Main Points

History is Now

Early Medieval history in the Middle East is a chronicle of the emergence of the Arabs under Muhammad, the rise of Islam as the world's youngest and yet it's most successful Medieval religion, and the dynamic culture they developed. However, as the centuries passed, a succession of Caliphs prioritized personal wealth and luxury above ruling the government and the Caliphate of the Arabs gradually was carved up by local Muslim warlords and foreign invaders. With the decline of the Arabs, it would be another people who emerged as the dominant power players in the Middle East.

While the history of the Turks is first found written in the pages of China's historians circa 500 AD, it is in the Middle East that they would establish their greatest and most successful states. Yet this proved to be a bittersweet accomplishment. The Turks were true Formative Era barbarians. If they were not as vicious as the Xiongnu (Huns) and Juan Juan (Avars) before them, neither had they settled, ruled kingdoms, or developed the basic institutions necessary to govern large territories. And thus the history of the Middle East from 1000 - 1900 AD is dominated by the story of Turks, their dramatic success, slow development, and ultimate failure to match the accomplishments of the Arabs before them, much less their own contemporaries.

Four Centuries of Barbarian Invasions

The Muslim civilization of the Arabs was one of the two greatest civilizations of the Medieval Era, however, all good things come to an end. Abbasid prosperity began to suffer under the renewed attacks of the barbarians of Central Asia, and in 945 AD the Buwayhid tribes conquered Baghdad. The Caliph was allowed to remain as ruler of the faithful from his palace, however the Caliph's practical authority derived from his secular power, and never did the concept of a purely religious leader (like the Christian Pope) ever develop. On the one hand Muslims have always listened to a number of priests, scholars, and political leaders; they make up their own minds on matters of doctrine rather than following an "approved" orthodoxy. However, there was some sense that if the Caliph was so powerful, why didn't he rule an impressive state. 945 AD, thus marks the effective end of the Caliphate though men would continue to hold that title for more than three hundred years.

Then in 967 AD, the Fatamids broke away, taking the title of Caliphs and control of Egypt and Syria. However, this merely proved to be a prelude in 1038 AD, when the Seljuk Turks stormed out of Central Asia in the greatest series of conquests since the Arabs themselves. Toghril, a Beg (Turkish war leader), led the Turks into the Middle East. Miscalculating the threat they posed, the Caliph invited Toghril Beg to Baghdad as a mercenary to help restore the Abbasid Caliphate to its former glory. The best which can be said is that he would live to regret his mistake. Many others did not.

The Turks were known for the two long braids they wore down their backs, and were dedicated horse warriors who used archers with deadly effect. Driving massed arrow fire into ranks of opponents, then turning and regrouping safely out of range of a response, the Turks would fire and retreat repeatedly until their enemies were so decimated that their archers would finally close and finish their enemies with short swords. The Turks conquered most of the eastern Abbasid Caliphate and ultimately drove all the way to the Mediterranean before they stalled. However, Toghril Beg was the beneficiary of these campaigns; the Arabs would never again control the vital heartland of Mesopotamia.

To add insult to injury, Christian warriors first began to arrive in 1095 AD for the 1st Crusade. They conquered much of Palestine and Syria including Antioch and Jerusalem as part of a holy war dedicated to annihilating the Muslims. The Muslim histories of the "Franj" (Frankish) invasions, paint them every bit as barbaric as the Turks and the Central Asian nomads; and on most points they are supported by Christian accounts. What the Turks wrote with amazement, the Europeans wrote with pride; for example both record the bloody fall of Jerusalem in graphic detail. The knights chasing men, women, and children through the streets, slaughtering them in their homes, and even as they clung to church altars. The Christian scribes explain in detail the legal premise that Muslims were unholy and therefore lacked the standing to claim sanctuary, in fact their unholiness defiled the churches they claimed to venerate and therefore a Muslim within the holy places was more deserving of death than one who was merely cut down in the street.

These conquests had been precipitated by calls from the Pope and the East Roman Emperor following the Muslim conquest of Christian Anatolia. This age old province was the heartland from which the East Romans drew most of their armies, and it had gradually fallen mile by mile to independent Turkish warlords carving up the weakened East Romans after their defeat at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 AD. These warlords were gradually united into the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum (the Turkish name for Rome). While Anatolia was forever lost to the Christians, for the next two hundred years until 1302 AD, local Muslim / Turkish city states would vie with the Christians for power. Not until more charismatic leaders built large regional states based on a new kind of Islamic religious fervor were the Muslims able to repulse the Franj invaders.

