The Principality Nobody Was Watching
An empire that began by being beneath notice
Anatolia had been under Mongol authority for a long time. The Sultanate of Rum, ruling from Konya, submitted to the Great Khan after its defeat at Köse Dağ in 1243—thirteen years before the Ilkhanate existed at all, and to which Anatolia would only later be attached. (The Saltukids of Erzurum had been swallowed by Rum earlier still, and had no say in any of it.)
What followed will be familiar to anyone who has watched a large organisation come apart. The suzerain keeps the title; the estate quietly redistributes itself among the local managers. As Rum decayed, the beyliks settled along its edges—Turcoman principalities that the sultanate did not so much govern as leave behind, in the manner of furniture. The Ilkhanids held most of them in vassalage. But some beys were simply too small to attract the attention of either Konya or Tabriz, and in this consisted the whole of their good fortune.
The smallest of them sat on the Byzantine frontier, between what are now Eskişehir and Bursa: the holding of Ertuğrul, a contemporary of Edward I, which passed to his son Osman. The dynasty Osman founded would hold power for rather more than six centuries: until the abolition of the sultanate on 1 November 1922, after which it retained the caliphate, and therefore no power whatever, for a further sixteen months. The starting date, 1299, appears in every reference work. It is known solely from Ottoman chronicles written in the fifteenth century, at the point when the house required a biography with a precise date of birth.
Bithynia, taken piece by piece
Osman and his son Orhan spent the first half of the fourteenth century removing Bithynia from the Byzantines a town at a time—Prusa (Bursa, 1326), Nicaea (İznik, 1331), Nicomedia (İzmit, 1337)—and made the first of these their capital.
Then Orhan turned, for the first time, on his co-religionists. Exploiting a succession quarrel, he annexed the beylik of Karasi, centred on Balıkesir and Bergama, in about 1345, completing the business by 1361. It brought him the Dardanelles shore and, far more valuably, a ready-made fleet: the Ottomans crossed into Europe in 1354 and took Gallipoli, then Rhaedestus (Tekirdağ). In Anatolia they reached the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, took Angora (Ankara), and came out on the Aegean, at the old sites of Troy and Pergamum.
What the Greeks left behind
That list repays slow reading, because it consists entirely of pairs.
Prusa → Bursa. Named for the Bithynian king Prusias I; the Turkish name is the same name, put through Turkish phonology.
Nicomedia → İzmit. Another royal name—Nicomedes I—and a long retreat: the city appears in Ottoman documents as İznikmid for centuries before contracting to İzmit in the nineteenth.
Nicaea → İznik. Here the authorities part company. One account treats the initial i- as an ordinary prosthetic vowel, Turkish declining to begin a word so awkwardly. The other sees a fossilised Greek preposition: εἰς Νίκαιαν, “to Nicaea”—what was borrowed being not the name but the answer to “where are you going?”, exactly as εἰς τὴν πόλιν produced Istanbul. The second is the prettier explanation and therefore wants watching: the Istanbul etymology is secure, and the Nicaean one rests on the analogy with it.
Adrianople → Edirne. Founded by Hadrian, who survives in the name of a Turkish city to this day, reduced to three sounds.
Angora → Ankara. The only entry on the list that an English reader is likely to have met outside a history book, having encountered it on a jumper.
Murad: war in the west, bookkeeping in the east
Orhan’s son Murad moved into Thrace, taking Philippopolis (Plovdiv) and Adrianople (Edirne), to which he transferred his capital, and then Bulgarian Sofia (1385) and Serbian Niš (1386). What he called himself while doing so is disputed: inscriptions and coins more often give “bey” and “hüdavendigâr”, and it was his son Bayezid who, on most accounts, declared himself sultan—on the field of Kosovo, over his father’s body.
The title is Persian: خداوندگار, from hudâ, “God”, with the possessive -vend and the intensifying -gâr. It means “lord”, “sovereign”—very nearly “godlike”. Later Ottoman tradition reinterpreted it piously as “he whom God assists”, and modern paraphrase has completed the journey to “devoted to God”: a title that began by likening its bearer to the Almighty has ended by subordinating him to Him. His contemporaries called Murad a sovereign; posterity has demoted him to a servant.
In Anatolia, Murad proceeded quite differently. Germiyan (Kütahya) cost him nothing at all: its bey married his daughter Devletşah Hatun to the prince Bayezid and sent Simav, Emet and Tavşanlı along as her dowry. Hamid (Isparta) was bought—first in 1374, for eighty thousand in gold, and then in 1381–82, when its bey, who feared the Karamanids rather more than he feared the Ottomans, sold Murad the remainder. Teke (Antalya), a cadet branch of the same house, yielded only in part under Murad and survived until 1423.
The Ottomans fought in the west and shopped in the east. The empire was assembled by two methods at once, and the less picturesque of them may well have contributed more.
Nor was the method peculiar to Anatolia. In June 1348 Clement VI bought the town of Avignon outright from Joanna I of Naples for eighty thousand florins—the same sum, as it happens, that Murad would pay the Hamidids, and paid for the same reason, which is that buying a place is cheaper than besieging it. The following spring Philip VI acquired Montpellier from the king of Majorca and, by the Treaty of Romans, the Dauphiné from Humbert II—a childless and comprehensively bankrupt prince who sold his entire principality and retired into a Dominican habit. The deed of sale, out of delicacy, called it a “transport”. France was assembling itself by cheque throughout the very decades we have been discussing, and the century has been named after the war rather than the conveyancing.
In 1389, at Kosovo, Murad and his son Bayezid defeated the allied Serbian and Bosnian princes. Murad did not survive the day.
Lightning
Bayezid was called Yıldırım—simply “lightning”, with none of the decorative English “the Thunderbolt” about it: a fourteenth-century Flash, whose principal weapon was the speed at which he could move an army. The name itself is Arabic, incidentally: Bayezid from Abū Yazīd, which is no odder for a Turkish sultan than a Greek name is for a Russian prince.
He finished the beyliks in a single winter campaign in 1389–90—Aydın, Saruhan, Germiyan, Menteşe, Hamid—completed the subjugation of Bulgaria, and reduced the Byzantine emperor to a vassal. Or rather sharpened an existing vassalage, imposed under Murad in about 1373, into something frankly humiliating: a kadı installed in Constantinople, Byzantine contingents marching in Ottoman campaigns. Of the Byzantine Empire there remained, by this point, essentially one city.
The young empire now ran from the Danube to the Euphrates. On the map, its borders at Bayezid’s accession are marked in green and his conquests to 1396 in red.
Dmitry Donskoy’s son Vasily I at this time receives from Tokhtamysh a label on Nizhny Novgorod and Murom, and at the same time takes Vologda, Bezhetsky Verh and Dvina Land from Novgorod — although he returns it a year later. Not every purchase is left to the buyer.
There was, however, one detail that Bayezid did not take into account in his rapid method. The beys whom he drove away from their bailiffs did not go anywhere: Yakub Bey of Hermia, Alaeddin Karamanid and other offended people went to the east and found there a willing listener.
And then the Arctic fox Tamerlane came. , but more on that next time.
