Ottoman Military and Warfare — Imperial Ottoman

The Ottoman state was built by its armies. For more than six centuries, from the modest bands of Turkmen horsemen who followed Osman I to the conscript armies that fought on four fronts in the First World War, Ottoman warfare underwent a series of transformations that left few institutions unchanged. Horse-archers gave way to disciplined musketeers, walled cities fell to colossal bombards, a Mediterranean fleet projected power from Algiers to the Indian Ocean, and a once-feared standing army was eventually abolished by its own sultan. The arc matters: 1299 to 1923 is not six and a half centuries of slow evolution, but a series of discrete military systems, each resting on a particular social compact, and each breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions.

This article surveys that arc. The cluster pieces on the Janissary corps, the devshirme, the sipahi cavalry, gunpowder siege warfare, the imperial navy, Hayreddin Barbarossa, the Great Siege of Malta, the siege of Vienna, and the battle of Gallipoli treat each of these in detail.

Key dates

1326 — Cannon at the siege of Bursa; among the earliest dated artillery deployments in the Islamic world.
1363 — Conventional date of the formation of the Janissary corps under Murad I.
1389 — Battle of Kosovo; consolidation of Ottoman rule in the Balkans.
1453 — Fall of Constantinople, made possible by the great bombards of Orban and the engineers of the imperial workshops.
1464 — Casting of the Dardanelles gun by Muslihiddin (Saruca) for the Karaman campaign.
1514 — Battle of Çaldıran; Ottoman gunpowder victory over the Safavids.
1526 — Battle of Mohács; Ottoman artillery and Janissary fire break the Hungarian line.
1529 — First siege of Vienna; repulsed before the walls of the Habsburg capital.
1538 — Battle of Preveza; Ottoman naval supremacy confirmed.
1565 — Great Siege of Malta; Ottoman failure before the new trace italienne.
1571 — Battle of Lepanto; the heaviest single defeat in the fleet’s history.
1683 — Second siege of Vienna; broken by Sobieski’s charge on 12 September; the conventional end of Ottoman expansion.
1699 — Treaty of Karlowitz; first major Ottoman cession of territory.
1770 — Battle of Çeşme; destruction of the Ottoman fleet by the Russian navy.
1826 — “Auspicious Incident” (Vaka-i Hayriye); abolition of the Janissary corps.
1908 — Young Turk Revolution; restoration of the 1876 constitution.
1912–13 — Balkan Wars; loss of almost all remaining Ottoman European territory.
1915–16 — Gallipoli campaign; the last great Ottoman military success.

Origins: the frontier warriors of a small beylik

The Ottomans emerged in the late thirteenth century as one of several Turkmen principalities on the Byzantine frontier in north-western Anatolia, with a military ethos inherited from the uç (march) traditions of the Seljuk and Danişmendid states. Light horse-archers, supported by lightly armed footmen, dominated these early campaigns. Two institutional features set the Ottomans apart from their Turkmen rivals: the akıncı corps, semi-regular light cavalry who served as scouts, raiders, and the vanguard of any serious expedition, headed by an akıncı başı who reported directly to the sultan; and the systematic use of the dirlik and timar — the prebendal fief — to bind mounted warriors to the ruling house. The akıncı raids into the Balkans from the 1350s, often deep into Hungary and Bosnia, became a defining feature of late medieval warfare on the European continent. The corps declined in importance as the Janissaries and sipahi cavalry rose, but survived into the seventeenth century.

The sipahi cavalry and the timar system

The sipahis were the provincial cavalry of the Ottoman state, drawn from the Muslim landholding class. A timar was a revenue unit — generally a village or part of one — granted to a cavalryman in return for service; the sipahi appeared at the muster with a certain number of armed retainers (his cebelu) and maintained his own horse, arms, and equipment. A senior timar, the zeamet, and a has (an estate reserved for the sultan and his senior officers) sat above the basic timar in a careful hierarchy. The system is described in detail in the article on the provincial sipahi cavalry; the classical army of Mehmed II and Suleiman was unimaginable without it.

The Kapıkulu and the Janissaries

From the fourteenth century onwards, the Ottoman sultans built up a standing household army, the Kapıkulu (“slaves of the gate”), in parallel to the sipahi levies. The Kapıkulu comprised the infantry Janissary corps, the palace cavalry of the Sipahi of the Porte and the Sipahi of the Silahdar, the topçu artillery, and various auxiliary and technical units. The Janissaries were by far the most famous and, in time, the most politically powerful. They are treated in a dedicated article; their recruitment is examined separately in the article on the devshirme system. The corps provided the disciplined infantry backbone of the Ottoman field army for over four hundred years, from the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 to the great sieges of the sixteenth century, and was finally abolished on 17 June 1826 in the “Auspicious Incident” (Vaka-i Hayriye).

Men of the sword and men of the pen

A point the cluster articles cannot make for themselves, and which is the single most important institutional fact about the Ottoman military: the ehl-i örf, the “men of the sword” — the ümera (generals) and the vüzerâ (viziers) who held provincial governorships and the great revenue assignments — governed the eyalets and sancaks of the empire in a parallel judicial structure to the ehl-i şer, the “men of the pen” — the ulema, the judges and jurists. The two were kept deliberately separate. Military-administrative officers did not normally hold judicial office, and the kadı (judge) was rotated every year or two to prevent the formation of local power. Revenue from the has estates of the sultan and the great officers was collected by the defterhane (the financial registry); the kadı and the mufti administered the şeriat (Islamic law) and the kanun (sultanic statute). The genius of the system — and Murphey is right, in my view, to insist on this — was that it bound the military class to the sultan through land and office while keeping the judiciary in the hands of a separate, religious, scribal class whose own interests lay in imperial stability. The breakdown of that separation, as the ayan (provincial notables) bought up timars and the Janissary ortalar turned into urban guilds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is one of the structural explanations for Ottoman decline.

