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Documentary, The Ottomans -1 of 3 Europe's Muslim Emperors
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00:00On the edge of Europe is a city that was once the heart of a mighty empire.
00:18From here in Istanbul, the glories of the Ottoman Empire came to match those of ancient Rome.
00:25Wow! Look at this. This is the view that the Ottoman Sultans would have seen.
00:35And it just simply takes your breath away.
00:42For 600 years, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, one dynasty of Ottoman Sultans,
00:50a single family ruled over huge swathes of the world.
00:55The Ottomans were staggeringly wealthy. This is an empire of a million square miles. It's a superpower.
01:04The empire stretched south to Baghdad and Cairo, controlling the holiest sites of Islam, Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
01:14But it also reached deep into Europe, taking in Sarajevo and threatening the gates of Vienna.
01:25What's more, it was the world's last Islamic empire and it collapsed less than a hundred years ago.
01:33In this series, I'll be discovering why the Ottoman Empire seems to have vanished from our understanding of the history of Europe.
01:42Why its story is exciting global interest once more.
01:46And how this year's struggles at the heart of the Ottoman story have reignited on the streets they once ruled, from Syria to Turkey and Egypt.
01:55It's remarkable how some of the most important yet unresolved issues confronting us today were also faced by the Ottomans.
02:04The conflicts between the Christian West and the Muslim East.
02:08The need to reconcile secular politics with religious ideology and balancing the demands of the clergy with the ambitions of the generals.
02:18All this was faced by one dynasty that ruled for 600 years across three continents.
02:24In this first episode, I'll discover the surprising roots of the Ottomans.
02:33The extraordinary speed at which nomadic horsemen from a corner of what is today Turkey, became powerful rulers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
02:49Across the continents, down the centuries, I'll be getting to grips with what we all need to know today about Europe's Muslim emperors.
03:19As a journalist, I've been dispatched to many regions of the world that were once part of the Ottoman Empire.
03:26American armour is moving at will across whole swathes of Baghdad.
03:36Now, with so much of the world they once ruled in turmoil,
03:42I want to uncover the Ottomans' forgotten story.
03:52If you don't understand the Ottomans, both the good and the bad,
03:57you don't understand partly the modern transformations of the Balkans in the Middle East.
04:03I think they are connected.
04:05The roots of today's turmoil can be traced, in part at least, to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
04:20Even before the war was over, the French and the British were already planning on how they would dismember this remaining territory.
04:35Many countries in the Middle East, whose names are in the news today, only came into being after this post-war carve-up.
04:43A list of the Ottoman successor states today reads like a catalogue of the world's trouble spots.
04:50Iraq, Syria, Israel and Palestine.
04:54The borders of these countries were not designed according to any geographical reality.
05:01The border between Turkey and Syria, for example, is a border that just doesn't have any reason.
05:07I mean, the two peoples on the same side of the border are still the same people.
05:11They still speak the same language.
05:18Modern-day Saudi Arabia and Yemen escaped control by the great powers of Europe.
05:25Only one other major Muslim country would achieve this.
05:30Remarkably, that nation was the heartland of the Ottoman Empire, modern-day Turkey.
05:38Turkey looks very different from its Arab neighbours.
05:50It's a confident, modern country whose economy and global importance are both growing.
05:57And for most of the past century, it's turned its back on the Ottoman past. Until now.
06:09Turkey and across the world, 200 million people are currently gripped by a TV drama about the Ottomans.
06:26It's an epic story of power won and lost across three continents.
06:36A great cultural force in history straddling the ancient and modern worlds.
06:42And ruled from one of the world's most strategically placed imperial capitals.
06:59Istanbul is a city that spans two continents.
07:03On this side is Europe, but a short hop across the Bosphorus takes you to the Asian side.
07:08It's always been a city where different beliefs and different cultures meet.
07:12Never more so than during the time of the Ottomans.
07:16This place became the heart of the Empire.
07:25But the Ottoman story began across the water on the Asian shore.
07:30Somewhere much more remote.
07:33The Ottomans first emerged over 700 years ago.
07:57Their heartland is said to be around the small town of Syria.
08:02150 miles or so from modern-day Istanbul.
08:07In rural Anatolia, the Asian part of modern Turkey.
08:17Each year there's a festival here to commemorate the Empire's founding fathers.
