29. Empire of the East
~ Empire of the East ~
The Near East c. 1520 - 1550
Musa I "Düzenli"
“The Sultan, he is the Shadow of Allah upon the earth; the weak seek refuge with him and by him the oppressed are given victory. Whoever honors the sultan of Allah in the world Allah honors him on the Day of Judgment.”
- Imam Jalal-Al-Din Al-Suyuti
The Near East c. 1520 - 1550
Musa I "Düzenli"
“The Sultan, he is the Shadow of Allah upon the earth; the weak seek refuge with him and by him the oppressed are given victory. Whoever honors the sultan of Allah in the world Allah honors him on the Day of Judgment.”
- Imam Jalal-Al-Din Al-Suyuti
As sultan, Musa I had chosen the role of administrator. The simple leg infection that claimed his father Selim I’s life - a consequence of countless hours spent on horseback - and the chaos that ensued after his death had left Musa wary of the rigors of travel and indisposed to the life of a soldier king campaigning over vast distances. While he did present himself on the battlefield for a few occasions (primarily in the Balkans), Musa mostly elected to stay within the confines of Topkapı Palace, expending his energies on putting the Ottoman state back in order and outmaneuvering its geopolitical enemies in the most cautious and calculated way possible. What this meant was a dual policy of major military buildup and accommodations for rebellious subjects.
There were a great number of non-Turkish populations under Ottoman rule, most of whom were ready to begin agitating for greater autonomy whenever the sultan showed any sign of weakness or inattention. The stability of the Ottoman state thus rested on the prolonged cooperation of millions of Turks, Slavs, Armenians, Arabs, Greeks, Jews, and others - virtually none of whom had very much in common - and the sultanate’s tribulations during the early 16th century consequently made such cooperation more necessary than ever. If the Ottomans were to continue to claim the inheritance of Rome, they had to put into practice the cosmopolitan policies that came with such imperialism. Musa I was the first Ottoman sultan to act consciously of this, reflected in his compromise with a league of rebellious Serbian bans in 1522, offering them essentially their own military governorate along the Danube frontier. Under Musa, the Janissaries - the sultanate’s fearsome crack troops trained and quartered in quasi-monastic conditions - were raised in number from 7,000 to roughly 10,000. As increasing the number of Janissaries required extracting a greater number of young boys from the Balkan Christians under Ottoman dominion through the practice of devşirme, Musa offered a counterbalance in the form of greater privileges for his Christian vassals. By 1525, Serbs had become an integral part of Ottoman designs on Hungary, and wherever the Turks chipped away at the Magyars, the Serbs prospered. Similarly important was Musa’s decision to open up the now depopulated regions of eastern Anatolia to the Armenians for settlement in 1525, gaining an important ally against the Persians (Ismail I undertook several notorious persecutions of the Armenians living within Persian borders) and initiating a profound demographic change that would lead to issues of its own centuries later.
Not all of these concessions were merely intended to control the fallout of the precarious early 1520s. Of all the parts of the Ottoman Empire that supplied its increasingly formidable war machine, the most useful were the Balkans. Besides providing soldiery through devşirme, the Balkans were a plentiful source of iron and timber, which were fed ceaselessly and in great quantities into the foundries and armories of Konstantiniyye. Musa had finished the expansion of the Imperial Arsenal on the waterfront of Konstantiniyye first planned by his father - a massive project that cost an estimated 200,000 ducats - and thus it was essential that he maintain peace in his Balkan possessions in order to keep up the flow of their much-needed raw materials.- Hajlított térdre -
While Musa was busy pulling his sultanate out of a serious crisis, something similar was underway in Hungary, particularly in the aftermath of the reign of Vladislaus II. Known later on as “Dobzse László” - “Very Well Vladislaus” - for his consistent approval of the decisions made by his Royal Council and by the Diet of Hungary (convened quite frequently during his reign), Vladislaus II had to make an enormous number of concessions in order to be elected king in 1490 by a Hungarian nobility deeply disgruntled with the expansion of centralized authority under his predecessor, Matthias Corvinus. Apart from weakening the overall power of the crown, these concessions also meant that Vladislaus II could no longer finance a standing army, and the feared Black Legion established by Matthias Corvinus had to be dissolved. The Ottomans were emboldened as a consequence, and began making more frequent raids across the Danube, even succeeding in shattering an army of Croatian barons at the Battle of Krbava Field in 1493, carving off pieces of the old kingdom of Croatia to add to the Sanjak of Bosnia. The unchecked power and privilege of the Hungarian nobility combined with their inaction against the Turks predictably led to a massive peasants’ revolt - some 40,000 strong at its height - led by a Székely named György Dózsa. Although Dózsa originally assembled this army in 1514 on the orders of Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom, to crusade against the Ottomans, he found himself leading it in opposition to the landed gentry as he began to take his peasant soldiers’ grievances to heart. Moving across the Great Hungarian Plain Dózsa’s army took to burning hundreds of castles and manor houses, while brutally murdering landholders without discrimination. When the revolt was finally suppressed by an army led by the nobles John Zápolya and István Báthory, an example was made of Dózsa, who was put through a horrifying ordeal which involved sitting on a smouldering iron throne and having his flesh rent and force-fed to his peasant followers. Thousands of peasants were killed, and many more were tortured. The revolt had been decisively crushed, but at the cost of Hungary’s political unity. This disunity would be further exacerbated once Protestantism entered the mix in the 1520s, and the divergence of interests between the different cultures, classes, and confessions put the Hungarian kingdom at great risk of foreign subversion, especially from the Ottomans.
