A military history of the ottomans pdf

In a lively and stirring narrative, this work tells the untold story of the Egyptian experience. During the 19th century, new arms and tactics and the rising force of nationalism transformed Egypt as the empire of the Ottoman Turks slowly decayed. Independence was thwarted by the British, who took over the country in the s to secure links to India. Yet the British paved the way for independence, retraining and strengthening the Egyptian military to make it the strongest and most nationalist force in the country.

CIA analyst Steven R. This history also provides background on the nationalist, tribal, and religious heritages of the country to help readers better understand Iran and its security outlook.

Drawing on a wide range of sources including declassified documents, the author gives primary focus to the modern era to relate the build-up of the military under the last Shah, its collapse during the Islamic revolution, its fortunes in the Iran-Iraq War, and its rise from the ashes to help Iran become once again a major regional military power.

He shows that, despite command and supply problems, Iranian soldiers demonstrate high levels of bravery and perseverance and have enjoyed surprising tactical successes even when victory has been elusive. Historians of technology ascribed the strength and reliability of Ottoman musket barrels to the techniques by which flat sheets of steel were coiled into a spiral.

Such Damascus-twist barrels manufactured in the Ottoman Empire were highly sought after in Europe and were mounted and remounted on European firearms from the sixteenth century on. Ottoman muskets, which reached China through Central Asia, weighed 4. The barrel itself was only — centimeters long and weighed 2. The bigger guns fired bullets of about 18 grams, while the smaller ones used projectiles of 12 grams. The touch- hole was farther from the rear sight, and thus when the musketeer fired his weapon the smoke did not interfere with aiming.

The writer of the treatise, Chao Shizhen, based his observation on the testimony and muskets of a Central Asian military expert, who had come to Ming China in the s. See also Chase, Firearms, p. While the Ottomans were late in introducing the bayonet en masse,47 the above information indicates that the vulnerability of the gunner after he fired his weapon, mainly to swift cavalry charges, was a concern among the Ottomans, and that they experimented with pos- sible countermeasures, including combination weapons similar to the one described in the Chinese treatise.

Provincial powder works usually were able to meet local demands and also helped to ease the logistical burden and costs asso- ciated with transporting hundreds of tons of powder to the theaters of war during major campaigns.

Moreover, the decentralized Ottoman system of powder production was flexible enough to respond to the exigencies of wars. At time of increased demand the Ottomans reac- tivated previously disused powder mills or set up new ones closer to the theaters of war. All together, Ottoman powder works met the demands of the army, the navy, and garrisons well into the eighteenth century, producing an estimated —1, metric tons annually from the late sixteenth century through the late seventeenth.

However, in the s diminishing production forced Istanbul to import substantial qualities of powder from Europe. Later Baron de Toth tried in vain to introduce the weapon in the Ottoman armies in the s. The Ottomans used bayonets en masse only from early nineteenth century on. In an age when standardization of calibers and quality was only attempted but never achieved, and when there were no major technological breakthroughs in weapons design and manu- facturing, the quality of weapons remained of secondary importance relative to that of their quantity.

Firepower and military superiority were achieved through the sheer numbers of weapons and troops, and not so much by their quality. In battles and sieges the party that out- numbered its opponent in terms of deployed weaponry and troops had a good chance of winning the engagement, provided that all other fac- tors were equal.

In this regard, the Ottomans were superior to their opponents until about the end of the seventeenth century. The availability of local can- non foundries, powder works, and major weapons depots in the Balkans and Hungary, eastern Anatolia, and Iraq greatly facilitated the deploy- ment of military hardware against both the Austrian Habsburgs and the Safavids.

The Ottomans were also aided by the availability of water transport. Heavy artillery and gunpowder was shipped from Istanbul via the Black Sea to Varna, whence it was loaded on carts, transported to Belgrade, and transferred onto hundreds of ships of the Ottoman Danube flotilla, which then transported the weapons and powder to the Hungarian theater of war.

In their campaigns against the Safavids, military hardware traveled to Trabzon on the Black Sea, where it was loaded onto camels and other draft animals, and transported to the theater of war.

When possible, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Ottoman river flotillas on these waterways—including hundreds of ships well armed with smaller guns and well manned with thousands of troops—were also mobilized for transport and amphibious warfare.