08:27The family that would become the Ottoman dynasty
08:30began as nomadic warriors alongside many other tribal clans.
08:37They were excellent horsemen.
08:39This is how they survived, how they lived.
08:42And on account of their, perhaps, fearsome qualities,
08:46they were used as hired mercenaries.
08:48These guns for hire had moved across Central Asia
09:00and fought for the powerful Muslim rulers based in Baghdad.
09:07That's how they were introduced to Islam,
09:09a religion that took its place alongside other beliefs.
09:13The religion of the Ottomans was the religion of the people on the frontiers.
09:19They were absorbing as much spirituality for the people they conquered
09:24as they were taking from their own hinterlands.
09:26The Ottomans' nomadic ancestors settled around Suez, competing with other tribes to survive.
09:40There were others who also settled down in neighbouring areas, neighbouring territory.
09:44And they were rivals for resources.
09:47They were rivals for territory.
09:49They were rivals for grazing lands.
09:51They were rivals for access to the sea.
09:54And the Ottomans needed to overturn them.
09:58By 1299, their leader in this ongoing struggle was a man called Osman, or Utman.
10:11His followers would become known as Osmanli, or in English, Ottoman.
10:16And just as Rome had its story of Romulus and Remus to give its origins a sense of divine authority,
10:23so the later Ottomans developed a founding myth around Osman.
10:32Osman dreamt that a tree came out of his navel, a very wide-spreading tree,
10:38which came to shape a very luscious and bountiful landscape under it.
10:43In the morning, Osman told this dream to his leader,
10:48who gave him the great news that he will be the head of a big empire
10:55and his sons and grandsons will rule the state.
11:04The story of how this legendary dream came true is one that holds many surprises.
11:10In the late 13th century, no-one could have dreamt that within a few generations,
11:20these nomads would become mightier than the imperial powers that surrounded them.
11:29To the southeast were influential Arab cities like Baghdad and Damascus,
11:34home to earlier leaders of the Muslim world.
11:38Further south was the great seat of learning in Cairo,
11:42and Islam's holiest sites of Mecca and Medina.
11:51Closer to home was a crumbling Christian empire.
11:54The capital of the Byzantine Empire lay just across the water of the Bosphorus.
12:11Modern Istanbul was at this time called Constantinople,
12:15named after the 4th century Roman emperor Constantine.
12:18It was the centre of the Eastern Christian world.
12:27Constantinople stood for the empire of the Christians on earth.
12:35One God in heaven, one emperor on earth, and one imperial city.
12:41The Byzantine world had total confidence that it had the ideal constitution,
12:49the ideal system of justice.
12:51They thought it was the perfect Christian empire.
12:53But after a millennium in power, the Byzantines were in decline,
13:04and weakened by battles with Europe's Western Catholic Crusaders.
13:09It was still against all expectations when in 1301,
13:14Osman claimed his first victory over the Byzantine imperial army,
13:18and it made his name.
13:25When the other Emirates or other principalities saw that,
13:29they started to join the Ottomans to fight with them,
13:34because they see a future in the Ottomans.
13:40This meant that they were able to amass huge numbers of soldiers.
13:43They could deploy fast-riding cavalry to killer effect.
13:58Osman's memory still arouses passions.
14:04At the climax of the Suat Festival,
14:07everyone marches to the tomb of the Ottoman forefathers.
14:10A scuffle breaks out about who should be the first to pay their respects.
14:13A scuffle breaks out about who should be the first to pay their respects.
14:27Osman's successors seized on his legacy and laid the foundations for empire.
14:32Osman's son, Orhan, made his mark.
14:36In 1326, he took the major Byzantine city of Bursa after a long siege,
14:39converting it into his capital city.
14:40Osman's son, Orhan, made his mark.
14:41Osman's son, Orhan, made his mark.
14:46In 1326, he took the major Byzantine city of Bursa after a long siege,
14:50converting it into his capital city.
14:52He wasted no time creating the infrastructure of a settled state.
14:54The earliest dated Ottoman coin is from this year.
15:10These were no longer nomads.
15:12The Byzantines were alarmed at the rise of this powerful and warrior-like group.
15:22And they tried to put this off with diplomacy.
15:27The Christian Byzantine emperor gave Orhan his daughter's hand in marriage.