Vladislaus’ declining authority was one of the factors that drove him to offer the House of Hapsburg the thrones of Hungary and Bohemia in a bid for assistance. As the noble houses of Hungary desired a monarch who would be both easier to control and more focused on Hungarian interests, they found this arrangement distasteful and ordered another Diet in order to put the succession to vote. At Hapsburg insistence, Vladislaus pocketed this petition, and when he died in 1518 the dissenters had to choose between submission or armed rebellion. A significant number would take up arms alongside like minded magnates in the kingdom of Bohemia, forming the League of Olomouc, but they would find themselves defeated in a matter of months by a large army of German and Italian mercenaries, which had been assembled in the Archduchy of Austria weeks prior to the election of Charles in anticipation of just such a rebellion. Still reeling from this quick and severe assertion of authority, the anti-Hapsburg camp slowly began to gravitate around John Zápolya as a potential pretender to the throne. Zápolya, voivode of Transylvania and scion of one of Hungary’s most powerful royal families, was also the son of a Palatine (the highest ranking official in the kingdom), Stephen Zápolya, as well as nephew of the Duke of Cieszyn and brother in law to King Sigismund I of Poland. Zápolya had greatly improved his standing amongst the Hungarian nobility during the reign of Vladislaus II, and was the leading candidate for the throne in opposition to Charles von Hapsburg in 1518 - something he embraced wholeheartedly. In March of 1525, following years of planning, John Zápolya and a number of Hungarian nobles felt Charles was sufficiently distracted by the Fourth italian War and raised the flag of rebellion at Gyulafehérvár, where they declared their own, separate Diet of Hungary and issued a proclamation declaring Charles von Hapsburg to be an illegitimate monarch chosen in blatant disregard for the ancient customs and privileges of the Hungarian nobility, further citing his repression of the League of Olomouc in 1518 and of the Protestant Horali from 1521 to 1523 as proof of his tyranny.
Hungary, c. 1526
(Cream: Hapsburgs, Red: Ottoman Turks, Light red: Zápolya’s rebellion, Light grey: unaligned nobles)
Associating with Zápolya’s rebellion carried several implications that many found objectionable , however. For one, Transylvania, which constituted Zápolya’s power base, was very much a culturally and religiously divided place - split between Vlachs, Ruthenians, Székelys, and Saxons, further divided by comparable representation of the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches. Many of Zápolya’s supporters seemed to hold only their support for Zápolya in common, and many compromises had to be made to the differing languages and confessions to maintain a semblance of order. Ultimately, much of the Hungarian nobility remained on the sidelines, tacitly supporting Charles but still holding their breath on Zápolya, wary of risking further alienation of the already highly dissatisfied Hungarian Catholic peasantry by siding with the anti-Hapsburgs. This risk of alienation worsened once Hungary’s neighbors to the south became involved.
Sensing an opportunity to make a protectorate out of Hungary (or at least destabilize it), Musa I rode to Vidin in May of 1526, where he extended an invitation to John Zápolya to speak about the possibilities for cooperation against the Hapsburgs. Zápolya accepted, and, while he flatly refused the offer of assistance in the form of Turkish troops, his decision to parley with the Ottoman sultan on friendly terms was quite scandalous. Charles, returning in June, was quick to frame his opponent’s actions as unfavourably as possible, even asserting that Zápolya had become a crypto-Muslim in exchange for the Turks procuring Hungary for him. Zápolya found it near impossible to sell himself as anti-Ottoman once a 40,000 man Turkish army (of which 15,000 were Serbs and Vlachs) was reported to be moving up the Danube a mere two and a half months after the meeting at Vidin - something which seemed to contradict his claim of rejecting the sultan’s aid.
John Zápolya meets the Sultan at Vidin
The objective of this army was clear. Belgrade and its location on the confluence of the rivers Danube and Sava had represented the forward position of Christian Europe against the Ottomans ever since John Hunyadi successfully defended it in 1456. Now, for the first time in almost 70 years a Turkish army had come to bear on the city. Belgrade’s defenses had been expanded and renovated during the decades of intermittent warfare, but they now had to content with a truly impressive array of ordnance smelted in Konstantiniyye by Italian master forgers and manned by teams of seasoned artillery specialists. Charles sent the Croatian baron Nikola Jurišić, one of his most committed loyalists, to garrison Újvidék and prevent any Ottoman attempts to cross the river, and he ordered Nicholas, the count of Salm and Charles' senior commander, to defend the city to the last man. Belgrade commanded a bottleneck position between the Pannonian Basin and the Lower Balkans, and if it were lost, Hungary would surely follow suit. Knowing that the siege of Belgrade would leave Charles with few troops to spare, John Zápolya had to strike fast and hard before Charles turned east to confront John Zápolya head on, pulling together 4,000 troops from Buda and Pozsony, as well as his family holdings in Austria.
