Great Seljuks

The Turkish migrations after the sixth century were part of a general movement of people out of central Asia during the first millennium A.D. that was influenced by a number of interrelated factors--climatic changes, the strain of growing populations on a fragile pastoral economy, and pressure from stronger neighbors also on the move. Among those who migrated were the Oguz Turks, who had embraced Islam in the tenth century. They established themselves around Bukhara in Transoxania under their khan, Seljuk.

Split by dissension among the tribes, one branch of the Oguz, led by descendants of Seljuk, moved west and entered service with the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.

The Turkish horsemen, known as gazis , were organized into tribal bands to defend the frontiers of the caliphate, often against their own kinsmen. However, in 1055 a Seljuk khan, Tugrul Bey, occupied Baghdad at the head of an army composed of gazis and mamluks (slave-soldiers, a number of whom became military leaders and rulers). Tugrul forced the caliph (the spiritual leader of Islam) to recognize him as sultan, or temporal leader, in Persia and Mesopotamia. While they engaged in state building, the Seljuks also emerged as the champions of Sunni (see Glossary) Islam against the religion's Shia (see Glossary) sect. Tugrul's successor, Mehmet ibn Daud (r. 1063-72)--better known as Alp Arslan, the "Lion Hero"--prepared for a campaign against the Shia Fatimid caliphate in Egypt but was forced to divert his attention to Anatolia by the gazis , on whose endurance and mobility the Seljuks depended.

The Seljuk elite could not persuade these gazis to live within the framework of a bureaucratic Persian state, content with collecting taxes and patrolling trade routes. Each year the gazis cut deeper into Byzantine territory, raiding and taking booty according to their tradition. Some served as mercenaries in the private wars of Byzantine nobles and occasionally settled on land they had taken. The Seljuks followed the gazis into Anatolia in order to retain control over them. In 1071 Alp Arslan routed the Byzantine army at Manzikert near Lake Van, opening all of Anatolia to conquest by the Turks.

Armenia had been annexed by the Byzantine Empire in 1045, but religious animosity between the Armenians and the Greeks prevented these two Christian people from cooperating against the Turks on the frontier. Although Christianity had been adopted as the official religion of the state around A.D. 300, nearly 100 years before similar action was taken in the Roman Empire, Armenians were converted to a form of Christianity at variance with the Orthodox tradition of the Greek church, and they had their own patriarchate independent of Constantinople. After their conquest by the Sassanians around 400, their religion bound them together as a nation and provided the inspiration for a flowering of Armenian culture in the fifth century. When their homeland fell to the Seljuks in the late eleventh century, large numbers of Armenians were dispersed throughout the Byzantine Empire, many of them settling in Constantinople, where in its centuries of decline they became generals and statesmen as well as craftsmen, builders, and traders.

Within ten years of the Battle of Manzikert, the Seljuks had won control of most of Anatolia. Although successful in the west, the Seljuk sultanate in Baghdad reeled under attacks from the Mongols in the east and was unable--indeed unwilling--to exert its authority directly in Anatolia. The gazis carved out a number of states there, under the nominal suzerainty of Baghdad, states that were continually reinforced by further Turkish immigration. The strongest of these states to emerge was the Seljuk sultanate of Rum ("Rome," i.e., Byzantine Empire), which had its capital at Konya (Iconium). During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Rum became dominant over the other Turkish states.

The society and economy of the Anatolian countryside were unchanged by the Seljuks, who had simply replaced Byzantine officials with a new elite that was Turkish and Muslim. Conversion to Islam and the imposition of the language, mores, and customs of the Turks progressed steadily in the countryside, facilitated by intermarriage. The cleavage widened, however, between the unruly gazi warriors and the state-building bureaucracy in Konya.

