Ottoman Army Quotes

We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

There are times,’ said Philippa shortly, ‘when I feel like the entire Russian army.’ ‘There are times,” said Lymond equally shortly, ‘when I wish that you were. It would solve the whole Tartar problem and save Ottoman Turkey for Jesus.

The British army’s occupation of Arab territories ended four centuries of Ottoman rule over them. An entirely new political map emerged as six new successor states from the former Ottoman Empire were created: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan.

Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.

Only because of the strength of a coalition of European armies at the battle of Vienna in 1683 did Europe avoid Ottoman rule.

The government here is entirely in the hands of the army. The Grand Signor [Ottoman Sultan], with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janissary's frown.

The Turks have an army that goes back to the Ottoman Empire. Our army is very new. But there's a world of difference already between the early 1990's and now (early 2000). The food and pay, it's all better.

and he prepared his elite professional household regiments: the infantry – the famous Janissaries – the cavalry regiments, and all the other attendant corps of gunners, armorers, bodyguards, and military police. These crack troops, paid regularly every three months and armed at the sultan’s expense, were all Christians largely from the Balkans, taken as children and converted to Islam. They owed their total loyalty to the sultan. Although few in number – probably no more than 5,000 infantry – they comprised the durable core of the Ottoman army.

For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.

Nicholas of Montenegro was not so easily swayed, however. He had bribed one of the defenders, an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army, to deliver the city to him. Essad Pasha Toptani, almost as much of a rogue as Nicholas himself, had first murdered the garrison’s commander and then set his price at £80,000 by sending out a message that he had lost a suitcase containing that amount and asking that it be returned.91 On April 23, Essad duly surrendered Scutari to the Montenegrins. In Montenegro’s capital, Cetinje, there were wild celebrations with drunken revelers firing their guns in all directions.

About an hour’s drive from Istanbul’s city centre, on the shores of the Black Sea, sat an old Greek fishing village called Kilyos, famous for its powdery beaches, small hotels, sharp cliffs, and a medieval fortress that had not once succeeded in repelling an invading army. Over the centuries, many had come and many had gone, leaving their songs, prayers and curses behind: the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Genoese, the corsairs, the Ottomans, the Don Cossacks, and for a brief period, the Russians.

...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end. ....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178)

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Clark, Christopher) - Your Highlight on page 26 | location 732-759 | Added on Saturday, 3 May 2014 14:31:16 Garašanin articulated this imperative in 1848 during the uprising in the Vojvodina. ‘The Vojvodina Serbs,’ he wrote, ‘expect from all Serbdom a helping hand, so they can triumph over their traditional enemy. […] But because of political factors, we cannot aid them publicly. It only remains for us to aid them in secret.’55 This preference for covert operations can also be observed in Macedonia. Following an abortive Macedonian insurrection against the Turks in August 1903, the new Karadjordjević regime began to operate an active policy in the region. Committees were established to promote Serb guerrilla activity in Macedonia, and there were meetings in Belgrade to recruit and supply bands of fighters. Confronted by the Ottoman minister in Belgrade, the Serbian foreign minister Kaljević denied any involvement by the government and protested that the meetings were in any case not illegal, since they had been convened ‘not for the raising of bands, but merely for collecting funds and expressing sympathy for co-religionists beyond the border’.56 The regicides were deeply involved in this cross-border activity. The conspirator officers and their fellow travellers within the army convened an informal national committee in Belgrade, coordinated the campaign and commanded many of the volunteer units. These were not, strictly speaking, units of the Serbian army proper, but the fact that volunteer officers were immediately granted leave by the army suggested a generous measure of official backing.57 Militia activity steadily expanded in scope, and there were numerous violent skirmishes between Serb četniks (guerrillas) and bands of Bulgarian volunteers. In February 1907, the British government requested that Belgrade put a stop to this activity, which appeared likely to trigger a war between Serbia and Bulgaria. Once again, Belgrade disclaimed responsibility, denying that it was funding četnik activity and declaring that it ‘could not prevent [its people] from defending themselves against foreign bands’. But the plausibility of this posture was undermined by the government’s continuing support for the struggle – in November 1906, the Skupština had already voted 300,000 dinars for aid to Serbs suffering in Old Serbia and Macedonia, and this was followed by a ‘secret credit’ for ‘extraordinary expenses and the defence of national interests’.58 Irredentism of this kind was fraught with risk. It was easy to send guerrilla chiefs into the field, but difficult to control them once they were there. By the winter of 1907, it was clear that a number of the četnik bands were operating in Macedonia independently of any supervision; only with some difficulty did an emissary from Belgrade succeed in re-imposing control. The ‘Macedonian imbroglio’ thus delivered an equivocal lesson, with fateful implications for the events of 1914. On the one hand, the devolution of command functions to activist cells dominated by members of the conspirator network carried the danger that control over Serb national policy might pass from the political centre to irresponsible elements on the periphery. On the other hand, the diplomacy of 1906–7 demonstrated that the fuzzy, informal relationship between the Serbian government and the networks entrusted with delivering irredentist policy could be exploited to deflect political responsibility from Belgrade and maximize the government’s room for manoeuvre. The Belgrade political elite became accustomed to a kind of doublethink founded on the intermittent pretence that the foreign policy of official Serbia and the work of national liberation beyond the frontiers of the state were separate phenomena.

