Bayezid I (r.1389–1402), they conquered much of the Balkans, taking Serbia (at the
battle of Kosovo) in 1389 and Bulgaria in 1393.
To the east, the Ottoman advance was aided by the weakening of Mongol power,
which began in China with the overthrow of the khanate there. To be sure, the
Ottomans were halted by Timur the Lame (Tamerlane) (1336–1405), a warrior
leader from the region of Samarkand, who saw himself as restoring the Mongol
Empire. But with Timur’s death, the Ottomans slowly regained their hold, in part
because of the superiority of their elite troops, the janissaries, professional soldiers of
slave origin. Adopting the new military hardware of the west—cannons and
harquebuses (heavy matchlock guns)—the Ottomans retook Anatolia and the
Balkans. Under Mehmed II the Conqueror (r.1444–1446, 1451–1481), their cannons
accomplished what former sieges had never done, breaching the thick walls of
Constantinople in 1453 and bringing the Byzantine Empire to an end.
The new Ottoman state had come to stay. Its rise was due to its military power
and the weakness of its neighbors. But its longevity—it did not begin to decline until
the late seventeenth century—was due to more complicated factors. Building on a
theory of absolutism that echoed similar ideas in the Christian West, the Ottoman
rulers acted as the sole guarantors of law and order; they considered even the leaders
of the mosques to be their functionaries, soldiers without arms. Prospering from taxes
imposed on their relatively well-to-do peasantry, the new rulers spent their money on
roads to ease troop transport and a navy powerful enough to oust the Italians from
their eastern Mediterranean outposts. Eliminating all signs of rebellion (which meant,
for example, brutally putting down Serb and Albanian revolts), the Ottomans created
a new world power.
The Ottoman state eventually changed Europe’s orientation. Europeans could—
and did—continue to trade in the Mediterranean. But on the whole they preferred to
treat the Ottomans as a barrier to the Orient. Not long after the fall of Constantinople,
as we shall see, the first transatlantic voyages began as a new route to the East.
The Hundred Years’ War