III. The Comnenian emperors failed to defeat the Turks, because the western Crusaders repeatedly disrupted Byzantine and Seljuk Anatolia during their marches east to liberate Jerusalem.
A. The First Crusade (1095–1099) tipped the military balance decisively in favor of the Byzantines, but the Crusader princes carved out feudal principalities in the Levant (Outremer) that proved dangerous to Constantinople.
1. Although the Frankish Crusaders shattered Turkish military power at Nicaea, Dorylaeum, and Antioch, Franks and Byzantines were divided by mutual distrust and antipathy.
2. Alexius I viewed the founding of Crusader states at Antioch and Edessa (1098) and Jerusalem (1099) as a violation of oaths of homage by the Crusader princes.
3. John II and Manuel I failed to impose effective imperial hegemony over the Crusader states or to expel the Seljuk Turks from central Anatolia.
B. The Second (1146–1148) and Third Crusades (1188–1192) were great royal crusades that threatened the Byzantine Empire and Seljuk states alike and contributed to the growing mutual hostility of Crusaders and Byzantines.
1. The Second Crusade compelled Manuel to break off his war against Sultan Masud I (1116–1146) of Konya, but the Crusader kings of the west—the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II and King Louis VII of France—failed to achieve their strategic objectives.
2. Saladin, who united Muslim Syria and Egypt, overran the Crusader east after his victory at Hattin (1187).
3. The kings of the Third Crusade—Richard I of England, Philip II Augustus of France, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa—also failed to regain Jerusalem.
4. The defeat of the royal crusades was blamed on Byzantine treachery.
C. The western European Crusaders and Venetians of the Fourth Crusade intervened in a Byzantine civil war and captured Constantinople in 1204, thereby destroying Byzantine power in the Aegean world and Anatolia.
1. In April 1204, the western Crusaders and their Venetian allies stormed into Constantinople and partitioned the Byzantine Empire.
2. The feudal “Latin Empire” established by the Crusaders proved a weak state, whereas Venice emerged as the leading naval power in the Aegean.
3. Theodore I Lascaris (1204–1222) founded a Byzantine state in exile at Nicaea; his successors repelled Frankish Crusaders and Turkish raiders.
4. In 1261, Michael VIII Palaeologus (1258–1282) reoccupied Constantinople, a capital in rapid decline, and transferred imperial power back to the Balkans at the expense of Byzantine Anatolia.
5. Michael VIII mortgaged the imperial fiscal future by granting trade concessions to Venice and Genoa in return for naval assistance.
6. To gain western military aid, Palaeologan emperors negotiated religious reunion under the papacy, but this policy alienated the majority of their Orthodox subjects.
7. With the disintegration of the Byzantine Empire under Andronicus II (1282–1328), Orthodox Christians preferred the ordered government of the Ottoman sultans rather than their Christian allies from western Europe
----
I In the twelfth century, the Comnenian emperors appeared to have the strategic advantage, but because they failed to dislodge the Seljuk Turks from central and eastern Anatolia, a new Turkish Muslim civilization had emerged in Anatolia by 1350.
A. The sultans of Konya and the ghazi warriors of central Anatolia were long in awe of Constantinople, and Comnenian emperors hoped to convert the Turks to Orthodox Christianity.
1. Byzantine efforts to reconquer the Anatolian plateau were distracted by the successive Crusader armies.
2. The Seljuk Turks excelled in light cavalry tactics, while Comnenian emperors fielded expensive mercenary armies that were difficult to direct.
3. During the desultory fighting, the roads, cisterns, and cities so essential to Byzantine rule gradually broke down across the peninsula to the strategic benefit of the Turkomen tribes.
4. The ghazi horsemen honed their skills in the tactics of stealth and ambush on the Anatolian grasslands.
5. With such tactics at Myricephalon (1176), Sultan Kilij Arslan II (1156–1192) defeated Manuel I and put the Byzantines on the defensive.
B. Sultan Kay-Khusraw II (1204–1210) appeared destined to unify Anatolia into a single Turkish sultanate of Rum, based on Konya, Sivias, and Kayseri, but his heirs failed to forge a unified Muslim state.
1. Seljuk sultans from Kilij Arslan II to Kay-Khusraw II extended their sway over the Turkomen tribes east of the Euphrates and on the steppes of al-Jazirah so that they clashed with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria.
2. Kay-Khusraw II imposed strict authority over the emirs and lords (beyler) and ensured royal revenues by promoting caravans and the mining of silver.
3. The Seljuk sultans failed to exploit Byzantine weakness after the sack of Constantinople (1204), and they could not control Turkomen tribes fleeing before the advancing Mongol armies.
4. At the Battle of Köse Da÷ (1243), the Mongols under Bayju annihilated the army of Sultan Kay-Khusraw III, thus shattering the Sultanate of Rum into weak competing emirates and beylikler.
C. Although the sultans of Konya failed to succeed as political heirs of Constantinople, they built Muslim political institutions in Anatolia and forged links to the wider Muslim Near East, away from Constantinople and the Mediterranean world.
