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The Transfer of Military Technology and Tactics Between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, C COLIN IMBER THE TRANSFER OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS BETWEEN WESTERN EUROPE AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, C. 1400-C. 1600 It was once common for European historians to describe the Ottomans as inherently incompetent in military as much as in governmental and cultural matters, and to attribute Ottoman success in war to the employ- ment of European “renegades.” While this view is now largely discred- ited, it still exercises a lingering influence and still tempts historians to take an oversimplified view of intellectual, technical and cultural exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. It also conceals a problem with the notion of “Europe” itself. Historians generally use the term to refer specifically to western and central Europe, but even accepting this definition, “Europe” was not a homogeneous entity and so to refer simply to “European” influences on the Ottoman Empire is largely meaningless. It is necessary rather to establish where in Europe the influences were coming from. Another tendency has been to regard cases where the Ottomans did not adopt European technologies or prac- tices as examples of Ottoman “failure,” without considering the context. In the military sphere, for example, the Ottomans before 1600 “failed” to adopt the tactic of deploying disciplined battlefield formations of pike- men and arquebusiers which had proved effective in Western Europe. In reality, however, this formation would have been useless for warfare in the mountains and desert fringes on the Ottoman eastern and southern My thanks to Professor Daniel Szechi for his invaluable comments on the first draft of this article. Turcica, 51, 2020, p. 9-36. doi: 10.2143/TURC.51.0.3288385 © 2020 Turcica. Tous droits réservés. 10 COLIN IMBER borders1 or on the steppes to the north of the Black Sea; and on their western front, in Hungary, no Ottoman army was to encounter such a formation as the major component in an enemy army before 1596.2 “Failure,” in fact, may indicate no more than lack of need. There are other problems, too, with the old view. It disregards the fact that the geographical situation of the Ottoman Empire ensured that it absorbed influences from the east as much as from the west – among the weapons in use in Ottoman armies, Damascus steel blades and the composite bow had their origin in Asia and not in Europe – and, secondly, it excludes any possibility that Europeans might have learned anything from the Ottomans. GUNS AND GUNPOWDER Nonetheless, however wrongheaded the lingering assessment of “the Turk” as almost wholly dependent on European expertise, Ottoman mili- tary technology owed much to influences coming from the west. Most obviously, the Ottomans needed to adapt to the “gunpowder revolution” which, during the course of the fifteenth century, was to transform the nature of warfare. Gunpowder and incendiary weapons had appeared in the Middle East before 1300,3 and it is not inconceivable that the Mon- gols had brought with them firearms from China, but it was not until the Ottomans adopted gunpowder weapons in the early fifteenth century that their use became widespread in the region. The formula for gunpowder 1. In 1534, the Safavid Shah Tahmāsb almost annihilated the invading Ottomans by consistently refusing to engage in battle, instead luring the sultan into a futile pursuit, until the severe cold and snow and lack of provisions forced him to retreat, with heavy losses of men and munitions, through the Zagros Mountains to lowland Iraq. Tahmāsb used the same tactic to thwart the Ottoman invasions of 1548 and 1554. In 1554, he rejected advice to make a surprise attack on the Ottoman army, on the grounds that the sultan had come with a large army, and since a large army is “an enemy of provisions”, the sultan would “go to hell” without his assistance. Events proved him to be correct (Tazkira-e Shāh Ṭahmāsb, p. 69). Koca Sinan Pasha’s success in subduing Highland Yemen between 1569 and 1571 owed as much to his negotiating with and bribing tribal leaders as it did to his skill in fighting in a hostile terrain. (al-Nahrawālī, al-Barq al-Yamānī). 2. The first Ottoman encounter with this tactic was probably, in fact, after the battle of Mohács in 1526. For a day after the battle, when the surviving Hungarian cavalry had fled the battlefield and the Hungarian infantry had been massacred, a company of “several thousand” Landsknechts and Bohemian infantrymen resisted Ottoman attacks before finally succumbing to a Janissary siege. This was presumably a pike formation that suc- cessfully kept the Ottoman cavalry at bay (Sanuto, I Diarii, XLII, 1895, p. 647). 