Both sides knew that a decisive victory had to be won as quickly as possible. With each day that passed without resolution, Charles was certain that it became more and more likely for Zápolya to rally greater portions of the country around him and for the Turks to overcome Belgrade’s defenders, just as Zápolya was fearful of Charles gradually accumulating improved numbers and financial resources from his family’s expansive demesne. Several pitched battles and skirmishes occurred over the months, with each bearing strategically indecisive results. Charles wrote to Nicholas of Salm every month with increasing graveness, reminding him that Belgrade must endure until justice had been rendered in the Kingdom of Hungary and John Zápolya had been relieved of his head. By May of 1527, Charles was prepared to force a conclusion, and personally marched from Győr at the head of 15,000 troops (the most his father, the Emperor Philip, could offer at the time) to relieve Debrecen, which had been put to siege by Zápolya and his force of 18,000.
Zápolya knew that Charles had not yet led an army by himself and attempted to bait his less experienced opponent onto unfavorable terrain by withdrawing towards Várad. Unbeknownst to Zápolya, Charles’ conflict with such a large bloc of the Hungarian nobility had made him the populist option, with thousands of hajduks and armed plowmen flocking to him as he progressed down the Körös River, swelling his numbers to 23,000. Nonetheless, Zápolya still possessed superior numbers of cavalrymen when the two armies met at Várad on the 29th of May, and, after a series of impressive charges, the Hapsburgs’ right flank and most of their center had been broken by noon. The day seemed to have been decided in Zápolya’s favor, but a decent chunk of the Hapsburg pikemen had held out, with a contingent of 800 Tyroleans holding the new center and offering particularly spirited resistance. As this Tyrolean regiment was concealed by a hillock, Zápolya and his retinue were unaware that the Hapsburg line had not been entirely decimated and advanced too far down the field, leaving themselves briefly, but dangerously exposed.
Unluckily, a torrential rain the night before had turned the lower portions of the battlefield - in which Zápolya now trudged - into a mire. Disaster struck when a certain Tordai Adorján, a hussar captain in the Hapsburg lines, spotted Zápolya’s banner while maneuvering southwards in retreat. Aware of the soggy conditions on the field, he ordered his men to strip the armor from their horses and from themselves so as not to be weighed down, and to re-form a charge. Inspecting to see if he needed to re-shoe his horse, Zápolya had dismounted before Tordai’s cavalry came into sight, and a well-placed shot from a wheellock nicked Zápolya’s horse along the mane while he was trying to re-mount, sending it galloping away and leaving Zápolya face down in the muck. The entire battle shifted in an instant. Other parties of Hapsburg horsemen that had been routed southwards realized what was happening and rushed to follow Tordai, creating a momentum that pierced Zápolya’s army in its now unprotected left flank. A devastating proportion of Zápolya’s most important noble supporters had been clumped together here, and were now helpless to avoid death or capture. When word had spread that Zápolya was at risk of capture, panic followed, and much of his vanguard was slaughtered as it attempted to pull back and reorganize on the other side of the hillock. Most of Zápolya’s army was dispersed at a stroke, and so many dissident nobles had been captured that their collective ransom was rumored to have financed a prodigious share of the bribes that got Charles elected Holy Roman Emperor 4 years later.
The Battle of Várad
(Red: Zápolya loyalists, Gold: Hapsburg loyalists)
Zápolya would be carried back to Debrecen in chains, where he was sentenced to death on the grounds of treason. As Zápolya was one of the men who had captured and executed the unfortunate György Dózsa fifteen years earlier, Charles appeased the crowd by having a glowing-hot iron circlet placed on his head before having him decapitated. Charles had Zápolya’s head sent to those assembled at the Diet at Gyulafehérvár, accompanied by a letter tersely asking if they had any other pretenders to send him. What remained of the Diet following the battle of Várad dissolved within a month.
- Yeryüzünde Allah'ın Gölgesi -
Nicholas of Salm was able to fulfill his (now uncontested) king's wishes, and Belgrade was kept out of Ottoman hands while John Zápolya was still alive. However, the security of the Hungarian throne seems to have relaxed the defenders' resolve, which had already been flagging from 9 months of siege warfare and from a bout of dysentery that now afflicted those both within and without the city. A crossing of the Danube had been forced by the Ottoman commander (and future vizier) Malkoç Bey, who had been brought in to replace Gazi Husrev-beg, the sanjak-bey of Bosnia who had succumbed to a fever 5 months into the siege. Able to fully surround the city, Malkoç Bey put his diligent engineers to work tunneling under the walls, and a breach was made after almost two weeks of digging. The heroic defence of Belgrade had deprived Musa of his chance to link up with Zápolya and thrown Hungary into complete chaos, but he had gotten what he wanted in removing the pesky staging point of so many raids into Ottoman Serbia and Bosnia, and deeper Ottoman incursions into the Pannonian Basin would now be much easier.
