advantage of the retirement of the Turks to raise an army and recapture Lippa. Before the surrender of the city, however, he was murdered by Ferdinand’s orders on strong suspicion of treachery. The campaign of 1552 was disastrous for the Austrians; the Turks, under the command of Ahmed Pasha, defeated them at Szegedin and captured in turn Veszprém, Temesvár, Szolnok and other places. Their victorious career was only checked, in October, by the raising of the siege of Erlau. In the spring of 1553 the victories of the Persians called for the sultan’s presence in the East; a truce for six months was now concluded between the envoys of Ferdinand and the pasha of Budapest, and Austrian ambassadors were sent to Constantinople to arrange a peace. But the negotiations dragged on without result; the war continued with hideous barbarities on both sides; and it was not until the 1st of June 1562 that it was concluded by the treaty signed at Prague by Ferdinand, now emperor. Suleiman kept the possessions he had won by the sword, Temesvár, Szolnok, Tata and other places in Hungary; Transylvania was assigned to John Sigismund, the Habsburg claim to interference being categorically denied; Ferdinand bound himself to pay, not only the annual tribute of 30,000 ducats, but all the arrears that had meanwhile accumulated. Even this treaty, however, was but an apparent settlement. A year passed before the Latin and Turkish texts of the treaty were harmonized; and meanwhile irregular fighting continued on all the borders. In 1564 Ferdinand died, and was succeeded by Maximilian II. The new emperor attacked Tokaj, which was in Turkish possession; the tribute had been allowed again to fall into arrears; and to all this was added that Mahommed Sokolli, the new grand vizier (1565), pressed for new war to wipe out the disgrace of the failure of the Ottoman attack on Malta (May-September 1565). In May 1566 the war broke out, Suleiman, now seventy-two years old, again leading his army in person. In August he laid siege to Szigetvár with 100,000 men; but on the 5th of September, while preparations were being made for a final assault, the sultan died. His death was, however, kept secret, and on the 8th the fortress fell.
The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent marked the zenith of the Ottoman power. At the time of his death the Turkish Empire extended from near the frontiers of Germany to the frontiers of Persia. The Black Sea was practically a Turkish lake, only the Circassians on the east coast retaining their independence; and as a result of the wars with Persia the whole Euphrates valley, with Bagdad, had fallen into the sultan’s power, now established on the Persian Gulf. The Venetians had been driven from the Morea and the islands of the Archipelago; and, except a strip of the Dalmatian coast and the little mountain state of Montenegro, the whole of the Balkan peninsula was in Turkish hands. In the Mediterranean, Crete and Malta yet survived as outposts of Christendom; but the northern coasts of Africa from Egypt to Morocco acknowledged the supremacy of the sultan, whose sea power in the Mediterranean had become a factor to be reckoned with in European politics, threatening not only the islands, but the very heart of Christendom, Italy itself, and capable—as the alliance with France against Charles V. had shown—of being thrown with decisive weight into the balance of European rivalries.
The power of the Ottomans at sea was maintained during
this period by a series of notable captains, such as Khair-ed-din
The Turkish
Sea Power.
and his son Hassan, Pialé, Torgud, Sali Reis and
Piri Reis. Of these the two first are separately
noticed (see Barbarossa). Pialé, a Croatian who
had been brought up in the imperial harem and succeeded
Sinan as capudan-pasha, crowned a series of victories over the
galleys of Andrea Doria by the capture of the island of Jerba,
off Tripoli (July 31, 1560). For this he was rewarded with
the hand of one of the sultan’s grand-daughters. He later
became the second vizier of the empire, and, as a supporter of
Sokolli, was in power till his death in 1575. Torgud, also
the son of Christian parents, was a native of the sanjak of
Mentesha in Asia Minor, and began his career as a soldier in
the Ottoman, sea service. After spending some time as a
Genoese galley-slave, he turned corsair and became the terror
of the Mediterranean coasts. He seized Mahdia, a strong post
on a tongue of land about 43 m. south of Susa in Tunisia, and
made this the centre of his piracies till, during his absence
raiding the Spanish coasts, it was bombarded and destroyed
by an expedition sent by Charles V. (September 10, 1550).
Torgud was now summoned to Constantinople to answer for
piracies committed on the friendly galleys of Venice; but he
sailed instead to Morocco, and there for two years defied the
sultan’s authority. But Suleiman, who needed the aid of the
corsairs against Malta, pardoned him, and he was given the
command of the expedition against Tripoli, which he captured.
He now turned against Corsica, captured Bastia (August 1553)
and on his return to Constantinople, laden with booty and
slaves, chastised the insurgent Albanians. He was rewarded
by Suleiman with the governorship of Tripoli, which he held
till his death. He was killed during the unsuccessful attack on
Malta, which he commanded (1565). Sali Reis, also by birth
a Christian of Asia Minor, was likewise successful as a corsair;
he distinguished himself especially at the capture of Tunis,
and succeeded Hassan Barbarossa as beylerbey of Algiers.
Other captains carried the Turkish arms down the Arabian and Persian gulfs far out into the Indian Ocean. Of these the most remarkable was Piri Reis, nephew of Kamil Reis, the famous corsair who, under Bayezid II., had swept the Aegean and Mediterranean. Piri sailed into the Persian Gulf, took Muscat, and laid siege to Ormuz. But the approach of the Portuguese fleet put him to flight; some of his vessels were wrecked; and on his return by way of Egypt he was arrested at Cairo and executed. He had compiled a sea-atlas (the Bahrije) of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, every nook and cranny of which he had explored, with an account of the currents, soundings, landing-places, inlets and harbours.
Another literary seaman of this period was Sidi Ali, celebrated under his poetic pseudonym of Katibi (or Katibi Rumi, to distinguish him from the Persian poet of the same name). He was no more successful than Piri or his successor Murad in fighting the elements and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf; but he was happier in his fate. Driven, with the remnant of his ships, into the Indian Ocean, he landed with fifty companions on the coast of India and travelled back to Turkey by way of Sind, Baluchistan, Khorassan and Persia. He wrote an account of this three years' journey, for which he was rewarded by Suleiman with an office and a pension. He was the author also of a mathematical work on the use of the astrolabe and of a book (Muhit, “the ocean”) on the navigation of the Indian seas.
At the close of Suleiman’s reign the Turkish army numbered
nearly 200,000 men, including the Janissaries, whose total he
Reforms of
Suleiman I.
almost doubled, raising them to 20,000. He
improved the laws and institutions established by
his predecessors and adapted them to the requirements
of the age; to him are due important modifications in
the feudal system, aimed at maintaining the fiefs in a really
effective condition. The codes of law were by him revised and
improved, and he was the first sultan to enter into relations
with foreign states. In 1534 Jean de La Forêt, a knight of
St John of Jerusalem, came to Constantinople as first
permanent French ambassador to the Porte, and in February
1535 were signed the first Capitulations (q.v.) with France.
A short sketch of the administration and state of the country at this time may find place here. Successively transferred from Brusa Ottoman Polity in the 16th Century. to Adrianople and thence to Constantinople, the seat of government was at first little more than the camp of a conqueror. After the conquest of the imperial city the sultans began to adopt the pomp and splendour century of eastern sovereigns, and largely copied the system, ready to hand, of the Byzantine emperors. Affairs of state were at first discussed at the imperial divan, where the great dignitaries were convened at appointed hours. Until the reign of Mahommed the Conqueror the sultan presided in person; but a rough Anatolian peasant penetrating one day to the council and exclaiming, “Which of you might be the sultan? I've come to make a complaint!” it