1. The failure of Byzantine emperors to restore imperial administration and episcopal and monastic institutions in central and eastern Asia Minor allowed for the emergence of a new Turkish Muslim civilization in Anatolia by 1350.
2. The Turkish military elite employed Iranian officials, who used Arabic or Persian as administrative languages and brought Muslim statecraft.
3. Seljuk sultans encouraged the emigration of Iranian architects and craftsmen into their increasingly Muslim cities and promoted trade with Muslim Syria, Iraq, and Iran.
4. Sultan Kaykubad (1219–1236) coined the first substantial Muslim silver coinage in Asia Minor from the specie obtained from new mines.
5. The sultans constructed a network of caravansaray, caravan stations, each with a vafik (endowment) of revenues levied from Christian agriculturists.
6. Sultanhan, a caravansaray outside Aksaray, epitomizes the Seljuk adaptation of Byzantine arches and masonry.
II. The transformation of Christian Anatolia into a Turkish-speaking Muslim land was a gradual and uneven process in 1100–1350, because Greek or Armenian-speaking Christians long resided in villages and towns throughout the peninsula, down to the early twentieth century.
A. The Seljuk sultans presided over the last religious and cultural rewrite of Anatolia from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries as they commissioned the first domed mosques and medresses. The minarets of these structures turned the skylines of Anatolian cities into Muslim sites by 1350.
1. The first mosques (ulu camii) were long colonnaded halls based on rectilinear plans, but at Konya, Alaeddin Camii (begun in 1219) was built with the first brick squinch dome based on Byzantine traditions.
2. Domed mosques and medresses had elaborately carved stone decoration, such as Ulu Camii in Sivas (1197) or the mosquehospital at Divri÷li (1228–1229).
3. Minarets decorated with glazed brick or porcelain tile dominated the skyline of Anatolian cities from 1300, as seen with the Çifti Medresse at Sivas and Erzurum and the Gök Medresse at Sivas.
4. Medresses, residences of ulema, a class of Muslim scholars, with hospitals, observatories, and libraries, succeeded to Christian monasteries.
5. Over 100 medresses were constructed in 1100–1300 (far more than the number of known mosques) and, thus, Islamized the urban landscape.
6. Over 3,500 türbler or tekkler, memorials to pious Muslim, were constructed that Islamized the sacred geography of villages and countryside.
B. The conversion of the majority of the Greek- and Armenianspeaking Christians resulted from the birth of a popular mystic Islam on Anatolian soil in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
1. Without a return of Byzantine rule, the episcopal and monastic institutions languished; Christians lived in demoralized, parochial communities.
2. By 1300, many Christians learned Turkish as their prime language.
3. Iranian Sufi mystics entered Anatolia in great numbers to become the new holy men of the peninsula in the thirteenth century.
4. The Persian poet Jalal-ud-Din Rumi (1205–1277) reorganized the Maullawiayah order at Konya so vital for the conversion of Christians.
5. The tekke (funerary memorial) of Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, hailed the Mevlana, at Konya became the premier pilgrimage site of Muslim Turkey.
6. Jalal’s followers, popularly known as “Whirling Deverishers,” assimilated folk Islam, Sufi mystical poetry, and dance to the festivals and rules of hospitality of traditional Anatolian villages.
7. Within a century (1250–1350), Muslim Turkey was born. Simultaneously, Seljuk sultans and, later, emirs and beys under Mongol rule sponsored the first achievements in Islamic art.
III. The Ottoman sultans from Osman (1299–1325) to Murad II (1421– 1451) constructed the classic institutions that enabled the rapid unification of the Balkans and Anatolia under the Porte, the Ottoman imperial government at Constantinople.
A. The Mongol Ilkans exacted tribute and obedience from their subjects in Asia Minor, but they paid no heed to the dissolution of the sultanate of Konya in 1277–1308.
1. Mongol forces were stationed in eastern and central Anatolia, and many of the Turkomen bands were recruited into service of the Great Khan.
2. On the grasslands of eastern Anatolia and Transcaucasia roamed the White Sheep and Black Sheep Turkomen hoards (Ak Kooyunlu and Kara Koyunlu).
3. Emirs and ghazi warlords carved out lordships based on their tribal armies; these strong men gave their names to the territorial states (beylikler).
4. For example, in c. 1260, the Bey Karaman seized the oasis city of Laranda (renamed Karaman) and, by 1300, the Karamanid emirs emerged from border lords to legitimate Muslim rulers.
B. The first Ottoman sultans carved out an emirate on the Bithynian borderlands of the Byzantine Empire in 1280–1300.
1. Orhan (1326–1362), crowned sultan in 1337, established Bursa (classical Prusa) as the first Ottoman capital.
2. Sultans Orhan and Murad I (1362–1389) based the Ottoman army on cavalry supported by military tenures (timars) whose holders, timaroits, doubled as provincial cavalry and administrators.
3. Murad II (1421–1451) introduced an artillery train and reformed the Janissary corps into disciplined infantry based on the Roman and Byzantine traditions.
4. With the superb Ottoman army, Mehmet II (1451–1481) had the means to unite Muslim Anatolia, but he came in the guise of the political heir to the Byzantine Empire rather than a Turkish ghazi warrior.