3. Al-Hasan, Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 106-120. MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS 11 seems first to have arrived in the Middle East from China,4 but its use in firearms, if not the formula itself, evidently reached the Ottomans via the Balkan Peninsula.5 References to the earliest Ottoman firearms are few, but it is clear that by the second decade of the fifteenth century the Otto- mans had begun to use cannon in sieges: in his account of Murad II’s assault on Constantinople in 1422, the contemporary Ioannes Kananos records the Ottomans using large, and also largely ineffective, “bom- bards” against the walls of the city.6 He does not describe the weapons, but they were perhaps breach loading, wrought iron cannon such as were in use in parts of Western Europe, and may, in fact, have followed Central European prototypes: writing in the 1460s, the Athenian historian Chalkokondyles was to claim that Murad had with him cannoneers from “Germany.”7 By the mid-century, Ottoman gunners were familiar with both the production and use of cannon. The Burgundian Waleran de Wavrin who commanded the galleys stationed on the Bosphorus in 1444 in an attempt to stop Murad II and his army crossing the Straits to encounter the invad- ing Hungarian army, describes how “camels came down from the moun- tain … carrying … metal from which cannon and bombards were cast on the following night. Next morning, they fired these at our galleys.” This seems to be the first record of what was to become a common Ottoman practice of casting bronze cannon in the field. At the same time Waleran noticed that, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, the Genoese of Pera had supplied the Ottoman grand vizier Halil Pasha with “cannon and culverins,” which Halil’s men fired at the Burgundian and Byzantine galleys.8 This is the first record of a transfer of Italian weapons to the Ottomans but, given the long standing alliance between Genoa and the Ottoman sultans, Murad II’s personal friendships with the Genoese lords in the Aegean, and Genoese maritime assistance to the sultan in 1422 and again in 1425, it seems unlikely that this would have been the first delivery of Genoese war materials. It is clear, however, that the 4. Chase, Firearms, p. 84. 5. Petrović, “Firearms,” p. 164-194. 6. On the development of Ottoman artillery in the fifteenth century and for further references, see Heywood, “Notes on the production,” p. XVI. 7. Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army, p. 337. 8. Wavrin, Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre. English translation of this passage in Imber, The Crusade of Varna, p. 125-129; Heywood (“Notes on the production”) was the first to recognise the significance of this passage. 12 COLIN IMBER sultan was not wholly dependent on Genoese expertise: the chief gunner in the operation on the Bosphorus was a Turk called Saruca9 and not an Italian, and the practice of casting cannon in the field, such as De Wavrin had observed, was clearly not new in 1444 and was to be a standard feature of Ottoman warfare in the second half of the fifteenth century. Two years later, in 1446, Murad II set up another field foundry to pro- duce the bronze cannon that destroyed the Hexamilion wall across the Isthmus of Corinth.10 The Hungarian wars of the 1440s did, however, reveal deficiencies in Ottoman knowledge and use of firearms. János Hunyadi’s defeat of Şihabeddin Pasha at the battle of the Ialomiţa river in 1442 was the first time that an Ottoman army had encountered the Hungarian tactic of form- ing a mobile fortification – the Wagenburg – of carts, shielding field- cannon, archers and infantrymen carrying portable firearms, and it was this tactic that brought the Hungarians close to victory in the campaigns of the Zlatitsa Pass and Varna in 1443 and 1444. The Ottomans, it appears, used a limited number of gunpowder weapons during these cam- paigns – an Ottoman soldier apparently shot Hunyadi’s horse from under him at the battle of the Zlatitsa Pass11 – but the Hungarian superiority in artillery was clear, and provided the impetus for the subsequent Ottoman development of both gunpowder weapons and battlefield tactics.12 Artillery became a crucial factor in all Ottoman campaigns following the accession of Mehmed II in 1451. Central to this development was Mehmed’s establishment of the Imperial Gun Foundry in Galata across the Golden Horn from Istanbul, shortly after the Genoese surrender of the town in 1453, and very probably on the site of an earlier Genoese foundry.13 This was not the only site for the production of cannon, but it was, and remained, the largest. Information about the foundry and 9. Gazavāt-i Sultân Murâd b. Mehemmed Hân; English translation in Imber, The Crusade of Varna, p. 84. 10. Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, p. 181. Aşıkpaşazade’s comment that, after his seizure of Kastamonu in 1423, Murad II “put its copper mines to work” hints that the sultan wished to procure copper for the manufacture of bronze cannon: Ibid., p.
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