Terror and toleration

As in all wars in world history, civilians became caught in the conflicts that attended the growth of the Ottoman Empire, but any assessment of the physical and social damage sustained has to take account of the destructive capacity of warfare in its medieval and early modern context. Because most conflicts could not achieve quick results owing to a lack of overwhelming firepower the wars were prolonged. This meant that the destructiveness was magnified out of proportion to the weaponry that was actually used. Bursa finally fell not because of military developments but because its food supply was dwindling owing to the policy of destroying the agricultural hinterland on which it depended. This took place over a period of years.

Many of the worst cases of suffering happened when the vassal states tried to hit back against the Ottomans. In 1462 Vlad Dracula of Wallachia wrote a letter to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary describing how he had killed precisely '23,884 Turks and Bulgarians in all, not including those who were burned in their houses and whose heads were not presented for our officials'. The raids are also described in the later German accounts of Vlad Dracula's life. These are often exaggerated, but the description of the Danube campaign cannot be very far from the truth, because he:

ordered that all these men, together with their maidens, should be slaughtered with swords and spears, like cabbage ... Dracula had all of Bulgaria burned down, and he impaled all of the people that he captured. There were 25,000 of them, to say nothing of those who perished in the fires.

When the Ottomans advanced on Wallachia Vlad Dracula realised that he could not face the Ottoman Army in open field combat, so he decided to retreat covered by a scorched earth policy, after which he would launch guerrilla raids on the Turks. This inevitably caused great suffering to the population when Vlad burned fields and destroyed villages in his own territory so as to deny supplies to the enemy. Wells were poisoned and lifestock slaughtered. 'Thus', wrote Dukas, 'after having crossed the Danube and advanced for seven days, Mehmet II found no man, nor any significant animal, and nothing to eat or drink.' The Turkish chronicler Tursun Beg described how:

the front ranks of the army reported that there was not a drop of water to quench their thirst. All the carts and animals came to a halt. The heat of the sun was so great that you could cook kebabs on the mail shirts of the ghazis.

Soon the guerrilla raids began, with stragglers being either beheaded or impaled. On the night of 17 June 1462, when the Turks were well on their way to Tirgoviste (Targoviste), Vlad the Impaler launched a daring night attack on the Sultan's camp. Chalkondylas tells us how:

At first there was a lot of terror in the camp because people thought that a new foreign army had come and attacked them. Scared out of their wits by this attack, they considered themselves to be lost as it was being made using torchlight and the sounding of horns to indicate the place to assault.

Thousands may have been slain, but the raid failed in its primary purpose of killing Mehmet the Conqueror himself because his loyal Janissaries rallied. The raiders were driven off and disappeared into the darkness. A few days later the Ottoman Army drew near to Tirgoviste. It had been prepared for a siege like any other medieval town, but with one unique addition. As Chalkondylas relates, Mehmet:

saw men impaled. The Emperor's army came across a field with stakes, about two miles long and half a mile wide. And there were large stakes upon which he could see the impeded bodies of men, women and children, about 20,000 of them ... There were babies clinging to their mothers on the stakes, and the birds had made nests in their breasts.

The sight of the famous 'forest of the impaled' persuaded Mehmet the Conqueror, a man who was well used to the horrors of war, to pull back from Tirgoviste.

In the absence of such overwhelming horrors many ordinary people joined in the fighting against the Ottoman conquests. Citizens as well as soldiers defended the walls of Constantinople during the siege of 1422. The final Turkish assault was beaten off by fierce hand-to-hand fighting in which all the citizens joined with whatever they had to hand:

With the help of the Virgin Mary they armed themselves with swords and stones and threw themselves against the enemy, and just as smoke scares a swarm of bees they encouraged each other, everyone with the weapons they had to hand, or even just with bare hands while others has swords and staves. They tied ropes to the platters they were eating from and used the lids of barrels as shields.

The repulse of the Ottomans on this occasion was ascribed to the intervention of the Virgin Mary, the protectress of Constantinople, who appeared on the battlements as 'a woman dressed in purple' - a miraculous apparition acknowledged even by the Turks.

A similar example of civilian fervour occurred during the 1456 siege of Belgrade. The passionate orations of the Franciscan friar John Capistrano resulted iti a citizen's army of 6,000 men equipped with scythes and cudgels, who made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in military experience. Together with John Hunyadi's 'regulars' Capistrano's 'people's crusaders' (who almost outnumbered the rest of the army) marched to the relief of Belgrade. They were initially alarmed by the multitude of Turkish tents that were pitched outside the walls 'like freshly fallen snow' and the 400 cannon that accompanied the besiegers, so the volunteers held back while Hunyadi's soldiers began the fight. Hunyadi's first task was to break the Turkish blockade of the Danube, which he succeeded in doing on 14 July. Meanwhile, in a worrying echo of Constantinople, Mehmet's artillery bombardment began to breach the walls of Belgrade in several places. The assault was led by janissaries on 21 July, who were met by fierce resistance and crude incendiary weapons made from tarred wood, blankets saturated in sulphur and even sides of bacon.