Charles von Hapsburg drew up what soldiery he could once the fall of Belgrade became imminent, and ordered the evacuation of the towns in its vicinity as far north as Temesvár. Yet, salvation would arrive quite fortuitously in August of 1527, with news of a large Mamluk invasion force heading north from Damascus. While the Turks did not abandon their conquest, their attempts to expand past the Danube or Sava - with a foreboding Ottoman victory at Nagybecskerek - proved abortive, and Musa would decide in late October to withdraw most of his forces from Belgrade, leaving behind a garrison of 12,000. This respite would be brief, however. The death of the Mamluk sultan in battle allowed Musa to once again shift his attention westward. The Ottoman garrison at Belgrade would swell to 60,000, and Musa personally accompanied it when it put Újvidék to siege in mid 1529. Another stroke of luck found the Hapsburgs later that year however, with the Ottomans forced to simultaneously contend with a now hostile Spain and Persia.
The conflict in Hungary would continue sporadically after 1529, and some tentative preparations were made for a major campaign in 1532. However, Charles von Hapsburg had just been declared Emperor, and was at the height of his (pre-Schwarzkrieg) prestige and authority - owing partly to his successful pacification of Hungary. Aware of Musa's plans, Charles assembled a multinational force of perhaps more than 100,000 at Passau in mid-1532, which successfully dissuaded Musa from campaigning in Hungary for several years. Although the vast majority of this quasi-crusader army that gathered at Passau would predictably disband, a significant portion of it would be retained by Charles for the purpose of relieving Spanish Italy in 1533, which was at the time subject to a large, privately funded invasion led by a number of Turkish corsairs.
But the Ottoman tide could only be kept at a low ebb for so long. The 16th century had thus far been deeply scarring for the realm of Hungary in ways both readily obvious and incredibly subtle. With its populace reduced by war and other hardships, and growing deeper religious and cultural fault lines, Hungary was no longer the same kingdom that had repeatedly beat back the Turks in the 15th century. Conversely, the Ottoman Empire was every year building up the steam it had lost in the 1510s, and was utilizing its more ingenious institutions while minimizing or sometimes fully doing away with the more detrimental ones.
The advantages the Ottomans held against a foe like Hungary were primarily administrative. Unlike its rivals in Europe, the Ottoman state did not rely on mercenaries or peasant levies for the bulk of its manpower. Instead, the Ottoman army relied on “timariots” - that is, the holder of a “timar,” which was a fief granted in return for military service. This arrangement pushed thousands of men into the Ottoman military in the hope of acquiring a timar of their own, and, much like the Byzantine theme system which preceded it, it also ensured that the Sultan’s troops would be tied to the land they were protecting. What was more, it united civic and military administration, effectively creating a distinct military class that numbered in the tens of thousands, spread across the ever-expanding empire like a finely-meshed net, under which the local populaces were kept subservient. A landed fighting class was also something well-understood by the pre-existing hierarchies in the territories conquered Ottomans in Europe, and the promise of material compensation in its most valuable form - land - in return for loyalty on the battlefield meant that non-Turkish and Christian nobles were very easily co-opted. This simple and efficient system afforded the Ottomans a consistently large amount of human capital to draw on, and - more importantly - it had no counterpart in the rest of Europe.
Had Charles von Hapsburg somehow employed a similar system, he might not have broken the bank with every campaigning season, scraping together some thousands of troops while the Ottoman sultan could field twice as many with an alarming speed and efficiency. The well-oiled, military-oriented Ottoman apparatus would make its full weight felt when it returned to Hungary in mid-1535, this time determined to fully subdue the Magyars with an army of 70,000 under Malkoç Bey headed for the crossing at Belgrade, and another 25,000 under the Croatian-born Murat-beg Tardić moving through the Bosnian hill country towards the Croatian heartland.
The Siege of Újvidék
The fissures in Hungarian society worked a disadvantage very early: Jovan Nenad, a Serb commander in service to Hungary, would defect to the Ottoman camp under the conditions that he would be given a Serbian banate over the Transdanubian region of Temesköz as the "Despot of Srem." Nenad ordered his men to open the gates to the Hapsburg fortifications opposite Belgrade at Pancsova and Barcsa, which had successfully held back the Ottoman advance for two months, and the Turkish army was at the gates of Újvidék, Temesvár, and Resicabánya by early 1536. Charles - having spent the months painstakingly mustering 40,000 troops in Lower Austria - was dithering in Vienna, unsure of whether this invasion or the war over the Savoyard succession was more pressing. The fall of Klis fortress, believed to be geographically impregnable, in late 1536 (due to rumored Venetian assistance) was enough to convince Charles to head south to Zagreb, while commissioning another army 25,000 strong to be raised in Hungary under Bálint Török, the titular ban of Belgrade, and the baron István Dobó.
