Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

The Encounter of Turks With Christians in Asia Minor and Europe ( The Balkans ), or the Legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire

"One sun dies away; another appears in the east."
Xenophanes of Colophon

The victory achieved by the Seljuks over the East Roman armies at Malazgirt in 1071 was brutal evidence of how that Empire had been in severe decline for some time. The date marks the beginning of the first five hundred years of the eight hundred and fifty year struggle between the West and the Turks. This period of conflict (from 1071 to 1566, i.e. the end of the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent) was a direct consequence of the void created by the disintegration of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was fundamentally a question of settling who should inherit the East Roman territory, and was therefore a geopolitical struggle of an entirely secular nature. The fact that it took on the appearance of a religious war was due to a variety of other circumstances.

It was the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia who first attempted to fill the void left by the disintegration of the Eastern Roman Empire. In the West, all Europeans, and the Franks in particular, also felt themselves charged with the same historic mission to fill this void. Turks and Franks thus confronted one another.

The reasons generally given for the crusades are, firstly, the capture of Jerusalem, taken by the Seljuks from the Fatimids of Egypt after the battle of Malazgirt, and secondly, the possibility that the Seljuks might obstruct Christian pilgrimages. In addition, the capture by the Seljuks in 1092 of Nicaea, ninety kilometres from Byzantium, so alarmed the Emperor that he sought the aid of the Pope. Personally I believe that there are even deeper reasons.

Just as the Turks were venturing beyond their traditional territory, so the Europeans from their side were for the first time expanding outside the frontiers of their continent. It would be to misunderstand the meaning of this event merely to regard it as a simple desire to protect their holy places against the Turks. Jerusalem, taken by Omar I in 688, had remained in the hands of the Umayyads and the Abbasids until 969, when Egypt was conquered by the Fatimids. After the Seljuks had become the dominant power in the region, they took Jerusalem from the Fatimids (1071). It is necessary to explain why the Europeans, after acquiescing in the Muslim domination of Jerusalem for four centuries, should only then have been provoked into undertaking crusades for the next two hundred years.

In order to understand the crusades ope has first to consider the internal evolution of Europe. By the eleventh century many of the great European forests had been cleared, so the area of cultivable land had increased considerably. Agricultural production had also been boosted as a result of, among other things, advances in tool-making and improved methods of cultivation. Markets were set up and trade developed. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries the production of wheat, the standard yardstick of success in agriculture, increased between two and a half and four times. Eastern Europe did not achieve this level until the nineteenth century!

First Venice, and then Pisa and Genoa, tried to gain a monopoly of the maritime trade in the Mediterranean, and they captured Sardinia and Corsica. After the conquest of Sicily by the Normans of France ( 1061-91 ), the domination of the eastern Mediterranean passed rapidly to the Italian city-states.

At the same time Europe experienced a population explosion. Estimated to be about 20 million in 950, the population of the West had increased to 55 million by 1350, having tripled in England, France, and Germany. In such circumstances unemployment became inevitable. It provoked struggles between feudal overlords, and an increase in banditry. Many knights, lacking a better alternative, set off in search of adventure. Security, both of property and lives, had become precarious in a Europe where social stability no longer existed. Hence the need to appeal to God for the re-establishment of internal peace and faith.

The Papacy was also making efforts to consolidate and extend its political power in Europe. First it established domination over the clergy, then it made the Church, previously united to the Empire, into an autonomous institution and the only source of religious authority. Pope Gregory VII excommunicated the German Emperor and bowed the head of the King of France.

Towards the end of the tenth century people believed that the end of the world was approaching, a belief which did not disappear after the year 1000, and which explained the numerous pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the eleventh century. Pilgrims wished to obtain pardon for their sins before the end of the world.

The capture of Jerusalem by the Seljuks at this time had a disruptive effect on the pilgrimages, while the influx of pilgrims also inconvenienced and irritated the local people and their leaders.