15:32It was always part of Byzantine diplomacy to use the emperor's family for intermarriage.
15:42Hopefully, you kept your enemies as friends rather than as attackers.
15:51The marriage did not stop the Ottomans setting their sights on Byzantine territory,
15:57beyond the narrow Bosphorus straits on the European mainland.
16:02As the Ottomans looked to the fertile lands of Greece and Italy,
16:12they could see the rise of Venice, the rise of Genoese traders, the rise of Pisa.
16:18I think it must have been very clear that the West was the future.
16:23First, they raided along the European coastline.
16:27But in the 1360s, the Ottomans seized their first European city,
16:32which was the first European country.
16:33It was a breakthrough moment.
16:37They made this their new capital.
16:43From this foothold in Europe, troops marched out to take the Kingdom of Bulgaria
16:48and the strategic town of Sofia.
16:49The important city of Salonica, now Thessaloniki in modern Greece, fell after a long siege.
16:57The routes west had been opened to Ottoman advance.
17:01The Ottomans wanted to be the future and they had all sorts of reasons in terms of power, military power.
17:11They were fantastic.
17:13In less than a hundred years, the Ottomans had started to take over from one of the most sophisticated imperial powers the world had ever seen.
17:26In what is now Greek Macedonia, there's a town founded by the early Ottomans.
17:51Yanica was built in the 1370s and then called Yanici Varda.
18:01In Turkish, Yanici means newly founded.
18:05And it holds some intriguing clues about the kind of future the Ottomans offered to their newly conquered lands.
18:12One traditional view in the west of the Ottomans has been to see them as Muslim invaders, plundering Christian lands in Europe for their own gain.
18:23They'd raise a place to the ground and then just simply move on once they'd taken everything that they could get.
18:31For many living in these lands today, it's hard to have a more positive view of what the Ottomans built here.
18:37This includes the town's mayor.
18:42It was a period where the people here had fear.
18:51He had fear, he lived with fear.
18:54But nonetheless, what remains 600 years on suggests something much more permanent than the image of marauding invaders would suggest.
19:10The historian Heath Lowry has been examining early Ottoman life here.
19:14It's a lot more impressive inside than what you can see from the outside.
19:40You're right. This is a typical Ottoman bathhouse called the Hammam.
19:46And what's standing today is really less than half of the full structure.
19:50This was a double bath, so it had one side for women, one side for men.
19:55The Ottomans, as Muslims, really had a bath culture.
19:59A bath culture that we really see previously only under Rome.
20:02It's as if there was this jump between the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
20:07It certainly tells people that you have just conquered that you're here to stay for a while.
20:13Because it can't have been easy and you wouldn't have built something like this if you were just passing through.
20:17But you needed water and you needed fresh water.
20:20So they, as part of this infrastructure, built a system that runs 12, 15 miles back in the hills of aqueducts and underground pipes to bring water to the city to provide for the fountains at his mosque and the bathhouse here.
20:38This is a very different view of Ottoman rule in this part of the world, isn't it?
20:44I mean, traditionally the Ottomans were just slash and burn sort of people who came through.
20:49You know, it's very hard to look at this infrastructure and think about the Ottomans just as some kind of semi-Mongol type horde that's just interested in slaves and booty and, you know, they weren't.
21:02They were interested in establishing normalcy as quickly as possible.
21:11It would be very foolish just to wreak havoc and ruin your resources when resources were what you needed, what life was about, especially if you were not an entirely settled population.
21:24You needed, you needed pastures, you needed sheep, you needed crops, gradually, and you needed towns, trades, crafts.
21:33To destroy everything around you would have been very counterproductive.
21:39The story of this Greek town shows how the early Ottomans matched the sophisticated infrastructure of the Romans.
21:46And before long, a young Ottoman Sultan would call time on the Roman Byzantine Empire's last grip on power.
22:00By the 15th century, the Ottomans had their sights set on their biggest prize yet.
22:06In 1453, Constantinople was the last Christian stronghold facing a rising Muslim world.
22:21It was set to become the scene of a great clash of religions.
22:25For the Muslim world, any great Islamic empire aspired to extend its rule over Byzantium, in a sense to prove the superiority of Islam over Christianity.
22:46Any assault on this Christian city by Muslims was a highly symbolic act.