Charles and his war council may have felt confident in the fortifications that had been erected in the towns near the Ottoman frontier since 1529, but had not yet seen them tested against this generation of Ottoman firepower and siege machinery. Resicabánya fell in less from a month with no other means employed the ottomans than bombardment by cannon, and Lugos - put to siege immediately after - was in Ottoman hands by late 1536. Even Temesvár, which was much better defended, fell all the same before the end of the year. The fall of Temesvár and the lurid stories that followed its violent sack greatly dismayed the rest of the kingdom. Dismay turned to despair when Bálint Török and István Dobó finally arrived with their army, and were routed in April of 1537 near Szabadka in an attempt to prevent Szeged from falling into Ottoman hands. Szeged was evacuated in advance of the Ottoman arrival, and Malkoç Bey now found the Great Hungarian plain open to him.
After Klis, Murat-beg Tardić took Jajce with relative ease, defeating a small army of Croatian horsemen and crossing the rivers Pliva and Vrbas, and took Banja Luka shortly after. However, Tardić had grown impatient with a lack of orders from Malkoç Bey by mid-1537, and, after drawing up another 10,000 auxiliaries from Bosnia, he took Bihac and put Sisak to siege in an attempt to attack Charles at Zagreb from two sides in a pincer movement. This maneuver ended up stretching Tardić's supply lines to their breaking point, something which Charles exploited when he withdrew his whole force from Zagreb and forced Tardić's numerically inferior army to give battle at Taborište, ending in a decisive Ottoman defeat. Charles broke off from his army in Croatia and moved towards Buda, where he could more effectively manage the disaster unfolding to the south.
The first check to Malkoç Bey's success would be a critical one. Unless he could maintain momentum, he might find himself recalled to Konstantiniyye for a dismissal or worse, and thus decided to make a bee-line for Buda in mid-1538 in the hope that he could overwhelm it before the campaigning season could come to an end. This left Malkoç Bey's army in uncharacteristically poor order as it straggled along past Kecskemét, where István Dobó and a hidden camp of some 4,000 horsemen could hardly believe their eyes. The surprise would force Malkoç Bey to turn back to Szeged, but, finding its defenses sabotaged in his absence, he again had to cross the Tisza to a more defensible position, losing many of his men in the rushing waters.
The Battle of Kecskemét
The Bosnian front was still capable of rallying and the army under Malkoç Bey could have pushed further inland had he been given more time, but the fact of the matter was that the Hungarian campaign had ground to a halt and had become a drain on Ottoman resources long before the defeats at Taborište or Kecskemét. Apart from human losses caused by desertion and casualties on the battlefield or from disease, much of the Ottoman baggage train had also been swept away after the fall of Szeged in an attempt to ferry it across the river Tisza, which had become dangerously swollen by Spring rains. The war would continue until 1541, with pitched battles seen at Óbecse and Temerin in 1539 and 1540, respectively. Both would be Ottoman victories, but Musa had given up on acquiring Hungary for the time being in the face of mounting expenses and the deprivation of valuable Turkish lives, and a ceasefire would come into effect in 1541. The Ottomans would not return to Hungary in force for another 17 years.
- Doğu Roma -
The ceaseless harassment from the Mamluk-Safavid-Hapsburg triad had made large-scale expansion in any direction exceedingly difficult, and the current Ottoman strategy of measured attacks in all three directions became more and more untenable. For most of the 1520s and 1530s, the Mamluks and Persians worked in seesawing motion with the Hapsburgs, with one side striking at the Ottomans while the other was side was bearing the brunt of Ottoman aggression - only pausing to recuperate once Ottoman energies were consumed by another succession crisis. The emergence of the Safavids and the staunch Hapsburg defense of Hungary had made Musa and his countrymen feel increasingly boxed in, and with enemies on all sides there was always an exposed flank.
The most easily solvable flank lie with the Mamluks. By far the weakest of the three powers impeding Ottoman expansion, the Mamluks had the added appeal of possessing Jerusalem and the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Musa had long resolved to fulfill his father’s ambition in absorbing the Levant and Egypt, but he had not felt secure enough to do so until 1541 with the declaration of a favorable ceasefire in Hungary and with the arrival of Alqas Mirza - brother of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp - in Konstantiniyye. Musa was well aware of Safavid intentions to seize Syria, and was anxious to do so first, meaning the opportunity to fling a claimant to the Safavid throne into Persia was simply too good to pass up.