The Crusades

The success of the Seljuk Turks stimulated a response from Latin Europe in the form of the First Crusade. A counteroffensive launched in 1097 by the Byzantine emperor with the aid of the first Russian state. Without pausing, the Mongols subdued the principalities of Galicia and Volhynia and broke through to Hungary, Wallachia, Poland and Silesia. Fully aware of the danger, Pope Gregory IX appealed to all Christian people to form an alliance against this "new Attila".

The period of the Crusades began, armed expeditions from Western Europe with the aims of freeing the Holy Places from the incursions of the Muslims and of keeping open the pilgrimage routes to the Holy Sepulchre. After varied fortunes and the foundation of a Frauk Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Crusades ended by effecting the reverse of what their spiritual fathers had had in mind: Saladin conquered Jerusalem in October 1187. This calamity for Christianity gave rise to the Third Crusade. This time the Crusader armies under the command of Frederick I Barbarossa, Philip II Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion went overland to Palestine. Barbarossa, detained by the Seljuks, besieged Iconium. It was the first direct confrontation of Christians and Turks. Like Alexander the Great on the way to Babylon, Barbarossa thought that he was dealing with savages and barbarians. To his great astonishment he was to discover a city adorned with marvellous buildings, which was far more sophisticated than most European cities! Barbarossa took the city and reduced it to rubble, but was not able to capture the citadel. He finally gave up the attempt, continued on his march to Palestine and drowned (in 1190) in the Kalykadmus (Saleph).

His march had altered nothing: Iconium rose again from the ruins to devote itself to art and science. The Empire of Rum reached its acme under Sultan Allauddin Kaikobad I (1220-1237). The main contributions of Seljuk culture to Turkish history were the introduction of Arab cursive writing (to replace the Kufic calligraphy in use until then) and of Arab-Persian culture.

While all this was taking place in Asia Minor and Palestine, Europe was threatened again by hordes pouring in from the interior of Central Asia. This time it was the Mongols under Genghis Khan (properly: Cingiz-Han) (1155 - 1227) . The ruler of the emerging global empire was himself a Mongol, but most of his generals were Turkmen from Chinese Turkestan or from the region of the Aral Sea. After the conquest of North China (including Peking in 1215) and the destruction of the Empire of the Khwarizm Shah (1220), which had extended all across Western Asia, and following the "turkizing" of the entire area between the Great Wall of China and the Urals, he assembled all his people in Karakorum, his capital city. He addressed the serried ranks from the battlements of the city wall to spur them on, exhorting them to "go out and conquer the world".
Soon afterwards the vast Mongolian hordes started westward. Attacking on a broad front, Genghis Khan overran Northern Iran, Armenia and Georgia and destroyed the kingdom of the Turkish Polovtsers in the steppes of Southern Russia.

In answer to their request for help, the Russian princes of the Kingdom of Kiev hastened to the south, but suffered a severe defeat near the Sea of Asov (Battle of the Kalka, May 1223). Instead of proceeding westward, Genghis Khan became embroiled in a feud with the Volga Bulgars and did not live to cross the great river. He died suddenly in 1227. It remained for his son, the Great Khan Ogedei (1229-1241) to continue the Mongolian advance on Europe. The Lesser Khan Batu invaded Russia in 1238, put an end to the Empire of the Volga Bulgars, conquered all of Central Russia and turned south instead of advancing to the Baltic Sea, as he had planned. He captured Kiev in 1240.

An alliance was formed between Pomerania, the King of Poland and the Duke of Silesia, Henry II. The army of Polish-German knights met the Mongols on the Valstatt by Liegnitz near the Oder on 9th April 1241, only to be decimated. Again the Occident lay open to the ravages of Asia's hordes. They had already ravaged part of Poland and Hungary (The Battle of the Theiss), when suddenly things took a turn for the better: Ogedei died early in 1241. Batu, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mongol vanguard in Europe, suddenly decided to check his advance in order to take part in the fight for succession to the throne of the Mongol Greater Khans. Once again the menace had gone up in smoke. Europe was saved. Bells rang in churches and cathedrals everywhere to celebrate the event.