On their return to Europe the pilgrims gave exaggerated accounts of the difficulties that they had had to overcome on their journeys. Their tales spread rapidly and grew with the telling, even after the difficulties had disappeared. This was the first campaign of disinformation against the Turks.

This first `black propaganda' which appeared in Europe at the time of the crusades, and the campaign of disinformation undertaken to back it up, served as the models for those that followed. By a `creative' interpretation of the facts the Turks were made the scapegoats for the difficulties encountered by the Europeans.

At this time Venice was beginning to monopolise maritime trade in the Mediterranean. The transport of soldiers into Italy drew the first `Capitulation' from the Eastern Roman Empire (992) in the form of reduced taxes. After fighting the Norman naval expedition against the Empire in the Adriatic in 1081, she received in return new Capitulations (1082). These served as the basis of a system which continued to be applied under the Ottoman Empire, and which enabled Venice to become dominant in the Aegean basin.

Pope Urban II was the instigator of the first crusade. At the councils of Plaisance (March 1095), and also at Clermont, he made appeal to `faith in God in favour of Europe'. A singular contradiction: in Christ's name he simultaneously urged internal peace and external war! Thus he exhorted those of his audience who had been guilty of disrupting internal peace to redirect their belligerence towards the crusade. . .

This policy is strangely similar to that adopted by the Arabs when, newly converted to Islam, they surged forth from their peninsula to found a great empire. The West condemned Arab imperialism, imputing it to Islam. In fact it was only doing the same thing, disguising its imperialism under the lanner of religion.

The similarity does not end there. The recapture of the holy places was to be accomplished by a holy war. The `reconquest' of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, for example, was considered to be not only a just cause but a holy one. According to the Western way of thinking, the Seljuks should have attacked the Eastern Roman Empire with the militant zeal of neophyte Muslims, whereas in fact they never undertook a holy war. They obeyed the ecumenical tradition of the Turks.

I should like to stress this point: the Turks never started a holy war against the Christians. On the contrary, it was Western Christianity that declared a holy war against the Turks. And just as Christianity had urged a holy war at the time of the struggle in the Balkans against the Ottomans, so the Ottomans themselves ended up imitating the Christians. When the Ottoman Empire finally collapsed, the Christian minorities claimed that they were struggling for their independence in the name of the same religious ideal.

Europe pushed beyond its boundaries because it had become more populous and more dynamic, and had become the instrument of the papacy. As for Venice, she had encouraged and undertaken crusades in order to assure for herself the commercial domination of the eastern Mediterranean. Without the Venetian fleet and money the crusades would have withered, and the Latin States established on the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean would not have been able to survive. In exchange, Venice obtained important concessions from both Christians and Muslims, enabling her to establish trading posts. When the crusades came to an end, commerce in the eastern Mediterranean basin belonged to the Italian city-republics, with the exception of the Red Sea which was dominated by Egypt.

When the first crusaders reached Anatolia, the Turks were as surprised as the Orthodox Christians. The Turks at first took them for mercenaries from Constantinople, then they called them `Frengs' (Franks), a name subsequently bestowed on all western Europeans. But by the end of the conflict between the Seljuks and the Franks, the Turks had learned to distinguish the Franks from the Orthodox, that is to say the western Christians from the eastern ones. The cultural characteristics of the two groups were in fact very different.

Before long those who came to liberate the holy places from the hands of the Turks adopted the same hostile attitude towards the Orthodox Christians and the members of other eastern Churches as they had towards the Turks. Most of the crusaders made no distinction between them.

In fact, they quickly lost sight of their original objectives and began to orient themselves towards a policy aimed at reuniting the Eastern Church with that of Rome. Innocent III, whose pontificate marked the apogee of the absolute power of the papacy, considered the Eastern Church, which did not recognise the power of the Pope, as an obstacle to the deliverance of Jerusalem. He held it to be `even more detestable than the Muslims'.41 This policy resulted in the sacking and burning of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204.