22:51In fact, Islamic armies had besieged Constantinople only a few decades after the death of Prophet Muhammad.
23:00But its high walls meant it had resisted such attacks.
23:13By the 1450s, though, Constantinople was not looking as invincible as it once had.
23:21It was very run down. It was a shadow of its former glory.
23:28Largely because of an attack by Christians, not by Muslims.
23:33In 1204, the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, coming east to the Holy Land, occupied and looted the city.
23:41Within the walls, there were 13 little villages.
23:45The population was down maybe to 50,000, living as best they could off what they grew in their gardens, what they grew in the fields.
23:58They questioned whether the Ottoman Turks were in fact anti-Christ and whether a whole cycle of world history was coming to an end.
24:07Others said Constantinople is the God-protected city. God is not going to desert us.
24:15There had been many failed Muslim attempts on the city.
24:18Now, the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II judged that the golden apple was finally ripe for the picking.
24:32He built a fortress north of the city to cut off essential supplies.
24:36It really meant challenging every form of defence, ultimately taking on the walls of Istanbul and just reducing it to rubble through persistence and numbers.
24:47Troops set out for the city walls.
24:50Troops set out for the city walls.
24:53Some were ferried in by boat.
24:55But the way was blocked by a massive chain placed under the water.
25:04By an incredible combination of ingenuity and sheer brute force, Ottoman ships were hauled out of the water onto greased planks.
25:13He carried his ships up land from the Bosphorus over into the Golden Horn so that they could be right against the sea walls.
25:28You can only imagine the skill and determination needed to lift the boats out of the waters like this.
25:34It may not be as well unknown a story, but as a feat of endurance, it's on a par with Hannibal driving his elephants across the Alps.
25:47The Ottoman troops now encircling the city walls had numbers on their side.
25:53But Mehmed had also invested in the latest technology.
25:56Gunpowder was a technology that was developing in the 15th century.
26:04The ability to use it was actually related to economics.
26:08Did you have the money?
26:10Apparently everybody knew about a man called Urban who was developing the cannon.
26:16He offered his expertise to the Byzantines, but they couldn't afford his prices, so he went to the Ottomans.
26:22After centuries of failed Muslim attempts on Constantinople, it took Mehmed just 54 days to breach the city walls.
26:41In the West, the defeat of Constantinople is known as the Fall.
26:46Here, it's the conquest.
26:47It was more than a strategic gain.
26:51The taking of this city would be remembered for centuries as the moment of Muslim triumph.
27:00This was, in many ways, the greatest moment in Islamic history since the prophetic message.
27:06It had always been the dream, since the beginning of Islam, that it become a Muslim city.
27:13And it never had.
27:15And suddenly, this brash 21-year-old does what no other Muslim ruler had ever been able to do.
27:21And it certainly gave the Ottomans immense prestige in the Muslim world.
27:26In the Christian world, it was the end of Byzantium.
27:30It was the downfall of Eastern Christendom.
27:36The Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Russians looked to Constantinople as the centre.
27:44And now, the centre, so it seemed, was gone.
27:47It was just 150 years since Osman's first triumph against the Byzantines.
27:58In making Constantinople their imperial capital, these former nomads now ended 1,000 years of Christian rule.
28:06Through the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II changes the state into an empire.
28:13How do you make an empire is a big question.
28:17One of the immediate goals is to develop Constantinople, make it a world-class city.
28:29The young sultan understood that he'd need to use his assets.
28:33Mehmed wanted to encourage people from all parts of the empire to come to Istanbul.
28:42He used favourable financial inducements and taxes in order to tempt people to come and help rebuild the city and revitalise its trade.
28:52But to ensure that he had the right people with the right skills,
28:56he was prepared to force craftsmen from other parts of the empire to move here.
29:01He actually sent edicts saying these groups of notables have to move to the city.
29:11And they're using force and using threats.
29:16He needed the builders, he needed the whole organisation.
29:20So there's an extraordinary revival of the city with the Christian population.
29:24Jews are coming from Europe to live freely and do their trades.
29:33For the Ottomans, economy is the key issue for an empire.
29:38He was not a ruler who said, mine is an Islamic empire and Christians shall have no place in it.
29:47Rather what he said was, we need these people, they have skills, they have resources, and we need them in our city.