The year 1453, therefore, marks the end of the Roman Empire. No one can fail to be amazed by the almost constant successes of the Ottoman armies, which developed in less than two centuries from a small group of fighters who waged war around their gazi in Eastern Anatolia into a force whose power reached the shores of the Bosphorus and the palace of Justinian’s successors. How

Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as their subjects paid taxes and provided recruits to the harems and armies of the Sultan, they could have whatever religion they liked. Only when they joined religion with revolt did scimitars and stakes come out. Orthodox Christianity was under far greater threat from the Roman variety imposed by Venetians and Franks and Catalans. Jews too were safer from pogrom under the crescent than the cross. This is not a line of thought that goes down well in Greek company.

The loss of Mecca threatened Sultan Mahmud II’s authority and finances, and in 1811 he ordered the Ottoman Governor of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, to expel the Wahhabis. Mohammed Ali Pasha and his son, Ibrahim Pasha, campaigned for seven years to destroy the First Saudi State. When Imam Saud al-Saud died in 1814, his son, Imam Abdullah, withdrew to the Nejd pursued by Ibrahim Pasha and an army of 5,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 150 artillerymen with howitzers, mortars, and cannon.14 This largely Egyptian army besieged the then Saudi capital of Dir’iyyah, where the vastly outnumbered and outgunned Wahhabis, who had no artillery, held out for six months before surrendering on September 11, 1818.

The Arab revolt for which Hussein hoped never took place. No Arabic units of the Ottoman army came over to Hussein. No political or military figures of the Ottoman Empire defected to him and the Allies. The powerful secret military organization that al-Faruqi had promised would rally to Hussein failed to make itself known. A few thousand tribesmen, subsidized by British money, constituted Hussein’s troops. He had no regular army. Outside the Hejaz and its tribal neighbors, there was no visible support for the revolt in any part of the Arabic-speaking world. The handful of non-Hejazi officers who joined the Emir’s armed forces were prisoners-of-war or exiles who already resided in British-controlled territories.

The Oasis compound was a fortress and an encampment for high Turkish army officials, long ago. Built around the late 1600s, it became a command post for the Ottoman Empire, hence, the beautifully ornate Moorish mosaic inlays around the Bahriji buildings. Since photography of the school was not allowed, I can only describe the school's marvelous historical architecture by reference to other structures that vaguely resembled the school’s architectural splendor.

Across the city, people quoted a prophecy the Arabs used to tell to glorify the Ottoman Empire: the Turks would leave Palestine only when a prophet of God brought water of the Nile to Palestine. The British had laid pipes that supplied their army with water in the desert, and so Allenby was called "Allah an-nabi", a prophet of God.

Jews volunteered to serve in the Ottoman Army as proof of their patriotism. The Istanbul–based Zionist newspaper Hamevasser repeatedly praised the participation of eighty Ottoman Jewish soldiers in the suppression of the Druze rebellion in southern Syria in 1910–11. This was a campaign in which more than fifty Jewish soldiers were wounded.4 Another effect of conscription was to prompt a new wave of Jewish migration. Thousands of young Jewish men left the Ottoman Empire to avoid being taken into the army. Many chose to cross the Atlantic and settle in the United States. In 1909 a Jewish community was founded in Portland, Oregon, made up of Jews from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara.5

