Az ottománok
- Idézetek: - "...he returned to the Balkans, where he clashed with the Hungarians under King Sigismund. The Hungarian army, which was quite a strong one, was reinforced by a division of French knights. According to tradition the Hungarians were decimated at Nicopolis on 25th September 1396 because the French knights were too quick to summon to the attack, shouting "May the Heavens fall if we do not spit all Turks on our lances!" Bayazid is supposed to have answered this challenge coolly: "Quiet, boasters, I shall soon be feeding my horses oats on the high altar of St Peter's!" Tens of thousands of Hungarian prisoners were decapitated on the battlefield. News of Bayazid's overwhelming victory spread all over Asia Minor, carried by couriers who were accompanied by long trains of prisoners." - "When Süleyman died in 1566, the Ottoman Empire was a world power. Most of the great cities of Islam--Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad--were under the sultan's crescent flag. The Porte exercised direct control over Anatolia, the sub-Danubian Balkan provinces, Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Egypt, Mecca, and the North African provinces were governed under special regulations, as were satellite domains in Arabia and the Caucasus, and among the Crimean Tartars. In addition, the native rulers of Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) were vassals of the sultan." - "Suleyman had many titles; in inscriptions he calls himself: Slave of God, powerful with the power of God, deputy of God on earth, obeying the commands of the Qur'an and enforcing them throughout the world, master of all lands, the shadow of God over all nations, Sultan of Sultans in all the lands of Persians and Arabs, the propagator of Sultanic laws (Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye ), the tenth Sultan of the Ottoman Khans, Sultan, son of Sultan, Suleyman Khan. Slave of God, master of the world, I am Suleyman and my name is read in all the prayers in all the cities of Islam. I am the Shah of Baghdad and Iraq, Caesar of all the lands of Rome, and the Sultan of Egypt. I seized the Hungarian crown and gave it to the least of my slaves. He called himself the "master of the lands of Caesar and Alexander the Great," and later as simply, "Caesar." It's hard, of course, not to be slightly humbled by assertions of such greatness, and no ruler in the sixteenth century was more adept at diminishing the egos of all the other rulers surrounding him." - "Besides invasions and campaigns, Suleyman was a major player in the politics of Europe. He pursued an aggressive policy of European destabilization; in particular, he wanted to destabilize both the Roman Catholic church and the Holy Roman Empire. When European Christianity split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states, Suleyman poured financial support into Protestant countries in order to guarantee that Europe remain religiously and politically destabilized and so ripe for an invasion. Several historians, in fact, have argued that Protestantism would never have succeeded except for the financial support of the Ottoman Empire." - "While Ottoman culture flourishes during the reign of Selim II, Suleyman's son, the power of the state, internally and externally, began to perceptibly decline. Islamic historians believe that the decline was due to two factors: the decreased vigilance of the Sultan over the functions of government and their consequent corruption, and the decreased interest of the government in popular opinion. Western historians are not sure how to explain the decline after the death of Suleyman. A major factor seems to be a series of eccentric and sometimes insane Sultans all through the seventeenth century. When the Ottomans abandoned the practice of killing all rivals to the throne, they began to imprison them. The Sultanate, then, often fell to individuals who had been imprisoned for decades and, well, there was often no cream filling in those Twinkies. This led to the growth of the power of the bureaucracy and its consequent corruption (this does not fundamentally disagree with the Islamic version of Ottoman history). The decline in the Ottoman Empire in the Western tradition is also considerably determined by the ever-increasing expansion of the European powers. How much this played a direct part in the decline of the Ottomans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is difficult to determine, but there is no question that the last century of the Ottomans (19th), the principle historical factor in Ottoman decline was the hyper-aggressive expansion of European colonial powers. Whatever the reason, the Ottoman Empire begins its slow transformation under Selim II, the son of Suleyman."

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