Gábor Ágoston, Ottoman Expansion and Military Power 1300-1453

17
Ottoman expansion and military power,

1300–1453
g á b o r á g o s t o n
Introduction
The Ottoman empire is named after Osman (d.1324), the eponymous founder of
the dynasty, whose name came to be rendered in English as Ottoman. Osman
was a Turkish frontier lord – beg in Turkish – who commanded a band of semi-
nomadic fighters at the beginning of the fourteenth century in northwestern
Asia Minor (Anatolia), known at the time to Turks, Persians, and Arabs as the
land of Rum (Rome); that is, the land of the Eastern Roman Empire. Osman Beg
was but one of many Turkish lords who carved out their respective principalities
in western and central Asia Minor, profiting from the power vacuum caused by
the Mongols’ destruction of the Seljuq sultanate of Rum in 1243.
Within three generations, Osman’s successors – Orhan (r.1324?–62), Murad
I (r.1362–89), and Bayezid I (r.1389–1402) – extended the Ottoman domains up
to the Euphrates river in Anatolia and to the banks of the Danube river in
Southeastern Europe (modern Balkans), known to the Ottomans and the
indigenous people of the peninsula as Rumeli or Rumelia; that is, the lands of
the Romans. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II (r.1444–6, 1451–81) conquered
Constantinople, the capital of the thousand-year-old Eastern Roman or
Byzantine Empire. Declaring himself Caesar, the heir to the Byzantine
emperors, and lord of “two lands” (Rumelia and Anatolia) and “two seas”
(the Black Sea and the Aegean), Mehmed II announced his imperial claims
both in Europe and Asia. Mehmed II’s grandson, Selim I (r.1512–20) crushed
the Mamlūk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, incorporating their realms into his
empire. Selim’s son, Süleyman I (r.1520–66) added what is today Iraq and
Hungary to his empire. Yet, any short summary of early Ottoman conquests
is misleading, suggesting a linear and easy expansion of the Ottoman
domains. But the rise of the house of Osman to prominence was neither
foreseeable at around 1300 nor unchallenged in the decades and centuries to
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come. Ottoman rule was contested by the neighboring Turko-Muslim prin-

cipalities, popular uprisings, and neighboring regional powers – both
Christian (Byzantium, Venice, Hungary) and Muslim (Timurids, Qara
Qoyunlus, Aq Qoyunlus, Mamlūks, and Safavids). Twice in the fifteenth
century, in 1402 and 1444, the very existence of the Ottoman dynasty was at
stake. How does one then explain the rapid Ottoman expansion?
The dominant explanation until the late 1970s was the so-called ghaza theory,
originally formulated in the 1930s by the Austrian Orientalist scholar Paul
Wittek. This viewed the Ottoman amirate as a quintessential Islamic frontier
warrior state, whose raison d’être was ghaza or “holy war” against the Ottomans’
Christian neighbors. The theory served as an all-embracing explanation of the
rise and bellicose nature of the Ottoman empire. In the past decades, historians
have pointed out the theory’s weaknesses and offered more complicated
explanations.1 Research has noted the propitious location of Osman’s small
amirate, the power vacuum in Anatolia that followed the collapse of the Seljuq
sultanate of Rum, and the wars among the Ottomans’ neighbors that all aided
Ottoman expansion. Interest in the history of the environment and epidemics
drew attention to the possible effects of natural disasters – floods and earth-
quakes – and the Black Death that arrived in Asia Minor in 1347.2 At the same
time, the study of Byzantine and European sources has demonstrated that
many of the early Ottoman campaigns, which Ottoman court chroniclers
termed as religiously inspired ghaza, were in fact inclusive political enterprises
in which Muslims and Christians often joined forces against the Ottomans’
regional rivals, both Muslim and Christian. Research has shown that through-
out the early fourteenth century, the Muslim Türkmen amirates of Aydın,
Karasi, Saruhan, and Ottoman forged numerous alliances and launched joint
military ventures with Christian Catalans, Byzantines, and Genoese.3 The
1 Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey, Thirteenth –
Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Colin Heywood (London and New York, Routledge, 2012), which
contains Wittek’s most important writings on the subject with Colin Heywood’s introduc-
tion; Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1995); Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State
(Albany, State University of New York Press, 2003); Rudi Paul Lindner, Explorations in
Ottoman Prehistory (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2007).
2 Elizabeth A. Zachariadou (ed.), Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: A Symposium
Held in Rethymnon 10–12 January 1997 (Rethymnon, Crete University Press, 1999);
Uli Schamiloğlu, “The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: The Black Death in Medieval
Anatolia and Its Impact on Turkish Civilization,” in Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter,
and Jean-Marc Ran Oppenheim (eds.), Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard
W. Bulliet (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 255–79.
3 Kafadar, Between Two Worlds; Lowry, The Nature; Colin Imber, “What Does Ghazi
Actually Mean?,” in Çiğdem Balım-Harding and Colin Imber (eds.), The Balance of
Truth: Essays in Honour of Professor Geoffrey Lewis (Istanbul, Isis Press, 2000), pp. 165–78.
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Ottoman expansion and military power, 1300–1453
Ottomans crossed the Dardanelles Straits in 1347 into Southeastern Europe as

allies of John Kantakouzenos, who sought help from Orhan, Osman’s son and
heir, in his bid for the Byzantine throne against Emperor John V Palaiologos
(r.1341–91), who succeeded his father at the age of 9 under the regency of his
mother Anna of Savoy. With Ottoman help, John Kantakouzenos – who
married his daughter Theodora to Orhan in 1346 – became co-emperor.
The history of Ottoman expansion and setbacks demonstrates that the
Ottomans not only profited from historical accidents and contingencies, but
employed a wide array of strategies to weaken, conquer, and subjugate their
rivals. They also managed to integrate elements of the conquered peoples’
societies and institutions into the Ottoman military and administrative sys-
tems, which, in turn, were shaped by these people, institutions, and encoun-
ters. Thus, following a brief overview of Ottoman expansion and setbacks –
a reminder that Ottoman expansion was anything but a linear process – this
chapter re-examines Ottoman strategies of conquest and incorporation and
the evolution of Ottoman military capabilities. These, as well as historical
contingencies and accidents, played a crucial role in the emergence of the
Ottomans as a military power in both Southeastern Europe and Asia
Minor.4
Expansion and setbacks

