I have now reached the birth and rise of the Ottoman empire.
I used to think that the story of the rise of Islam was linear. It rose in Arabia, from the mind of Mohammed, spread across the Mediterranean chopping the remnants of the Roman empire in ever small pieces. But the story is way more complex.
As I have written above, after the rise of the Caliphate it self imploded, from the force of its own surprising success. Mirroring the success of Alexander the Great. Turning previously well run provinces into an ever increasingly dysfunctional mess. Step by step the Byzantine empire clawed back control until, under Basil II, (around 1000 AD) the Byzantinian empire was almost back to its size it had had prior to Mohammed. It still didn’t control North Africa. But it looked like it was only a matter of time.
After Basil II though, the empire descended into a series of civil wars. In the middle of all this Turkic step nomads (not united) start pouring down from the Asian steppes looking for pasture lands. These are nomadic and as such only value things they can carry with them. They have zero interest in conquering anything or ruling any empire. Their way of life is basically an extortion racket. They continually harass the farming community along their migration routes until they pay them off.
It’s good to explain the differences in cultures between step nomads and agrarian societies. In agrarian societies your neighbours can’t run away, and neither can you. Not without losing everything you own. You are forced to compromise and figure out ways to get along. This leads to stable conservative societies that care a lot about tradition and ritual.
Step nomads who don’t get along with their neighbours can just move. Life is fundamentally fluid and constantly changing. They have zero incentive to give a shit about anyone outside their tribe. But even that’s iffy. Alliances are constantly broken and reformed. Step nomads will make any promise and then wheel around and break them at the first opportunity. Because these extreme lack of trust between them, and the constant bickering and infighting, being able to rapidly fuck off when necessary was important to them. They could not afford to become sedentary. When they would besiege a walled city, after the city surrender, the step nomads would come in, remove all movable wealth, not take the remaining food (because they wanted to come back later), not unnecessarily kill anyone, let the rulers stay in power, and fuck off, until next time.
So here’s a bunch of Turkic step nomads on the Iranian plain harassing and annoying Byzantine settlements in Anatolia. So how did these guys end up forming one of the greatest empires in history?
It’s this guy who does it; Nikephoros III Botaneiates.
His emperor Michael the VII puts him in charge of protecting Anatolia from the Turkic raiders. He decides to make a play for being crowned emperor, dismantles the defences completely, talks the Turk Tzachas (it’s way more complicated than this, but let’s keep it simple) into joining him. In return Tzachas gets to control a bunch of Byzantine cities. Nikephoros III Botaneiates gambles that after he’s emperor it’ll be easy to just go in and retake the cities. The Turks aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with these cities, but accept. In defence the Norman (Viking) mercenaries are hired led by Roussel de Bailleul, who culturally behave very similarly to the step nomads. 100% opportunistic.
The first chance the Normans get they turn on the Byzantinians and set up their own kingdom. Something they have already done in Sicily. They had no interest in keeping it. It was a tried and tested method, where they would seize land and then sell it back to the king. But the empire was broke.
In this mess the Bulgars smell Byzantine weakness and strike in the Balkans. Cutting off the emperor's last access to any cash.
Nikephoros III Botaneiates comes out on top and becomes the Byzantine emperor. But at a huge cost to the empire. There’s nothing they can do now to take back what they gave to the Turks. Their focus now has to be on
The Turks convert to Islam and copy the methods of rule from the Persians, Found the Seljuk Empire and start behaving like a settled empire. Nobody saw that coming. I’m sure, least of all, the Turks.
There you have it. The Muslims were destined to become a second rate group, slowly being gobbled up by their more organised neighbours, and then just before sliding irreversably into oblivion, they were revived at the last moment by a new empire, that seemingly popped into existence out of nowhere.
en.wikipedia.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzachas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roussel_de_Bailleul
en.wikipedia.org
https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/2019/07/23/episode-195-king-of-the-ashes/