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 (1520
1566), 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.