This attitude of the crusaders towards the Orthodox Christians appears to us to be important, because it constitutes the principal factor in the transmission of the East Roman heritage to the Turks.

The expansion of Islam brought Muslim Arabs and Orthodox Christians into opposition, but their struggle was not continuous; it was broken by alliances between themselves, and with other Muslims and Christians. On both sides diplomatic relations became almost entirely secularised. Eventually, in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, Greeks and Arabs lived peacefully side by side.

On the other hand, apart from those on the Iberian peninsula, Roman Catholics were seldom in close contact with Arabs, either in war or in peace. Furthermore, they perceived the Arabs through a fog of irrational hearsay. The western European was brought into contact with Islam through the intermediary of the Turk, so it is the Turk who for him represented the Muslim enemy. The idea persisted because the Westerner never had the opportunity to live side by side with the Turk and thereby dispel the myth, as the Orthodox Christians were able to do.

Both during and after the crusades, the West considered the Turks to be the enemies of its religion, and endowed them with an undeserved reputation. These sentiments have persisted for an unbelievably long time.

It was, in fact, the crusaders of Barbarossa (Frederick I) who, for the first time in 1190, gave Anatolia the name of `Turchia', meaning `Land of the Turks'. This name spread through the West in the thirteenth century. No other land in which the Turks had lived, or founded a state, had been identified in this way. By the end of the crusades, western Europe had agreed that Anatolia was Turkish, thus resolving the problem of who should inherit the Asiatic territories of the Eastern Roman Empire. In 1247 Palestine passed into the hands of the Mameluke Turks of Egypt.42

The crusades continued at a decreasing level until 1291, finishing with the abandonment of Palestine to the Turks. The end of the crusades was no more logical than their beginning.

The Ottoman Empire 43

The genesis of states, like their decline, is a very complex process. Even today the real explanation of how the Ottoman Empire became established remains unknown. It is still surprising that a small tribe, entering Anatolia around 1225, was able to found one of the great empires of the world.

Initially the Ottomans formed the smallest principality of Anatolia. They had been granted a small area of rocky, arid land by the Seljuk Emperor. They were not numerous, and their history contained few episodes of importance. They had previously been in a state of continual migration. It is therefore impossible to explain why the combination of such an insignificant tribe with the land of Anatolia should have given rise to such a great empire.

The theory of Toynbee that those who are exposed to a serious but manageable threat are more apt to grow does not entirely hold with respect to the Ottomans. It is true that they were exposed to what was left of the Eastern Roman Empire, against which they could either expand or perish. But to their west and north-east were two other emirates which were more likely to succeed in this task, since they were both larger and more populous than the Ottomans.

Certain chroniclers recount that Osman (the future Osman I, who gave his name to the Empire) dreamt that he saw a ray of light which settled on his navel. From it rose an immense tree whose top was lost in the heavens, and whose thick foliage covered the universe. On each of its branches was perched a different flock of birds. This miraculous vision was interpreted by the diviners as the portent of an empire of many nations.

Perhaps the unconscious within this small race of people, who lacked everything necessary to build an empire, did harbour a secret urge to transform themselves, like a seed under the earth. But did the earth offer the elements necessary for the seed to burst and bloom?

The Turks had begun to form colonies in Anatolia after the victory of Malazgirt (1071). This was not a planned immigration, but often the outcome of victories over the Eastern Roman Empire and, later, of the crusades. The huge waves of crusader invasions did not result in protecting the Christians against the Muslims; in fact both communities suffered the same fate at the hands of the crusaders. The Orthodox Christians of Anatolia had always felt more affinity with the Anatolian Muslims than with the Latin Christian invaders. Not long after the crusades, when Mongolian hordes invaded Anatolia, this feeling of belonging to the same land and sharing the same destiny once again drew Muslim and Orthodox together.

