452 nicholas doumanis
The Asian pastoralists responsible for the greatest alteration in Mediterranean life
and culture came from Arabia. The vast empire created from the 630s by the follow-
ers of Muhammad was led by Bedouin tribal peoples who destroyed one Eurasian
“superpower” (Sassanid Persia) and greatly diminished another (Byzantium) within a
handful of years, and who by 711 had conquered most of Spain. To be sure, success
was not a case of tribesmen overrunning imperial infantries with horses and camels,
for recent research has confirmed that the armies of the caliphs were largely composed
of infantry. Greater mobility was nevertheless a factor, particularly for logistical pur-
poses and for striking quickly at enemy locations (Kennedy, 2001: 4, 11). For our
purposes, what is especially significant about this remarkably rapid military expansion
is that half the Mediterranean acquired a durable common culture based on faith and
language. Arabic supplanted Greek and other lingue franca, and Islam gradually
eclipsed the various eastern Christianities as the dominant faith. The caliphate also
established a new “transnational” focus of political loyalty. According to Fred Donner,
as Muhammad’s followers from Arabia claimed control of the West Asia, North Africa
and Spain, “the leading cadres and the bulk of their soldiers, all Arabic-speaking and
mostly from Arabia, could hardly have failed to notice that most of their subjects were
not Arab-speaking,” and that the “association of Arabic with political dominance thus
may have generated a sense among Arab speakers that the empire was an Arab king-
dom” (Donner, 2012: 219–220).
The ascendancy of Islam as the dominant culture in the Mediterranean was
jeopardized briefly by the break-up of the Abbasid caliphate from the ninth cen-
tury, and by two reconquistas: in Spain and the much less successful Crusades.
Muslim fortunes were revived, however, by mass incursions by Oghuz Turks
known as the Seljuks, who built an empire that stretched from much of Iran to
northern India (1037–1194), and who by the mid-eleventh century began to
challenge Byzantine control of eastern Anatolia. The Seljuk victory at Manzikert
in 1071 precipitated a major civil war within Byzantium, which allowed the Seljuks
to occupy nearly all of Anatolia with little opposition. The Byzantines were to
reclaim much of Anatolia after 1096, with some help from the First Crusade, but
they could not dislodge the Seljuks from the central plateau region, a region more
conducive to pastoral activity than to agriculture. The various Turkic principalities
that emerged in the region gradually pushed the Byzantines out of Anatolia under
the banner of holy war (gaza), a struggle that attracted the regular recruitment
of Turkic nomads, who also sought booty. From the 1280s, the Byzantine state no
longer seemed capable of defending its Anatolian territories from Turkic raids.
Nor could it stop one particular principality, the Osman (Ottoman) beylik, from
seizing most of its European territories from the mid-1350s. These early Ottoman
conquests were led by warrior horsemen, who waged continuous raids along the
imperial frontier, and who eventually reduced the Byzantine Empire to a mere
city-state (Imber, 2002: 254).
As with the Arabs before them, the Ottomans consolidated their grip on their vast
empire by becoming sedentary. However, certain pastoralist traits and traditions
proved very useful along the way. Historians have stressed that nomadic groups had
to be exceptionally resourceful in order to survive along Central Asia’s steppe lands,
and that they were particularly receptive to outside influences (Christian, 1994).
Put more concretely, the early Ottomans were capable of meeting challenges very