Notes

Chapter 22 Concepts:
1. The Osman Turks started on the Anatolian peninsula in Turkey. As the Seljuk Turks declined, the Osman began to expand and the Ottoman Dynasty began. The Ottoman empire was the Muslim empire at that time. They were Sunni Muslims and they were responsible for guiding the flock and keeping Islamic law. They were tolerant of non-Muslims, but they had to pay a tax. The Safavid dynasty started with Shah Ismail and they started off in Azerbaijan near the Caspian Sea. They were also Muslims, but they were Shiite Muslims which caused conflicts between him and Suleiman of the Ottomans. Babur was the founder of the Mughals and he united the Hindu and Muslim kingdoms of India. He took the Khyber Pass in northwest India and the city of New Delhi in North India. The ruling class was all Muslim but the commoners were all Hindus. This didn't cause a conflict until Aurangzeb came in and tried to convert everyone to Islam which caused social unrest.

2. Before the Mongols took over, the Islamic heartlands were all separated into the Abbasids, Seljuks and Buyids. The Abbasids had control over North Africa, all of Saudi Arabia, and parts of present day Turkey. They came after the Umayyads and their capital was at Baghdad. The Seljuks took over the Abbasids, and ruled over the same area in the 9th century. They were also Turkish. The Buyids were around the northern border or Saudi Arabia and they took control of Baghdad around the 970s.

8. Like the Byzantine Empire as a whole, Constantinople had fallen on hard times in the centuries before the Ottoman conquest in 1453. But soon after Mehmed II's armies captured and sacked the city, the Ottoman ruler set about restoring its ancient glory. He had the cathedral of Saint Sophia converted into one of the grandest mosques in the Islamic world, and new mosques and palaces were built throughout the city .This construction benefited greatly from architectural advances the Ottomans derived from the Byzantine heritage. Aqueducts were built from the surrounding hills to supply the growing population with water, markets were reopened, and the city's defenses were repaired.

9. Despite internal revolts and periodic conflicts with such powerful foreign rivals as the Russian, Austrian, Spanish and Safavid empire,s the Ottomans ruled into the 20th century. Yet the empire had reached the limits of its expansive power centuries earlier and by the late 17th century the long retreat from Russia, Europe and the Arab lands had begun. In a sense some contraction was inevitable. Even when it was at the height of its power, the empire was too large to be maintained given the resource base that the sultans had at their disposal and the primitives state of transportation and communications in the preindustrial era.

10. Both the Abbasid and the Ottoman Empires suffered from weak emperors addicted to luxury, the empire becoming too large to control, taxation issues, and peasant rebellions. However, while the Abbasid decline was the mostly the result of tension and conflict between potential rulers, the Ottoman Empire also suffered from a decline in the effectiveness of the administrative system, viziers gaining too much power, military leaders gaining too much power which led to the decline in the sultans' power, and lack of new land to conquer, which led to current land being conquered by Ottoman enemies.

11. The Safavid dynasty arose from the struggles of rival Turkic nomadic groups in the wake of the Mongol and Timurid invasions. They had their origins in a family of Sufi mystics and religious preachers, whose shrine center was at Ardabil near the Caspian Sea. In the early 14th century, one of these Sufis, Sail al-Din, who have the dynasty its name, began a militant campaign to purify and reform Islam and spread Muslim teachings among the Turkic tribes of the region.

12. In the chaos that followed the collapse of Mongol authority, Sail al-Din and other Safavid Sufi leaders gained increasing support. But as the number of the Red Heads (as the Safavids' followers were called because of their distinctive head gear) grew, and as they began to preach Shiite doctrines, their enemies multiplied. After decades of fierce local struggles in which three successive Safavid leaders perished, a surviving Sufi commander, Ismail, led his Turkic followers to a string of victories on the battlefield. In 1501, Ismail's armies captured the city of Tabriz, where he was proclaimed shah, or emperor.

13. In August 1514, at Chaldiran in northwest Persia, the armies of the two empires met in one of the most fateful battles in Islamic history. Chaldiran was more than a battle between the two most powerful dynasties in the Islamic world at the time. It was a clash between the champions of the Shiite and Sunni variants of Islam. The religious fervor with which both sides fought the battle was intensified by the long standing Safavid persecutions of the Sunnis and the slaughtering of Shiite living in Ottoman territories by the forces of the Ottoman sultan, Selim. The battle also demonstrated the importance of muskets and filed cannon in the gunpowder age.

14. Of all of the Safavid shahs, Abbas 1, known also as Abbas the Great, made the most extensive use of the youths who were captured in Russia and then educated and converted to Islam. They not only came to from the backbone of his military forces but were granted provincial governorships and high offices at court. The Persians had artillery and handguns long before the arrival of the Portuguese by sea . But Abbas and his successors showed little reluctance to call on the knowledgeable but infidel Europeans for assistance in their wars with the Ottomans. By the end of his reign, Abbas had built up a standing army of nearly 40,000 troops and an elite bodyguard. These measures to strengthen his armies and his victories on the battlefield appeared to promise security for the Safavid domains for decades to come.