The Ottomans’ first major success was the capture of the Byzantine town of
Prousa in 1326 by Orhan, which he promptly made the capital of his princi-
pality. In 1352, profiting from the Byzantine civil war as ally of John
Kantakouzenos, Orhan acquired the Ottomans’ first foothold in Thrace in
Southeastern Europe. Two years later his son, Süleyman Pasha, captured the
important Byzantine fort and naval base of Gallipoli, whose defenses
a devastating earthquake had just destroyed. The Ottomans not only used
Gallipoli as their bridgehead for their raids into Europe, but soon turned it
into a maritime base and the site of the first Ottoman naval arsenal, built on
the basis of the existing Byzantine dockyards. With the conquest of
Adrianople, most probably in 1369, Murad I gained access to Thrace and
Bulgaria. The fact that Murad made the city his capital signaled that the
Ottomans were in Europe to stay and that they considered themselves
a power with strategic interests both in Asia Minor and Europe. In 1386,
4 I examine the emergence of the Ottomans and the formation of the Ottoman military in
more detail in my forthcoming book, The Last Muslim Conquest.
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Murad I’s better-organized army defeated the amir of Karaman, although the
Karamanids remained a challenge to Ottoman ambitions until Mehmed II
eventually incorporated the amirate into his empire towards the end of his
reign.5
The death of Murad I in 1389 at the battle of Kosovo Polje (Field of the
Blackbirds) could have halted Ottoman expansion in Europe. However, the
Serbian ruler Lazar was also killed in the battle, and his successor, Stefan
Lazarević, became the vassal of the new Ottoman ruler, Bayezid I, who
quickly assumed power and embarked on aggressive campaigns of expansion.
He conquered Bulgaria (1393, 1395) and defeated a European crusader army
led by Sigismund of Hungary at the battle of Nikopol (1396). This prompted
Sigismund to adapt a defensive strategy, based on a multilayered defense
system consisting of vassal states, border provinces, border forts along the
lower Danube and its tributaries, and a field army as a last resort in case the
Ottomans broke through the first three layers of defense. This is just one
example of how Ottoman expansion impacted the policies in the neighboring
countries.
Byzantine support for the crusaders provoked a long Ottoman blockade of
Constantinople (1394–1402). To control navigation along the Bosporus Straits,
Bayezid I ordered the construction of a castle on the straits’ Asian shore –
called Anadolu Hisarı or Anatolian castle – northeast of Constantinople. This
bold strategic move could not compensate for the lack of adequate Ottoman
siege artillery. Yet, Constantinople was saved not due to lack of Ottoman
siege artillery, but rather because Bayezid had to abandon the siege and face
his new opponent, Temür Lenk (Tamerlane), the ruler of an expanding
Muslim empire in Transoxiana.
Ottoman conquests in eastern Anatolia provoked a clash between Bayezid
and Temür. Temür claimed suzerainty over all Anatolian amirs on account of
his descent from Chinggis khan (r.1206–27), whose Ilkhanid successors ruled
over Asia Minor in the second half of the thirteenth century. Bayezid, on the
other hand, considered himself heir to the Seljuqs of Rum, who had ruled
Anatolia from the late eleventh through the early fourteenth century. In open
defiance, Bayezid requested from the caliph in Cairo the title of “Sultan of
Rum,” used by the Rum Seljuqs. However, at the battle of Ankara (July 28,
5 For the early Ottoman conquests see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481
(Istanbul, Isis, 1990); Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire,
1300–1923 (New York, Basic Books, 2006); and Kate Fleet (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, 1071–1453 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2009).
452
1402), Temür defeated and captured Bayezid, who died in captivity the next
spring. Temür’s victory at Ankara checked the first phase of Ottoman
expansion. The debacle also threatened the very existence of the Ottoman
polity, as Temür restored the lands that Bayezid conquered in eastern
Anatolia to their Türkmen lords and partitioned the remaining Ottoman
domains amongst Bayezid’s sons.
However, the sons of Bayezid started a decade-long fight to establish
undivided sovereignty over the Ottoman domains, suggesting that the idea
of the indivisibility of the domains of the house of Osman had taken root
among the Ottoman elite. Having defeated his brothers, Mehmed I (r.1413–21)
emerged victorious and set out to reestablish Ottoman sovereignty in
Anatolia. In 1416, he eliminated Sheikh Bedreddin, a charismatic Muslim
mystic and judge, who led a popular uprising against Mehmed southwest
of the Danube delta. The same year, Mehmed also routed his brother
Mustafa, who had just been released from Timurid captivity and appeared
as a pretender to the Ottoman throne. Mustafa entered into negotiations with
the Byzantines, Venetians, and Wallachians, hoping to mount a coordinated
assault on Mehmed. Defeated, Mustafa found refuge with the Byzantine
Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (r.1391–1425), and Mehmed found it wise to
pay Manuel an annual sum of 10,000 gold ducats so that the emperor would
not release Mustafa from his custody.
Murad II (r.1421–44, 1446–51) continued his father’s work, eliminating his
uncle and brother – dubbed “False Mustafa” and Little Mustafa by Ottoman
court chroniclers – whom the Byzantines released from custody to instigate
rebellion against the new sultan. Using military force, diplomacy, appease-
ment, vassalage, and marriage alliances, Murad II not only secured his
throne, but also saved the Ottoman state from possible collapse during the
crisis years of 1443–4. As a response to Ottoman raids into Hungary and
Murad II’s subjugation in 1439 of Serbia, Hungary’s vassal, the Hungarians
attacked the Ottomans. The campaign into Ottoman Rumelia in the winter
of 1443–4, and a renewed offensive of the amir of Karaman in Anatolia, yet
again threatened the very existence of the Ottoman domains and forced
Murad II to seek peace. The Hungarian–Serbian–Ottoman peace treaty of
1444 reestablished the pre-1439 borders by returning Ottoman-conquered
Serbia to its ruler, George Branković. Now Murad II turned against the
Karamans, who made peace with Murad, accepting the status quo ante.
Having thwarted the danger, Murad II abdicated in favor of his 12-year-old
son, Mehmed II. However, the young sultan was unable to deal with the
rebellion of Skanderbeg in Albania, a renewed Karaman campaign, and, most
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importantly, an anti-Ottoman crusade. Urged by the papacy, which declared

