© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_004
chapter 2“Political Philosophy” and the Moralist Tradition
It may be argued whether certain elements of the “imperial vision” were
present in the Ottoman state and ideology before the mid-fifteenth century;
undoubtedly, however, it was during the reign of Mehmed II that the Ottomans
became a fully-fledged empire with claims to universal dominion of some
kind. As Dimitris Kastritsis notes, “Bayezid [I] ... had anticipated in many ways
Mehmed the Conqueror’s centralizing imperial vision”1 (and this explains why,
as noted above, critics of the latter also dismissed the policy of the former).
Yet the battle of Ankara was a major setback, and in the first years of the inter-
regnum a vision of the prevailing prince as primus inter pares seems to have
gained traction once more.2 It took years for the Ottomans to recover militar-
ily and politically, as well as ideologically, from this period of introverted self-
reevaluation. Moreover, their conquest of Constantinople, an ancient Islamic
dream foretold in the Quran and laden with apocalyptic and eschatological
overtones, permitted the Ottomans to pursue an imperial policy aimed at cre-
ating a world empire.
The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was only the first in a series of
victories:3 by 1458, Serbia (with its silver mines) was subjugated (partly due
to the efforts of the grand vizier Mahmud Pasha Angelović, himself of Serbian
origin), as were the Genoese colonies in western Anatolia and the north-
eastern Aegean. What remained of the Byzantine Empire, namely the
Peloponnese and the Black Sea coast, followed a few years later (with some
setbacks at the beginning of the next decade). Mehmed’s next targets
were Wallachia, Bosnia, and Albania, where he gained considerable success
(though not without some difficulties), while at the same time he consolidated
his dominance over the Venetians in central Greece (notably with the conquest
of Euboea in 1470). Moreover, the Ottomans had to cope with the Akkoyunlus
in their eastern borders, under their ambitious ruler Uzun Hasan (an ally of
the Venetians): the early years of the 1470s were dominated by the struggle for
suzerainty over Karaman, i.e. central Anatolia, which ended in total Ottoman
victory. The second half of the decade saw Mehmed establish his hold over the
1 Kastritsis 2007, 202 and 211ff.; see also Emecen 2014.
2 See Kastritsis 2007, 207–211.
3 For a concise chronology of Mehmed’s, Bayezid’s, and Selim’s reign, see Emecen 2001b, 20–31;
Imber 2009, 25ff.; for a more detailed exposition, see Mantran 1989, 81–116 and 139–145.