Chapter 24

Asia in the Era of the Gunpowder Empires

The Ottoman Empire The Mongols had smashed the Persian center of Islam in the

1250s, conquered Baghdad in 1258.

The Ottoman took full advantage of the Mongols' defeat at Ain Jalut to maintain its independence.

Two developments gave Ottoman Dynasty to be in Asia Minor: First: the Turkification of the Abbasid caliphate army. In 1071, a crucial Seljuk victory over the Byzantines at the

Battle of Manzikert gave the Turks direct access to Asia Minor for the first time. They established the Rum Sultanate in eastern Asia Minor and continued their jihad against the Christian enemies to the west.

Second: the growing importance of the dervish , or Sufi orders in Islam.

Many dervishes/sufis formed religious associations or brotherhoods (tariqas). In most cases, these were organized around a central religious figure, or shaykh, whom the dervishes believed possessed extraordinary spiritual authority

The Ottoman Empire began around 1250, when a Turkish chieftain named Osman and his group of followers entered into the service of the Rum sultans of eastern Asia Minor.

Osman was given a small fiefdom in western Asia Minor to wage jihad against the Byzantines.

The empire began as a ghazi state.

Osman's tiny state was initially organized around two dervish orders.

Osman succeeded in becoming independent when the Mongols destroyed the Rum Sultanate .

His son Orhan (13261359), continued expansion, and he began the conquest of what remained of the Byzantine Empire on the Balkan peninsula.

By the 1450s, the empire had grown to include all of Asia Minor and most of the Balkans south of modern-day Hungary.

Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (14511481) succeeded in taking Constantinople in 1453.

Under the new name of Istanbul, it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

By the reign of Suleiman , the Magnificent (15201566), Hungary, Romania, southern Poland, and southern Russia had been added to the sultan's domain, while in North Africa and the Middle East all of the Islamic states from Morocco to Persia had accepted his overlord-ship

Ottoman Government The government divided into a secular bureaucracy; a

religious bureaucracy; and a chancery called the Sublime Porte.

At the head of both stood the sultan.

Most members of the secular bureaucracy originally were non-Muslims who had converted to the Muslim faith.

The religious bureaucracy members were the ulama.

The sultan appointed a high official as the head of this vast bureaucracy called the Shaykh al-Islam.

The Ottoman army was far superior to European militaries by virtue of its professionalism and discipline.

At its heart were the well-trained and well-armed Janissaries , an elite infantry corps.

The system was designed to create new units of the army and the Sultan's palace, staffed by servants whose only loyalty was to the sultan.

In the early centuries of Ottoman rule (13001600), official treatment of Christians and Jews was generally fair.

Until the seventeenth century, the public lives of minorities within the millet system seem to have assured them more security than most Jews or Muslims living under Christian rule could expect.

During the eighteenth century, the condition of the Balkan Christians had become sufficiently oppressive that they began looking for liberation by their independent neighbors, Austria and Russia.

The Ottoman Empire reached its peak during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century.

He extended control over all of North Africa, the island of Rhodes, Belgrade and Budapest.

In 1529, he put siege against the capital of the Austrian Empire, Vienna but withdraw for weather.

Suleiman defeated a powerful Safavid Shi'ite state in Iran and took Iraq.

The Safavid Realm

The Safavid state began in the region of Tabriz, west of the Caspian.

It was organized around a Turkish Sufi association.

It took its name from its founder, Safiad-Din who claimed to be a descendant of Muhammad.

In the early 1500s, a leader named Ismail, claiming to be a representative of the hidden Shi'a Imam, succeeded in capturing much of Persia and Iraq, including Baghdad, and made himself shah (king).

Ismail proclaimed Shi'ism to be the official cult of the Safavid state.

It lasted for two centuries and was a strong competitor to the Ottomans.

It reached its height during the reign of Shah Abbas I (15871629), the greatest of the Safavid rulers.

Following his reign, a gradual decline resulted from encroachments by highly independent Turco-Iranian tribesman.

The empire collapsed altogether in the 1720s under Turkish and Afghani attacks.

The Mughal Empire During the late 600s, Arabs and Persians had moved into

the Indus valley and seized the province of Sind.

800 years after the province of Sind was captured, a branch of the Turks known as the Mughals created one of the most impressive Muslim empires in world history in northern India.

The word Mughal is a corruption of the name Mongol.

In the early 1200s, the Delhi Sultanate was established by a Turkish slave army operating from their base at Ghazni in Afghanistan.

Within a century, the sultanate controlled much of the Indian subcontinent.

By early 1500s, Babur, arose again from the Afghan base and conquer much of the territory once ruled by the Delhi sultans.

By the time of his death in 1530, he had established the Mughal Muslim Indian dynasty.

Akbar the Great (15561605) was the most distinguished Indian ruler.

The Mughal Empire came to control most of the subcontinent.

He completely reorganized the central government, developed an efficient multinational bureaucracy.

Akbar practiced a policy of religious and social toleration.

He allowed all faiths including Christianity to flourish and to compete for converts in his lands.

He married a Hindu princess.

His sons, Aurangzeb, succeeded him.

Hindus were given equal opportunities to obtain all but the highest government posts, and the Hindu warrior caste called Rajputs became his willing allies in governance.

The Taj Mahal tomb of the much-loved wife of the seventeenth-century emperor Shah Jahan, is the most famous example of a Persian-Indian architectural style.