the treaty of 1444 concluded with the “infidel Turk” void, the Hungarians
broke the truce. In September 1444, a crusading army – led by King Wladislas
of Hungary and Poland and his general János Hunyadi – entered into
Ottoman domains. At this critical moment, Murad II assumed command of
the army, while Mehmed remained the sultan. Murad’s army of some 40,000
defeated the 18,000 crusaders at the battle of Varna on the Black Sea coast
(November 10, 1444), killing King Wladislas.6
The crises of 1443–4 revealed the vulnerability of the young Ottoman state
and the friction among the old and new leaders, represented respectively by
viziers from the old Turkish aristocracy and by statesmen of Christian origin,
who were either recent converts from Christianity to Islam or products of the
Ottoman levy of Christian boys. The first group pursued a cautious policy
against the Ottomans’ European enemies, while the new elite advocated for
a more belligerent policy. In order to avoid a possible disaster such an
aggressive policy might cause, Grand Vizier Halil Pasha, the scion of the
famous Turkish Çandarlı family and the leader of the old elite, recalled
Murad II from his retirement for the second time, using as pretext the 1446
janissary rebellion in Edirne. This erupted partly because Mehmed II debased
the Ottoman silver coinage in which the janissaries received their salaries.
During his second reign (1446–51) Murad II secured Ottoman rule in Rumelia,
defeating another crusading army in 1448 at Kosovo Polje in Serbia. When he
died in 1451, his son Mehmed II, by then 19 years of age, was poised to execute
his belligerent plans against his Christian rivals.
Mehmed II’s greatest achievement was the conquest of Constantinople.
To assume control over the Straits of the Bosporus, which separated the
Ottomans’ Asian and European lands, the sultan had a fortress built at its
narrowest point. Rumeli Hisarı or Rumelian castle stood opposite the old
“Anatolian castle,” which Bayezid I had erected. With their cannons deployed
on the walls of the two castles, the Ottomans effectively sealed off
Byzantium, depriving it of reinforcements and supplies. With 80,000 men,
the besiegers greatly outnumbered the defenders, who counted 8,000 Greeks
and 2,000 foreigners, in addition to 40,000 civilians. Following fifty-four days
of constant Ottoman bombardment and repeated attacks, Constantinople fell
on May 29, 1453. The conquest proved the advantages of firearms against
6 Pál Engel, “János Hunyadi and the Peace ‘of Szeged’ (1444),” Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 (1994), 241–57; Colin Imber (ed.), The Crusade of Varna, 1443–45
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006); John Jefferson, The Holy Wars of King Wladislas and Sultan
Murad: The Ottoman-Christian Conflict from 1438–1444 (Leiden, Brill, 2012).
454
medieval fortifications. During the siege, the Ottomans deployed some of the
largest bombards known to contemporaries, which threw stone balls weigh-
ing between 240 and 400 kg, a testament to Ottoman manufacturing and
logistical capabilities. However, cutting-edge military technology was but
one element in the Ottoman success. Other important factors included
numerical superiority, careful planning, better logistics, prowess in siege
warfare, and resourceful leadership, which portaged ships, soldiers, and
weaponry into the Golden Horn, where the Byzantine defense was the
weakest.7
Marcher lords, the house of Osman,

and the evolution of the Ottoman military
The heterogeneous nature of the early Ottoman society was a rich source of
military and administrative skills and acculturation. Amongst the closest
comrades of Osman one finds Orthodox Greeks and recent Christian con-
verts to Islam, such as Köse Mihal and Evrenos Beg, who assisted the
Ottomans with their knowledge of the neighboring societies and geography.
Mihal was the Byzantine castellan of a small fort in Bithynia in control of the
lowlands of the Middle Sangarios/Sakarya river valley, bordering Osman’s
realms. Mihal and Osman concluded a mutually beneficial alliance by which
Mihal stabilized his position on the volatile Byzantine–Ottoman frontier,
whereas Osman secured his rearguard during his raids. Mihal later converted
to Islam, and in 1326 as an Ottoman commander negotiated the surrender of
Prousa to the Ottomans with the town’s Byzantine commander. Ottoman
chronicles claimed that Evrenos Beg was a Muslim Turk from the neighbor-
ing Karasi amirate. However, a recently discovered source suggests that he
was of Serbian descent, the son of a certain Branko Lazar, who after his
conversion to Islam was known as Isa Beg. It is also plausible that Branko
Lazar had joined the Ottomans in order to preserve and extend his original
patrimony by fighting (now under the Ottoman banner) against his local
Christian rivals. His Serbian origin might explain why Murad I entrusted
Evrenos Beg to lead the Ottoman army to the battlefield of Kosovo. Unlike
the newcomer Ottomans, Evrenos Beg was familiar with the region’s
7 Kelly DeVries, “Gunpowder Weapons at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453,” in

Yaacov Lev (ed.), War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th–15th Centuries
(Leiden, Brill, 1997), pp. 343–62; Gábor Ágoston, “War-Winning Weapons? On the
Decisiveness of Ottoman Firearms from the Siege of Constantinople (1453) to the
Battle of Mohács (1526),” Journal of Turkish Studies 39 (2013), 129–43.
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geography and politics. Evrenos Beg was one of the most famous marcher
lords (sing. uc begi), who conquered for the Ottomans most of what is today
northern and central Greece.8
The marcher lords possessed large hereditary estates and substantial
armies of frontier raiders. These the Turks called akıncı, meaning “those
who flow,” because – in the words of the Byzantine chronicler Doukas – they
descended upon their enemy “like a flooding river.”9 The marcher lords often
acted independently of the Ottoman rulers, and governed large areas in the
Rumelian marches as fellow generals of equal status to the Ottoman sultans
rather than military commanders subject to the orders of the latter. The
status and influence of the marcher lords can be seen from the important role
they played in the Ottoman succession struggles of 1402–13, as none of the
warring Ottoman princes could hold onto their lands in Southeastern Europe
without their support.10 Exempted from taxes, the akıncı raiders originally
sustained themselves from plunder and sale of booty, especially captured
slaves. Due to the exceptional speed and endurance of their horses, bred
especially for swift and long-distance raids, these cavalrymen played impor-
tant roles in cross-border attacks, devastating the border areas of the
Ottomans’ neighbors and terrorizing their population. In campaigns, they
served as scouts and vanguard forces, demoralizing the enemy by their
guerilla tactics. They also guarded river crossings and bridges. The light
cavalry akıncı raiders remained a significant unit in the Ottoman military
until the early sixteenth century.
In addition to these mounted soldiers under the command of the marcher
lords, the early Ottomans also recruited young volunteer peasants for the
infantry yaya (footman) and cavalry müsellem (lit. exempt) corps. Paid by the
ruler during campaigns, they returned to their villages after campaigns and
were exempted from certain taxes in return for their military service. Under
Murad I, the müsellems were gradually replaced by the dynasty’s salaried
palace horsemen, whereas azab infantrymen and the janissaries took the
8 Heath Lowry and İ smail E. Erünsal, The Evrenos Dynasty of Yenice-i Vardar: Notes &
Documents (Istanbul, Bahçeşehir University Press, 2010); Mariya Kiprovska, “Byzantine
Renegade and Holy Warrior: Reassessing the Character of Köse Mihal, a Hero of the
Byzantino-Ottoman Borderland,” Journal of Turkish Studies 40 (2013), 245–69;
Mariya Kiprovska, “Ferocious Invasion or Smooth Incorporation? Integrating the
Established Balkan Military System into the Ottoman Army,” in Oliver Jens Schmitt
(ed.), The Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans (Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences Press,
2016), pp. 79–102, esp. pp. 96–9.
9 Quoted in Lowry, The Nature, p. 46.
10 Dimitris Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid: Empire Building and Representation in the Ottoman
Civil War of 1402–1413 (Leiden, Brill, 2007).
456
place of the yaya infantry. The yayas and müsellems became auxiliary forces,
charged with transporting weapons and ammunition, and building roads and
bridges during campaigns. Organized similarly to the janissaries, and armed
with bows and swords, the infantry azabs were a kind of peasant militia,
originally composed of unmarried (azab) young men. They received their
military kit from a certain number of tax-paying families. The azabs were
lower-quality troops, who could be used as cannon fodder and who fought in
the first ranks of the Ottoman battle formation, in front of the cannons and
janissaries. Although their number was significant (some 20,000 in 1453), the
janissaries gradually replaced them, relegating the azabs to garrison and naval
duties.11
The most important pillars of the Ottoman dynasty’s military power, with
which they gradually overpowered not just their Türkmen rivals in Anatolia
but also the lords of the Rumelian marches, were the Ottoman prebendal
system that financed thousands of mounted provincial soldiers, and the
standing household army under the direct control of the Ottoman sultans.
The Ottoman prebendal system, based on revenue or service grants called
timar, had developed under the first Ottoman rulers, following pre-existing
Byzantine and Seljuq conditional service grant arrangements, known as
pronoia and iqta‘, respectively. In return for the right to collect revenues
from his assigned timar prebends, the Ottoman provincial cavalryman or
sipahi had to provide for his arms (short sword and bows), armor, and horse,
and to report for military service along with his armed retainers when called
upon by the sultan. During campaigns, muster rolls were checked against
timar registers in order to determine if all the timariot cavalrymen had
reported for military duty and brought the required share of retainers and
equipment. If the cavalryman did not report for military duty or failed to
bring with him the required number of armed retainers, he lost his timar,
which was then assigned to someone else. Numbering some 10,000–15,000
during Murad I’s wars, the timariot provincial cavalry and the timar system
played an important role in transforming the early Ottoman military into
a semi-permanent army under the sultan’s command.
From the earliest times the Ottoman rulers could count on their military
entourage, known as kul (lit. slave or servitor) and nöker (companion, client,
11 On the early Ottoman army see Gyula Káldy-Nagy, “The First Centuries of the
Ottoman Military Organization,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 31
(1977), 147–62; Pál Fodor, “Ottoman Warfare, 1300–1453,” in Fleet (ed.), Byzantium to
Turkey, pp. 192–226, esp. pp. 211–12 (on the azabs); and Gábor Ágoston, “Azep,”
Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (Leiden, Brill, 2007– ).
457
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retainer). These were the forerunners of the sultans’ salaried household

