The Ottomans

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 232: The Ottomans – From Mehmet the Conqueror to Selim the Grim (1444-1520)

These last dozen or so episodes we have examined the genesis of two of the three major strategic preoccupations of the Habsburg empire, the rivalry with the French kings and the relationship with the imperial princes. Today we will look at the build-up of the third major strategic challenge to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottomans. One can argue, and many have, that the threat of an Ottoman invasion in the 1520s and 1530s prevented the emperor Charles V from clamping down on the protestants in the empire. By the time the border had been stabilised and the Habsburgs could focus again on the religious and political changes in the German lands, it was too late to reverse events. There is an element of irony here that I will refrain from elaborating on.

When Constantinople fell in 1453, the Christian nations of Western Europe assumed  that they could regain the ancient capital of Byzantium and even Jerusalem if only they were united under the crusading banner. By the time Suleiman the Magnificent appeared before Belgrade in 1521, that had become inconceivable. The Christian nations, and in particular the Habsburgs were on their back foot.

So, what had happened in these 70 years that made the Ottoman armies appear unbeatable?

Let’s start with the city of Constantinople itself. When Mehmet II took it, he allowed his army to sack what was left of the once mighty capital of the Roman Empire. How much there was still to take is a question. Its population had shrunk from almost half a million in the days of Justinian to barely 50,000 souls. Its churches and palaces had been stripped of valuables first by the catholic crusaders in 1204 and then by the late emperors desperate to fund the defence of their shrinking realm. Its trade had shifted away to Aleppo and Cairo. The prominent Turkish historian Halil İnalcık called it “the dead centre of a dead empire”.

There was hence no rational reason to revive the city of Constantinople, let alone make it the capital of an empire. The purpose, if there was one, relates to a hadith, a saying by Mohammed that quote: “Constantinople will be conquered. Blessed is the commander who will conquer it and blessed are his troops”.

It is important to remember that the early Ottoman sultans had no legitimacy for their rule, other than their military might. They weren’t descendants of the prophet, nor could they claim ownership on the basis of inheritance. They were just a Turkic tribe made good. By breaking the Theodosian walls, Mehmet II had fulfilled a destiny set by the Prophet, a task Muslin rulers had failed in since the 7^th century. And that elevated him to a spiritually sanctioned level. Constantinople had to thrive as a Muslim city to prove that the Sultan was the rightful ruler and leader of the Islamic world.

And thrive the city did. By the end of Mehmet II’s reign, the city had grown by 50% and by 1550 it had almost fully recovered. But it did not become an exclusively Muslim city as many in the Ottoman camp had wished for. Instead it turned into a melting pot that reflected the ethnic and religious mix of the lands the Sultan ruled.

Mehmet invited Muslims from all over his possessions to come to live in the new capital. But he did not expel its Orthodox Christian inhabitants and many other religious groups arrived there too, seeking advancement. To fill the empty streets and rebuild the ruins, Mehmet II ordered the jews of Thessaloniki to be resettled in Constantinople. At the end of his reign the city proper is estimated as 60% Muslim, 20% Greek Orthodox, 11% Jewish, 5% Armenian and 2% Italian. Meanwhile in Pera and Galata, across the Golden Horn, housed only 35% Muslims, 39% Greek Orthodox, 22% Italians mainly from Genova and 4% Armenians.

This toleration of different religions was one of the many features in which the Ottoman Empire differed from the Christian nations. Though both the Bible and Qur’an take a dim view of forced conversions, the Christians practiced it with abandon, whilst the Muslims stayed closer to the original text which states: “Whoever wills—let him believe; and whoever wills—let him disbelieve.”

Mehmet II appointed leaders for the recognised religions, Sunni Islam, Greek Orthodoxy, Judaism and Armenian Christianity, and gave them seats and places of worship in the capital. Of course Sunni Islam received the prime sites, Minarets dominated the appearance of the city and many churches, including the greatest building on earth at the time, the Hagia Sophia were turned into mosques. But the other religions were allowed to keep, even build new places of worship. Their religious leaders became the political and judicial representatives of their community. They were given administrative, fiscal and legal powers to regulate the spiritual and private affairs of their members. They oversaw judicial courts, operated schools, seminaries, hospitals, even jails. They registered deaths and marriages. Jewish and Christian leaders sat on the imperial council and could reach high positions in Ottoman society. If they were prepared to convert, they could rise to the top of the administration, as viziers, admirals or even grand vizier.

