AREN't the Ottoman turks brilliant :)

Who's with me on this on?
The reason (and the sole reason) I think this is because of their capture of Constantinople and the destroying of the Roman Empire (its a pity thinks went down hill a bit after 1800 :()

I shall have to check my sources, but I think the Turks fielded the first army to check the Mongols, when they were laying waste to every foe that stood in their way, in the 13th Century, AD.

When I saw this thread I said to myself: "lets see what's the reason why he likes the O.Turks"
I must say I didn't expect to read that one.

Even those who like the Turks admit that by taking Constantinople (and crushing the Byzantine empire generally) they destroyed a civilisation which was better than them.

but I think the Turks fielded the first army to check the Mongols

The Turks originaly came from the plain's of mongolia.They were once just a mongol tribe.So they probaly fighted other mongol tribe's (like Merkiets or tartars) earlier when they still lived there.
So they were originaly barbaric.Though in contrast to other tribe's who after conquest and short occupation were almost all of the time's assimilated by the conquered nations (like the mongols) ,they managed to start their own culture ,although it was buided on the strong foundation of the Byzantian culture.They also maneged to keep pace with the technological advancement's of other European countrey's for a long while ,wich give them a very strong position in a region that was genneraly not that advanced as europe.

The first Turks were originally ironsmiths of the tribes and clans of the Mongolian plains. Being ironsmiths, they accumulated enough power to build up their own tribes. Originally they looked south and threatened the Tang Chinese empire. However the Tang Emperors (who were half Turkish themselves) broke up the Turkish tribal confederation. Half swore allegiance to the Tang and the rest began migrating westwards.
They appeared in what is now Turkestan and also Persia and also took up the religion of Islam, eventually becoming its sword arm. But the first Turkish empire, the Seljuks, was destroyed by the Mongols a few centuries later who also brought more Turkic troops with them into the Mid-east. Then in the 1300s, Osman in Anatolia in a small region somewhere just east of Constantinople raised up the state of the Ottomans (named after him of course) and rest is history, like they always said.
One more thing - the Ottomans managed to take Constantinople because the Byzantines had been severely weakened. The cause was the Fourth Crusade I think sometimes in the 1200s. A West European army passed by Constantinople on its way to the Holy Land. Instead of continuing, it sacked and occupied the city. And effectively splintered the Byzantines into a few successor 'states'. Pity.
The reason for the Ottomans' astounding success was their willingness to employ men of talent of all races in their adminstration. Do you know that their greatest vizier was actually a converted Serb? And that their trade was mostly carried out by Greeks?
Also another reason was their elite army, the Janissaries. These were slaves, captured or bought as small children and brought up and trained to serve the Ottomans. As Muslims cannot be slaves, so these were mostly Christian children from the Balkans. They served the Ottomans in everything from shock troops to gardeners, cooks and palace servants. A lot of the officials were originally Janissaries too as these special states slaves were very well bought up for their time. They were trained in the military arts as well administrative skills, literacy, engineering skills etc depending on the individual aptitude of each slave.

I like them because on Age of Empires they kick ass! :D

Janisarries rule the battlefield etc. They were still pretty successful though because the empire survided unitl abit after 1900.

Who was it who had the *lucky* victory against the mongols. Was it the Turks or the Saracens? I remember reading about it and it mentioned that the Mongols were completely under strength and some of their army was made up of either Turks or Saracens...cannot remember which one...

Who was it who had the *lucky* victory against the mongols. Was it the Turks or the Saracens?

Weren't it the Mammeluk's?

Originally posted by SKM
One more thing - the Ottomans managed to take Constantinople because the Byzantines had been severely weakened. The cause was the Fourth Crusade I think sometimes in the 1200s. A West European army passed by Constantinople on its way to the Holy Land. Instead of continuing, it sacked and occupied the city. And effectively splintered the Byzantines into a few successor 'states'. Pity.

Yeah that was a pity in deed....
The Pope of Rome, John-Paul II officially apologised for that in his last trip to Greece.


Originally posted by SKM

The reason for the Ottomans' astounding success was their willingness to employ men of talent of all races in their adminstration. Do you know that their greatest vizier was actually a converted Serb? And that their trade was mostly carried out by Greeks?

Yes I knew that. One of the smartest things in Ottoman policy was to allow the Greeks to carry trade. The Ottomans were aware of the fact that Greeks were prosperous traders at sea and skilled seamen.
That way both the empire and the greek traders were getting rich.
The Greek traders even had a special flag for their ships. Here are the two variants I can remember...
(see bellow)

Originally posted by SKM

Also another reason was their elite army, the Janissaries. These were slaves, captured or bought as small children and brought up and trained to serve the Ottomans

Yeah the Janissaries.
Turks and Albanian muslims regularly raided the christian provinces in order to capture small children.
Nowadays many people in Turkey are descendants of the Janissaries but most of them don't know about it. There are even some that still speak Greek but again they don't know that their language is the same with the one spoken by the "hated neighbours".
My father once went to a village in Turkey were they spoke Greek. When he tryed to show them they spoke the same language those people thought he was from a neighbouring village and he was making fun of them!

