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
Jerusalem's Importance in Early Islam
While the expanding Islamic state had shown many internal weaknesses by the 11th century, the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries were seen as “The Renaissance of Islam” including great economic and cultural expansion. Islam’s continuing conquest of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe came to an end during the 11th and 12th centuries. At that time, almost simultaneous attacks by both external and internal enemies began to take place. From the east, the Steppe people (better known as the Turks) began what would become their ascendency to the vanguard of political Islam; in Africa, a new Berber empire arose in Spain and parts of Arab North Africa; the two Arab tribes of Sulaym and Hilal came out from Egypt and swept across Libya and Tunisia; in the north, the Georgians reestablished their empire and pressed into Muslim territory. At the same time Christian Europe awoke and in their re-conquest wrested vast territories away from the Islamic empire. It was during this process of fragmentation and weakness in the
Islamic world that Crusades reached the Middle East.