The Mamelukes (1254 - 1332)

The death of Genghis Khan, like that of Attila, led to the disintegration of the empire. The Hordes were partitioned under various local rulers and numerous unemployed white mercenaries, who had been taken captive in the Caucasus, found themselves "redundant". The Ayyubid Sultans of Egypt, the successors of Saladin, were happy to secure their services and brought them to Cairo. In 1230 Sultan al-Kamil bought over 12,000 of them from the Mongols. Their martial prowess soon made them the real rulers of the country. They took advantage of the situation to assassinate the last Ayyubid ruler and seize power in 1250.

Then they founded, as "Turkish Mamelukes", the Kalaunid Dynasty, which ruled from 1257 to 1382.

When Genghis Khan's hordes appeared in Europe, only to vanish again, and after their survivors, the Turkish Mamelukes, had settled in Egypt, newcomers, also from the high plateaus of Central Asia, appeared on the borders of the Empire of Rum. Unlike their predecessors, they were neither distinguished nor numerous so that there arrival went almost unnoticed.

At their head was valiant warrior called Ertughrul (or Tughril, 1231-1280). He was accompanied by his son Osman (or Othman, 1280-1324). His armies were only a tiny twig from the giant tree of the Turkish people. There were hardly more than two thousand of them living in four hundred tents. But these two thousand men were possessed of such drive that in a few generations they were to found one of the world's greatest empires.

As tradition has it, on crossing the Central Anatolian Plateau, Ertughrul one day spied a cloud of dust on the horizon. It had risen from the battle near Eskic;ehir - formerly Dorylaion - which a Seljuk detachment was fighting against Mongol invaders. Ertughrul took an historic decision, although probably unaware of what its consequences would be. He resolved to intervene in the battle, thus enabling the apparently losing side to win. That day the Ottomans saved the Empire of Rum.

To show his gratitude, the Seljuk Sultan Kaihusrev II (Kaikosrau) gave Ertughrul a strip of land encircling the battlefield. The land extended from Eskic;ehir along the Sakarya (in antiquity: Sangarios) Valley. It corresponded roughly with the Roman province of Bithynia which the Seljuks had taken from the Byzantines about a century previously
Osman I founded a small empire there, which he called "Memalik Osmanya", or "The Principality of Osman". He made Bursa its capital in 1305, captured Gemlik in 1326 and thus laid the foundations of what was to become the Ottoman Empire.

The Osmanli Kingdom of Bursa flourished quickly, while the Empire of the Seljuks of Rum declined. Eventually the latter was incorporated in the Ottoman Empire so that the tomb of the Seljuks became the cradle of the Ottomans. The latter, who had come from Khurasan, soon occupied the entire Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor. But their expansion was not yet at an end. The goals they had set themselves were the conquest of the Balkans and the capture of Constantinople. This task was undertaken by Osman's son, Sultan Orhan (1326-1359).

He had already conceived the notion of attacking "the far bank" of the Bosporus from Bursa, although he had established firm ties to the Emperor Johannes VI Kantakuzenos, whose daughter he had married. In 1356 a small band of about sixty Turks on rafts made of treetrunks lashed together with ropes landed at Gallipoli (Gelibolu) on the European side of the Dardanelles. That very morning the walls of the fortress had been destroyed by an earthquake; therefore nothing prevented their entry into the city. But the Turks' victory was not merely due to fortunate circumstances. It resulted, rather, from the creation of a standing army which was to make the Ottoman Empire the greatest military power of the time. Until then the Ottoman troops had consisted of a cavalry, which could be raised at need.

Orhan established regular standing cavalry formations ('akinci') to which he added infantry regiments known as "Yenic;eri" or "new soldiers". These were the celebrated "Janissaries", an awesomely well-disciplined body of troops, the like of which the world had not yet seen. They were recruited from Christian children, prisoners and inhabitants of subjugated provinces, who had been educated from early childhood at Muslim schools. There they were not only taught iron discipline, but also the teachings of the Defenders of the Faith ('Gazi') after the principles of Haji Bektash, the founder of the Bektashi Dervish sect. A regular cult grew up around him. His grave near Caesarea in Cappadocia has remained a place of pilgrimage to this day.