This was of course no paradise where, everyone can seek sanctity in their own fashion as Frederick the Great would allow in his lands 300 years later. Muslim rules and customs were always superior and churches could be desecrated or converted by the will of the Sultan. But Jews, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christians found life under the Ottomans a lot more acceptable than conditions in France, Italy, the Empire or Spain. When Ferdinand and Isabella confronted Spain’s Jews and Muslims with the choice between conversion or expulsion, the Ottomans welcomed these refugees with open arms. Sultan Bayezid II wondered aloud why anyone would call Ferdinand of Aragon “the Wise” when he sent him such excellent subjects.

What the Sultans however demanded from non-Muslims was loyalty. Their religious leaders were appointed and served at pleasure of the Sultan. Their privileges could be restricted or revoked at will, their churches and synagogues confiscated and converted and they had to pay higher taxes than their Muslim neighbours. However, most non-Muslims found these restrictions easy to bear. The empire was growing, it gave them opportunities in commerce and politics as well as freedoms they could not even dream of anywhere else in Europe. There are catholic Christians too who moved into the Ottoman empire seeking employment for their skills as artisans, engineers, artists or admirals. For instance, the man who cast the cannon that broke the Theodosian wall had been a Hungarian.

There was however one levy placed upon the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire that we would find unbearable today, the Devshirme. Every four to five years scouts would go into the Christian communities in the Balkans and the Caucasus to select prepubescent boys based on intellectual and physical capability as well as their looks. They were forcibly removed from their families and sent to Constantinople. Upon arrival, they would be circumcised. Those of superior beauty were selected as palace pages to be trained and educated inside the Topkapi palace. After a number of years of initial education a subset of these pretty pages would then be given a ticket to the elite school in the palace grounds that trained the future leaders of the empire.

Those who did not pass the first or second selection process were first sent to work on Anatolian farms to toughen them up. They became accustomed to hardship, learned Turkish and got immersed in the Islamic faith. After six to eight years they returned to Constantinople and worked as labourer in the palace kitchens, stables and gardens, or in the arsenal or mosque construction before being enrolled in the Janissaries, the Sultan’s feared standing army. The Janissaries initially counted about 7 to 8,000 men and continuously expanded until hitting its peak at 65,000 in the  late 17^th century.

This Janissary system had been introduced by either Orhan or Murad I in the second half of the 14^th century. What changed with Mehmet II was the introduction of this palace school at Topkapi.

Those who had passed the selection were destined to become the leading administrators of the empire. Mehmet II established a complex bureaucracy that included eunuchs in charge of the different parts of the royal palace, military judges, civil administrators, financial secretaries, treasurers and a chancellor. He introduced an imperial council that met four times a week. It was to advise the Sultan on administrative, political and military matters, it issued decrees in the ruler’s name, appointed and promoted civil servants and acted as a law court for the most serious crimes.

This council was led by the Grand Vizier, the Sultan’s deputy who was running the empire and lead the armies in war, unless the ruler took charge himself. Under Mehmet II’s predecessors, the grand Vizier and other senior positions were held by members of important Turkish families, much like royal councils in the west were populated by the senior aristocrats.

In June 1453, immediately after the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmet II had his Grand Vizier Halil Pasha executed. Halil Pasha had counselled against an attack on the city and was accused of taking bribes from the Byzantines. Though the real reason for his disgrace and death was a break in the system. Halil Pasha had inherited the position of Grand Vizier from his father who was the son of previous grand Vizier. Beheading the member of this immensely powerful aristocratic family was Mehmet II’s way to decapitate the old aristocratic elite. The conquest of Constantinople had given him the authority to do this. And his palace school provided him with apt replacements.

Most grand viziers from then forward had gone through the Topkapi palace school, meaning they were despite their elevated social position, still slaves. Men who had no power base other than the one granted by the Sultan.

It also meant that these men were fiercely loyal to the system that had brought them to power. The administration they led was again made up mainly from men who had gone through the same procedure and who they presumably knew extremely well. Their coherence as a separate class made them difficult to penetrate for domestic or foreign opponents. And given their legal status as slaves, the Sultan could have them removed or killed at any moment for any reason.