29:52Mehmed obviously wanted Constantinople to be seen as the centre of the civilised world.
30:01He wanted to revive that. He did. He succeeded. It was brilliant.
30:05Mehmed saw himself as the heir to the Romans, ready to model his new Ottoman Empire as their natural successor.
30:14For the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed II is Augustus.
30:23He plays the same role because Augustus changes the republic into an empire and Mehmed II changes the small Ottoman state through the conquest of Constantinople.
30:35But for all Mehmed's pragmatism, he understood the importance of the victory he had given Islam over Christianity.
30:45Within days, he made the importance of this religious supremacy clear for all to see.
30:52On the first Friday after the conquest, Mehmed attended Muslim prayers in a building which only days earlier had been the Imperial Church, the Ayah Safir.
31:01The Church of Ayah Safir, built in the sixth century, biggest church ever built.
31:13From the outside, it doesn't look that wonderful.
31:17It's only till you go inside that it creates a feeling of another world.
31:23Another world.
31:31Hagia Sophia is a model of what a true place of worship should be.
31:39The sense of space and light.
31:43For us, it signifies heaven on earth.
31:46You could walk through any day, you could see parts of the true cross of Christ, you could see perhaps bits of Noah's Ark.
31:59It was the place where every major event was celebrated in the Byzantine world.
32:05Converting this iconic Christian basilica into a mosque wasn't difficult.
32:11The crosses and bells of Christianity simply had to be replaced with a prayer niche, pulpit and prayer mats.
32:20But the impact on Eastern Orthodox Christians was deep and long lasting.
32:25You look around, you know, they're visitors to the Ayah Safir every day, hundreds of visitors.
32:34They're Muslims, they're Christians, they're people of no faith.
32:38Does it still have a symbolism today for people?
32:41I mean, who are Muslim and Christian?
32:43This is Mecca for Orthodox people.
32:48I mean, this is the most important image of the Eastern Orthodoxy.
32:54I have friends in Greece.
32:56When they are talking about Hagia Sophia, they're crying.
33:00You know, they're in tears.
33:05After 900 years as a cathedral, the Imperial Church became a mosque.
33:10Five centuries later, in the 20th century, it became a museum.
33:16There are many Muslim groups.
33:19They had a prayer here in front, just outside Hagia Sophia this year.
33:22Really?
33:23Yeah, they were protesting that...
33:25It should be made into a mosque again.
33:26Into a mosque, yeah.
33:28So those feelings, that passion still runs pretty deep.
33:32Yeah.
33:33The conversion of the Imperial Church into a mosque was not the only act to stay in the minds of the sultan's new Christian subjects in Europe.
33:45In the heart of Europe is a city that exemplifies Ottoman rule in conquered Christian lands.
34:05It's Sarajevo in Bosnia.
34:10Sarai in Turkish means palace.
34:12This was a major Ottoman city built in the 1460s and proudly facing Christian Europe.
34:21Just as in Constantinople, the new city offered a degree of religious toleration to enable its own growth.
34:29Maya Savic has studied the politics and society of Sarajevo during Ottoman times and helped me spot evidence of the pecking order they introduced.
34:43Right now we are standing in the biggest mosque in Sarajevo.
34:47You can just see how the size of it and the splendor and the grandeur of all the arcs.
34:52It just tells you that it was kind of a center of trade life, of religious life of Sarajevo.
34:57Was this mosque built in a way to make a statement about Muslim grandeur and located right at the heart of the city?
35:07Was it a point that was being made?
35:08Well, certainly there was a point to be made, but in the early Ottoman period it wasn't really all about showing the grandeur of Islam as a religion
35:18and to present it in a good light to make it closer to the local people.
35:23But primarily they wanted to show the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire itself and what they were able to bring to this region that was in Bosnia at that time considered backwards.
35:36Built around the same time as the mosque was a Serbian Orthodox Church serving the new city's Christian population.
35:43So now we are at the old Orthodox Church and as you see it is much more humble than the mosque and this pathway is very narrow.
35:57Courtyard is not very big and you can't even see the bell tower from here because it is very small.
36:02So nothing compared to the grandeur of the mosque that we saw.
36:07But yet it's still very, they're still very close to each other.