Orhan Gazi continued to extend the boundaries of the new country, adding Izmit and other places to his territories. Orhan gained a notable victory over a Byzantine army which attempted to lift the siege of Nice and added the principality of Karesi to his lands. Angora was regained from the Ahi Tribe and Cheembi Castle, Gallipoli, Bolayir, Malkara, Chorlou and Tekirdagh were added to Ottoman territories.
During the reign of Orhan Gazi coins were used for the first time in the Ottoman Empire. Orhan died in 1360, being succeeded by his son Murad I .
Orhan's son, Murad I (1359-1389) profited from his father's reforms. His armies marched about the Balkans in all directions.

They took Adrianople (today Edirne) in 1362, Sofia in 1385, Nish in 1386, Shumen in Bulgaria, Nicopolis (Nigbolu) and Silestre in Dobruja. Only at Turnovo was a tiny Bulgarian state left, which had to pay annual tribute to the conqueror until 1393.
Murad was not only active in the Balkans. In Asia Minor he captured Angora/Ankara (in antiquity: Ancyra) and subdued the East Anatolian Principality of Karaman as well as a dozen cities and extended his territory to include all of Anatolia.

Yet his work was not yet at an end. Two important tasks still stay ahead: conquering Serbia and raising Adrianople to the dignity of a capital (1362). After Ikonya and Bursa it was the third city in which the Sultan established his seat. But none of these cities was ever considered the final Royal Seat. They were simply stations on the inexorable westward advance of the Turks.
After the Serbian Tribe was defeated in 1371 their leader acknowledged the overlordship of the Ottoman Empire and agreed to pay 50 okkas of silver to the Sultan. He also agreed to send troops to fight for the Empire as and when needed. Following this victory Murad I returned to Bursa and married his son, Bayazid, to Solyman Shah's daughter, receiving Kutalya, Tavshanh, Simav and Emet as dowry.

The Battle of Kosovo (1389)
After taking possession of Anatolia, Murad I crowned his life's work by conquering Serbia. It was a rapid and ruthless campaign, culminating in the Battle of Kosovo Polye (also called "Blackbird Field"), in which Murad and the Serbian King, Lazar, stood face to face. Abandoned by the Occident, the Serbian knights were decisively defeated in 1389. The Turkish chroniclers describes the battle as follows: "Rivers of blood lent the diamond swords the hue of hyacinths and the glittering metal of the lances became rubies. Great numbers of severed heads and unravelled turbans had made the battlefield into a calourful field of tulips." At least sixty thousand men died that day. When it became apparent that the Serbians had lost and that King Lazar had been taken captive, Serbian sources relate that a Serbian nobleman, Milos Obilic, rushed with ten men into Murad's tent and thrust his dagger into the Sultan's breast. He was executed on the spot. King Lazar was dragged before the dying Murad and also executed. Thus the expiring Sultan had the satisfaction of seeing his enemy die before he himself did so.

His son, Bayazid I (1389-1402), who had fought in the front ranks, succeeded to the throne that very night. Murad's mortal remains were brought back to Bursa and interred in a splendid mosque.
Tribes such as the Menteske and Hamid Oghoullari seized the opportunity to declare war on the Ottoman Empire but Bayazid the Yilderim (Lightning) quickly moved against them and put an end to their challenge. Beysheheer was ceeded to the Empire and peace was declared.

His son, Bayazid I (1389-1402), who had fought in the front ranks, succeeded to the throne that very night. Murad's mortal remains were brought back to Bursa and interred in a splendid mosque.
Tribes such as the Menteske and Hamid Oghoullari seized the opportunity to declare war on the Ottoman Empire but Bayazid the Yilderim (Lightning) quickly moved against them and put an end to their challenge. Beysheheer was ceeded to the Empire and peace was declared.