It is often believed that these boys had been completely brainwashed and had forgotten their Christian families in the Balkans, or that they never had any. But that is not true. They were taken from the age of 10, so they already had strong memories of where they had grown up. The selectors preferred children from stable families as this was supposed to imbue them with moral values. In many cases they stayed in contact with their mothers, fathers and siblings, often helping them along financially or to find attractive roles in local administration. So, in a weird way, the administration of this Turkish empire was mainly in the hands of Christians from the Balkans.

Machiavelli summed up the Ottoman system as follows: “The entire monarchy of the Turk is governed by one lord, the others are his servants; and, dividing his kingdom into sanjaks, he sends there different administrators, and shifts and changes them as he chooses. [..]. He concludes that the Ottoman empire would be hard to defeat. The regime could not be undermined by fermenting opposition amongst the leading families or corruption of his advisors, because there are no powerful families and the men in charge do not have the people behind them. But on the flipside, he believed that if the Sultan was ever defeated, it would be easy to hold his lands, much easier than it would be for the Sultan to hold a Christian kingdom he could defeat more easily.

Basically, the Ottoman empire was the polar opposite to the Holy Roman Empire. Where the Holy Roman empire was rigid in its religious outlook, the Ottomans were tolerant. As much as the Empire was politically fragmented, Ottoman power was  consolidated. Ottoman tax collection was reliable and plenty, imperial tax collection was missing in action. And that meant the Ottomans could and regularly did raise armies 100,000 strong, whilst European powers could at a stretch field 50,000, and only for brief periods of time.

One of my favourite authors covering this history, Marc David Bear described the Sultanate at this time as follows: “Emperor and Caesar. Khan and Sultan. The ottoman dynasty bore all the hallmarks of its Byzantine, Mongol-Turkish, and Muslim heritage, a Eurasian amalgam that lasted more than 500 years. With their conquest of the Second Rome, the Ottomans became more like the Byzantines, claiming authority as successors of the Eastern Roman Empire, taking on an imperial ideology, seeing themselves as inheritors of Rome, and adapting its architectural models. [..] As the Ottomans revitalised the ‘dead centre of a dead empire’, whose revival was fed by repopulating the city with Christians, Jews and Muslims from their ever expanding empire, the Islamic world gained an imperial centre to match or even surpass Christendom in wealth, size and magnificence”. End quote,

Which gets us back to the initial question, as rulers of the most advanced empire and commander of the largest and most modern army of their day, why did neither Mehmet II nor his two successors, Bayezid II and Selim the Grim go west and roll up the Hungarians, Bohemians and Austrians before taking Italy and the rest of Europe?

Mehmet II had made a first attempt to take Belgrade in 1456, which was unsuccessful thanks to the skill of its defenders (episode 210 if you want to check back). After that, he turned to the remainders of the Byzantine empire in Greece and Albania as well as Venetian trading posts in the Aegean. However, this was not the big move that one would expect. Maybe there wasn’t enough bandwidth to do both a massive campaign into Western Europe and the huge reforms he was pushing through in the Ottoman empire.

We should also not forget that the Hungarians under Matthias Corvinus had created one of Europe’s most impressive armies and built a string of fortresses on the border. This was not insurmountable, but it just wasn’t yet the time for it. Mehmet and Matthias signed various peace agreements over the years that allowed the Hungarian king to indulge in his ambitions in Bohemia and facilitated Turkish raids into Styria and Carinthia. See episode 212.

Things got more serious when in 1479 Mehmet II tried his luck with the knights of St. John at their stronghold in Rhodes. This chivalric order, also known as the Knights Hospitallers were the last remains of the crusader states. They had turned the island  into a giant fortress and made their money from controlling shipping along the coast of Anatolia. They had become a particular nuisance to the Sultan due to their habit of prying on ships carrying pilgrims on their route to Mecca and Medina. But this siege was repelled. It would take until 1522 before Mehmet’s great grandson Suleiman the Magnificent could expel the knights after an incredibly long and costly siege.

That was followed by another major effort when he took the city of Otranto in southern Italy. This was intended to be the first step in a larger operation taking advantage of the political fragmentation of the peninsula. Given how rapidly the French pushed through from Piedmont to Naples in 1495, the Italians were justifiably concerned that a Turkish force could rapidly take Rome and Milan from this bridgehead.

It was the unexpected death of the great Sultan in 1481 that saved Europe from a full scale invasion. He was by all accounts a remarkable man with many facets to his life. Marc David Baer dedicates a whole chapter arguing that he was as much a Renaissance prince as his contemporaries in Italy, France and the Low Countries.