Due to their production and transportation capabilities, the Ottomans managed to accumulate large quantities of weapons and ammunition in their fortresses—indeed, often more than was needed or could be used. After the Habsburg reconquest of Buda in , the Habsburgs found cannons in the fortress, of which pieces lay unused in the depots. War-Winning Weapons? These Ottoman victories fun- damentally altered the geopolitics in Europe and southwest Asia.

They signaled the end of the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire , of the Mamluk sultanate in Syria and Egypt and , and of the medieval Hungarian kingdom But were these Ottoman victories due largely to firearms? The reexamination of the above engagements suggests a more complex picture. While Safa- vid sources and earlier historiography claimed that Sultan Selim I employed twelve thousand to twenty thousand janissary arquebusiers, it is more likely that only about one third of the 10, janissaries, who were listed in the pay sheets, carried firearms.

Similarly, the artil- lery gunners and gun carriage drivers present in the battle could have served about — field pieces, and not — cannons, as suggested in earlier works. However, even this more modest firepower proved crucial against the Safavids, who had no arquebusiers and can- nons in the battle. Moreover, the Ottoman wagon laager, described by Safavid sources as an impenetrable strong fortress or wall, effectively protected the janissaries against Safavid cavalry charges.

Unlike the Safavids, the Mamluks deployed dozens of field guns and had trained arquebusiers at Marj Dabiq, but could not match Otto- man firepower and numbers of troops. Like the Safavids, the Mamluks too were unable to penetrate the Ottoman wagon laager. At Raydaniyya, the Mamluks and Ottomans were more comparable in terms of troop numbers and firepower. The Mamluk sultan Tumanbay also learned the lessons of Marj Dabiq and decided to use entrenched positions, firearms, and wagon laager.

Recently discovered sources show a mixed Hungarian army consisting of sixteen thousand horsemen and ten thousand footmen, armed with handguns, pikes, and large shields, and supported by eighty-five cannons, six hundred smaller hook guns, and five thousand wagons that could be used as Wagenburg. While the Ottomans had twice as many field guns as the Hungarians, infantry firepower was more comparable, with four thousand handguns used by the janissaries.

In the end, it was the much larger Ottoman cavalry and reserves, and the discipline and volleys of the janissaries protected by chained cannons, that decided the battle.

It seems that the Ottoman cannons played a minor role, for their shots landed beyond the attack- ing Hungarians, due to uneven terrain and the resulting elevation of the gun barrels.

In short, firearms were useful in combination with the Ottoman tabur and cavalry on the wings, both of which provided protection to the infantry janissaries. The Safavid, Mamluk, and Hungarian cavalry were unable to penetrate the tabur, and were decimated by janissary volleys.

Except for Raydaniyya, the Ottomans greatly outnumbered their enemies in terms of deployed troops and firearms. This, in turn, reflected the strength of the Ottoman administrative-fiscal and logisti- cal systems, which maintained and supplied one of the largest profes- sional armies in Europe and southwestern Asia in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The janissary core comprised less than 15 percent of the mobilized Ottoman army, yet, at critical moments, their discipline and endurance proved crucial.

Firearms and the Growth of Ottoman Military Manpower A spectacular increase in military manpower in most European armies is one of the hallmarks of the Military Revolution. Sources available in the s and s showed that the number of janissaries rose sharply from 12, in to 37, in , which was then explained by the Long War. At the same time, Hungarian historians demonstrated that the imperial forces fighting against the Ottomans in the war of — were in the forefront of the Military Revolution in terms of the high proportion of gun-carrying infantry relative to pikemen.

In light of new research, however, both the timing of the growth of the janissary corps and its underlying reasons now seem more com- plicated. I propose the following. First, this growth was part of a more general military expansion and transformation that affected the entire Ottoman military.

And third, Ottoman military expansion and transformation must be explained by a more complex socioeconomic approach, with an emphasis on both increased demand for and supply of military manpower, rather than the challenge of the European Military Revolution alone, which is indeed a reduc- tionist reasoning bordering on technological determinism. Data regarding the janissaries and janissary novices demonstrate that the spike started before the number of janissaries rose from 8, in to 12, in , while that of the novices rose from 3, to 5, As the Ottomans entered the s, their military began a transi- tion to an infantry-based standing army led by a caste of professional officers and cen- tered on specialized corps characterized by standardization, of which the Janissaries were the most well known.