Sultan Bayazid Khan now besieged Istanbul, an action which led to a new Crusade. At the Battle of Nighbolou the Crusaders were utterly defeated and the siege of Istanbul continued. The Anatolian Castle was built and Bayazid, leaving the siege in the hands of the Vezir Ali Pasha, passed on to Anatolia and annexed Koniah. Burhanuddin and Malatia were also conquered.
While Bayazid was away, a fleet under the command of Boucicant raised the siege of Istanbul and regained the castles. Bayazid renewed the siege in 1400 but the invasion of Anatolia by Timour caused him to lift it again.

In Anatolia Bayazid took Cappadocian Kayseri, Tokat and Sivas (1392/93). He secured Ankara, and incorporated into the Empire the province of Kastamonu as well as the cities of Amasya (the Amilous of antiquity), Konya and Sam sun on the Black Sea.
He secured the eastern borders of the country. After his first campaign he returned to the Balkans, where he clashed with the Hungarians under King Sigismund. The Hungarian army, which was quite a strong one, was reinforced by a division of French knights. According to tradition the Hungarians were decimated at Nicopolis on 25th September 1396 because the French knights were too quick to summon to the attack, shouting "May the Heavens fall if we do not spit all Turks on our lances!" Bayazid is supposed to have answered this challenge coolly:

"Quiet, boasters, I shall soon be feeding my horses oats on the high altar of St Peter's!" Tens of thousands of Hungarian prisoners were decapitated on the battlefield. News of Bayazid's overwhelming victory spread all over Asia Minor, carried by couriers who were accompanied by long trains of prisoners.

Bayazid's achievement was short-lived; his army was destroyed at Ankara in 1402 by Timur (Tamerlane), the last of the Mongol invaders to reach as far west as Anatolia. There followed an eleven-year hiatus between 1402 and 1413, when the Balkan states and the Anatolian emirates took advantage of the opportunity provided by the Mongol victory to shake off Ottoman rule, although further Mongol advance ceased after Timur's death in 1405.

The reconstruction of the Ottoman state by Mehmed I (1413-21) and the revival of the conquests in the reign of his son Murad (1421-51) again brought most of eastern and central Anatolia and the southern and eastern Balkans under direct or indirect Ottoman control. However, Ottoman rule in the Balkans was far less oppressive than the system it superseded, in which feudal dues and compulsory labour services weighed heavily upon the peasantry; in consequence, the Ottomans were often welcomed as deliverers. The rounding off of these conquests, and the emergence of the Ottoman state as a world power, was the work of Mehmed n al-Fatih, The Conqueror (1451-81), whose conquest of Constantinople in 1453 removed the last major barrier to expansion into northern Anatolia and enabled the Ottomans to dominate the Straits and the southern shore of the Black Sea.

Aside from scattered outposts in Greece, all that remained of the Byzantine Empire was its capital, Constantinople. Cut off by land since 1365, the city, despite long periods of truce with the Turks, was supplied and reinforced by Venetian traders who controlled its commerce by sea. On becoming sultan in 1444, Mehmet II (r. 1444-46, 1451-81) immediately set out to conquer the city. The military campaigning season of 1453 commenced with the fifty-day siege of Constantinople, during which Mehmet II brought warships overland on greased runners into the Bosporus inlet known as the Golden Horn to bypass the chain barrage and fortresses that had blocked the entrance to Constantinople's harbor. On May 29, the Turks fought their way through the gates of the city and brought the siege to a successful conclusion.

As an isolated military action, the taking of Constantinople did not have a critical effect on European security, but to the Ottoman Dynasty the capture of the imperial capital was of supreme symbolic importance. Mehmet II regarded himself as the direct successor to the Byzantine emperors. He made Constantinople the imperial capital, as it had been under the Byzantine emperors, and set about rebuilding the city. The cathedral of Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque, and Constantinople--which the Turks called Istanbul replaced Baghdad as the center of Sunni Islam. The city also remained the ecclesiastical center of the Greek Orthodox Church, of which Mehmet II proclaimed himself the protector and for which he appointed a new patriarch after the custom of the Byzantine emperors.

