The Empire in the Making: Construction and Early Critiques

Abstract

The emergence of what was to become the Ottoman Empire is one of the most fascinating stories of state-making we know, and discussions surrounding its features and character have been some of the liveliest in the Ottomanist field. Whatever the exact nature of the early Ottoman emirate, its development was, by any measure, spectacular.1 The first emir, Osman son of Ertoğrul (d. 1324?), seems to have risen around the year 1299 to become a chieftain of settlers and raiders under vague Seljuk suzerainty in the region of Bithynia. Osman’s success in raiding and in battle gave his son Orhan (d. 1362) a stable base from which he was able to conquer a number of important Byzantine towns in the region, including Proussa (Bursa, 1326), Nikaia (Iznik, 1331), and Nikomedia (Izmit, 1337). Moreover, Orhan’s armies took advantage of an earthquake (at Kallipoli/Gelibolu, in 1354) to cross to Europe, where they played an active role in the struggles between the contenders to the Byzantine throne and, as a result, gained territories and towns such as Didymoteichon (Dimetoka, 1359 or 1361). Under Orhan’s successor, Murad I (d. 1389), the state (by now increasingly endorsing the traditions and institutions of its Islamic predecessors) annexed territories of both the fellow-Muslim emirates of Anatolia (Germiyan, c. 1375; part of Karaman in 1387) and the Christian states of the Byzantine Empire (Adrianople/Edirne, c. 1369; Thessaloniki, 1387; Verroia, c. 1385) and Serbia (Nish, 1386). A major role in this process was played by warlords and the heads of large families, such as Evrenos and Mihaloğulları, who seem to have actually governed their own conquests in the Balkans, under Murad’s nominal suzerainty. In the Ottoman victory at the decisive battle of Kosovo (1389) Murad was killed, but his son Bayezid I established Ottoman suzerainty in the area of the Balkans that had formed Bulgaria and southern Serbia (crushing a Hungarian-led crusade at Nicopolis in 1396) and then annexed many of the Turkoman principalities of Anatolia, occupying Konya (1397) and Sivas (1398). Bayezid, however, met his end at the hands of Timur; at the battle of Ankara (1402), his Anatolian vassals deserted him and he died a prisoner of