I am not yet fully convinced by this, but what is hard to deny is that Mehmet II established or improved many institutions that made and maintained the Ottoman empire as a foremost power in Europe and Asia.

But his great construct still had a massive Achilles heel. There was no clear rule for the succession to the Sultanate. It was understood that the sultan should be succeeded by his son, but it did not say which son. And given a harem full of slave concubines, there were usually lots of sons. In principle this was supposed to be a meritocracy, where the most able of the sons was to follow the father. To establish their credentials, the sons of the sultan were given governorships or military commands in the border provinces.

That meant that on the day of Mehmet II’s death the forerunners for the succession, his sons Bayezid and Cem were a long way from the capital. What followed was two weeks of chaos. Without a master to obey, Mehmet’s system of slave administrators and slave soldiers collapsed. The body of the sultan was left forgotten in the palace and allegedly stank tremendously before it was finally buried.

Then there was the race to the capital. Whoever made it there first was likely to become the ruler, simply by taking control of the administration. That race was won by Bayezid, who became sultan Bayezid II.

His brother Cem managed to take the old capital of Bursa on the other side of the Sea of Marmaris. He was popular with the troops and in particular with the Turks of Anatolia. So he too had himself proclaimed Sultan and minted his own coins. He offered his brother to split the empire, he would take the Asian provinces and Bayezid the European ones. That offer was refused and in the ensuing battle, Bayezid’s forces prevailed. Cem fled first to Adana in Southern Turkey and then to Mamluk Egypt.

The Mamluks ruled Syria, Egypt and what is now Saudi Arabia including the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. They had custody of the Khalif, the religious leader of the Umma, the community of the Islamic faith. Their capital, Cairo was multiples larger than Constantinople and they also ruled Aleppo, the main trading hub for silk and luxuries from the East. All that made them the foremost Muslim power.

There Cem hoped he would find support for another attempt at dislodging his brother. But following a number of failed attempts, the Mamluks tired of Cem or Cem of the Mamluks and he went to Rhodes, the home of the Knights Hospitallers.

This was a godsent for Europe. Cem or Djem, as the Italians called him, became a permanent threat they dangled before Bayazid II. Cem had expected that the knight of St. John would convey him over to the Hungarians who had offered him command of their armies in an attack on the Balkans. But the defenders of the Christian faith did no such thing. Instead they struck a deal with Bayazid II. Bayazid paid them a generous annual subsidy and in turn they kept Cem as an honoured guest in Rhodes. Then the chivalric knights sold Cem to the French who still prevented him from going to Hungary and collected the subsidy from Bayazid II. Bayazid then tried to put an end to this malarky and allegedly offered the king of France the church of the Holy Sepulchre in exchange for his brother. That was turned down on the grounds that Bayazid did not yet have Jerusalem. Even the lance that pierced Jesus’ side was thrown into the bargain, still no takers. Cem was finally handed over to the pope and lived the life of a wealthy nobleman in Rome. He was paraded as a novelty and appeared in various renaissance paintings, most prominently in the frescoes of the Borgia apartments in the Vatican, standing next to another contemporary celebrity, Lucrecia Borgia.

Beyond looking great in a picture, Cem’s real value was as a walking insurance policy. As long as he was in Italy and could be deployed to the Hungarian border at any time, Bayazid II did not dare to move on Western Europe.

Only when Cem had died and his body had been returned to Bursa and buried in 1499 did Bayazid II make his first move. The Venetian Ottoman war of 1499-1503 cost the Venetians another set of trading posts. But even more importantly, the Ottomans won their first naval battle against the Venetians, which gave them maritime control of their coastline. That was something the Byzantine rulers had lost way back in the 12^th century and provided the Sultan with another important military tool alongside his Janissary infantry and cavalry forces.

His brother Cem was however not Bayazid’s only reason to refrain from westward expansion. He also had a huge domestic challenge to deal with, a domestic challenge driven by religious divisions in his empire. Not divisions between Christians, Jews or Muslims, but amongst Muslims.mehmed Westerners, me included, always see Islam as a unified religion with clear rules adhered to from one end of the Muslim world to the other. Only Sunni and Shia are known distinctions. But like literally every religion ever created, in Islam too, people disagree about matters of faith.