The disappearance of the Serbian kingdom, followed by the absorption of Herzegovina and much of Bosnia, left Hungary as the major European power facing the Ottomans. Mehmed's failure to take Belgrade in 1456 left the line of the middle Danube and lower Sava as the Ottoman boundary with Hungary for over sixty years. With the final re-absorption of Karaman in 1468 the last of the independent emirates disappeared, leaving the Turcoman confederation of theAkkoyunlu (White Sheep) as the Ottomans' major opponents in the area until their destruction by the Safavids of Iran in the early 16th century. Further north, Mehmed established a bridgehead in the Crimea by the capture of Caffa (Kefe) from the Genoese in 1475, thus bringing the Khanate of the Crimea, the most important of the successor states of the Golden Horde, under Ottoman control
The last years of Bayazid n's reign, and most of that of his successor Selim I (1512-20), were largely taken up with events in the east, in Iran, Egypt and the western fertile crescent. The rise of the Safavids in Iran had brought to power a state both militarily strong and ideologically hostile to the Ottomans as their eastern neighbour. Shi'ism, the form of Islam favoured by the Safavids, was also attractive to dissident forces and groupings within the Ottoman state, who rallied to support the new dynasty in Iran. A series of Shi'i-inspired risings among the Turcoman tribes of eastern Anatolia in the last years of Bayazid n's reign was a prelude to the war which broke out in the reigns of Selim and Shah Isma'il (1501-24), culminating in the defeat of the Safavids at the battle of Caldiran in 1514. For a time, eastern Anatolia was secured and the threat of religious separatism removedSelim's annexation of the emirate of Dhu'lQadr in 1515 brought the Ottomans into direct contact with the Mameluke empire for the first time. Over the next two years Selim destroyed the Mamelukes politically and militarily, conquering Aleppo and Damascus in 1516, and taking Cairo in 1517. As well as bringing Syria and Egypt under Ottoman control, this campaign also added the Holy Places of Christendom and Islam to the empire, thus adding to the prestige and authority of Selim and his successors. At Selim's death in 1520 the Empire stretched from the Red Sea to the Crimea, and from Kurdistan to Bosnia, and had become a major participant and contender in the international power politics of the day. Furthermore, substantial Turkish Muslim migration to the Balkans had begun to make permanent changes in the demographic and ethnic structure of that area.

Selim I's son, Süleyman I (r. 1520-66), was called the "lawgiver" (kanuni ) by his Muslim subjects because of a new codification of seriat undertaken during his reign. In Europe, however, he was known as Süleyman the Magnificent, a recognition of his prowess by those who had most to fear from it. Belgrade fell to Süleyman in 1521, and in 1522 he compelled the Knights of Saint John to abandon Rhodes. In 1526 the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Mohács led to the taking of Buda on the Danube. Vienna was besieged unsuccessfully during the campaign season of 1529. North Africa up to the Moroccan frontier was brought under Ottoman suzerainty in the 1520s and 1530s, and governors named by the sultan were installed in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. In 1534 Mesopotamia was taken from Persia. The latter conquest gave the Ottomans an outlet to the Persian Gulf, where they were soon engaged in a naval war with the Portuguese.

When Süleyman died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was a world power. Most of the great cities of Islam--Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad--were under the sultan's crescent flag. The Porte exercised direct control over Anatolia, the sub-Danubian Balkan provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Egypt, Mecca, and the North African provinces were governed under special regulations, as were satellite domains in Arabia and the Caucasus, and among the Crimean Tartars. In addition, the native rulers of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were vassals of the sultan.