Coming of the Mongols

However, the worst was saved for last. In 1220 AD, Mongol armies stormed through the Iranian Plateau and around the Caspian Sea in what is considered one of the most perfect campaigns in military history. The Great Raid of 1220 devastated many of the most important cities of Islam and stripped them of the riches of centuries. When Genghis Khan died in 1227 AD, his warriors had leveled whole cities. In the future, they decided that cities could be enslaved to serve the Mongols. However, Genghis Khan's first philosophy had been that cities were weak and disease-ridden; they wasted and blackened the landscape which ought to serve as good horse pasture, literally feeding the Mongol war machine. After 1227 AD, however a new pattern emerged; cities were devastated by Mongol sieges, but they were not razed to the ground. However, any conquered city that revolted against the Mongols was surrounded, cut off, and every human being was put to death. The only record of their rebellion being the pyramids of skulls which the Mongols stacked up as a warning to others.

In 1241 AD, Genghis Khan's son died, and the empire was divided into four great Khanates. Persia became the seed of the Ilkhanate, and in 1258 AD, the Mongols invaded Mesopotamia and sacked Baghdad itself. The last Abbasid Caliph, kept on by the Turks as a figurehead, was put to death. The devastation was so complete that Cairo and after 1453 AD, Istanbul, became the centers of Islamic culture. Even the impregnable Assassin fortress of Alamut was wiped off the face of the Earth. Almost the entire Middle East fell to the Mongols within the span of two years. The Seljuk Turks were crushed leaving only the remnant of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum semi-independent in Asia Minor. The Mongols were poised to invade Syria and Egypt when the death of Mongke Khan sent most of the armies back to contest the succession. However, the Mongols left a sizable force to stalk Syria. It would be several years before Kubalai was declared Great Khan and the Ilkhan returned to the Middle East. By the time he returned, he had lost his chance.

Meanwhile, Egypt had been dealing with its own problems. In 1250 AD, Louis IX of France (better known as St. Louis) led the Seventh Crusade to conquer Egypt. They conquered the Egyptian armies and seized the North. The tragedy was contagious, first the Sultan and then his only son died. With one of France's most famous kings marching on the capital at Cairo, it was the Sultana who rallied the government and put the Muslim armies on the path to victory. Her rule was not popular, however, and she was pressed to marry; for her husband she chose one of her generals, a mamluk. The mamluks ("owned") were slaves and a tradition that dated back to the Abbasid Caliphs. In a world where warriors gave more loyalty to their local warlords than a far away Caliph, the Caliphs depended on slaves to fill their armies. Purchased for military service, often as children and raised as Muslims, they were the backbone of the army by the 1200s and filled the posts in the government bureaucracy as well. The Sultana's new husband did not live long, as first one mamluk and then another fell to assassination and political treachery; however, a slave dynasty was hereby established for several centuries.

However in 1260 AD, a mamluk leader marching a small force through Ain Jalut in Syria was spotted by the Mongol army and attacked. The mamluks used their mobility to their best advantage annoying the Mongols, but their numbers were too few and they eventually had to retreat. The Mongols chased the mamluks into the highlands intent on capitalizing on their victory; it was here they were ambushed by the main mamluk force and destroyed.

The battle of Ain Jalut was the turning point in the Mongol wars, though no one could be sure of this at the time. Indeed, the peak of Mongol expansion only occurred 40 years later when the Mongols defeated a mamluk army and seized Syria and Palestine for several months. However, the Mongols were disintegrating. Kubalai was the last Great Khan; never again would one Mongol exert even nominal authority over the others Khans. The result was that the Mongols fell to fighting among themselves, eviscerating their empire from the inside out, usually with the help of their subjects who sped things along as best they could. The Mongols would never invade, much less conquer Egypt.

The mamluks believed that the Mongols were a judgment upon the impure. Trusting in their faith, but acting with their rigid military discipline, the mamluks had decided to oppose the Mongols, and with their victory at Ain Jalut, they became the saviors of Islam overnight. While they never succeeded in expanding their realm beyond the borders of Egypt, their brand of fundamentalism would have a deep impact on desperate Muslims throughout the Middle East.

And yet untold damage had already been done. The uncultured Turks had overturned the generally wise rule of the Arabs and imposed patterns of Formative Era government. The Turks would be viewed even more poorly in Muslim histories, were it not for the even more terrible devastation reeked by the Mongols after them. Between this barbarian devastation and the fundamentalism which the Mamluks championed, the glory days of Muslim high culture faded into dim memories. Never again would Islamic culture shine as the brightest and most advanced civilization on the planet.