36:09Yes, still very close to each other, just a couple of minutes walk from the mosque actually,
36:15which just shows you that the people were able to mix on the streets as they left their places of worship
36:21and it serves as evidence that people were free to practice their own religion in their own churches.
36:28Ottoman society was not completely blind to religious differences, far from it.
36:34Non-Muslims paid more tax.
36:36But the population accepted Ottoman authority and the supremacy of Islam in exchange for freedom from persecution.
36:46Why don't they want to persecute? Because they want their populations to produce.
36:52They want, they want their Jews to be business and traders.
36:56They were tolerated as long as they were obedient and peaceful and accepted the rule of Islam.
37:08The Jewish priests couldn't wear the typical Turkish hats called turbans and later on they were given a permission but they can be, they could only be yellow.
37:17They also had to pay taxes to set up a business and those taxes were much higher than the Muslims had to pay.
37:26Given the standards of today, the Ottomans are not tolerant.
37:32But the Ottoman Empire did not live in a moment of democratic equal rights. Nobody had those rights at the time.
37:45What the Ottoman Empire gave is the lack of persecution.
37:50For many people across the Balkans, Ottoman rule was unwanted and there were unsuccessful rebellions.
38:04For Christian Serbs, it's a period of hostile occupation that remains a strong and traumatic folk memory.
38:11CHOIR SINGS
38:38When it happened that the Turkish troops would fall into a Turkish territory,
38:47then the Turks did the same thing that they did on their feet, they did the same thing that they did on their feet,
38:51they did the same thing that they did on their feet.
38:54However, their life was terrible.
38:57In that period, I certainly didn't understand anyone from the Ottoman Empire in Europe from Austria.
39:05according to this version of history the Ottomans grabbed as much land as they could in Hungary
39:13Serbia and Bosnia and impose their Muslim faith on the towns and villages they conquered
39:19Ottoman toleration had its limits and Christian families had good reason to live in fear the
39:33Ottomans took Christian children to provide manpower within the Empire this practice called
39:40the defshirme seized young Christian boys Ottoman soldiers came in every few years depending on the
39:51need and levied one boy one Christian boy from every Christian family if they had only one boy
40:02they did not take and they did not take two boys from the same family so that I think there is an
40:09awareness that this is a very harsh levy they did not demand so many children from each village and
40:18leave the villagers to choose they would have gone round into the homes and taken those who seemed
40:27handsome and healthy the Christian boys were taken to Istanbul converted to Islam and prepared for a
40:40life in the service of the Ottoman state sometimes people wanted to get their sons into the defshirme
40:46knowing that they could go on and have glittering careers in the Ottoman army and beyond that the ones
40:54that were very smart could rise to become Grand Viziers of the Empire so like the Prime Minister if you
41:03will of the Empire in fact out of 45 early Grand Viziers only three four of them were of Turkish origin
41:11this was a direct infringement of the holiness of the Christian family and the idea that their
41:21children should be brought up as Muslims that was deeply resented and it wasn't just soldiers and
41:34bureaucrats recruited from Christian communities to serve the Muslim Sultan this is the sumptuous top copy
41:57palace in Istanbul built by Mehmed after his conquest of the city young Christian slave girls were brought
42:06here to play a key role at the heart of Imperial power the Ottomans adopted a practice of other Muslim
42:17dynasties who used concubines to bear the sultan's children the use of concubines at Muslim courts is a
42:27very well-established tradition a ruler is superior to all others in society if he has a wife that wife has a
42:35family and then that family is able to put pressure on the ruler in various different ways and there's
42:41also an implication of parity that there are two families which are in alliance through the marriage
42:46so that's why you have only slave women that is women without roots with women without strings attached
42:55who are recruited in order to provide procreation the history and mythology of what happened here the
43:06harem is synonymous with Ottoman rulers with images of concubines and luxury this apparent exoticism has
43:14captivated observers of the Ottoman court through the centuries it's part of the appeal of the current hit TV
43:21series but not all women in the harem were concubines and the reality was less glamorous life in the
43:32harem wasn't particularly exotic for the most part they spent their days chatting sitting around doing
43:41needlework perhaps doing more menial chores if they were junior members they were kept in a very
43:46constrained space for life it was actually a very tedious boring kind of life almost the polar opposite of