Gunpowder weapons and siege warfare

The Ottoman military was an early and aggressive adopter of gunpowder. Cannon were used at the siege of Bursa in 1326, and hand-held firearms appear in Ottoman inventories within decades of their appearance in Europe. The technical story — the topçu ocak, the great bombards, the sappers, the slow contest with the trace italienne — is told in the article on Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare. By the reign of Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) the artillery was organised as a permanent corps, and the great bombards cast by the master engineers — Orban’s Basilica gun of 1453, Muslihiddin’s Dardanelles gun of 1464 — were already feared across Europe.

The Ottoman navy

The fleet reached its apogee in the sixteenth century under Suleiman, when the corsair-admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa served as Kapudan Pasha (1533–1546) and won the decisive battle of Preveza (1538). The fleet’s history is set out in detail in the article on the Ottoman navy; two of its operations, the Great Siege of Malta (1565) and the siege of Vienna (1529 and 1683), are treated in their own pieces. The disaster of Lepanto (7 October 1571) — about 200 Ottoman ships lost, Kapudan Pasha Ali Pasha killed — was a shock, but the fleet was rebuilt within months, a fact that tells you something about the depth of the Ottoman shipbuilding establishment at the Golden Horn.

The seventeenth century: long war and stagnation

The seventeenth century is conventionally treated as a period of costly wars and relative military stagnation. The struggle with the Habsburgs in Hungary, the long war with Venice over Crete (1645–1669), the unsuccessful campaigns against Persia, and the renewed pressure on Vienna from 1683 placed a heavy burden on army and treasury alike. The devshirme was no longer the main source of Janissary recruits; the corps had become largely hereditary; and the timar system was breaking down. The high point of the crisis was the second siege of Vienna in 1683, broken by Sobieski’s charge on 12 September. Within a generation the Ottomans had lost Hungary, the Morea, and the northern Black Sea coast, and the balance of power in south-eastern Europe had shifted decisively.

Modern scholars are split on whether the 1683 failure at Vienna was the inflection point of Ottoman decline or merely a symptom of structural problems visible from the 1650s. İnalcık leans toward the former; Finkel and Rogan toward the latter. The truth, I think, is that 1683 is when the symptoms became undeniable to a court that had refused to look at them.

The nineteenth century: reform, abolition, and the new army

Mahmud II’s abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 was the first step in a century of reform. A new modern infantry, the Nizam-ı Cedid, had been created by Selim III in the 1790s; Mahmud revived the project in the form of the Sekban-ı Cedid and, after a mutiny, replaced it with the Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye in 1826. A French-style staff system was introduced, the military schools reorganised, and European officers served in increasing numbers. The Crimean War of 1853–1856 was a high point of the new order; the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–1878 exposed continuing weaknesses in supply and intelligence.

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 restored the 1876 constitution and brought the Committee of Union and Progress to dominate Ottoman politics. The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, with the loss of Edirne and Salonica, and the January 1913 coup that brought Enver Pasha to the War Ministry, set the empire on the path to the First World War. The CUP brought the empire in on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914. Sarikamish (winter 1914–15) cost perhaps 60,000 men; Baghdad fell in March 1917; Jerusalem in December 1917; the battle of Megiddo in September 1918 ended the war. The Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918) demobilised the army; by 1923 a new Turkish state was established in Ankara. The campaign at Gallipoli, in 1915–16, was the last great Ottoman military success, and it made the reputation of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Legacy

The Ottoman military left a deep mark on the political and administrative history of the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. The institutional vocabulary of the modern Turkish armed forces preserves some of these older forms: ordu (army), tümen (division), alay (regiment), and bölük (squadron/company) are all of Ottoman origin. The mehterhane, the music of the Janissary bands, is still played on state occasions in modern Turkey. The officer corps of the early Turkish Republic was, in considerable part, the officer corps of the late-Ottoman army, and that continuity is one of the defining features of the transition from empire to republic.

The Janissary corps — Elite slave-soldier infantry, in service from c. 1363 to 1826, abolished in the Vaka-i Hayriye.
The devshirme system — The collection of Christian boys for the household army and the palace school.
The provincial sipahi cavalry — The timariot horsemen, the mounted backbone of the classical army and the first to decline.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The topçu ocak, the great bombards, and the long contest with the trace italienne.
The Ottoman navy — The imperial fleet built at the Golden Horn, from the early galleys to Lepanto and Çeşme.
Hayreddin Barbarossa — The corsair-admiral who became Kapudan Pasha and shaped Ottoman power in the western Mediterranean.
The Great Siege of Malta — The 1565 Ottoman failure before the fortified island of the Knights of St John.
The siege of Vienna — The 1529 and 1683 sieges, the high-water mark and the conventional turning point of Ottoman expansion.
The battle of Gallipoli — The 1915–16 campaign, the last great Ottoman military success and the making of Mustafa Kemal.

Sources and further reading

Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Praeger, 2009).
Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).