Another consequence of these invasions was the weakening of the hitherto well established authority of the Seljuks. By prolonging the duration of the Eastern Roman Empire, this situation provided plenty of time during its decline for considerable cultural interchange between the neighbouring communities. The two invasions therefore reduced the differences between the two religious groups and their cultures, and allayed feelings of animosity between them.

In the thirteenth century Anatolia fell prey to the disorder resulting from the absence of governing authority. Also at this time a kind of mystical impulse took hold of the population. This Anatolian mysticism was born of the shared experience of the fear and suffering caused by invasions and internal troubles. Such communal agony overcame barriers of religion and race, and reunited the people under the protection of the same all-encompassing God.

The pioneers of this new movement were two Turks: Mevlana and Yunus. They created a remarkable synthesis between the mystical heritage of the Dervishes of Central Asia and Islamic Sufism, the inheritor of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy.

At the same time, the Bekta?i cult was developing another synthesis between the religious rites of pre-Islamic Central Asia, Islam, and the customs of the Anatolian peoples. The miracles performed by the Dervishes and the Bekta?i sheikhs-levitation, healing the blind, resurrection, walking on water, feeding crowds with a few morsels of food-had their source in the Old and New Testaments, particularly the latter. This heterodox branch of the movement known as `the minor tradition' coexisted with the `major tradition' based on the Orthodox Islam of the urban centres.

These new cultural and social developments were instrumental in the establishment of the Ottoman Empire which, since its inception in 1299,44 had begun to unite the Muslim and Christian masses in Anatolia, already accustomed to living together for more than two centuries.

However, by fighting at one time for, and at another time against, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire became sole candidate to inherit it. When, after four centuries, Constantinople became Istanbul in 1453, the Turks had earned their inheritance, having been indigenous in the region for such a long time. The capitulation of Byzantium to the troops of Sultan Mehmet II was confirmation of this.

The end of the crusades coincided with the foundation of the Ottoman Empire and marked the tacit acceptance by the West of the fact that Asia Minor was Turkish. The growth of the Ottomans brought into the foreground the question of the East Roman territories in the Balkans, that is to say in Europe. The conflict over this legacy was regarded as the continuation of the struggle between Islam and the Church of Rome, which had started with the crusades. The disputed territories were in Europe, and the Catholic Church had already been engaged in a long struggle there with the East Romans in an attempt to gain the allegiance of the Orthodox Christian Empire. Although it had so far failed, the Catholic Church had not given up hope of one day succeeding. In the end, however, even southern Italy would be reclaimed by the Ottomans.

Was the European campaign a holy war in the eyes of the Ottomans? Did they conduct the war in the Balkans against `the eternal enemy', Christianity, with the soul of a ghazi (Muslim warrior)? Undoubtedly they did, but only reciprocally. The Anatolian Turks, who had been on the defensive against the crusaders, went on the offensive, and the conflict reached unforeseen dimensions. The Christian countries defending the Balkans then resorted to the crusade in order to extend their alliances. The Balkan countries, incapable sed the pro-Turk faction to gain supremdid likewise. But this involvement of religion had the effect of inciting the Ottomans to do the same-both parties used a religious pretext for their actions. Perhaps it was a necessity of the time, for religious factors also played an equally determining role in the internal struggles within Europe.

The Ottomans obtained a foothold in Europe in the following way. In 1349 the King of the Serbs captured Thessalonika. This event caused the Roman Emperor to demand the help of his son-in-law, Orhan the Ottoman. Orhan sent his son, Suleyman, who with the fleet recaptured the town and returned it to the Empire. This cooperation between the Ottomans and the East Romans then continued against a Bulgaro-Serbian alliance. As a reward the basileus made a gift to the Ottomans of the town of Tzympe, situated on the European shore of the Straits of the Dardanelles.