I find this a pretty sad story actually...

Dont be dissing the Ottomans now Az :)

The 4th crusade had nothing to do with the ottomans taking constantinople - they took around 200 years after the crusade.

They didnt defeat the mongols in the 13 th century - that was the mamelukes adn teh ottomans wern't a big player then.
I think some of you are confusing them with the seljuks who are really a sperate people.

More ottoman victories were those over the Mamelukes, who like the Eastern roman empire, could not face the modern weapons they employed and Greece and Bulgaria - they were fantastic

They didnt defeat the mongols in the 13 th century - that was the mamelukes adn teh ottomans wern't a big player then.

The Ottomans just didn't exist then.

And that victory of the Mammeluks was worthless.The Mongols with a troop force of 300.000 men (wich was enormous at those days standards)(although i250.000 of them were troops recruited in counquered nations)were on the virge of burning down egypt and murdering most of it's poppulation (wich was their usual tactic) when Möngke khan (the last ruler over all Mongol tribe's) died and thus all troops (stupidetly) had to immidiatliy go home for new Koëriltai.the troops that were beated by the mammeluk's were just some left behind troops.After that ,there was never again a campaign by all mongels.

John-Paul II officially apologised for that in his last trip to Greece.
Is this really true?
The pope apologised for an act formented by a seperate state (Venice, nothing to do with Rome at the time) over 700 YEARS after it happened?
The world has gone mad, MAD I tell you :crazyeyes

"The 4th crusade had nothing to do with the ottomans taking constantinople - they took around 200 years after the crusade. "

Yes, but the Crusade was what effectively finished off the Byzantines as an effective power on the intl scene. The fact that they managed to cling on for another 200 yrs showed the tenacity of their culture more than anything else.

"The pope apologised for an act formented by a seperate state (Venice, nothing to do with Rome at the time) over 700 YEARS after it happened?
The world has gone mad, MAD I tell you "

The Crusade was launched under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, and called by the Pope.

" Nowadays many people in Turkey are descendants of the Janissaries but most of them don't know about it. There are even some that still speak Greek but again they don't know that their language is the same with the one spoken by the "hated neighbours".
My father once went to a village in Turkey were they spoke Greek. When he tryed to show them they spoke the same language those people thought he was from a neighbouring village and he was making fun of them! "

The Anatolian plateau had been the home of a host of peoples and nations in the past like the Greeks, Lydians, Hittites, Galatians (Celtic migrants) and so on. It is a wild melting pot of a lot races and cultures.

The Ottoman Empire was a mixed bag.

On the plus side, it built in the late Middle Ages the premier military machine, incorporating a thousand years of military tradition from the northern Steppes, the Mahgreb, Persia, India and Byzantium. Not only did it conquer the Byzantine Empire but it also, among its many other conquests, seized such powerful medieval kingdoms as Hungary and Serbia, and twice laid seige to Vienna - in 1529 and 1683. Had the Turks succeeded in taking Vienna, the gateway city into western Central Europe, well, things in Bavaria and Switzerland might be a little different today. Luckily, Vienna was saved in 1529 by an outbreak of plague in the Turkish camp and the sudden arrival of the Polish cavalry in 1683. Many contemporaries at both times throughout Europe fully expected Vienna to fall. The Ottoman military administration was highly efficient and loyal. The Ottomans also oversaw major technological gains in science, especially in the nautical sciences. Also, Islamic art and architecture achieved new heights under the Turks, heights it has never since approached. The Turks became known for their benevolent rule of non-Moslems, often with more humanitarian laws than the Christian European states. The freedom and social mobility of non-Moslems in the Ottoman Empire, particularly Jews, was in stark contrast to the abysmal treatment of minorities in Europe.