While the Turks were burying their dead the following morning some of the more fanatical defenders disobeyed orders and sallied out to fight. When they were attacked in their turn more hastened out to join them, and what had begun as an unplanned skirmish rapidly developed into a full-scale battle. John Capistrano left the safety of the walls to try to recall the men, but as this proved impossible he decided to harness their enthusiasm and led them into further action. This was so successful that John Hunyadi followed him. Soon the Turks were in full retreat. Even the camp of the Janissaries was overrun and Mehmet the Conqueror was knocked unconscious. When he recovered his senses he found that he had been evacuated many miles away in a wagon and was so distressed that he contemplated suicide.

Ottoman administration

The Ottomans waged war hard, but they governed their conquests with a light hand. The very nature of the territory they inherited made it vital that people looked after themselves. The Ottomans were always interested in effective forms of self-government. 'They pay great respect to the customs of foreign nations,' wrote a commentator, 'even to the detriment of their religious scruples.' However, there was a great deal of common sense behind the idea. When they acquired the mines of the Balkans they reissued the exemplary Saxon mining laws rather than imposing a new scheme of their own.

The earliest Ottoman warriors were lent strength by the ferocity of their commitment to Islam and showed extreme tenacity and perseverance, characteristics that were undoubtedly linked to their religious beliefs. As for the impact of Islam on the vassal states, the Christians under Muslim rule seem to have enjoyed a greater toleration than was shown to the Orthodox under Latin domination, so resistance was not always as fierce as may have been assumed. Churches might be turned into mosques, while those left in Christian hands suffered certain restrictions such at the prohibition of bell ringing and public processions, but matters could have been much worse. The Orthodox world had the tragic memory of the Fourth Crusade of 1204 to remind them of how well off they were under Ottoman rule by comparison with a western conquest. 'Better the Sultan's turban than the bishop's mitre' wrote one Byzantine scholar. It is also interesting to note that in the case of the inhabitants of the borderlands around the Danube temporary flight and depopulation naturally occurred when war threatened. But when the heaviest fighting was over the peasants returned as rapidly as possible to their lands.

Social relationships between the Ottomans and their Christian subjects varied considerably throughout the period covered in this book. The Ottomans' first victims soon learned that the only way to avoid the onslaughts of the ghazis was to become subjects of the Islamic state. Non-Muslims could then live under Islam's protection. Many took this path, renounced the ineffective protection provided by the Christian states and sought the refuge provided by subjection. As the Muslim conquerors were careful to abide by these rules this helped greatly in the growth of the Ottoman Empire. Christians and Jews were expected to have their own laws. Everyone was organised in the so-called 'millets', communities based on faith, and as long as the millet did not come into conflict with Islamic organisation and society, paid its taxes and kept the peace, its leaders were largely left to run their own affairs. Contrary to popular belief, 16th-century registers suggest that during that century only about 300 families a year converted to Islam. The empire wanted peaceful tax-paying subjects, not Muslims and certainly not rebels. Trade was the one area of civil life where the Ottomans felt obliged to interfere to maintain the efficiency of their armies and the security of their city streets.

The experience of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) is a good illustration of the accommodating method operating on both sides. Its citizens had petitioned the Pope for permission to trade with infidels right after the Turks' first serious victory in Europe. By the 15th century the Ottomans had turned Ragusa into their own Venice, to every successive doge's fury and despair! The Ragusans' behaviour was so mild and noble that by 1347 they had erected an old people's home. By the mid-15th century they had abolished slave trading, forbidden torture, organised a dole, a public health service, a town planning institute and several schools. Perhaps once every 25 years, when their courts were obliged to pass a death sentence on an offender, they had to import a Turkish executioner and the whole city mourned.

Less compliant Ottoman vassal rulers were subjected to a number of requirements. They were forced to send their sons to the Ottoman court as hostages, had to pay tribute and to take part in the Ottoman wars either in person or represented by their sons. Control over their compliance was exercised by the watchful beys of the marches. Should any vassal renounce his allegiance, his territory was immediately regarded as a field of battle that would attract the rapid attention of akinji raiders.

The Sultan's position

The ordinary subjects of the Ottoman Empire were never under any doubt that they were being ruled by a great dynasty. Mehmet II was the first to take on a quasi-imperial role over his territories. The conquest of Constantinople turned him overnight into the most celebrated Sultan in the Muslim world. Receiving soon the epithet of 'the Conqueror' Mehmet began to see himself as the heir to a world empire. As ruler of the Ottomans his power was in any case unquestioned, but the taking of Constantinople made his world look suddenly much wider. It was a situation summed up ten years later when he was addressed by a Greek diplomat with the words:

No one doubts that you are Emperor of the Romans. Whoever is legally master of the capital of the Empire is the Emperor, and Constantinople is the capital of the Roman Empire.

There was also a third strand in Mehmet's concept of himself as a world leader that derived from the Ottomans' ancient origins in the steppe lands of central Asia. As well as being ghazi and Caesar, Mehmet the Conqueror was also the Great Khan.