The simple fact that the Turks had set foot on the European continent was subsequently presented by Westerners as well as Turks and Greeks as a major event. In reality, the idea of a Christian European continent was Frankish in origin. The Eastern Roman Empire, like the Greek world of antiquity, regarded the Aegean Sea not as a frontier but as a place of passage and a centre around which they could develop. Thus the Romans possessed not only Anatolia, but equally the Balkan territories. The Ottoman Empire, which succeeded them, similarly developed quite naturally on both shores of the Aegean and the Straits, not in Europe and in Asia as such, but in Rumelia (the Balkans) and in Anatolia. Crossing into Rumelia had a symbolic importance because it was, territorially speaking, an act of imperial succession.

At the time of Orhan (1324-60), the rising star of the Ottomans was already attracting certain Orthodox Christians to abandon their State and join the Ottomans. They were the first to believe that the Ottomans would become the inheritors of the Roman Empire. The most famous was the Byzantine prince Evrenos. A short time after Orhan's conquest of Bursa (1326), Evrenos became converted to Islam and joined him. He later became a celebrated war leader, commanding the armies in the west while Murat (1360-89), future successor of Orhan on the Ottoman throne, commanded those in the east. The armies of Evrenos captured Thrace, Macedonia as far as Albania, and Bulgaria with its capital Sona. During the reign of Sultan Bayezit I (1389-1402), who succeeded Murat I, Evrenos conquered central and southern Greece, and then Thessaly and Larissa.

The role played by this prince, who gave Greece and a large part of the Balkans to the Ottomans, is significant. From all the evidence it seems that Evrenos placed the defence of the unity of an empire, which the Basileus did not appear to him to be any longer capable of safeguarding, above his attachment to his original religion. Should we not admire a statesman of such a modern spirit in a time of fanaticism?

Zaganos Pasha was a Christian boy recruited in childhood. It was he who, during a meeting of the Council of Mehmet II, opposed the suggestion of the Grand Vizier, Candarli Halil, to lift the siege of Constantinople. He advocated the continuation of the war at any price, and likened Mehmet II to Alexander the Great. Two days after the capture of Constantinople he was named Grand Vizier. After he had become Governor (beylerbeyi) of Rumelia, he completed the conquest of Greece.

There are many reasons for these attitudes. In contrast to the Eastern Roman Empire, where a single religion was enforced, the Ottomans tolerated several. This was not due solely to their spirit of synthesis, nor to their universalist traditions, even though their entry into Anatolia had signalled a period of coexistence between two great monotheistic religions. It was also a necessity because, since pre-history, all the great civilisations had prospered, one after the other, on Anatolian territory. There were many social groups who owed their origin to these earlier civilisations, and who had survived with their cultural characteristics intact. A State established in these lands could not absorb these groups of people as if they were simply barbarians. In Anatolia, therefore, the Ottomans from the beginning incorporated respect for other cultures and beliefs into their system of government.

The Latins, on the other hand, did not as a people have any ecumenical vocation. Although Christians, they were strangers to the Byzanrine culture. The Empire was now in full decline and the pro-Latin and the pro-Turk factions were locked in a bitter struggle. Contrary to what is generally accepted, it was not the arrival of the Ottoman armies which caused the pro-Turk faction to gain supremacy.

In the thirteenth century of the Christian Era the Greeks had reacted violently against the so-called Latin Empire imposed upon them for half a century by the `Franks' of the Fourth Crusade. In the fifteenth century they had repudiated the union of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, achieved on paper at the Council of Florence in AD 1439, though this union appeared to offer them their only chance of Western support against the Turkish invader. They preferred the Padishah to the Pope.

The reasoning of the Romans was simple: the Empire was doomed in any case, whether this was the doing of the Turks or the Latins. From this point of view there was no difference and, besides, it had been the Franks and the Slavs who had been the main cause of the Empire's downfall. But to be rescued from the Turks by the Latins would mean the complete loss of the Orthodox religion, the most important element in their cultural identity. Such a danger did not exist in the case of Turkish sovereignty. Furthermore, the Anatolian Christians, and the Orthodox Greeks in particular, worked well together with the Turks, and had applied themselves to making the new empire flourish.