After decades of planning, Musa, accompanied by Alqas Mirza, finally presented himself physically at the head of an army nearly 80,000 strong, which was assembled near Adana and began the march into Mamluk territory in late February of 1542. Even with knowledge of the impending Ottoman invasion gained as early as 1540, the Mamluk sultan Sayf-ad-Din al-Ashrafi was only able to scrape together 30,000 troops with which he departed the city of Hama in late March. This was a remarkable pace by Mamluk standards, but as Sayf-ad-Din had learned his lesson from Qansuh II, his father. When he decided in 1526 to invade Ottoman Cilicia (which they had severed from the Mamluks in 1522), Qansuh had proceeded up from Cairo in a leisurely manner typical of his predecessors, causing him to not reach Damascus until 1527, completely miss an opportunity to secure the Cilician Gates against a scrambling Turkish army, and end up getting himself killed in an unlikely victory for the Ottomans at Ceyhan in 1528. Sayf-ad-Din was only 15 at the time, and the entire sultanate nearly collapsed. Once he had come into his own as a ruler and had captured and executed the traitorous governor of Aleppo, Kha'ir Bey, who had secretly defected to the Ottomans and left Qansuh II’s flank exposed at Ceyhan, Sayf-ad-Din made numerous efforts to bring the Mamluk regime up to speed with its vigorous neighbors. Nevertheless, the sheer dead weight of the powerful yet staid Mamluk aristocracy meant that the reform programs of Sayf-ad-Din intended to stave off an Ottoman takeover simply delayed the inevitable.
A Mamluk training
In too much of a hurry to contemplate his surroundings, the Mamluk sultan and his army proceeded straight for the last reported Ottoman encampment at Nurdağı. By letting the Mamluk army advance along the Aswad river, Musa was able to lure them into unfavorable terrain. While the Mamluk military had embraced firearms in the late 1520s after a string of embarrassing defeats by the better-armed Safavids, they were still outgunned by the Turks, who used the high ground of the river valley to pour bullets on their exposed adversaries. Sayf-ad-Din and the Mamluk nobility maintained as orderly of a retreat as they could under the circumstances, and surrendered the field. Aware that the entrenched position of his army at Hassa would likely prevent a full pursuit of Sayf-ad-Din’s army, Musa had already sent his son Selim ahead with about 5,000 of his spahi (the Ottoman fief-holding cavalry corps) broken off from the main force weeks in advance to move along the coast by Iskenderun and then to move east to intercept Sayf-ad-Din before he could reach Antioch. The Mamluk sultan would be caught at unawares near the village of Aktaş 4 days later, some 35 kilometers north of Antioch, and would be unable to maintain discipline and prevent a full rout. In the confusion following the battle at Aktaş, the opportunity to capture Sayf-ad-Din clearly presented itself.
However, Musa’s reluctance to campaign in person and his consequent tendency to delegate command to others was now offering complications. In the opening stages of the campaign, Musa had chosen his two sons, Mehmet and Selim, to lead the invasion, unaware of the depths of the lifelong rivalry that simmered between them. The competition between the two şehzades was heightened by the chance to prove themselves on the battlefield, and, as the elder brother, Mehmet was the heir apparent and would not tolerate the thought of Selim overshadowing him, especially with knowledge of the bloody succession war that put his father on the throne.
But the battlefield was simply not an environment in which Mehmet was able to maintain preeminence over his brother. Mehmet was much like his father: cautious, calculated, and sometimes paranoid. Mehmet certainly had admirable qualities as a leader, but the admiration he inspired paled in comparison to his brother, Selim. To the men he commanded and his other supporters, Selim was the “Drawn Sword of Islam,” a shrewd, zealous, and temperate man who treated his troops with respect and was keen on uniting the Muslim world by whatever means necessary. Yet Selim was not a perfect prince by any means, and Mehmet would be able to exploit the concerns many had with his behavior. To his detractors, Selim was a volatile, unreasonable fanatic who had no interest in dealing with Europeans in any terms other than their total surrender. The latter was an opinion held most prominently in the Venetian Great Council, which feared what would become of the Republic’s possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean if the Ottoman throne fell to someone like Selim. The young, hotheaded şehzade revealed himself to be a troublesome loose cannon fairly early. The concern with Selim peaked in 1543, when, after taking the port city of Tripoli following a siege, Selim put the entire Christian expatriate population - including the Venetian Quarter - to the sword, claiming that they had assisted the Mamluks in defending the city. The Venetians had spent centuries learning to bite their tongues in the face of indignities in order to maintain their steady and advantageous flow of trade with the East, but this was simply too much. When it became apparent that the Great Council would not be pursuing any vengeful action against the Turks for this massacre, massive riots erupted along the Grand Canal and did not subside for weeks. In order to appease his Venetian acquaintances, Musa assured them that those responsible for the massacre would be punished, which essentially amounted to a slap on the wrist for Selim and the beheading of a handful of Selim’s disposable subordinates.
Venetian merchants in the Mamluk Sultanate
Mehmet was more than likely jealous of his younger brother: he wanted to be the holy warrior with numerous victories and episodes of derring-do to his name. Jealousy was not a becoming trait for a sultan-to-be, and a heated dispute between the two brothers would greatly prolong the war with the Mamluks. Sayf-ad-Din was helpless to prevent the capture of Aleppo and Antioch, the latter of which would become Musa’s wartime residence and center of operations, while direct, field command of the Ottoman armies was left to Mehmet and Selim. Mehmet refused to provide Selim with the numbers or armament necessary to push the advantage after Aktaş and possibly end the war in a single stroke, and Sayf-ad-Din was safe to withdraw all the way to Homs in order to avoid capture. Despite its poor showing at Hassa and Aktaş, Mamluk heavy cavalry was still something to be feared, and an unexpected rout of the Turkish vanguard at al-Maʿarra reminded Musa to be cautious of its strength in open terrain.
