REBIRTH 173The Ottomans profited from the single most crucial bit of luck that
makes the difference between success and failure for a family dynasty: it
had a series of long-lived rulers, all of them pretty capable. One of them,
Murat I, sailed across the Black Sea and began adding bits of Europe to his
conquests. By his era (1350-1389 CE) the Ottoman dynasty no longer
ruled from horseback but had an urban capital, a palace, a government bu-
reaucracy, a tax policy, a treasury. Ottoman rulers adopted a veneer of high
Islamic civilization, not to mention some of the rituals, pomp, and cere-
monials of the Byzantine court.
Another Ottoman ruler, Bayazid I (1389-1402) launched a program
called the devshirme, which consisted of bringing captured boys from
Christian Europe back to his palace, raising them as Muslims, and devel-
oping them into crack soldiers. These were really just the familiar mam-
luks of Islamic history by another name; mamluks were Turkish boys
growing up in Arab or Persian courts, these were Christian boys growing
up in a Turkish court. The soldiers developed by the devshirme were
called janissaries, a corruption of the Turkish phrase Yeni Ceri, which
means "new troops."
Bayazid's janissaries liberated him from his own feudal lieges, those re-
cently sovereign aristocratic ghazis who traced their descent back to Cen-
tral Asia. Their troops still provided Bayazid with foot soldiers, but the
janissaries gave him a professional corps of officers to lead them.
Bayazid's raids reached ever deeper into Europe. The kings of France
and Hungary got together and organized a force to check him, but Bayazid
demolished their joint army in 1396, at Nicopolis, a town in present-day
Bulgaria. Now the amir of the Ottomans truly ruled an empire. In fact,
Bayazid had outgrown the title of amir. He called himself the sultan,
thereby declaring himself the chief executive of Dar al-Islam, a secular ver-
sion of the khalifa. His military adventures became full-blown campaigns,
and every year he launched a new one, striking west one year, heading east
the next year to absorb more ghazi emirates and extend his rule into the
old Muslim heartland. Back and forth he scuttled, moving at such speed
that people began to call him the Thunderbolt. Bayazid acquired the swag-
ger of a Caesar.
Then it all came crashing down. On one of his forays east, Bayazid ran
into a warrior tougher than himself-the dreaded Timur-i-lang. Bayazid's