George of Trabzon, a celebrated Greek philosopher of the fifteenth century, even devised a special ideology: Helleno-Turkism. He recognised the importance for this region, situated centrally between the East and the West, of a major cultural fact-the coexistence and the interdependence since the eleventh century of Hellenism and Turkism. He conceived the idea of a Turkish-Greek political entity.

On the day after the entry into Constantinople of Mehmet II, the Conqueror, George of Trabzon wrote him two letters, proposing in them the creation of a bi-partite Turkish-Greek State. Less than two months after the fall of the town, in July 1453, he drafted a study under the title On the Truth of the Belief of Christzans which he sent to the Conqueror. He held that there existed no fundamental difference between Islam and Christianity, and that ht was therefore in Mehmet's interest to unite the two religions under his sceptre. Mehmet II was open-minded and favoured union. Although he was unable fully to implement the proposition of the Trabzonian, he accepted its essential idea and accorded the Orthodox Church extraordinary privileges.

In 1466, in another letter to Mehmet II, George of Trabzon declared:

No one doubts that you are, in full right, Emperor of the Romans. For he is Emperor who legally holds the seat of the Empire. Now the seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople: he, therefore, who holds this town in law is Emperor. And it is not of men but of God, and by the sword, that you hold this throne: you are therefore the legitimate Emperor of the Romans. . . Now, he who is Emperor of the Romans is also Emperor of the whole earth.

It is also interesting to note that, of the four theologians, all renowned philosophers, who accompanied the East Roman Emperor Jean VIII, the Palaeologist, to the Council of Florence in 1439 in order to study there the possibilities of the union of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, three became partisans of the Turks. The first, Georges Amoiroutzes, convinced the Emperor of Trabzon to cede his territory to omans but, still more important, the Ottomans themselves also wanted to be considered as having taken up this inheritance. The Sultan Bayezit took the title of `Sultan of the Romans', and attempted unsuccessfully to have it acknowledged by the Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo. Mehmet II was able to take this title because he had conquered ¹ÿÆşxof the city. The ceremony was conducted in the same manner as in the old times. Mehmet II, in the role of the Roman Emperor, gave him the insignia of his position, saying to him: `Keep all the privileges which your predecessors enjoyed.' The Basileus would never have imagined such concessions possible.

The powers of the Patriarch over all the Orthodox Christians living in the Empire were not limited to the judicial, educational, and religious spheres. The Orthodox Church, for the first time in its history, also received political powers. In the hands of the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople were united the religious and political powers of the East Roman Emperors, whose insignia-the two-headed eagle-he adopted, together with the titles of Lord and Despot. Head of `the eminent race of the Romans', he possessed sovereignty (kyriarchia) and the right of jurisdiction (dikaiodosia) over all the Orthodox of the Empire, as well as control over the immense properties of the Church.

Thanks to the Ottomans, the Patriarch had supreme authority over the Churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, as well as those of Bulgaria and Serbia, as a result of the dismantling of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Patriarch and the bishops were treated as not belonging to the class known as rayah who paid taxes. They were exempt from them.

After ratifying the election of the Patriarch, the Sultan accorded him the title of `Pasha of Three Horsetails' (tu?), which was the equivalent of a Grand Vizier. The Patriarch and his entourage had the right to ride on horseback. These powers, titles, and privileges made the Patriarch not only a member of the ruling class but, in effect, a new East Roman Emperor within the framework of the Ottoman Empire. Although the conquest of Constantinople by Mehmet II brought about the end of the Roman Empire, it also began the realisation of the long-held dream of the Orthodox Church, namely the regrouping of the Orthodox `nation' under a single government. The Ottoman expansion, and finally the conquest of Crete in 1669, enabled this ambition to be achieved.