troops, known as kapukulu; that is, “slaves/servitors of the sultan’s gate.”
Either Orhan or Murad I established the ruler’s elite slave guard, the famous
janissary corps, from the Turkish yeniçeri, meaning “new troops.”12 Initially
numbering only a few hundred men, the janissaries were the first standing
infantry in European history that existed continuously for centuries following
its establishment, preceding similar permanent infantry formations in
Western Europe by some two centuries.
In battle, the janissaries’ main function was to protect the sultan. Forming
a square of several rows and positioned after the irregular forces, the
janissaries engaged in the fight only if the enemy, having routed the provin-
cial cavalry on the wings and the irregular infantry azabs before them,
reached their ranks and threatened the sultan. Accounts of mid-fifteenth-
century battles such as Varna (1444) and Kosovo (1448) describe the janissaries
as an impassable wall, protected by an embankment strengthened with iron
stakes and large shields. Behind the janissaries, the Ottomans placed their
camels laden with rich baggage. Should the enemy reach the embankment,
these were to be used to distract the enemy to buy time.13 In siege warfare,
the janissaries played an equally important role. Ordered to scale the walls of
enemy fortresses during decisive attacks, they regularly broke the resistance
of defenders, leading to the capture of the fortress.
At first the sultan used prisoners of war to create his own independent
military guard. In the 1380s, a forced levy of Christian boys, called devşirme or
“collection,” was introduced to recruit soldiers for the janissaries. Under the
levy, Christian boys between 8 and 20 years old were periodically collected, at
varying rates. In the 1490s the average age of levied boys was 13.5 years. The
collection occurred haphazardly in the fifteenth century, more regularly in
the sixteenth century when frequent and prolonged wars often decimated the
ranks of the janissaries. Reports recording the number of youths levied varied
from a thousand to several thousand per collection and/or year. Extensive
and circumspect regulations governed the collection of boys based on
12 Colin Imber, “The Origin of the Janissaries,” in C. Imber, Warfare, Law and Pseudo-
history (Istanbul, Isis Press, 2011).
13 See, for instance, Halil İ nalcık and Mevlud Oguz (eds.), Gazavat-i Sultan Murad
B. Mehemmed Han, Izladi Ve Varna Savaşları (1443–1444) Üzerinde Anonim Gazavatname
(1989), also published in English in Imber (ed.), The Crusade of Varna; see also
a Hungarian captive’s narrative, Georgius de Hungaria, Incipit Prohemium in
Tractatum de Moribus, Conditionibus et Nequicia Turcorum (Urach, 1481), Hungarian
translation in Lajos Tardy (ed.), Rabok, követek, kalmárok az oszmán birodalomról
(Budapest, Gondolat Kiadó, 1977), 74; cf. Jefferson, The Holy Wars.
458
physical and mental condition, as well as their social status. According to the
Laws of the Janissaries – written in 1606 by a former janissary but reflecting
both early practices and changes that had occurred until the early seven-
teenth century – the officials charged with the collection of boys could not
gather the only child of a family, for the head of the household needed his
help with cultivating his land in order to pay his taxes to the timariot
provincial cavalryman. Similarly, they were not supposed to collect the
sons of the village elders “as they were vile and so were their children”;
the children of shepherds and herdsmen “as they had been brought up in the
mountains so they were uneducated”; the boys of craftsmen since they did
not fulfill their pledge for soldier’s pay; and the married boys, because their
“eyes had been opened, and those would not become the sultan’s kul” – that
is, household slave. Likewise, excluded from the levy were orphans, those
who were not in perfect health, those who spoke Turkish or were circum-
cised, those who were too tall or too short – they were considered stupid and
trouble-makers, respectively – and those who had visited Istanbul but
returned to their province, “for they were shameless.” Certain ethnic groups,
like the Hungarians and Croatians beyond Belgrade, or Christians who lived
in the regions between Karaman and Erzurum were also excluded from the
collection. The Hungarians and Croatians were considered unreliable, while
those belonging to the second group were suspicious because they lived
among Georgians, Türkmen, and Kurds. Officials compiled two copies of
detailed registers for each group of 100–150 or 200 levied boys, called “the
flock.” The registers listed the boy’s name, the name of his father, that of his
sipahi, and his village. They also gave a physical description of the boy.14 The
“flock” then traveled on foot to the capital. Many perished during the long
journey of hundreds of kilometers, while others managed to run away. Still
others escaped the levy because their families bribed the recruiting officers.
On the other hand, Ottoman and European sources alike indicate that some
Christian families volunteered their boys, because the levy provided them
with opportunities for upward social mobility.
Those who made it to the imperial capital were, upon arrival, inspected,
circumcised, and converted to Islam. The smartest ones were singled out for
education in the Palace School. In due course, these lads could achieve the
highest offices within the empire, becoming provincial governors and grand
14 Quotations are from Mebde-i Kanun-i Yeniçeri Ocağı Tarihi, published in Orhan Sakin,
Yeniçeri Ocağı Tarihi ve Yasaları (Istanbul, Doğu Kütüphanesi, 2011), pp. 9b–11b; see also
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power, 2nd rev. ed.
(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 123–7.
459
gábor ágoston
viziers. The majority of the levied boys, however, were hired out to Turkish
farmers, during which time they became “accustomed to hardship” and
learned the rudiments of the Turkish language and Islamic customs. After
seven or eight years of hard work in the fields, the boys were recalled to the
Ottoman capital and Gallipoli. There they joined the ranks of janissary
novices and lived in their barracks under strict military discipline. They also
served as a cheap workforce in public construction, in the imperial gardens,
the Imperial Cannon Foundry, and the Naval Arsenal. Only after several
years of such service did the novices become janissaries or fill vacancies in the
corps of artillery gunners, gun-carriage drivers, armorers, and bombardiers.15
The Ottoman timar and kul/devşirme systems considerably strengthened
the Ottoman ruler’s position vis-à-vis the marcher lords and helped to
consolidate the rule of the house of Osman after the debacle of Ankara and
the decade of fratricide. In line with his centralizing policy, Mehmed II also
transformed the akıncı raiders into soldier-peasants, who worked on the plots
that they received from the state and fought for the Ottoman dynasty as light
cavalry in return for tax exemptions. Government officials surveyed and
recorded the akıncıs into registers that contained their numbers, privileges,
and obligations. One such register, prepared in 1472–3 in preparation for
Sultan Mehmed II’s 1473 campaign against Uzun Hasan, ordered the con-
scription of one mounted akıncı “from every thirty households of unbelievers
and Muslims” in Rumelia, while the remaining households, called yamak or
helpers, paid a sum of money to cover the expense of their fighting peer.
Mehmed’s intention was clearly to weaken the corps’ traditional Türkmen
and Muslim character as he ordered his judges to levy Muslims only if they
could not find enough people “among the unbelievers who are able to serve
as akıncıs.”16
Following the conquest of Serbia and Bosnia, Mehmed used the creation of
new administrative units to tighten his government’s control over the
marcher lords by appointing them governors of the newly established
Ottoman military-administrative units, called sancak. The sancak (lit. flag,
standard) originally designated an army unit, without territorial association,
under a standard that the unit commander received from the ruler as
a symbol of transferred authority. Soon the sancak became the basic
15 Mebde-i Kanun-i Yeniçeri, pp. 7a–8a, 16b–18b; see also Gülay Yılmaz, “Becoming
a Devshirme: The Training of Conscripted Children in the Ottoman Empire,” in
Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (eds.), Children in Slavery through
the Ages (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2009), pp. 119–34.
16 Lowry, The Nature, pp. 51–4.
460
territorial-administrative unit in the Ottoman domains, headed by a governor