Unfortunately for the Mamluks, while Venetian commercial interests were greatest in the Levant and Egypt, the Venetian Republic was in an arrangement with the Ottomans that they could not shake. As a consequence, they preferred that the Ottoman conquest proceed as quickly and smoothly as possible. Thanks to the assistance of the Venetian fleet, Turkish artillery was unloaded at the port of Tartus as Selim moved south towards Homs, causing Sayf-ad-Din withdrew with his retinue and the remains of his northern army to Damascus, which was much more defensible.
While the Persians had invaded Syria twice in 1527 and 1532, the Safavid and Mamluk leadership was well aware of the growing threat posed by the Ottomans, and decided to put aside their feud long enough to confront the Turkish menace together. The Safavid Shah Tahmasp had a glut of manpower to work with due to the Ottoman war of expulsion against the Qizilbash of Eastern Anatolia, and offered to boost the Mamluk war effort by opening up a new eastern front. After a couple weeks gauging the situation, Musa I decided that the Mamluk front was the least of his concerns at the moment and the bulk of the invasion force should be redirected to force the Safavids out of the war. Mehmet was sent northeast with 55,000 to confront the Safavid army, while Selim would continue south into Syria with 20,000 of his own.
After taking Aleppo, the Ottoman army soon became harassed by persistent parties of Qizilbash in Persian employ who were ranging westward from Ar-Raqqah. Tahmasp himself soon arrived in the region, departing from Mardin with 45,000 troops and headed for Urfa, where Mehmet intercepted him. Not anticipating so many Ottoman troops to be diverted from Syria, the battle of Urfa was a defeat for Tahmasp, but he left Mehmet’s army significantly bloodied. Mehmet, who had not one, but two camels shot out from under him during the battle, was shaken and humiliated.
Sayf-ad-Din was wise to rely on the defenses of Damascus. Even after Selim's army spent weeks fighting in order to make it close enough to the city walls to initiate an actual siege, his supply lines were incredibly strained by both the climate and the persistence of Bedouin raiders. Just when it seemed that the indomitable Ottoman war machine was finally grinding itself down and that a small concession would be all that was needed to persuade Musa to accept peace, Sayf-ad-Din was informed by one of his court eunuchs who had just returned from Cairo that the sultan’s eldest son, Janbalat, was conspiring to seize power in a palace coup, following which he would surrender the Mamluk domain to the Turks in exchange for the right to govern Egypt. A less paranoid ruler might have tried to reason with his son or simply accepted defeat, but Sayf-ad-Din was hardened by a lifetime of intrigue and succession disputes and would not allow Janbalat the benefit of the doubt. Within a week’s time, the heir apparent to the Mamluk Sultanate was murdered, stabbed hundreds of times and left in the bloodied waters of his personal bathhouse.
Needless to say, Janbalat’s murder during the height of the Ottoman invasion did not exactly inspire much confidence in Sayf-ad-Din. The sultan had already been leaving a trail of bodies in his witch hunt for Turkish spies, and in doing so had effectively kept defections low, but now he was running out of men who were willing to earn his trust. Unsurprisingly, Sayf-ad-Din would wind up dead himself in December of 1544, only two weeks later, something which Janbirdi al-Ghazali, the governor of Damascus, would publicly blame on an undetected infection before handing over the city to its besiegers. Sayf-ad-Din would be succeeded by his younger son, Taimur, who was a mere 16 years old.
Sayf-ad-Din’s eunuch half brother Nasir, who had mustered a relief army several months earlier, would be intercepted by Selim and his army near Irbid in April of 1545. Irbid would prove to be Selim’s finest display on the battlefield (and the apogee of his life), using the nimble Turkish light cavalry - known as akinji - to weave through the encumbered Mamluk heavy cavalry, killing, capturing, and dispersing them amidst the veritable dust storm they kicked up. All of Palestine would thus be tacked on to the Ottoman state in a single battle, and news of the Turkish entry into Jerusalem was met with equal parts mourning and dread in Christian Europe, with Pope Ignatius remarking that “the Turks are truly a race of devils among us … soon shall be the days in which the battle for the Sepulchre of Christ must be decided.” The Schwarzkrieg had presented Musa with a tempting opportunity to strike again at Hungary, and it grew more tempting when the trajectory of that war seemed to point to a defeat at the time for the Hapsburgs - so much so that the Mamluk campaign was put on halt in June of 1546, with an armistice signed after the battle of Rahat, where the young sultan Taimur himself was captured and carted off as a permanent hostage to Konstantiniyye.