43:54the exotic image we tend to have in the West the hurry meant that Christian born slaves became the
44:04mothers of sultans the most famous would be hood and favorite of Sultan Suleiman in the 16th century
44:12who unusually even got to marry the Sultan like the devshirme the harem was an Ottoman institution that
44:22placed the Christian born right at the heart of the Sultan's court the priority was simple the needs of
44:30the Ottoman Empire came first before considerations of religion or ethnicity perhaps the most shocking
44:40proof of this was how the Sultan removed the possibility of any threat to his authority even from his own
44:48family Ottoman rulers were known for their lavish lifestyles and of course sumptuous buildings but the
44:58corridors of their palaces were also places of intrigue violence and murder
45:09there was no automatic right for the Sultan's eldest son to succeed to the throne instead it was a case of
45:17survival of the fittest on the death of the Sultan that tended to be a fight between his eligible sons to take over the Sultanate this meant that it was not necessarily the eldest son who inherited but it did mean that you tended to get a strong able man who fought his way to the top
45:39there are plenty of cases especially at the beginning of the 15th century where the Ottoman Empire has been on the brink of disappearing because of rivalries between siblings to guarantee his place on the throne at the age of just 19 Mehmed had secured the backing of the religious authorities with an order or fatwa sanctioning the murder of his brother
45:46and the second comes up with this idea of making sure that the Sultan who comes up with this idea of making sure that the Sultan who comes to the throne will not be sent and to do it
45:53his place on the throne at the age of just 19 mehmed had secured the backing of the religious
46:00authorities with an order or fatwa sanctioning the murder of his brother
46:08maybe the second comes up with this idea of making sure that the sultan who comes to the throne will
46:15not be subjected to that kind of rivalry and that kind of risk this is murder this is homicide you
46:22you don't you don't kill let alone kill your own brothers but this was politically expedient
46:29it can seem shocking but it was actually to avoid civil war with brothers backed by different
46:36factions contending for power dynastic struggles were a common problem for royal households in the
46:4615th century there was a long battle for the french throne known as the hundred years war
46:52and the houses of lancaster and york fought the war of the roses for the english throne
47:00when you look at europe during the same period what the ottomans do institutionally the european
47:06crowns do through poisoning so it was really some kind of an institutional savagery
47:13over a chaotic one that would have happened anyway but despite these policies crafted to protect ottoman
47:23power by the early 16th century there was an emerging threat to their growing influence
47:29it came not from christian europe but from the muslim middle east
47:47ottoman authority had never been accepted by neighboring muslim rulers
47:52the task of establishing supremacy fell to mehmed's grandson sultan selim the grim
47:59in his eight-year reign he would change the course of history and break the great taboo that muslims
48:06should not fight fellow muslims under selim the first selim the grim uh aptly named who is the ottoman
48:14ruler from 1512 to 1520 you have full-scale war the ottomans have to justify to themselves fighting fellow muslims
48:31the threat to selim came from the safavid dynasty which originated in modern day iran
48:37it's adopted a different branch of islam to the ottomans setting two rising powers on a collision course
48:57in 2009 i gained access to iran the ottomans like most of the muslim world today followed sunni islam
49:06here the tradition is shia islam
49:14this is the shrine of the son of the fourth imam now according to sunnis an imam is just someone
49:20who leads a congregation into prayer but it has a completely different meaning according to shias
49:27here imams are venerated as the rightful successors of the prophet muhammad
49:32for the majority of shia muslims only 12 imams are revered and it's believed that the 12th and final
49:40imam is hidden and will one day return he will come as a mahdi a sort of messiah-like figure and he'll be
49:49joined after a cataclysm on earth by jesus christ to dispense justice and peace in the world
49:56the ottomans had never been much interested in religious differences within islam
50:03but in 1501 the leader of the safavids declared shia islam his state's religion
50:09some of the shia religious fervor which followed spilled over to tribes on the ottoman eastern
50:16borderlands with iran the kazal bash lived in the east close to the iranian border
50:22they could identify more closely with shia safavid iran than they could with the distant ottomans
50:32they were disgruntled people the poorer peasants those who had lost their land and so they rebelled
50:42the kazal bash encouraged by the safavids staged an uprising