(sing. sancakbeği), who commanded the timariot cavalry troops in his respec-
tive sancak. Ali Beg of the famous Mihaloğlu dynasty of marcher lords was the
longest-serving sancak governor of Smederevo, directing this frontier sancak
and its akıncı raiders for more than twenty-five years in the latter part of the
fifteenth century. The creation of the sancak of Bosnia provided Mehmed II
with an opportunity to dismantle the marches around Skopje by appointing
its marcher lord İ sa Beg as the first sancak governor of Bosnia in 1463 and
integrating most of his marches into the new sancak.17 The gradual incorpora-
tion of the marcher lords and their akıncı raiders into the Ottoman military
and provincial administration is also reflected in the terminology used in
contemporaneous Ottoman sources. The uc of the marcher lords gradually
became serhad; that is, a frontier province governed by sancak governors
appointed by the central government. Changing terminology in turn
reflected the gradual transformation of the Ottoman frontier polity into
a territorial empire increasingly under the control of the sultan and his
government.
Having lands both in Rumelia and in Anatolia, the Ottomans realized early
on the need for a navy, which could maintain communication between the
two parts of their domains and ferry troops, weaponry, and supplies from
Asia to Europe and vice versa. While the early Ottomans could occasionally
rely on Genoese ships for such tasks, with the takeover of Byzantine Gallipoli
in 1354 they acquired an important dockyard and naval base, which they
quickly turned into the basis of Ottoman naval construction and seafaring. By
1374 under Murad I, just two generations after the founding of their small
frontier principality, the Ottomans possessed their own fleet. Following the
conquest of the maritime Turkish principalities of Aydın and Menteşe,
Bayezid I fitted out a fleet of some sixty long warships and used his fleet
during the long blockade of Constantinople from 1394 to 1402. By the early
1410s Ottoman vessels were plundering Venetian islands, which, in turn,
forced the Venetians to challenge the Ottomans in open battle. In the first
such engagement in 1416 between the two powers, the Venetians soundly
defeated the as yet weak and inexperienced Ottoman fleet.18
17 Ema Miljković-Bojanić, Smederevski sandžak, 1476–1560: zemlja, naselja, stanovništvo