However, the Ottoman Empire had some built-in design flaws, some of which still plague Islamic societies today. The Ottoman Empire was primarily a military machine, one massive military organization that controlled administration, the economy, all social and economic aspects of life in the empire. For a while in the 14th-16th centuries, this was a tremendous advantage for the Turks. However, as Europe began to move away from mercenary armies and medieval social straightjackets, the Turks remained behind. That was the problem; the Turks had inherited an arrogence from the original Islamic Empire that claimed they would rule the known world sooner or later. Since their society was inherantly superior, there was no need to improve things or - shudder - adapt foreign practices. There were the occasional reformers in Constantinople (as the Ottomans referred to the city until the Turkish nationalists seized power as the Young Turks in 1908) but they usually ended up dead soon. The administrators and landholders of the old feudal system, once very loyally and strongly tied to the Sultan's service, now held onto their titles and lands, disregarding the Empire's interests. The Jainessaries in the Balkans repeatedly revolted in the 17th and 18th centuries against reform. And just as the old Islamic Empire slowly came apart and its various regions became independent belonging to the Empire in name only, many conquered territories began to go their own way regardless of Constantinople - Morocco, Libya, Tunesia, Egypt, Serbia, Wallachia, Bulgaria & Rumelia. As well, to boot, the Turks, while maintaining the Islamic empire's ideals, did manage to monopolize power not only through Turkish appointments but they often encouraged the appointment of recently-converted peoples; in the 16th century Serbo-Croatian was a virtual 2nd language in Constantinople. The Arabs and Persians, who saw themselves as the true bearers of Classical Islamic culture, deeply resented being side-lined.

The upshot is that already by the early 18th century, despite the Porte's partial recovery against the Austrians, few of the Empire's residents were willing to defend it. By the 19th century the Empire was propped up by the power politics of balance in Europe. Repeated European crises were sparked by Russian intrusions into the Ottoman lands, and resolved by Anglo-French conferences that preserved the Ottoman Empire for a few more years. Turkish ethnic nationalism tried to revitalize the empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but that didn't work in an old, creaky medieval empire that had a huge array of ethnic and religious groups. The Habsburgs were dealing with that same exact problem...

The death that came in 1918 was as inevitable as it was pathetic. The Sultan had to flee his empire in a British battleship that was sitting with impunity just outside his palace, as Mustafa Kemal's forces surged towards the old imperial capital.

The Ottoman Empire had an impressive run - from the early 14th century until 1918; nearly 700 years. It truly deserves to be considered the last great Mediterranean empire, following a whole series of such empires stretching from the early Phoenician and Greek, Persian and Carthaginian, Egyptian and Roman. On the other hand, the Turks' inherent conservatism and social revulsion against innovation condemned the lands they ruled to backwardness and under-development that would leave them easy prey for the European empires in the age of Imperialism. That, coupled with the militaristic nature of Ottoman society, left an indelible mark on Islamic society that it still has not overcome.

Nice story Vry(ko)lakas!!!

The Ottoman Empire had an impressive run - from the early 14th century until 1918; nearly 700 years. It truly deserves to be considered the last great Mediterranean empire, following a whole series of such empires stretching from the early Phoenician and Greek, Persian and Carthaginian, Egyptian and Roman.

On the other hand, the Turks' inherent conservatism and social revulsion against innovation condemned the lands they ruled to backwardness and under-development that would leave them easy prey for the European empires in the age of Imperialism. That, coupled with the militaristic nature of Ottoman society, left an indelible mark on Islamic society that it still has not overcome.


Yes it does deserve the title of last great mediteranean empire.

But I think your last statement is one of the answers to the question: "why can't the greeks (or any other person whose country was conquered by the Ottomans) stop blaming the Ottoman empire for so many things?"
That's also why I always say that I would have prefered any other invador but the Turks.
Nazi Germany also followed a tactic of exploiting the conquered coutries to death.

Originally posted by TheDuckOfFlanders


Weren't it the Mammeluk's?

Yeah thinking about it later I came to the same conclusion. I was counting the Mameluks as the same as the Saracens...

SKM:
The Crusade was launched under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, and called by the Pope.
True, but irrelevant. The fourth crusade was in effect being run for the benefit of Venice and the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo. Dandolo was actualy excommunicated by the pope for his part in this sorry episode, and a Byzantine witness to the sack puts the blame squarely on his shoulders, NOT on the pope's.

If anyone is interested, there is an informal piece on the fourth crusade here (http://www.boglewood.com/murano/crusade.html) and another on the Venitian role here. (http://www.southeastern.edu.gr/literature/crusade.htm)

"True, but irrelevant. The fourth crusade was in effect being run for the benefit of Venice and the Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo. Dandolo was actualy excommunicated by the pope for his part in this sorry episode, and a Byzantine witness to the sack puts the blame squarely on his shoulders, NOT on the pope's."

I was merely trying to explain why the present Pope felt compelled to apologise for something that happened more than 7 centuries ago. Regardless of who was the real power behind that Crusade or who was at fault or who influenced the Crusaders to occupy Constantinople, the Crusade was still nominally and officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church. And it was perceived as thus in the present day.
Anyway, this is getting away from the topic. Suggest we'll just let this point rest.