The battle of Irbid seems to have had a profound effect on Selim, who had always found fighting his coreligionists distasteful. After entering Jerusalem and making his night prayers at the Mosque of Omar, Selim declared before those who had accompanied him that he would never again raise his his hand against a fellow Muslim until his father invaded Italy and wrested Rome from the infidel. Despite having his crisis of conscience seemingly resolved, Selim's behavior became more erratic and his appearance more slovenly. Meanwhile, things had turned around for Mehmet during his campaign against the Persians. Tahmasp had been pushed all the way back to Van by 1547, and although he was able to repulse the besieging Turks, the Ottomans' eastern border was left much more secure than it had been. Mehmet acquired a greater confidence from his He had acquired a sense of physical courage, even though it had cost him the use of his left hand from an sharpshooter's bullet and the vision in his left eye from the hilt of a Persian scimitar. The wounding of Mehmet's eye, which would grow almost completely opaque with age, would add to his renown.
Mehmet "Tek Gözlü"
The issue of Selim and his agitation against his father was made all the more concerning for Mehmet given the fierce loyalty of Selim's men. This whole issue was brought to the fore once their father Musa fell ill in late 1546, possibly from malaria. Mehmet gradually took on more of Musa's duties in the latter's weakened state, essentially becoming his regent and angering Selim, who now seemed all but prepared to declare a new Levantine sultanate in opposition to Mehmet. However, as the months dragged on and Musa's health fluctuated at random, it would be Selim that would end up the first to die, and under very suspicious circumstances. In spite of these circumstances, the physician present claimed that Selim was taken by an aggressive fever, and Mehmet implicitly added his support to the rumor that his brother was a closet alcoholic, and his death was a direct result of his morbid drunkenness.
When a band of Mamluks murdered the Ottoman envoy installed in Cairo as Taimur's representative, forming their own oligarchic government, Mehmet would take up Selim's reigns and would personally march into Egypt in early 1548, putting the fortress of Bilbeis on the Nile Delta to siege and seeing the Mamluk loyalist army crushed at nearby Nishwah. Yet this tremendous Ottoman victory was not quite a complete one. Since the sack of Baghdad in 1258, the Abbasid Caliphs had resided in Cairo as figurehead rulers used to legitimize the Mamluk sultans. The Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil III had died in 1543, and had been succeeded by his son Al-Musta'in II. The Caliph’s capture was of utmost importance for Ottoman legitimacy and would set the Ottoman Empire on a course to earn either the subservience or cooperation of the entire Sunni world. It was the sacred ambition of Ismail I’s twilight years for the Persian Shiites - not the Turkish or Mamluk Sunnis and their barbarian, slave-born overlords - to take possession of Mecca and Medina, and possibly al-Quds as well. For what little of his life remained, Ismail I had striven ardently to be declared the custodian of the holy cities, and it was such an ambition that would be passed down (albeit slightly diluted in its urgency) to his successors and would form one basis for the necessity of an alliance with the monarchs of Spain - who were similarly eager not to see the Ottomans declare themselves the new Caliphs.
If there were to be any one episode which best reflected changing Spanish priorities in light of the new alliance with the Persians, it would be the fate of the Caliph Al-Musta'in II following the battle of Nishwah and fall of Bilbeis. Under the cover of night on April 9th of 1548, with Mehmet mere leagues from Cairo, Al-Musta'in II was picked up by a team of Portuguese in a rowboat at as-Suways, and was brought to a small convoy of 1 carrack and 3 dhows which ferried him and the relics of Muhammad - his sword and mantle - to the port of Jeddah. At Jeddah, Al-Musta'in II was secured by a group of Maluk loyalists who brought him to the Sharif of Hejaz, Al-Hassan II bin Barakat, who had been given a hefty bribe pooled by the Safavids and the Estado da Índia to protect the Caliph and keep him out of Ottoman hands. Ironically enough, the Portuguese captain tasked with leading this mission was none other than Gonçalo de Albuquerque, the grandson of the same Afonso de Albuquerque who had sacked Jeddah decades before and who had striven so mightily to wipe out global Islam.
Although the Mamluk Burji dynasty was not extinguished and the symbolic authority of the Caliphate remained out of reach, the Ottomans had still succeeded in more than doubling their empire, gaining millions of taxable, conscript-able subjects as well as access to some of the richest trade routes in the world. With all of the lands of the Mamluk Sultanate absent the Hejaz de facto incorporated into the Ottoman regime by early 1548, the Ottoman borders would be brought to almost exactly those of the old Eastern Roman Empire. The imperial pretensions of the Ottoman Sultanate began to be taken much more seriously by both the Christians of the West - who now found their ambassadors subjected to a much more elaborate and humbling etiquette before the Sultan - and the Sunni Muslim world - which began to look to the Sultan as more than just another secular ruler amongst secular rulers. Musa would mostly recover from his illness, left in a reduced mental and physical state until he perished in early 1550. The şehzade Mehmet would succeed him unopposed as Mehmet III, the One-Eyed Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Kayser-i-Rûm, Padishah of the East, and Shadow of Allah on the Earth.
Eastern Mediterranean, c. 1550
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