Across a broad range of species—chimpanzees, walruses, lions, elk, mice—larger males and groups of males invariably win physical confrontations with each other, but that is not the case with humans. It is a quality entirely unique to humans that a smaller entity, like the Montenegrins, could defeat a larger one. Were this not so, freedom would effectively be impossible: Every group would be run by a single large male, and the world would be dominated by fascist mega-states, like the Ottomans, that could easily crush insubordinate populations. But that’s not what the world looks like. Large armies—or people—are stronger than small ones but usually slower and less efficient. This is true at every scale, from open warfare to street corner fistfights. Because the outcome of any human conflict cannot be predicted with certainty, the powerful often end up having to negotiate with the weak, and those negotiations invariably revolve around freedom.

synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Murad’s army was around 30,000 strong and included more than 2,000 Janissaries, an elite infantry unit created by Murad

but we do know that the bulk of both armies became casualties on the field.

The army of Murad endured such heavy casualties that it too withdrew from the field,

Under the leadership of Orhan, the army of the Ottoman Empire conquered the city of Bursa in northwestern Anatolia,

by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1261. The Latin Christians, who diverted from their original goal of capturing the Holy Land,

Crucially, in 1301, Osman defeated a Byzantine army outside of the city of Nicomedia (Izmit),

the army of the Ottoman Empire conquered the city of Bursa in northwestern Anatolia,

the remnants of the Christian army fled.

On June 15, 1389, the two armies faced each other

armies were some of the largest ever deployed on a battlefield at the time

was a crushing and completely unexpected defeat for the armies of Christianity.

His nomadic armies laid waste to vast swathes of Persia and the Levant

the army of the Ottoman Empire under the command of Sultan Bayezid near the city of Ankara.

under the command of King Sigismund of Hungary faced the Ottoman army on a flat area close to the River Danube on September 25, 1396.

but by nightfall, King Sigismund had fled the field in a fisherman’s boat and what was left of his army surrendered to Sultan Bayezid.

In 1402, Timur’s army invaded Anatolia, and on July 20,

Bayezid, who rallied his armies and confronted his brother near the town of Yenişehir,

Members of the Janissary and the sipahi (cavalry) corps of the army were discontent with the continued defeats the army suffered.

By the time of Sultan Suleyman’s death in 1566, the empire spanned three continents, possessed a huge army and a competent navy,

were forced to convert to Shia Islam and would soon make up the core of the empire’s army.

He was confronted by a large Mamluk army of no less than sixty thousand men north of Aleppo

the Ottomans achieved a close victory against the Mamluks, thanks to their superior troops, and killed the Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghuri, routing the Egyptian army.

Selim’s rule is characterized by the increased importance of the Janissary infantry, which was the core of the Ottoman army in the

fielding their own armies, raising their own taxes, and maintaining their own relations with their counterparts,

Ottoman army needed modernization and understood that the Janissaries stood in his way of fielding a military worthy of his European counterparts

Historians estimate that both armies counted around twenty-five thousand men.

The Ottoman army wanted more war and conquest, and a simple setback would not be enough to stop its drive.

army crossed the Danube and besieged the fortress. Nicopolis, located at a natural defensive position where the Danube joined with the river Olt,

stationed between his army and the castle walls, preventing him from going near the

Sigismund’s forces started a mass retreat, with the different contingents of the crusader army being routed one by one.

(commanders who waged holy wars), who comprised most of his army, were reluctant when it came to fighting other Muslims,

Murad took his armies to Macedonia and Bulgaria, crushing the remnants of the Serbian uprising

A year and a half had passed since Berchtold had first taken charge of the Viennese Foreign Office, and in this time all his efforts at diplomacy had ended in failure. When the Balkan War had started Berchtold had been so confident of a Turkish victory that he had then declared that, no matter what happened at the front, the status quo in the Balkans would remain unchanged. He had spoken recklessly, and too soon, for almost at once the rebels in the Turkish provinces had chased the Ottoman armies from the field, and so there had been no question, after such dizzying triumphs, of ordering the victorious insurgents to withdraw behind their former frontiers. Berchtold had then found himself in the unenviable position of having to go cap in hand to the London Conference, defend his now untenable former convictions and somehow save what he could from the debacle he had failed to foresee.