As we already talked about in episode 168, the Turkic tribes of the Anatolian plateau were followers of Sufism, a sort of Islamic mysticism that sought a connection to god through Music, Dance and Poetry. The best known of their rituals are the Dancing Dervishes that still exist. They lived in Sufi lodges, not dissimilar to monasteries and dedicated themselves to worship. Since the days of the Poet Rumi who founded the Mevlevi branch of Sufism, various further branches evolved. Some were quite extreme in their practices, shaving off all hair and walking around naked even in winter.

Mehmet II had a good relationship, even with the more extreme groups. One of these, led by a ascetic wanderer named Otman Baba, whose speciality was drinking other people’s bathwater, turned on Bayazid. They did believe that in any era there lived a perfect human, the pole who acted as an isthmus between god and humanity. And everyone owed allegiance to the pole and his deputies, even the most powerful sultans. The bathwater drinking Otman Baba believed himself to be that pole, the reincarnation of Adam, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Ali, even God. His disciples swallowed all this hook, line and sinker. Otman Baba had died in 1478, but his deputies continued in his vein. And when Bayazid II did not follow their instructions, they tried to assassinate him.

Bayazid reacted brutally. He had the followers of Otman Baba tortured and executed and the rest, including a bunch of other sects, exiled to Anatolia. That was a mistake, a bad one.

Because there they found a new leader. Across the border in Persia, Shi’i shah Ismael I had just established the Safavid dynasty in Tabriz. Ismael I was not only the Persian king, he was also the leader of a radical mystic Shiite Sufi sect, whose military wing was made up of Turkmen and Kurdish fighters called the Redheads after their headgear.

The Redheads saw Ismael not just as their political and religious leader, they were convinced that he was at least the perfect human, the pole who was to be obeyed as if he was god, if he wasn’t actually god himself. Such a mystic Sufi leader had a natural appeal to the recently exiled followers of Otman Baba. The fact that the Safavids were explicitly Shiite was no hinderance. Many Sufis, including these that enjoyed the patronage of Bayazid II revered the divine Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed. The two branches of Islam had just not separated as sharply as they have today.

Bayazid’s problems did not end there. The Janissaries, despite being born as Christians had developed a strong affinity to radical Sufism and were hence susceptible to Safavid propaganda. Then there were the old Turkish aristocracy that Mehmet II had sidelined and replaced with his palace pages and slave Viziers. They wanted back into power.

The net result were a string of Safavid supported apocalyptic rebellions in Anatolia that had to be crushed with brutal force. Meanwhile Ismael I incorporated the White Sheep confederation that controlled eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Western Iran. This was not just thanks to his religious and military power, but also due to his family connections. He could trace his descent to both White Sheep rulers and the Byzantine emperors.

The combination of threats an invasion led by his brother and the rising power of Ismael I in Persia was what blocked Bayazid II. Being stuck without progress was at this time an intolerable situation. The Ottoman empire had been in constant expansion mode for a century and a half and this period of defensive stagnation did not go down well with the Gazi’s the Turkish cavalry fighters nor did it satisfy the Janissaries.  

Bayazid II’s son Selim was one of those who could not bear this any longer. Plus he was just one of several sons, and a younger one to boot. But what he had going for him was a great relationship with the troops. He had been given the governorship of Trabzon of the Persian border. There he had fought incursion after incursion and had gained the respect of his men with ambitious counterattacks and a relaxed attitude to raping and pillaging.

In 1511 Selim travelled to Crimea, the former Genoese port of Caffa where he deposited his son Suleiman as governor. Caffa was the heart of the second major Ottoman industry, the trade in slaves. The Crimean Tatars would raid eastern europe for slaves and bring them to Caffa for shipment to Constantinople, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and North Africa. The scale of this slave trade was humongous. Between 1500 and 1700 an estimated two million slaves were transported, a number comparable to the transatlantic slave trade.

From this centre of human misery, Selim took his forces of loyal soldiers to Edirne to have a chat with his dad. Selim suggested he should be given a governorship closer to Constantinople, just to make sure he was on hand should – god forbid – the old man pass away unexpectedly and the scenes of Mehmet’s death repeated themselves.