In the countries of the eastern Mediterranean the Muslim rulers regarded Christians and Jews as millet (nations) and gave them a religious and legal autonomy. The Ottomans also established this system, and the Orthodox Christians were organised as a millet around the patriarchal authority.

The Ottoman Government refrained from altering the landowning system. The Byzantine provinces were divided into fiefs (timar) of which the overlords, commanders in times of war, were naturally Orthodox. They were called pronoiarioi, and those who agreed to support the Ottomans retained their fiefs. Thus the Mihaloglu, one of the most celebrated families of the Ottoman landowning aristocracy, were descendants of a Greek called Köse Mihal who became a convert to Islam in the reign of Osman I, and who rendered great service to the State.

The Ottomans had sufficient authority to be able to reform the organisation of the fiefs. They suppressed forced labour and lightened the taxes imposed on farmers, thus securing the support both of the farmers and of the Orthodox landowners.

In addition, the fiefs provided the cavalry for the Ottoman army. As the fourteenth century Byzantine philosopher, Georges Gemistos Plethon, understood, the fact that the Ottoman Empire, through its re-established authority, was able largely to prevent the abuse of peasants by their feudal overlords, greatly enhanced Turkish control.

Finally, the establishment of Ottoman sovereignty in the Aegean Sea and in the Balkans resulted in the disappearance of the commercial advantages that the Latins had enjoyed at the expense of the Eastern Roman Empire since 1082. There had been times when Imperial ships had not even put to sea. When the Ottomans broke the commercial monopoly of Genoa and Venice, it was the business of Greek merchants which benefited, so the Ottoman Government gained their support too. On the other hand, it created antagonism between the Greeks and Venice.

The patriarchal establishment, the system of `nations', the maintenance of the old landowners, the protection of farmers, and the improvement of trade were some of the achievements that promoted acceptance of the Ottomans among the people. The Orthodox Greeks were prepared to accept the Ottomans as the heirs of the East Romans but, still more important, the Ottomans themselves also wanted to be considered as having taken up this inheritance. The Sultan Bayezit took the title of `Sultan of the Romans', and attempted unsuccessfully to have it acknowledged by the Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo. Mehmet II was able to take this title because he had conquered Constantinople.

The Ottomans thus took possession of the East Roman lands with the support of the Greeks. The fact that Anatolia, the `legacy of Byzantium', remained in the hands of the Turks is perhaps the only positive result of the crusades.

In capturing the territorial legacy of Eastern Rome with Muslim and Orthodox cooperation, the Ottoman armies came up against new crusades, this time in the Balkans. As in 1444, the crusaders pillaged the Orthodox villages and destroyed their churches, which they considered to be schismatic temples. The expansion of the Ottomans in the Balkans was undertaken as the reconquest of a legitimate heritage. Hungary was conquered in order to put an end to the military operations that she was conducting against the Ottomans. Hungary, even though the majority of the population was Orthodox, was ruled by a Catholic aristocracy afraid for its future. The siege of Vienna was intended to temper the aggressiveness of the Habsburgs, who claimed to represent Christianity. However, my own view is that the Ottomans originally had no intention of going beyond the frontiers of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Two centuries after its foundation, namely in 1480, the Ottoman Empire had attained virtually the same frontiers that the Eastern Roman Empire had held in the eleventh century, with the exception of southern Italy. The frontier separating the Empire from the Islamic world to the east and to the south of Anatolia had also separated Romans from Islam. This similarity is partly explained by the fact that the geopolitical conditions had, of course, not changed.