Well, it makes me angry that it was thought an apology was thought necessary given the circumstances. :mad:

Sorry, I'm afraid that kind of political correctness just burns me up, no offence meant to you, SKM. :o

I don't like the Ottoman Turks, and I'll tell you why: Turks stole my radio. I could tell they were Turks because they had those funny hats with feathers sticking out of them. I think they were Ottomans, but I don't know how to tell an Ottoman Turk from a regular one.

Damn Turks... :mad:

Originally posted by Crazy Eddie
Well, it makes me angry that it was thought an apology was thought necessary given the circumstances. :mad:

Sorry, I'm afraid that kind of political correctness just burns me up, no offence meant to you, SKM. :o
It's just a symbolic gesture I guess. The world is full of people who just can't forget the past no matter how long ago and need to be placated by symbolic gestures.
Incl me I may add. ;) The bloody Japanese invaded China and killed/masacred/slaughtered millions of Chinese during WW2 and to this day, they still refuse to even say a simple sorry. And they are blackening out or toning down on the atrocities commited by Japanese troops during WW2 in their school textbooks so the younger Japanese aren't even aware of it. :mad:

"I don't like the Ottoman Turks, and I'll tell you why: Turks stole my radio. I could tell they were Turks because they had those funny hats with feathers sticking out of them. I think they were Ottomans, but I don't know how to tell an Ottoman Turk from a regular one. "

Ottomans are not a race, just whoever's connected with the Ottoman Empire. Since it has been gone for almost a century now, there are no Ottomans any longer I guess.

Almost a century indeed, but not quite yet. :p

"Yeah thinking about it later I came to the same conclusion. I was counting the Mameluks as the same as the Saracens..." - Del

As for what I know, I would recall that the Mamelukes were but a privileged warrior-slave caste of Egypt. By themselves they weren't really a *people* per se, but a part of the Saracen/Egyptian "race".

But then again, I never did claim to be a historian. Just a happy amateur. :egypt:

The Ottoman Empire ruled for approximately six centuries and at their greatest occupied parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The center of their power was located in the city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). During the fourteenth century Anatolia, the eastern part of Turkey, was splintered into small regions, each loyal to a local leader. By the year 1453, one group from northwest Anatolia had risen to power and captured Constantinople. This was an important city because it was located on the Bosphorus River, the body of water that separates Asia and Europe. Due to this location, the Ottomans drew from cultural traditions to both the east and west.

In art the Ottomans also used great care in creating symbols of power and supremacy. The sultan was involved in regulating building types and decorative motifs to ensure that they worked toward maintaining the strength of the empire. One of the most important Ottoman rulers was Suleyman the Great. He was not only a strong military leader but also an important patron of the arts. The lands that the Ottomans ruled were diverse in language, religion, and culture. Therefore, rulers such as Suleyman had to consciously create symbols to unite their land and show their power.

the last Jannisary leader :
brunette 2.25m 130kg

Kudos for the interesting info. :goodjob:

I am not one to worship the Ottoman Empire - however, one needs to give credit where it's due. Turk417 gave a good description of its history, and it is truly the final great eastern Mediterranean empire. At its height the Ottoman empire brought stability and development to the many areas of Anatolia, the Mahgreb, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula it ruled. It also became a powerful cultural repository for both Classical Arab and Persian culture, as well as developing a Turkish tradition along the way. Again giving credit where credit is due, the Ottoman military machine at its height (14th-16th centuries) was unparalleled in Europe or probably anywhere in Eurasia.

Its great downfall was over-militarization, and a failure to develop an effective civilian administration brought the empire to its knees long before any foreign invader could. The milet land system (with the beys, etc.) was designed exclusively for military exigiencies and did not foster economic development; on the contrary it stifled it. Also, the Ottoman zealous adherance to Islamic law and practices were lauditory in many ways, as converted Moslems were treated equal to native-born Moslems and non-Moslems were accorded more rights than religious minorities in Christian Europe. This fidelity to Islamic law became a liability however when the Ottoman Sultans insisted on conquering lands the empire could never incorporate successfully or even rule effectively, and drove the Sultan's armies to attempt invasions of infidel territories long after the empire was capable of supporting such efforts.

In my old university city of Pécs, (southwest Hungary), there is a 16th century mosque just outside of the center that is a museum but is also still a functional mosque on Fridays (for Moslem foreign students). The mosque was refurbished by the Turkish Republic's government in the 1980s, an act appreciated by many Hungarians but also received with some mixed sentiment; they haven't quite forgotten the rough 150 years (1526-1690) Hungary spent under Ottoman rule. Hungarian children today still learn a nursery song about shooting Turks as they come over the hill (akin to that song American children learn about the 10 little Indians)...