(Belgrade, Istorijski Institut, 2004), p. 53; Rossitsa Gradeva, “Administrative System
and Provincial Government in the Central Balkan Territories of the Ottoman Empire,
15th Century,” in R. Gradeva, Rumeli under the Ottomans: Institutions and Communities
(Istanbul, Isis, 2004), p. 26.
18 Kate Fleet, “Early Turkish Naval Activities,” Oriente Moderno 20.1 (2001), 129–38.
461
gábor ágoston
The Ottomans realized the importance of controlling the rivers and river
crossings in Rumelia and established their own flotillas on the Danube and its
tributaries. The capture of Golubac on the Danube from the Hungarians
(1428), for instance, enabled the Ottoman akıncı raiders to cross the river into
Hungary, and to turn the fort and town into a naval base. When in the spring
of 1433, the Burgundian traveler Bertrandon de la Brocquière was in Belgrade,
he noted that in Golubac, “two days journey below Belgrade,” the “Turk . . .
keeps a hundred light galleys, having sixteen or eighteen oars on a side to pass
over to Hungary at his pleasure.”19
The siege and capture of Constantinople in 1453 was a major boost to
Ottoman naval power. According to a Venetian eyewitness account, at the
siege the Ottomans used some 145 ships, including twelve armed galleys and
seventy to eighty fuste or large galiots.20 They also famously portaged some
seventy smaller ships overland from the Bosporus into the Golden Horn,
whose entrance the Byzantines had blocked by a stretched chain in order to
deny access to the Ottoman fleet. After the conquest, the Ottomans turned
Constantinople into the naval base of a formidable armada, due to its natural
harbor, the Golden Horn. Along with Venice and Barcelona, Constantinople
was one of three port cities in the Mediterranean that was capable of serving
a large galley fleet, thanks to its wealthy hinterland and natural harbor.
The Ottoman navy possessed impressive capabilities by the late fifteenth
century. In their campaign against Belgrade in 1456 they employed some 200
ships, including sixty-four galleys.21 In 1470 against Negroponte they mobi-
lized 280 galleys and fustes. Sultan Mehmed II mobilized 380 galleys in his
Caffa campaign (1475), which resulted in the conquest of the Crimea and the
subjugation of the Crimean Khanate. By this time the Ottomans could
operate two large armadas independently. In May 1480, an Ottoman fleet of
104 vessels (including forty-six galleys) arrived at Rhodes under the command of
Mesih Pasha, a member of the Byzantine Palaiologos family. Another Ottoman
fleet of twenty-eight galleys and 104 light galleys and transport vessels, under the
command of Gedik Ahmed Pasha, landed at Otranto in July.22 In 1496, Marino
19 Bertrandon de la Brocquière, The Travels of B. De La Brocquière to Palestine, and His

Return from Jerusalem Overland to France During the Years 1432 and 1433, trans. T. Johnes
(At the Hafod Press, L.P.J. Henderson, 1807), p. 283.
20 Fleet, “Early Turkish Naval Activities,” p. 134.
21 Gábor Ágoston, “La strada che conduceva a Nándorfehérvár (Belgrade): L’Ungheria,
l’espansione ottomana nei Balcani e la vittoria di Nándorfehérvár,” in Zsolt Visy (ed.),
La campana di mezzogiorno: Saggi per il Quinto Centenario della bolla papale (Budapest,
Edizioni Universitarie Mundus, 2000), p. 239.
22 Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481, pp. 248–50.
462
Sanudo the younger claimed that the Ottomans had a hundred galleys, fifty
fustes, fifty grippi (smaller vessel than the fuste), three galleasses, two
carracks, and two smaller carracks called barzotti. In the Ottoman–
Venetian war of 1499–1503, the Ottoman fleets under the command of
Kemal Reis that defeated the Venetians in the battles of Zonchio in 1499
and of Modon in 1500 are said to have numbered about 260 and 230 ships,
respectively.23
Strategies of conquest and incorporation

Ottoman expansion entailed more than military conquest. The marriage of
Orhan to Theodora in 1346 established a pattern of Ottoman dynastic mar-
riages as a tool of subjugation and conquest. Dynastic marriages were not
unique to the Ottomans. Other contemporary ruling dynasties, both
Christian and Muslim, also used them to forge marital alliances, further
diplomatic goals, and acquire crowns and lands. However, the Ottoman
dynasty used marriage to subjugate and annex the neighboring Christian
and Muslim polities. Through their marriage alliances with the Byzantine,
Serbian, and Bulgarian royal houses and with the Anatolian Türkmen princi-
palities of Germiyan, İ sfendiyaroğlu, Aydın, Saruhan, Çandar, Karaman, and
Dulkadır the Ottomans acquired new territories, gained useful alliances, and
received taxes and auxiliary troops from their vassals. At the same time,
Ottoman sultans were careful not to produce children by these marriages so
that the wives’ families could not claim Ottoman patrimony, the basis of the
dynasty’s power. Except for Murad I’s mother, Nilüfer, daughter of a local
Byzantine lord near Prousa who later converted to Islam, the early Ottomans
procreated with slave concubines. Mehmed II ended the policy of dynastic
marriages, for it would have been below the sultan’s dignity to marry his sons
and daughters to petty princesses and princes of Rumelia and Anatolia. The
mighty Ottoman armies soon conquered most of these lands, thus leaving no
viable candidate for such marriages anyhow. Yet, the marriage strategy of the
first sultans is a reminder that Ottoman conquest went beyond the use of
sheer military force.24
23 John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the
Mediterranean, 649–1571 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 180.
24 Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 28–35; Imber, The Ottoman Empire,
1300–1650, pp. 80–3.
463
gábor ágoston
In their recently conquered lands from Southeastern Europe to the Aegean

Island of Limnos and the former Byzantine “empire” of Trebizond in north-
eastern Anatolia on the Black Sea coast, the Ottomans preserved and
absorbed the local Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Byzantine
administrative and military institutions, and incorporated pre-Ottoman
land regimes and tax regulations. The Ottomans used the sancak system to
integrate pre-Ottoman administrative divisions. The sancaks of Nikopol and
Vidin, for instance, incorporated the lands of the last Bulgarian tsars of
Trnovo and Vidin. The sancaks of Küstendil in Bulgaria, Karlıeli in Epiros,
and Dukakin in Albania were named after these regions’ former Christian
lords, as were three of the five subdivisions of the sancak of Bosnia (Bosna)
after its establishment in 1463. In similar fashion, the sancaks of Karesi,
Saruhan, Aydın, Menteşe, Germiyan, Hamid, and Teke in western Asia
Minor preserved the names of the pre-conquest Türkmen dynasties. In
Rumelia, in order to maintain law and order and thus secure the steady
flow of revenues to the imperial center, the Ottomans allowed pre-Ottoman
local communal organizations and their leaders (knezes and primikürs) to
continue to function in conquered Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. Adjusting
Ottoman taxation regimes to match that of pre-Ottoman taxation practices,
protecting the taxpaying subjects from unjust levies through an efficient
provincial administration, and providing for the poor through a network of
soup kitchens and dervish lodges were all methods in accordance with the
Islamic principle of istimalet or accommodation, but also indications of
Ottoman governmental pragmatism.25
While the Ottomans usually eliminated the royal dynasties and aristocra-
cies of the conquered lands after their victory, they tried to win over the
middle and lesser nobility by enlisting thousands of local Christians in the
Ottoman timar-holding provincial cavalry, frontier garrisons, and auxiliary
military organizations. Just as Muslim timariot sipahis in Anatolia, Christian
military prebend-holders in Rumelia too collected taxes and dues from their
respective villages in return for military service and maintained law and order
in the countryside. By these arrangements, the conquerors not only eased
their manpower shortage of fighting men in the newly conquered and
25 Halil İ nalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 104–29;