The Ottomans continued to expand into East Roman Europe until 1517. At this date the Orthodox inhabitants of the Empire were more numerous than the Muslim population. The European characteristics of the Empire therefore prevailed. After 1517 the Ottomans turned towards eastern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and then towards Hejaz, the sacred region of Islam. These regions, with the exception of Hejaz, had also belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire, and until the appearance of Islam in the seventh century they had sheltered large Christian communities. Since that time they had become countries with a Muslim majority, so their annexation caused the Muslim population within the Ottoman Empire to become the majority. The inverse situation took place later when, during the dismantling of the Empire, the Balkans were the first areas to be lost, thereby accentuating the Asiatic image of the Empire.

It was during the period of Ottoman expansion in the Balkans, after the crusades, that Western opinion became convinced that the Ottomans were the enemies of Christians. I think I have shown that the Ottomans, on the contrary, were not the adversaries of Christianity, and that for a long time they lived at peace with the Orthodox community, at times even sharing their destiny.

Perhaps the greatest mistake made by the Ottomans in the eyes of the West was to impede the fusion of the Eastern and Western Churches, the union of the Orthodox Church with the Papacy. The Latins were thus able in the Balkans to continue to use the argument that they were defending Christianity, even though this tactic had not succeeded in Anatolia. Perhaps they were able to convince themselves, but they could not make the Orthodox people of the Balkans believe that the Ottoman was the enemy of the Christian, for the Orthodox have always rejected the totalitarianism of the Papacy.

Eventually the Ottoman Empire began to weaken. The situation was aggravated as ideas of nationalism, spread by the French Revolution, influenced the Christian communities of the Empire. The Ottoman struggle against the Latins, and then against the Habsburgs in the Balkans, had strategic and economic consequences. By putting the emphasis on religious ideology, the Westerners forced the Ottomans to adopt the concept of holy wars, ghaza and jihad. It should not be forgotten that the Ottomans were also battling against the Muslim Turkish principalities, against the Mamelukes, and the Iranian Shi'ites, so it seems likely that recourse to the idea of a holy war was largely a tactical move.

If I had to sum up, I would say the following. Islam had been coexisting with Christianity for two or three centuries in Syria and Egypt before the Turks reached the Middle East. We have seen the importance of the Greek philosophers in Islamic philosphy and the role played by Turkish Muslim philosophers in this sphere. As for the Turkish population, I have described how, after their arrival in Anatolia, they lived side by side with the Christian majority for two centuries prior to the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, and for almost four centuries before the capture of Istanbul.

By the time the city fell, the Turks had for four hundred years been studying in their schools (medrese) various Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus; they studied logic, rhetoric, and law within the framework of Scholastic philosophy. Either directly or through the Abbasids, Samanids, and Seljuks, the Ottomans had been exposed to the influence of Byzantium, that is to say, the influence of the Eastern Roman Empire, and therefore of Rome.

For two hundred years before the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks had cooperated with Orthodox Christians in a variety of activities including commerce, agriculture, crafts, and fine arts. This cooperation had also been nurtured by various other factors such as itinerant monks, both Muslim and Christian, a common administration, and shared experience of foreign invasions and wars. Finally, just as our culture today still owes much to ancient elements deriving from Anatolian pre-history, from our first recorded history, and from the Greek civilisation, so one can be sure that the same factors were a strong influence in Anatolian society at the time when the Turks arrived.

It would therefore be reasonable to consider TurcoIslamic culture as forming part of western Mediterranean culture. In those years an Anatolian Turk would have been much more influenced by Rome and Greece than a Norman, a Teuton, or a Frank would have been. Though not a Christian, neither was he a Hindu or Buddhist. Was not Islam, like the other monotheistic religions, revealed uniquely to Semites? Did it not ordain the worship of only one God?

This is why during the Middle Ages the Anatolian Turks were not looked on as being orientals, especially not by the Orthodox population of Anatolia. The Westerner, for his part, would have had to consider the Turk as no more and no less oriental than the Orthodox Greek. It was the conflict between the Turks and the Europeans in the Balkans which changed this attitude, and which caused the Westerner to look on the Turk as an enemy, a foreigner totally different from himself, and deserving of enduring animosity.

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