Who the Ottomans Were

     Given the role they played in getting us to where we are, most of us really ought to know more about them. Modern Turkey is what’s left of their Empire. It once included Greece and essentially all of the Balkans, Egypt and North Africa, Bulgaria and most of Asia Minor and Southwestern Europe.  Their navy was unchallenged anywhere in the Mediterranean or the Black Sea for more than a century. Twice they laid siege to Vienna. In the aftermath of WWI the victorious British and French sat down and carved up Mesopotamia and The Levant, all that was left of the Empire save Turkey itself. From those conferences came lines on the map laying out what are today Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. It can be fairly said that the twenty first century War on Terror is a legacy of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire.
     So let’s talk about Ottomans. First, they weren’t that old. Tradition holds that the dynasty began with a tribal chieftain who led a band of 400 nomadic horsemen from Central Asia into Western Anatolia sometime in the thirteenth century. Thirty five successive generations of Sultans followed. The first ten established the Empire and led it through an astounding series of military victories culminating in the capture of Constantinople by Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453. In 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent failed at the first siege of Vienna and initiated a long decline. Winston Churchill famously called the Empire the sick man of Europe but it was Tsar Nicholas II who first used that term. Ottomans survived for two centuries longer than they should have for their value as a buffer in the “great game” as England and Russia jockeyed for position. Young Turks reduced the Sultan to a figurehead at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk sent the last one, Mehmet VI, into exile at the founding of the Turkish Republic.
     A bizarre aspect of the Sultanate was the manner of succession, essentially a process of fratricide. The first prince to learn of his father’s death would declare himself Sultan and immediately send assassins to strangle his brothers. The first Mehmet even had it codified into Ottoman law, in the public interest since there could be only one Sultan. A group of deaf mutes were kept on hand for the purpose and adopted as their symbol the silken bowstring, the traditional implement for the deed. The practice was modified in later centuries. Potential rivals were allowed to live imprisoned in the harem in what became known as the cage. Some went insane. More than one poor devil was dragged from the cage after many years and, mad or not, made Sultan in a palace coup.
     Like the Abbasid Caliphs before them, most Sultans didn’t bother to marry, preferring concubinage. Some of the harems numbered in the thousands. This was not technically a violation of Muslim law. A man can have only four wives but as many slaves as he can afford and there is nothing wrong with using them as concubines. Muhammad himself had at least one. However, since a Muslim cannot be made a slave it is ironic that not only did the Sultans have precious little Turkish blood, most of their mothers were Christian.
     This was the institution that Attaturk abolished. Good riddance. Attaturk is widely reviled among today’s Arabs but the Republic he founded has remained stable and more or less democratic. There is little else good that ever came of the Ottoman Caliphate. Arabs would do well to look again.