144 ISLAM AT WAR
be troubled by the Mongols and Tamerlane to such an extent that not until
the early fifteenth century would they assert themselves at sea. When they
did, the sultan’s navies sorely tested the Western states only just beginning
to feel the Renaissance of ideas that would carry Europe into the modern
world.
The astonishing resurgence of Turkish power following Tamerlane’s
incursions is revealed by the simple fact that Tamerlane died in 1405, and
by 1453 Ottoman power had sufficiently reestablished itself to destroy the
remnant of the Byzantine Empire by capturing Constantinople. It is fair
to point out that the Byzantines had been astonishingly resilient over the
centuries. Arabs and Turks had besieged Constantinople at least twelve
times over the past seven centuries, and its fortifications were considered
the most powerful in the world. It was a major accomplishment worthy
of any great warrior nation to vanquish the proud old empire. It is also
instructive that sea power was such a powerful tool in the hands of the
Turks, a steppe people in the past, who had just suffered so much from
another incursion from central Asia.
Three wars were fought between the Ottoman Empire and Venice. The
first of these in the 1440s demonstrated to the land-oriented Turks the
difficulty of fighting a sea power when Venetian fleets opposed Ottoman
Balkan interests from a distance by supplying various political factions
from the sea. The Venetians even supported a rival to the Ottoman throne.
Turkish counters to this use of maritime power were frustrated by the
superior naval power of Venice and her numerous Aegean island bases.
This first Ottoman-Venetian war had a clear effect on the sultan and
consumed considerable resources to provide for a modern naval force
based on Gallipoli. The combination of the growing Ottoman navy and
Ottoman army successes eventually forced the Venetians back, but not
until 1479 was Scutari, the last Venetian post in Albania, surrendered.
In the midst of the Venetian wars the Ottoman fleet was used to capture
Constantinople by the clever ruse of hauling ships by main force across
the peninsula and thus into the Golden Horn behind the chains and booms
that guarded the way. Naval power put the final nail into the imperial
coffin, a nail that had been lacking for 700 years. The sultan took this
lesson to heart, and by the 1450s had more than sixty great galleys based
in the straits and a large Danube flotilla of more than 100 river galleys.
With the fall of the great city, Ottoman naval power inherited the docks
and skilled workers of the Byzantine fleet, as well as the ability to shift
power from east to west via the straits. By the beginning of the sixteenth
century the sultans put substantial effort into turning the Black Sea into a
Turkish lake and also into the ongoing naval wars with Venice. Serious