Ottoman Holy War & Conquest: The Battle for Contantinople, 1453
There are three primary reasons why Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. First was the Ottoman's use of gunpowder, cannons, and their more advanced siege engines. Without better cannons than the defenders, the walls would have likely remained unbreakable but Constantinople could not answer the Ottoman's superior firepower. Secondly, by 1362 the city was virtually encircled when the Ottomans took Adrianople (Erdine in Turkish) 140 miles to the west in Europe and established their capital there. The Christian capital was a Christian island surrounded by Islamic waters. What the Ottomans lacked at the time was an adequate naval strategy to seal off the city and the technology to storm the massive defensive walls. Within a century, this problem was solved.
Lastly, albeit equally important were the deep divisions in the Christian world. On 16 July 1054, three cardinals from the Catholic Church of Rome sent by the Pope to settle theological disputes, delivered a bull of excommunication in the church of St. Sophia.[68] Thus began the process of what is known as the Great Schism in Christendom. Without this schism, it would have been unlikely the Western crusades would have sacked Constantinople in 1204. The divide between the Greek Orthodox and the Catholic church continued to grow and by the time it was apparent that Mehmed II was going to lead an assault on the Eastern capital, very few in the Christian West answered Constantinople's call to send forces to repel the Muslim invaders.
In order to understand the Ottoman motivation behind their decision to take the city, an appraisal of Wittek and Lindner's theses is required:
Ottoman Holy War & Conquest: The Battle for Contantinople, 1453
"There were so many events in this war that the pen can't describe them all, the tongue can't list them all."
-Neshri, fifteenth century Ottoman chronicler[30]
It is clear from Wittek's thesis that the battle for Constantinople was a religious one, just as it is clear from Lindner's thesis that religious zeal had nothing to do with it. According to Princeton University Ataturk Professor, Heath Lowry, "the desire to see Islam spread among the conquered Christian peoples was a secondary factor."[31] He argues that once the Empire extended beyond Egypt, and included, Syria, Palestine, and parts of Iraq, (early-mid sixteenth century) the Ottomans began to perceive themselves as the inheritors of the great past Islamic dynasties. "This meant conveniently rewriting early Ottoman history. No longer was the state portrayed as what it had had been: a state with only a nominal regard for the niceties of Orthodox Islam. It was now projected as having always been a gazi state driven by the ideal of spreading Islam by sword into the reaches of Christian Europe...[they] were repackaged as devout Muslims who were driven by zeal to spread Islam in the lands of the unbelievers."[32] This revisionist interpretation is not supported by the surviving firsthand accounts.Ottoman Holy War & Conquest: The Battle for Contantinople, 1453
It was with the coming of the pagan, steppe dwellers (known now as the Turks) that the flame of jihad was rekindled. They came from the grasslands of Central Asia from where waves of nomadic raiders, later including the Mongols, issued forth periodically to ravage the settled, city dwellers to the west. Gradually, these raids continued to carry Turkish tribes westward and by the ninth century, many settled along the frontier zone along the Muslim border. The Caliph of Baghdad recognized their fighting qualities and recruited many of them into his armies as military slaves.
The Turks had primarily three kinds of contacts with the Muslims:
- raids and encounters in skirmishes along the southern border - and the prisoners subsequently taken
- wandering Muslim holy men, such as the dervishes and Sufis
- mercantile relations
Ottoman Holy War & Conquest: The Battle for Contantinople, 1453
At the center of the ghazi debate are two diametrically opposed theses. The first is Paul Wittek's 1938 thesis that claims that ghazi tradition was the motivating factor in the formation of the Ottoman Empire. A relative consensus formed around his influential thesis and it remained largely unchallenged for half a century. In the 1980s, several scholars began to challenge Wittek's basic assumptions. Among them was Rudi Paul Lindner, whose elaborate, systematic, and anthropological approach to dismantling ghazi theory became the most recognized work in his 1982 article and subsequent book.[8] He claimed that ghazi ethos had nothing to do with the Empire's formation.
Both Wittek and Lindner rely on the issues of genealogy, migration, and the value of a fifteenth century chronicler's account - Ahmedi's chronicles. There are several other differences in approach leading to diametrically opposed conclusions. What follows is the essence of the two theories (they are to be kept in mind during the subsequent discussion - see "Conclusions" for this author's appraisal):