Hazim Šabanović, Bosanski pašaluk. Postanak i upravna podjela (Sarajevo, Svjetlost,
1982), p. 39; Heath Lowry, Fifteenth Century Ottoman Realities: Christian Peasant Life
on the Aegean Island of Limnos (Istanbul, Eren, 2002); Heath Lowry, The Shaping of the
Ottoman Balkans, 1350–1550: The Conquest, Settlement & Infrastructural Development of
Northern Greece, 2nd ed. (Istanbul, Bahçeşehir University, 2010); Imber, The Ottoman
Empire, 1300–1650, p. 171; Kiprovska, “Ferocious Invasion,” p. 82.
464
overwhelmingly Christian lands, but they also integrated layers of the local
elite and former military into their provincial military-administrative system,
facilitating the acceptance of Ottoman rule among the conquered. In return
for their cooperation with the conquerors, such Christian timariot cavalrymen
preserved portions of their hereditary estates (baština) or pronoia prebends, along
with their privileged status within the local society. Following the Ottoman
conquest, the share of Christian timariots could have been quite high in certain
regions, amounting, for instance, to 65 percent in northern Serbia. However,
within a generation or two many Christian sipahis disappeared from the
Ottoman registers. Their proportion in the sancak of Smederevo decreased
from 48 percent in 1476 to 21 percent in 1516, indicating their gradual conversion
to Islam and the consolidation of Ottoman rule through fuller integration.26
By converting to Islam, the sons and grandsons of the original Christian
lords who sided with the conquering Ottomans achieved higher offices,
occasionally becoming sancak governors. A scion of the Albanian Muzaki
family, for instance, governed the Albanian sancak of Arnavut-ili (“the land of
Arnavut/Albania”) in 1441, and died during the 1442 Ottoman campaign
against Hungary. Yet, these men also had to give up part of their patrimony
and feudal privileges. The wealthier their family originally had been, the
greater loss they sustained. This occasionally led to resistance and insurrec-
tion, of which that of Iskender Beg (alias Skanderbeg) is best known.
A member of the Albanian Kastrioti noble family, George Kastrioti was
sent to Murad II’s court in Edirne as hostage in 1423, after his father was
forced to accept Ottoman suzerainty. Having been educated in the sultan’s
court, he served the Ottomans for some twenty years, including as sancak
governor of Debar in northern Albania. However, when the sultan ordered
his sancak governor at Kroja to take control of all the forts of his family,
Skanderbeg deserted the Ottoman army marching against the crusaders in
1443, rebelled against his sovereign, and led a protracted insurrection against
the Ottomans for the next twenty-five years.27
In addition to the coopted Christian nobility and timariots, military men
in Southeastern Europe were incorporated in the thousands into the
Ottoman voynuk and martolos organizations. Established in the 1370s or
26 Halil İ nalcık, “Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı İ mparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de

Hıristiyan Sipahiler ve Menşeleri,” in 60. Doğum Yılı Münasebetiyle Fuad Köprülü
Armağanı (Istanbul, Dil ve Tarih Coğrafya Fakültesi Yayını, 1953), pp. 215–22;
Miljković-Bojanić, Smederevski sandžak, pp. 73–4.
27 İ nalcık, “Stefan Duşan’dan,” pp. 225, 227–8; John V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans:
A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (Ann Arbor,
University of Michigan Press, 2009), pp. 522, 556–8.
465
gábor ágoston
1380s, voynuks – from the Slavic vojnik, meaning fighting man or soldier –
retained part of their hereditary baština estates as timars in lieu of military
service. They were to be found in significant numbers in Bulgaria, Serbia,
Macedonia, Thessaly, and Albania, especially along strategic routes and
border regions. Large numbers of Christian nomads in Rumelia, called
vlachs, were also incorporated into the ranks of voynuks. Around the 1420s,
the Ottomans also incorporated to their military system the Christian
martoloses, from the Greek armatolos, meaning armed men. Guarding
border forts, and often amounting to a substantial part of border garrison
troops in Rumelia, martoloses also served on river flotillas. They habitually
raided enemy territory, terrorizing and kidnaping their fellow Christians
on the other side of the border. They also guided Ottoman soldiers into
enemy territory and were regularly charged with reconnaissance missions.
Performing military service in return for tax exemptions, these Christian
military men soon became part of the Ottoman privileged military class,
receiving regular pay and a share of the booty. Christian timariot sipahis,
voynuks, and martoloses significantly augmented the Ottomans’ military
potentials in Southeastern Europe, while also bringing valuable tactical
diversity and knowledge of enemies’ lands.28
Weapons, Wagenburg, and military acculturation

Most Ottoman soldiers used swords and bows. The Ottomans made their
reflex and recurved composite bows of wood, horn, sinew, and glue. The
typical Ottoman bow measured only 102 to 110 cm in length and was the
shortest among its relatives. Ottoman composite bows had formidable range
and armor-piercing capability. Historical records and modern velocity tests
made with bows and arrows similar to historic ones suggest that Ottoman
master archers could shoot their light arrows at distances of more than 800 m.
While flight archery had little military applicability, target shooting was
important in military training. In combat, Ottoman archers owed their
superiority to their archery technique: drawing and releasing the string
with the thumb, using a thumb ring to protect the thumb, and having shorter
draw, which allowed the archer to shoot from horseback. Since the string
28 İ nalcık, “Stefan Duşan’dan,” p. 223; İ nalcık, “Ottoman Methods,” pp. 112–17;