The Ottomans had always dealt with the European states from a position of strength. Treaties with them took the form of truces approved by the sultan as a favor to lesser princes, provided that payment of tribute accompanied the settlement. The Ottomans were slow to recognize the shift in the military balance to Europe and the reasons for it. They also increasingly permitted European commerce to penetrate the barriers built to protect imperial autarky. Some native craft industries were destroyed by the influx of European goods, and, in general, the balance of trade shifted to the disadvantage of the empire, making it in time an indebted client of European producers.

European political intervention followed economic penetration. In 1536 the Ottoman Empire, then at the height of its power, had voluntarily granted concessions to France, but the system of capitulations introduced at that time was later used to impose important limitations on Ottoman sovereignty. Commercial privileges were greatly extended, and residents who came under the protection of a treaty country were thereby made subject to the jurisdiction of that country's law rather than Ottoman law, an arrangement that led to flagrant abuses of justice. The last thirty years of the sixteenth century saw the rapid onset of a decline in Ottoman power symbolized by the defeat of the Turkish fleet by the Spanish and Portuguese at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and by the unbridled bloody succession struggles within the imperial palace, the Seraglio of Constantinople.

In Islamic history, Suleyman is regarded as the perfect Islamic ruler in history. He is asserted as embodying all the necessary characteristics of an Islamic ruler, the most important of which is justice. The reign of Suleyman in Ottoman and Islamic history is generally regarded as the period of greatest justice and harmony in any Islamic state.
The Europeans called Suleyman "The Magnificent," but the Ottomans called him Kanuni, or "The Lawgiver." The Suleymanie Mosque, built for Suleyman, describes Suleyman in its inscription as Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye , or "Propagator of the Sultanic Laws." The primacy of Suleyman as a law-giver is at the foundation of his place in Islamic history and world view. It is perhaps important to step back a moment and closely examine this title to fully understand Suleyman's place in history.

The word used for law here, kanun, has a very specific reference. In Islamic tradition, the Shari'ah, or laws originally derived from the Qur'an , are meant to be universally applied across all Islamic states. No Islamic ruler has the power to overturn or replace these laws. So what laws was Suleyman "giving" to the Islamic world? What precisely does kanun refer to since it doesn't refer to the main body of Islamic law, the Shari'ah ?

The kanun refer to situational decisions that are not covered by the Shari'ah . Even though the Shari'ah provides all necessary laws, it's recognized that some situations fall outside their parameters. In Islamic tradition, if a case fell outside the parameters of the Shari'ah , then a judgement or rule in the case could be arrived at through analogy with rules or cases that are covered by the Shari'ah . This method of juridical thinking was only accepted by the most liberal school of Shari'ah , Hanifism, so it is no surprise that Hanifism dominated Ottoman law.

The Ottomans, however, elevated kanun into an entire code of laws independent of the Shari'ah . The first two centuries of Ottoman rule, from 1350 to 1550, saw an explosion of kanun rulings and laws, so that by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the kanun were a complete and independent set of laws that by and large were more important than the Shari'ah . This unique situation was brought about in part because of the unique heritage of the Ottomans. In both Turkish and Mongol traditions, the imperial law, or law pronounced by the monarch, was considered sacred. They even had a special word for it: the Turks called it Türe and the Mongols called it Yasa . In the system of Türe and Yasa , imperial law was regarded as the essential and sacred foundation of the empire. When this tradition collided with the Islamic Shari'ah tradition, a compromised system combining both was formed.

The Sultanic laws were first collected together by Mehmed the Conqueror. Mehmed divided the kanun into two separate sets or laws.The first set dealt with the organization of government and the military, and the second set dealt with the taxation and treatment of the peasantry. The latter group was added to after the death of Mehmed and the Ottoman kanun pretty much crystallized into its final form in 1501. Suleyman, for his part, revised the law code, but on the whole the Suleyman code of laws is pretty identical to the 1501 system of laws. However, it was under Suleyman that the laws took their final form; no more revisions were made after his reign. From this point onwards, this code of laws was called, kanun-i 'Osmani , or the "Ottoman laws."

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 1298