Page 153 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

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Standing up to the Ottoman Empire: civilian resistance to
Turkish expansionism during the fifteenth, sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries

KELLY DE VRIES

Describing Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II’s military goals in the mid-fifteenth century, con-
temporary Ibn Kemal writes:
“like the world-illuminating sun he succumbed to the desire for world conquest and it was
his plan to burn with overpowering fire the agricultural lands of the rebellious rulers who
were in the provinces of the land of Rόm [the Byzantine Empire]. He took with the hand of
power and the grip of conquest one by one the cities and lands of the princes who were on
the sea shores and it was his plan to flow over them in turn like a wave”. 1
Although directed specifically at Mehmed II (reigned 1444-46, 1451-81), this description
could apply to any of the Ottoman sultans from Osman (c1300) to Suleyman the Magnificent
(1520-66). No military leaders or their armies were more feared at the end of the Middle
Ages/beginning of the Early Modern period than the Ottomans. There seemed to be no stop-
ping them as they acquired more and more of the Eastern Mediterranean, crushing all who
chose to fight against them. Yet, on three occasions they were stopped, however not by supe-
rior armies or greater leaders but by the tenacity of the civilian populations who faced them,
largely non-military people who determined that they would simply not become Ottoman
themselves: at Belgrade in 1456, Rhodes in 1480, and Candia in 1645-69.
Situated as it was at the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers, the value of Belgrade
to the Ottoman Turks was enormous. Well past this city in their conquests of Southeast-
ern Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, an independent Belgrade meant that they could not
proceed farther into Central Europe, while raiders sent from the city threatened poorly gar-
risoned imperial fortifications and communication and supply lines. But perhaps even more
importantly, Belgrade stood as a symbol that the Turks were not invincible. In 1396, follow-
ing the impressive Turkish victory of Bayezid I over Central and Western European troops,
Belgrade had been threatened but had not fallen. In 1440 it had withstood a siege of six
2
months with the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, forced to withdraw because of deprivation and
dissension in his own ranks. And from then until 1456 the city had flaunted its resistance,
3
being used for pro-Crusade propaganda, most especially by a Franciscan friar, John of Cap-
istrano (Giovanni da Capistrano).
But Mehmed II was not Bayezid, his grandfather, nor Murad, his father. In 1453 he had

1 ibn Kemal, Tevárih-i-Âl-I Osman VII. Defter, 2 vols. (Ankara, 1954-57), II:180. The translation used is that
of Andrew C. Hess, “The Evolution of the Ottoman Seaborne Empire in the Age of the Oceanic Discoveries,
1453-1525,” American Historical Review 75 (1970), 1902.
2 See Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade of Nicopolis (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1934).
3 Colin imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 24-25, and
Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571) (Philadelphia, 1978), II:58.