While the Ottomans expanded into Europe during the following century, they concurrently developed a multicapable army with up-to-date tactics and weaponry. By the mids, the Ottoman military possessed a professional infantry and artillery force as well as effective, albeit largely irregular, cavalry and light infantry. Sometimes the term Turk is used interchangeably with the word Ottoman not to mention the term Seljuk and Turcoman , which can lead to confusion on the part of the reader.

Therefore, a brief review of Ottoman history through is presented to establish a contextual framework for this chapter. The Seljuks gradually subsumed the Turcomans into their empire but themselves were over- thrown by the Mongols in The term Ottoman Empire originated with Osman, but it was his son Orhan who took the city of Bursa and then led his soldiers in across the Dardanelles into Europe, establishing the dynasty as a force to be reckoned with.

Mehmed I reestablished the leadership of the house of Osman in after an internal power struggle. Murad II ruled from to , and the dynasty prospered and undertook a period of great expansion in both the Balkans and in Anatolia. The Middle Eastern Military Legacy The rise of Ottoman Empire from an obscure small political entity is without doubt one of the most important phenomena of the late medieval period. Unfortu- nately, the history of the origin and foundation period of the Ottoman Empire is very problematic because of their nomadic beginnings.

The illiterate nomads pro- duced no written records, and primary sources from contemporary neighboring countries, including Byzantine chronicles, do not provide concrete and sound information. Instead, there are only occasional entries about different aspects of the Ottoman emirate, which create more questions rather than answering the original ones.

In terms of military history, the situation is far worse. The available informa- tion consists of bits and pieces that were heavily contaminated with sagas and legends, which themselves reflected a religious war mentality portraying nearly all military activities from the perspective of a struggle between good and evil.

Moreover nationalist interpretations of Ottoman history by the historians of the modern suc- cessor states have also contributed to this quagmire. It is obvious that we cannot reconstruct the foundation and early periods of the Ottoman military by depending only on chronicles and narratives, which themselves were mainly the products of fifteenth-century chroniclers who were writing well after the events in question.

Due to decades of negligence, ignorance, and even open hostility, however, these studies are still in their infant stages and do not yet provide us with much needed scientific information.

The ottoman empire full history By Lino V Bonnici. Download PDF. They were a separate fighting force, slave-soldiers that were the personal property of the Sultan. The Janissaries were recruited as children from Christian villages in lieu of taxes, converted to Islam, and trained as a disciplined soldiers, eventually armed muskets and cannons. They got salaries, unlike all other slaves. Such a military system provided the empire with an immense army, of about 10, men, which protected the empire and gave it the power to conquer more land, which played an essential role in the expansion of the empire.

Those young recruits that demonstrated more brain than brawn would enter the civil service, as someone the Sultan could rely upon. Seyidova 8 Not only did the empire have a strong military system, it also had highly effective artillery.

Technological superiority often played a key role. Firearms such as cannons required strenuous training and discipline that often were incompatible with nomadic life. In many cultures including the Ottoman, cavalry prevented the use of gun that took a long time to reload and grated on the warrior ethic of bravery and courage demonstrated through hand-to-hand combat.

As firearms became the primary weapon of the army, the cavalry and its timer financial base became decreasingly relevant. As the Empire expanded, it became increasingly multinational and multireligious. However, Turkish remained as the language of the government and the Empire was principally Muslim. The Ottoman Empire allowed major religious groups, which are, the Greek Orthodox, the Jews, and the Armenians, to follow their religious laws under the protection of the Sultan.

Religious tolerance helped in the expansion of the Empire because it attracted people who traded, paid taxes, and could possibly be used as armed forces. However, the fact that the Empire had become primarily Turkish and Muslim encouraged the immigration of the Turks which allowed Mehmed II to repopulate the newly conquered city. The acceptance of various religions within the Empire allowed more people to migrate to Istanbul while generating a larger population. The migration contributed to the economic and political growth of the Empire, because the more people there were within the Empire, the more individuals traded and paid taxes.

In addition, it was useful to have many citizens in the state in a case of a shortage of military forces. Furthermore, the religious leaders of the Empire were also political leaders, which greatly influenced the expansion of Islam under the Ottoman rule. The denominational system is limited, conditional, originating in or influenced by the beliefs or interests of a religious, political party. An example of this system was visible in religious Christian schools.