The role of the Ottoman leadership
The Ottomans on the stage of history:
At that time, the Ottoman Turks emerged on the stage of history. Mehmed II, son of Murad, at the age of twenty-four, conquered Constantinople, the mighty capital of the Byzantine Empire, in 753 AH (1453 CE). This renewed hope for Islam and revived the spirits of Muslims. The Turks, and the Ottomans in particular, were considered trustworthy leaders of the Muslim world, capable of restoring Muslim power and standing in the world. Their conquest of Constantinople, which had resisted Muslims for eight centuries (1), was proof of their competence and strength, their mastery of warfare, their excellent military leadership, their superiority over contemporary nations in weaponry, and their application of both scientific and practical power. All of this is indispensable for the Muslim community.
Muhammad al-Fatih excelled in the art of war:
According to Draper, Muhammad al-Fatih was knowledgeable in mathematics and adept at applying it to military art. He had prepared himself for this conquest, utilizing all the military equipment available in his time.
Baron Carra de Vaux said in his book “Thinkers of Islam” in the first part, when translating the biography of Muhammad al-Fatih:
This conquest was not granted to Mehmed the Conqueror by chance, nor was it facilitated simply by the weakness of the Byzantine state. Rather, this sultan had been planning the necessary measures for it beforehand, and had used all available means to achieve it.
He was a man of great scientific power in his time, for cannons were then a recent invention. He worked on assembling the largest cannons that could be assembled at that time, and he commissioned a Hungarian engineer to build a cannon whose weight was such that the ball it fired weighed
It weighed 300 kilograms, and its range was more than a mile. It was said that it took 700 men to pull this cannon, and it took about two hours to load it. When Muhammad the Conqueror marched to conquer Constantinople, he had three hundred thousand fighters under his command, and he had a huge artillery force. His fleet besieging the town from the sea consisted of (120) warships. He was the one who, from his own ingenuity, conceived of pulling a part of the fleet from the land to the Gulf and slipped (70) ships onto grease-coated timbers, which he had launched into the sea from the direction of Qasim Pasha (1 ).
Advantages of the Turkish people:
The Muslim Turkish people, under the leadership of the Ottomans, possessed unique advantages that distinguished them from other Muslim peoples at that time, and by which they deserved the leadership of the Muslims:
Firstly, it was a rising, enthusiastic, and ambitious people with a spirit of jihad, and it was sound – by virtue of its upbringing and recent history of naturalness and simplicity in life – from the moral and social ills that afflicted the Islamic nations in the East in their fatal way.
Secondly, he had the military power with which he could extend the material and spiritual control of Islam, repel the aggression and hostility of opposing nations, and assume leadership of the world. The Ottomans, at the beginning of their state, took the initiative to use military equipment, especially firearms, and they took an interest in cannons and adopted the latest modern war machines. They took care of the art of war, organizing and mobilizing armies until they became undisputed leaders in the manufacture of war, and the perfect example and model for Europe.
They ruled over three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. They possessed the Islamic East from Persia to Morocco, conquered Asia Minor, and penetrated deep into Europe, reaching the walls of Vienna . They were undisputed masters of the Mediterranean Sea, transforming it into an Ottoman lake with no foreign presence around it. The representative of Tsar Peter the Great at the Sublime Porte wrote that the Sultan considered the Black Sea his private domain and forbade any foreigner from entering it. They also built a mighty fleet that Europe could not even rival.
The empires of the Pope, Venice, Spain, Portugal, and Malta all joined forces to crush him in the year 945 AH – 1547 AD – but their large numbers did not help them at all.
During the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire combined land and sea sovereignty with political and spiritual authority.
The borders of the Ottoman state, under the rule of Suleiman, reached the Tuna and Sawa (riverine) regions in the north, the source of the Nile and the Indian Ocean in the south, the Caucasus Mountains in the east, and the Atlas Mountains in the west, an area of more than 400,000 square miles.
The Ottoman fleet consisted of more than 2,000 warships, and the eastern part of the Sea of Severn, the Sea of the Adriatic, the Sea of Marmara, the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf was in its possession and under its control.
Every famous city in the ancient world, except Rome, was included within the borders of the Ottoman state (1) . All of Europe trembled in fear of them, and its great kings submitted to their kings. The people of the land refrained from ringing their church bells out of respect for the Turks when they came to them. The Pope ordered that a feast be celebrated and that prayers of thanksgiving be held for three days when news of Muhammad the Conqueror reached him.