50:46there were all sorts of incidents and uprisings they spread westwards and the ottomans had to
50:54try and suppress put the lid on this threat to their legitimacy troops sent to deal with the uprising
51:00were forced to retreat in disarray emboldened the rebels headed north towards here istanbul they got
51:09worryingly close the kazal bash rebellions were eventually quashed and as the new sultan selim the
51:18grim was determined to deal with what he saw as the root cause of the trouble the shia safavids
51:29selim was clear there were to be no further challenges to his power but in islamic law there's no
51:36justification for going to war with a fellow muslim state the solution the shia safavids were declared
51:42heretics from the true path of islam
51:51selim's decision marked a turning point in the history of islam
51:58the ottoman empire starts developing a stronger sunni identity
52:05to fight against the iranian shiite identity so as a result it becomes more sunni it becomes stronger
52:18the decisive battle happened in 1514 close to the modern border of turkey and iran
52:27the ottomans won their victory shaped the islamic world of today
52:32the shia safavid threat receded but it did not disappear the division between the shia and the sunni
52:42is not an ottoman product yet during the ottoman reign the rivalry seems to have consolidated and
52:52those tensions are very much part of the middle east today
53:01the ottomans tamed the safavid's empire they did not conquer it
53:07but their triumph encouraged greater ambition to leadership of the muslim world
53:13it was the safavid challenge to their legitimacy to rule which drove the ottomans to claim the
53:19ultimate muslim authority it was a step that would prove to be every bit as significant as the
53:26conquest of constantinople with repercussions that echoed down the centuries to today
53:39the ottoman's south eastern lands bordered the 200-year-old mamluk empire of modern-day syria
53:46and egypt from its center in cairo the dynasty controlled the muslim holy sites of mecca and medina
53:58the mamlut considered it a mark of their status their precedence among
54:02muslim rulers that they were able to do this but they have been around for quite some time 200 years
54:09and their powers beginning to falter
54:16just like the old byzantine empire the weakened mamluks were vulnerable to attack
54:22the only thing that could protect them from the ottomans was that they were sunni muslim brothers
54:27but as policies like fratricide had shown for the ottomans religious doctrine was trumped by empire building
54:35selim's advisors came up with the pretext that there had been a mamluk safavid alliance
54:43making the mamluks heretics too and in 1516 he marched his army into syria
54:49when the ottomans met the mamluks in battle there was a kind of clash of cultures a mamluk would prove
55:06his valor by his swordsmanship and his horsemanship however the ottomans were trained to use muskets
55:15new gunpowder weapons a kind of weaponry that cavalry men often found demeaning and didn't want to use
55:23because it was dirty noisy and so as the ottomans saw their mamluk rivals from a distance they leveled
55:31their guns and they shot them
55:32the defeat of the mamluks in syria gave the ottomans the city of damascus
55:51with that came control over islam's third holiest site jerusalem
55:56but an even bigger prize awaited
56:07in 1517 ottoman troops marched into battle in egypt with their sights set on cairo
56:13cairo
56:21cairo was a huge metropolis one of the largest cities in the world at that time
56:26but on top of this whoever controlled cairo controlled the major islamic traditionally
56:33very prestigious centers of the muslim world mecca medina
56:37when the ottomans seized cairo it gave them control over the mamluk empire which stretched into africa and arabia
56:51what's more this conquest secured the keys to the muslim world's most important cities
56:59within the space of two years the empire had been transformed the ottoman sultans now ruled over a
57:06vast muslim population and it altered the equilibrium of the states which had until that point
57:11been predominantly christian it was a change that sealed the future direction of the empire
57:29the ottomans had made a remarkable journey
57:31from a tribe of nomadic horsemen in rural modern-day turkey
57:39to the rulers of a vast empire spanning three continents
57:50with their conquests had come leadership of the muslim faith
57:55how they responded to such a responsibility would impact the future of the islamic world
58:00and have repercussions for europe for centuries to come
58:15next time we reach the golden age of europe's muslim emperors
58:20in the 16th and 17th century the ottoman sultan really was the most powerful man in the world
58:25the ottomans march their armies right to the gates of vienna for a battle that would define the
58:31relationship between europe and islam and the ottomans face nationalism fundamentalism and rebellion
58:41and deal with tensions echoing those of today in egypt turkey and syria
58:54so
59:00so
59:04so
59:07so
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