Somehow Bayazid did not immediately agree and challenged Selim for battle. Selim did in the end not dare to raise his hand against the Sultan and retreated. Meanwhile his brother Ahmed, Bayazid’s favourite, went to Constantinople expecting his elderly father would now declare him Sultan. Bayazid may have wanted to do that, but he ran into opposition from the Janissaries. To quote Marc David Baer again, the Janissaries believed “Ahmed to be effeminate, a man devoted to pleasure, drinking and music, his only desire to kiss the mouths of rosebud-lipped beauties and to clasp the waists of those whose tall figures resemble cypresses”. End quote

Such inclinations turned out to be deadlier than even the moralists claim. Ahmed had to leave Constantinople, Selim forced his father to abdicate in his favour and he hunted down his brothers, Ahmed and Korkud and had them strangled.

It is from this point forward that the sultan would have all his brothers and half-brothers ceremoniously strangled with the finest silk scarves as a matter of course. And to ensure this could actually be done, the sons were no longer given governorships or military commands. Instead they were kept in a golden cage in the Topkapi palace waiting to be called out either to rule or to be executed. That did solve the succession problem, but created another one. These men who lived in a permanent competition for their lives with their brothers and were otherwise isolated from the outside world, weren’t exactly natural rulers. That problem did not materialise immediately as Selim had only one son, Suleiman and Suleiman grew up in a reasonably normal fashion. But Suleiman’s sons and grandsons went through this experience and turned out to be – with few exceptions – utterly incompetent. Their fate often been determined by the political skill of their mothers, themselves usually enslaved concubines who played harem politics for their and their son’s survival. But despite this monstrously dysfunctional system to select the monarch, the Ottoman state continued to flourish well into the late 17^th century, testament to the resilience of the political system established by Mehmet II.

And that gets us to the last chapter in today’s episode, the military. Selim, often called the Grim, though the correct translation from Turkish is “the awesome” did what he had promised his soldiers long ago. He resolved the Safavid problem and the Mamluk one to boot.

In April 1514 after the exchange of delightfully insulting letters and much posturing, Selim mustered his army for the 1,800 km march from Edirne to the Safavid capital. On the way he had tens of thousands of Redheads, the religious followers of Shah Ismael I executed. And on August 23^rd the two armies met at Caldiran near lake Van.

10,000 Janissaries, armed with muskets, hundreds of cannon and a further 90,000 men wreaked havoc with the Safavids, who did not have a single firearm. The Ottoman Sultan may not have an exalted bloodline nor did he have a hundred thousand fanatical followers who believed him to be a god, but he had guns. And that was enough. Shah Ishmael survived the battle and fled. The Ottomans captured his capital but could not hold it for logistical reasons. Still the spell was broken. The man so many people believed was a god had been defeated. There were no more Shia uprisings in Anatolia and the gap between the two branches of Islam became a chasm.

Next Selim turned on the Mamluks. In 1516 he advanced on Aleppo, one of the richest cities in the Muslim world. Selim’s army of his 10,000 musket-armed Janissaries and 60,000 general troops, mostly cavalry faced 20,000 Mamluks and Bedouin Arabs. Again Marc David Baer described it best quote: “Despite being surrounded by 40 descendants of the prophet Mohammed bearing copies of the Qur’an on their heads and the caliph, Mamluk sultan Al Ghawri was killed, the seventy-five-year old’s head presented to Selim I and his army defeated. Arquebuses had defeated swords and arrows again.” end quote.

There was little bit more fighting, but by April 1517, Selim had taken full control of the Mamluk empire, all of the Levant, including Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem, Egypt with its magnificent capital of Cairo and the crown of achievement, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Selim I could now call himself the defender of the Holy cities and  Caliph. He had not only doubled the size of the empire, he had also given legitimacy to the sultan as the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, a position recognised well beyond the borders of his empire. The wealth of Cairo, Aleppo and the rapidly growing Constantinople was now in the hands of one man, whose administration was manned by slaves who had to follow his every whim.

And all this power was now turning its gaze westwards. Selim left this task to his only son, Suleiman the Magnificent who took the reins in 1520, ushering in two centuries of war between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. But that would go far beyond this episode, which is why we stop here.

Next week we will get back to the latter years of emperor Maximilian who laid the foundations for that Habsburg empire the Ottomans ran up against.

And in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode and the show in general, why don’t you open your purse and go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you find various options to keep this show going and advertising free, in the same way Mr. S.C.F., Bram R. Adam W. Andrew E., Birket H. Carl J. Deborah McK, and Mr Roy B. have already done.