Fortunately, the Ottomans were unrivaled masters of supply-chain logistics. No other state in Europe devoted as much energy or care to the repair of its roads. From very early on, the Ottomans became justly famous as builders of beautiful stone bridges, whose delicate arches appeared to be as delicate as eggshells but proved as durable as iron. Supplies of food, cloth, gunpowder, and steel flowed continuously over this system of roadways. Camels, able to carry twice as much as any European beast of burden, made their transport easier. Every year, thirty thousand of these essential animals arrived from the Maghreb and Syria, in time for the campaigning season. But the real heart of the Ottoman procurement system was its bakeries. In Istanbul alone, 105 gigantic ovens worked around the clock, baking hardtack for the army and navy stores. Many more operated across the provinces.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

Next to this, the western armies were poorly motivated, poorly armed, and often unpaid.

Suleiman entered Buda without opposition, and there were rich pickings for his army.

In 1825, however, Sultan Mahmud II issued a fatwa stating that it was the duty of every Muslim to serve in the Ottoman military while reinstating the Nizam-ı Cedid Army in 1826, in an attempt to replace the Janissaries. When the Janissaries revolted in 1826 and sacked parts of Constantinople, the Sultan crushed the revolt, leading to the death of 4,000 Janissaries, and the subsequent dismantling of the old military force.

On the military level, the first period of reforms was marked by the introduction of conscription along with a fixed period of military service introduced in 1843 and based on the Prussian Conscription Law of 1814. The Ottoman military was then divided into five Imperial Armies garrisoned in different regions of the Empire. The military service was established as a period of five years between the ages of 20 to 25 along with an additional seven years of reserve duties. The first and second military reforms also saw the emergence of a new, more educated class of middle to high ranking officers and cadets, who progressively became involved in the Ottoman palace politics, as illustrated by the May 1876 coup (see the First Constitutional Era). The

In his most thrilling military victory to date, Napoleon had defeated an Ottoman force eighteen thousand men strong at Aboukir. It had been Javert’s first real taste of battle, watching cannon fire blow ships into splinters and hearing the last screams of drowning men. The French army, stinking and spluttering with plague, had emerged victorious but exhausted. They had taken refuge in Alexandria, though it hardly felt safe. Very recently, Napoleon had left with a few of his nearest friends for a voyage into the Delta. Now Javert was just one of the confused mass left reeling in the wake of the chaos.

The sieges of Gvozdansko, Croatia and Alamo, U.S. tell the true stories of small bands of heroes who stood against massive armies to defend their homelands. They echo innate human devotion to the idea of fighting for freedom across the world. Alamo was designate by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2015. Gvozdansko deserves more research and the same level of respect and protection for its equal relevance. The Croatian landmark was the site of the pivotal 103-day Battle of Gvozdansko in 1578 against the Ottoman army. Among those who fought and died there were the common miners together with their families.

One afternoon, in the suffocating damp heat of a Washington summer, I was taken to learn about the American game of baseball. The game remained something of a mystery to me, but I learned more about the actual separation between the white and black races. In the stadium I and my white escort were seated on the side reserved for whites, and on the opposite side of the stadium were seats for the blacks, of whom there were many more than the whites. In buses, too, separation of the races was strictly enforced, with whites at the front and blacks at the back. The public toilets were strictly separate. No Afro-American would think of entering a hotel or restaurant frequented by whites; the division was absolute. Blacks had their own eating and sleeping places. And of course, all schools were segregated. There was nothing like this in Baghdad. While there were very few black students in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, they were treated just like the rest of us and many real friendships developed between the two. This easy relationship existed although it had been only a few years since Ottoman days, when Iraqis were able to buy black slaves openly, a practice that was banned when the British army arrived in 1917. Yet here in the United States, the Land of Liberty and Equality, at least in the southern states, no white man could sit down in a restaurant and have a meal with a black friend. Though this discrimination no longer existed legally, it was clearly still in practice in the nation’s capitol.

The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the devshirme, to serve as courtiers and soldiers in his Jeni Ceri – new army – the Janissary corps; the cavalry was still drawn from Turkish levies under Anatolian beys. Those enslaved would number uncountable millions. His harem was simultaneously drawn from girls stolen from Slavic villages or Greek islands, often sold via Mongol khans and Italian slave traders. While Ottomans were Turks from Turkmenistan, Murad’s system meant that the Ottomans were often the sons of Slavic concubines, and viziers were often Slavs too.