The economic devastation begun by the Turks and completed by the Mongols impaired the region's prosperity for generations. And those who turned to fundamentalism began to question the very notion of culture and advancement... instead seeking personal religious purity, a feature which survived into the modern Middle East. While Muslim culture would... slowly... rise again, they had fallen far behind the other powers, and Islamic fundamentalists (like the Christian fundamentalists of Europe) were intent on slamming the brakes on any notions of social growth. Indeed, the mantle of global leadership had passed forever beyond the reach of the Middle Eastern powers.

Rise of the Ottoman Turks

Into this daunting challenge stepped one of the most surprising cultures of the period. In 1280 AD, a small state within the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum was established by a ghazi (Turkish warlord), named Osman. In 1299 AD, he felt powerful enough to follow other more powerful ghazis and declare his independence from the Seljuk Sultan. Through several generations the Ottoman Turks would be a small group among the power players in the complex web of Anatolian politics. However, they gradually emerged as the heirs of the Seljuk Turks and the primary beneficiaries of the slow collapse of the Ilkhanate. There was a fundamental problem, though, in many ways the Ottomans were no better than the Mongols themselves.

Like the early Mongols, the Ottomans held cities in disdain, and hated the luxurious city life of cultured peoples. The early Ottomans accepted the importance of having a capital, and appreciated that the power of their rivals lay in their cities, but they were all the more determined to deprive their enemies of their primary strength. We know this because of the records left by the last emperors of the East Roman empire. The Ottomans were frequently able to impose tribute on the now microscopic state which year by year amounted to less and less until only Constantinople itself was left. Part of Roman vassalage was enforced military service in which the last Roman emperors wrote mournfully of their role destroying city after city in the annual Ottoman campaigns. Populations were laid waste, cities destroyed, and whole regions depopulated to ensure the security of the Ottoman Turks.

This was the brutal but effective foundation for the Ottomans' early conquests. For the first time, Turks invaded Europe, seizing Gallipoli in 1356 AD. In 1396 AD, they destroyed one of the last Crusader armies at the Battle of Nicopolis. In 1402 AD, their empire almost collapsed after a critical defeat at the hands of Timur, last of the important Khans of the Mongols. However, succeeding Ottoman rulers managed to reconquer the independent territories and capped this comeback when a young Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453 AD.

Using siege techniques undreamt of by previous conquerors, the Ottomans seized the mighty walls of the Constantinople, and using a special railroad, they carried Muslim ships over land to seize control of the Golden Horn, the great harbor of Constantinople. The fall of Constantinople finally brought an - almost merciful - end to the Roman Empire. Fortunately, the city was largely spared. 1453 AD represented the year the Ottoman Turks grew up; they had seized the fabled city which had withstood Muslim attack for more than 700 years. This accomplishment seemed to convince the Ottomans that they were in fact a major power and ought to behave accordingly. The city was renamed Istanbul and remained the capital of the Ottoman Empire until its collapse in 1922 AD.

Following their conquest of the East Romans in 1456 AD, they seized Athens and completed their conquest of the Balkans. These European lands became the key to Ottoman power. Following the mamluk model, the Ottoman sultans ordered that Christian parents in the conquered lands were to be deprived of one son as part of an Ottoman conscription program. While enlisted as slaves, these Christian-born Muslims would form the backbone of Ottoman bureaucracy. In the armies, they became the elite Janissary corps upon which the success of Ottoman conquests rested. This was a tremendously transformative time in Ottoman history where the Middle Eastern and SE European cultures fused and the barbarian Ottomans began to first appreciate art and the kind of luxurious living which they had previously hated so bitterly. This was also partly due to the great wealth of the conquered territories which now flowed into Ottoman coffers allowing them to buy guns and artillery to keep pace with the technological advancement of the Europeans. However, it was not the Europeans who would suffer most from the Ottoman arms trade.

Using these technologies and their highly trained soldiers, the Ottomans began a series of lightning campaigns through the other Muslim powers. They seized Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Mecca. Then under their greatest monarch, Suleyman "the Lawgiver" (Suleyman "the Magnificent" to Europeans), they conquered Mesopotamia, Hungary, and in 1529 AD, laid siege to the city of Vienna. The survival of the city was the first serious defeat for the Ottomans and represented the stabilizing of Muslim and Christian spheres of influence. The states of Europe were beginning to grow into their future role as international powerhouse and Vienna would mark the border between Christian Europe and the Muslim empire for hundreds of years.