Olga Zirojević, Tursko vojno uređnje u Srbiji (1459–1683) (Belgrade, 1974), pp. 162–9;
Yavuz Ercan, Osmanlı İ mparatorluğunda Bulgarlar ve Voynuklar (Ankara, TTK, 1986);
Fodor, “Ottoman Warfare,” pp. 215–16; Kiprovska, “Ferocious Invasion.”
466
hand of the archer could hold several extra arrows, this technique also
resulted in a faster shot sequence.29
The appearance and mass employment of firearms in warfare was one of
the most significant developments of the Late Middle Ages. By the 1380s, the
Ottomans were acquainted with the new weapon, as they faced enemies who
used firearms – Byzantines, Venetians, and Hungarians. Ottoman sultans
established a separate artillery corps as part of their standing army in the early
fifteenth century, well before their opponents in Europe and Asia. Sultan
Bayezid I had artillery gunners paid with military prebends, and a generation
later the sultans began to employ salaried cannoneers. From the mid fifteenth
century onward, there was a separate unit of armorers (sing. cebeci) within the
sultan’s standing household troops, who looked after and carried the infantry
janissaries’ weapons. Beginning in the second half of the same century, the
army had its own gun-carriage drivers (sing. top arabacı), whose job was to
manufacture, repair, and operate war wagons in campaigns. The corps of
bombardiers (sing. humbaracı) was established in the late fifteenth century. All
this was in sharp contrast to most of the Ottomans’ European adversaries, in
whose realms the gunner remained a master craftsman. Archival sources
from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards list Ottoman artillery
gunners and arquebusiers, both Muslim and Christian, in a number of
Ottoman-held castles in Rumelia, including Novo Brdo, Nikopol,
Smederevo, Vidin, and Zvornik. While most of these specialized troops
were Christians or recent converts, in strategically located forts all of the
artillerymen were Muslims, who gradually outnumbered their Christian
peers in other forts as well. Ottoman soldiers used cannons in their sieges
of Byzantine Constantinople (between 1394 and 1402, 1422, and 1453),
Thessaloniki (1422 and 1430), Antalya (1424), Novo Brodo (1427 and 1441),
Smederevo (1439), and Belgrade (1440). Considering that cannons became
common in European sieges only from the 1420s on, these examples suggest
that the Ottomans were on par with developments occurring elsewhere in
Europe. In addition to siege warfare, by 1444 the Ottomans had started to use
cannons aboard their river flotillas, and in field battles. They employed
cannons against both fixed and moving targets – such as castles and enemy
ships. By this time, they also used matchlock arquebuses.30
29 Murat Özveri, Okç uluk Hakkında Merak Ettiğ iniz Her Şey (Istanbul, Umut Matbaacılık,
2006), pp. 82–3.
30 Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the
Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 16–21, 28–9; and
467
gábor ágoston
During the Hungarian–Ottoman wars of the 1440s, the Ottomans

acquainted themselves with the Hussite Wagenburg tactic. The Wagenburg
or wagon laager, perfected by the Hussites in Bohemia during the Hussite
wars (1419–36), was a defensive arrangement of war wagons, chained together
and manned with crossbowmen and handgunners. The Hungarian general
János Hunyadi – who had learned the Wagenburg tactic in Bohemia, fighting
against the Hussites in the service of King Sigismund of Hungary – deployed
some 600 war wagons against the Ottomans in his winter campaign of 1443–4
In the 1444 Varna campaign the crusaders had some 2,000 wagons, most of
which the Ottomans captured in the battle. The Ottomans quickly realized
the usefulness of the Wagenburg and also determined how to overcome it.
They surrounded the wagon laager out of range of the guns, forcing the
enemy to give up its positions, a tactic they successfully employed at the
battles of Varna (1444) and Kosovo (1448). It is not known when the Ottomans
first used their wagon laager, known as tabur, after the Wagenburg’s
Hungarian name (szekér tábor). Whereas in the battle of Kosovo in 1448
Hunyadi used the wagons as Wagenburg, the Ottomans employed not the
Hungarian-style wagon laager, but the type of defensive embankment that
served them so well at Varna in 1444: a deep trench and a dirt embankment
strengthened with iron stakes and large shields, behind which stood janissary
archers, arquebusiers, and light artillery pieces. By the second half of the
fifteenth century, however, the combined use of field artillery, arquebus
infantry, and the tabur had become a decisive factor in Ottoman battlefield
victories.31
Conclusions
Three years after the conquest of Constantinople Mehmed II failed to take
Belgrade, despite the deployment of a large army and flotilla. While this
failure halted any Ottoman advance beyond the Danube until the early 1520s,
under Mehmed II’s reign the Ottomans did conquer Serbia (1459), the
Byzantine Despotate of the Morea (1460), Bosnia (1463), Herzegovina (1463–
6), and Albania (1468). The Ottoman capture of Negroponte (1470) in the
Venetian–Ottoman war of 1463–79, secured Ottoman possessions in western
Rumelia and the Peloponnese. After annexing the southern shores of the
“Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Military
Revolution, 1450–1800,” Journal of World History 25 (2014), 88–90, 94.
31 Ágoston, “Firearms,” pp. 91–2; Constantin Emanuel Antoche, “Du tabor de Jan Žižka et
de Jean Hunyadi au tabur cengi des armées ottomanes,” Turcica 36 (2004), 91–124.
468
Black Sea with the capture of the last remaining Byzantine state of Trebizond
(1461), Mehmed turned to the northern shores. He eradicated the Genoese
trading colony of Caffa in the Crimea (1475) and made vassals of the Crimean
Tatar Giray dynasty, the rulers of northern Crimea and the adjacent steppes
(1478). These latter conquests turned the Black Sea for three centuries into an
“Ottoman Lake,” although in fact Ottoman control over the sea was never
complete. In Anatolia, Mehmed II defeated the Ottomans’ most stubborn
rival, the amir of Karaman (1468), but he could re-annex their lands only after
he defeated the Karamans’ eastern neighbor, Uzun Hasan (r.1453–78) of the
Aq Qoyunlu (“White Sheep”) Türkmen confederation, which controlled
eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and western Iran from its capital Tabriz.
By the death of Mehmed II in 1481, the Ottoman army was one of the
strongest in Rumelia and Anatolia. It was also the most effective instrument
by which the sultan asserted his power over both regional and domestic
rivals. Mehmed II also made his empire a naval power. His fleets not only
guarded the empire’s capital city Constantinople, its coastlines, and maritime
lanes, but also played a crucial role in projecting Ottoman power into the
Mediterranean, Aegean, and the Black Seas. Using his military and the navy,
Mehmed II successfully transformed his father’s ghāzı̄ frontier state into an
increasingly centralized empire with claims to universal sovereignty.
469

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17

Ottoman expansion and military power,

come. Ottoman rule was contested by the neighboring Turko-Muslim prin-

Ottomans crossed the Dardanelles Straits in 1347 into Southeastern Europe as

Expansion and setbacks

importantly, an anti-Ottoman crusade. Urged by the papacy, which declared

Marcher lords, the house of Osman,

7 Kelly DeVries, “Gunpowder Weapons at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453,” in

retainer). These were the forerunners of the sultans’ salaried household

territorial-administrative unit in the Ottoman domains, headed by a governor

17 Ema Miljković-Bojanić, Smederevski sandžak, 1476–1560: zemlja, naselja, stanovništvo

19 Bertrandon de la Brocquière, The Travels of B. De La Brocquière to Palestine, and His

Strategies of conquest and incorporation

In their recently conquered lands from Southeastern Europe to the Aegean

25 Halil İ nalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 104–29;

26 Halil İ nalcık, “Stefan Duşan’dan Osmanlı İ mparatorluğuna: XV. Asırda Rumeli’de

Weapons, Wagenburg, and military acculturation

28 İ nalcık, “Stefan Duşan’dan,” p. 223; İ nalcık, “Ottoman Methods,” pp. 112–17;

During the Hungarian–Ottoman wars of the 1440s, the Ottomans

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