastic rights. The confrontation came at the Battle of Ankara in July 1402. Timur commanded perhaps 140,000 men against Bayezid's 70,000-85,000; crucially, many Anatolian soldiers defected to Timur to reclaim their beyliks. Bayezid was captured — the first Ottoman sultan ever taken prisoner — and died in Mongol captivity within months. The defeat shattered Ottoman power temporarily, restored the Anatolian beyliks, and gave Constantinople a reprieve of fifty years. Yet the Ottoman institution proved resilient: after a decade of civil war among Bayezid's sons, Mehmed I reunited the empire, and within two generations his grandson Mehmed II would complete what Bayezid could not.
- Year: 1299 CE
- Category: Political
