Origins of the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal Empires
Overview
Origins of the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal Empires
The founding of the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal empires occurred within a number of historic contexts, including the expansion and intersection of Islam and Turco-Mongol power across Asia. The founder of each empire followed a tradition and imperative of conquest most famously practiced and immortalized by Genghis Khan during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Khans would-be successors continued this tradition, including the fourteenth-century west Asian conqueror Tamerlane. The goal of these conquerors was the conquest of everything in sight, with the world as the ultimate goal. While that was not a practical goal for Mughal, Ottoman, or Safavid rulers, global conquest was at least worthy of lip service. The founder of each of these three empires embraced conquest without question, practicing it as part of a cultural norm or ritual, like members of a fraternity mindlessly getting drunk. They didn’t think much beyond conquest. Accordingly, each founder of these three empires also came from a lineage of conquerors.
Learning Objectives
- Describe the origins of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires as outgrowths of Turco-Mongol power in late medieval Eurasia.
Key Terms and Concepts
Osman: founding ruler of the Ottoman empire, and the source of its name, he led a small kingdom in northwest Anatolia, the core or homeland of the Ottoman empire
Ismail: founding ruler of the Safavid empire
Babur: founding ruler of the Mughal empire
Along with being products of a culture of conquest, the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid empires all had viable territorial cores. The Ottoman empire made Anatolia its base, Ismail established the Safavid dynasty by taking over Persia, and Babur forged the Mughal empire by taking over northern and central India.
Osman was the first of these three empire builders. In the early fourteenth century, he founded what would become the Ottoman empire in northwest Anatolia. His people were one of a number of Turkish peoples who lived across Asia. The Ottoman empire rose in power with the decline of the Seljuk Turks during the fourteenth century. From that territorial base the Ottoman Turks expanded westward across Anatolia, to the Bosporus and Dardanelle Straits, and then across those straits into southeastern Europe. In the process of this expansion, they conquered the Orthodox Christian Byzantine empire, with the capture of Constantinople in 1453, known in the Ottoman empire as Istanbul.
Ismail established the Safavid empire through his conquest of part of Persia, the core of the Safavid empire.
Babur, who founded the Mughal empire, was descended from both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Babur was the latest in a succession of invaders who had attempted to conquer India. During the early eleventh century Mahmud—ruler of the Ghazni state in what is now present-day Afghanistan—moved east across the Indus River into northeastern India. From the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries the Delhi Sultanate controlled northern India. While each made progress into northern India, they were stopped from advancing into southern India by various Hindu states. Hinduism had emerged as the primary religion of India with the development of Aryan culture. This animosity between Hindus and Muslims was also the defining division of the Mughal empire.
Each of these three empires reached its apex during the sixteenth and/or seventeenth centuries, and then began to decline, each at its own pace. Similar sets of factors contributed to the rise and then the fall of each. During the eighteenth century the Safavid empire disintegrated, and the Mughal empire was eclipsed by advancing British interests. The Ottoman empire held on for nearly two centuries before giving way to a final nationalist movement after the First World War, which resulted in the establishment of Turkey.
This expansion distinguished the Ottoman empire from the Mughal and the Safavid empires in that the Ottoman empire was the only one of the three to expand into Europe, influencing various southeast European peoples. The Ottoman empire’s expansion constituted a conduit through which Islam spread. The Ottoman empire also came to incorporate more ethnically and religiously diverse peoples as part of this expansion.
In their study of empires historians invariably pose the question of when an empire peaks. This question cannot be answered objectively. Any answer is a matter of interpretation. For example, the apex of an empire’s fortunes could be measured in years, decades, or even centuries, as represented by the metaphoric peak or plateau. Arguably the Ottoman empire peaked during the sixteen and the seventeenth centuries, as marked by its two most ambitious military operations: the Ottoman sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. The failures of both sieges define the high point of Ottoman imperial power, although that was not immediately recognized as such. With respect to its longer and more gradual decline, beginning arguably at the end of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman stood apart from the Mughal and the Safavid empires.
Safavid expansion was constrained by the Ottoman empire to the west and the Mughal empire to the east. For Safavid rulers, expansion was more a matter of regaining lost ground than taking over new territory, such as an entire empire outside of the Islamic world. These territorial struggles were exacerbated by the division between the Shi’ite identity of the Safavid empire and the Sunni predominance in the Mughal and the Ottoman empires.
The reign of Akbar(1556 – 1605) marked the apex of the Mughal empire. Akbar implemented the most ambitions in the effort to bring together Hindus and Muslims in a harmonious synthesis that would be a new type of Indian civilization. Arguably India still has not achieved that today, as made clear by the 1947 partition of Muslims and Hindus into the newly independent nations of Pakistan and India. Hindu kingdoms across southern India blocked Mughal expansion.
The similarities and parallels in the origins of these three empires continue with their development and fates. These west Asian empires represent a different direction of development and orientation during the early modern period. In their origins lie the seeds of these distinctions, along with the seeds of their failure to keep up with the emerging European powers.
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Title Image - Painting of Shah Ismail I by unknown medieval Venetian artist. Attribution: Uffizi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Provided by: Wikipedia. Location: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shah_Ismail_I.jpg. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
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