However, the rising power of the European states was most stunningly shown in 1571 AD. A coalition shocked the Ottoman navy with a resounding defeat at the Battle of Lepanto, off the shores of Greece. Within two years, the Ottomans had rebuilt their fleet, but for the first time since the emergence of the Arabs, Christians navies began to hold their own for control of the Mediterranean. The Ottoman empire had reached its peak. It would spend the next couple centuries unsuccessfully trying to expand their borders without much success: at Vienna against the Austrians, in the Balkans against the Russians, and in Mesopotamia / Persia against the Muslim rulers of Persia, the Safavid dynasty. In its final centuries, the Sultans were embroiled in the dangerous game of playing the European states off one against the other, since any one of them had the military power to conquer the empire.

It's not that the Ottomans did not grow, they did. Their art is still admired the world over as some of the finest ever produced by Islamic artists. Their armies were among the best troops of their time. Their politicians did a masterful job playing the European powers one against the other to survive long after Russia had the power (and blood thirsty desire) to storm Ottoman lands and absorb them for their own. However, the Turks were a Medieval Empire. In 1453 AD, they were just starting to develop the Medieval prosperity and social / political institutions that Europeans circa 1000 AD had begun developing after they survived their own barbarian invasions. But Europe was now in the grip of the Renaissance, and in the next 200 years, they would grow dynamically into the Industrial Era. It was just simply too late for the Ottomans to develop naturally and still compete with Europe.

End of the Medieval Era

If the Renaissance Era is about the rise of nation states and the rebirth of learning, then despite the cultural advances and beautiful art which the Ottomans would leave behind them, they never truly emerged from the Medieval Era. This was an important reason why the empire gradually disintegrated through the 19th century. A nationalist Greek movement fought and won their independence by rebelling against the Ottomans from 1828-1832. To add insult to injury, the Ottomans were forced to recognize the independence of Egypt in 1833. Throughout the territories under their control, the Ottomans sultans ruled more or less ably but there was never any attempt to establish national unity, national culture, or a national Ottoman identity. The empire was the personal property of the sultan in 1830 AD exactly as the Frankish empire belonged to Charlemagne in 800 AD. There was absolutely no concept of nationhood to keep either one from falling apart.

As Europe moved into the Industrial Era, its technological advantages gave it the ability to project its power around the globe and its Industrial philosophies and alternative concepts of political order infiltrated societies around the world. Convinced (and content) of Ottoman superiority, the Sultan was willing to buy European arms, but never embraced the lessons of European politics. Others did however. These ideas fueled local politically powerful separatist movements like the Greeks. The Ottoman government quite simply lacked the institutions to counter it and could not prevent local separatists from tearing the empire apart. In the wake of the Sultan's unpopular decision to sign a losing peace with the Allies in World War I, Turkish nationalists overthrew the Ottomans in 1922 AD. The separatist movements throughout the Empire jumped at the chance to carve up the Empire for themselves and create their own nationalist states, inaugurating the Industrial Era in the Middle East.

Though the Ottoman collapse fragmented a large political entity and caused a great deal of disruption, it was the reason that new, more sophisticated states were able to move forward. In the same way that no Roman celebrated the collapse of the Empire, like Rome, the rigidness of the Ottomans could not be overcome internally. The collapse of the region allowed the nationalist proto-states to emerge as successor states in their own right. It allowed them to innovate, grow, and develop more sophisticated institutions than any enjoyed by the Ottomans. But emerging from the Medieval era directly into the Industrial caused serious complications.

Nor was their path made easier by outsiders. The now mechanized European powers were coping with the steady stream of colonies becoming independent, but this did not stop them from trying to exert colonial influence over the new and comparatively immature states of the Middle East. Thus the Middle East was the last gasp of colonialism, and Europeans did all they could to stunt and delay social progress in the interest of preserving weak states that were easier to manipulate.

Unquestionably, Turkey was the most successful state to emerge from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire because the Turks enjoyed a unique position. While local movements lacked genuine political experience, the Turkish nationalists, on the other hand, were at the hub of Ottoman power and had exposure to how government really worked. Thus they were in the best position of the successor states. Also, their leader Kemal Ataturk immediately began to distinguish himself first as a forward-looking modernist; his reforms established Turkey as the most progressive, most Westernized, and most tolerant state in the Middle East. Just as importantly, his brilliant generalship expelled the European expeditions sent to punish him for thumbing his nose at the treaty obligations which the Ottoman sultan had signed. This allowed Turkey to define its own destiny in the 20th century. For the rest of the Middle East, colonial powers would interfere in internal politics for decades.