The curved sword of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror.
Both sides of the blade carry gold-inlaid thuluth inscriptions, praising Allah, blessing the Sultan, and declaring the enemies’ necks as its sheath.
Now on display at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul.
https://x.com/dailyturkic/status/2040196117682373063?s=46&t=V4TqIkKwXmHjXV6FwyGPfg
I wanted to ask this because on the Wiki page Ottoman killing of civilians are mentioned. Unfortunately people overall are very biased and still mad at the Ottomans therefore this place seems the best to ask. Thanks in advance!
Selim the Grim, known in his time as Selim Shah or in Western literature as "Selim the Terrible," was the first Marshal and Sultan to actively employ "Field Artillery" as a transformative force in pitch battles, changing the course of global warfare. Prior to him, the use of cannons by his grandfather, Mehmed the Conqueror, at the Battle of Otlukbeli had marked a historical first. Although cannons were used on the field earlier at the Battle of Crécy (1346) in Europe, they were primarily intended to frighten horses with noise; "Otlukbeli" represents the first systematic use of field artillery in a pitched battle.
The Ottoman artillery corps turned the cannon into a barricade and an offensive power positioned ahead of the infantry—not just for sieges, but in open field combat—establishing this discipline far earlier than in Europe. This brings us to the strategic relationship between Napoleon and Selim the Grim.
At the Battle of Chaldiran, Selim did not spread his cannons across the entire front. Instead, he concentrated all firepower at the center, taking a defensive stance to force the Safavids into a counter-move. The sudden Safavid charge was shattered by the combined fire of the artillery and the Janissaries’ muskets. The Safavid cavalry, which had launched a heavy assault on the left flank, was lured into the kill zone of the cannons and completely annihilated.
The core of Napoleon’s warfare philosophy was to forcibly create a "decisive moment" in his favor. He achieved this not by using every element of the army equally, but by over-strengthening a single point to break the enemy there. This is exactly what Selim did at Chaldiran. The Ottoman army was not "strong" along the entire line; the center was overwhelmingly powerful. Artillery, Janissaries, and defensive fortifications were piled there. Contemporary chronicles by İdris-i Bitlisî and Kemalpaşazade explicitly emphasize that Selim "concentrated the weight of the army at a single point." This approach is the intellectual peer of Napoleon’s Grande Batterie. Napoleon famously stated, "Cannons do not hold the line; they break the line." This principle was physically executed by the Turkish army at Chaldiran in 1514, 300 years before Napoleon.
For both Selim and Napoleon, artillery was a tool to pin the enemy in place. At Chaldiran, the Safavid cavalry was not just destroyed by fire; its order was ruined, its momentum cut, and its maneuverability lost. This was followed by Janissary fire and cavalry strikes. We see the same sequence in Napoleon’s battles: "Artillery-infantry pressure-cavalry blow." This is the direct equivalent of the "fire-fix-decide" scheme Jomini outlined for Napoleon.
Both leaders consciously abandoned old forms of combat. Selim ended the era of pure cavalry warfare in the East—a style that had granted rulers like Tamerlane and Shah Ismail their crushing victories. Napoleon, in turn, dismantled the static linear armies of the 18th century. Both were criticized in their eras for being "too fast, too harsh, and too centralized," which serves as another thread showing the resemblance between these two Marshals.
At the Battle of Marj Dabiq, Al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri ordered attacks on the flanks while keeping his center in reserve. Selim had again concentrated his firepower in the center, and Al-Ghawri’s maneuver initially put him in a difficult position, as Selim had expected a direct charge like at Chaldiran. Acting quickly, the Sultan moved his artillery positions and Janissaries forward, advancing the firing line. He closed the distance with the Mamluk center. Perceiving this as a gap and seeing the Ottoman center approaching him, Al-Ghawri was forced to order a central charge. Once the Ottoman cannons opened fire and the Mamluk center collapsed, the troops pressuring the Ottoman flanks also began to flee.
Napoleon applied this exact tactic at the Battle of Wagram in 1809. While the Austrian center waited, Napoleon established Lauriston’s massive artillery group. Initially, the fire began from a distance. When the Austrian center’s resistance could not be broken, the cannons were moved forward, the range was shortened, and the fire intensity was increased. The Austrian center collapsed. This is the concept of advancing the firing line. Napoleon himself defined it: "Artillery prepares the infantry’s march; when necessary, it marches itself." This sentence is the modern articulation of the tactic physically performed at Marj Dabiq.
Furthermore, Sultan Selim was the first to discover and introduce the "Volley Fire" system to world military history. At the time, soldiers could only fire once before racing against seconds to reload. To overcome this, Selim lined up nine ranks of soldiers. When the first rank finished firing, the second took over, continuing until the last rank fired—by which time the first rank had finished reloading. This tactic left Shah Ismail’s army at Chaldiran in utter shock (Gabor Agoston) Babur Shah, the founder of the Mughal Empire, was deeply impressed by these tactics of Selim the Grim and began equipping his army with artillery using support received from the Ottomans. This marked the beginning of his story as an effective power in India. In fact, Babur had previously been a vassal of Shah Ismail.
Sources: Gabor Agoston "Osmanlı'da Strateji ve Askeri Güç", İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı: "Osmanlı Devleti Teşkilatından Kapukulu Ocakları", Kemalpaşazâde Tarihi, Babürnâme
The four individuals referred to by the people of the Balkans and the Pope as the "Holy Defenders of Christendom" lived during the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror. With the exception of Stephen, the other three shared a common trait: they were all trained by the Ottomans. John Hunyadi was a youth raised alongside the Ottoman Akıncı Lord Malkoçoğlu Ali Bey. Vlad Dracula grew up in the Ottoman palaces with Mehmed the Conqueror since he was a child. Skanderbeg was raised from childhood by Murad II (Mehmed’s father), who personally gave him the name "İskender."
John Hunyadi is one of Hungary’s greatest commanders and a national hero. He lost most of the battles where he faced Sultan Murad II (such as the Second Battle of Kosovo and the Battle of Varna). However, the core of the resistance in these battles was due to his personal command and his ability to act according to Ottoman battle tactics. While Hunyadi rarely secured victories against the Sultans themselves, he succeeded in defeating Ottoman armies commanded by Grand Viziers or generals. His most significant achievement in this regard was the Battle of Niş. Following this battle, Skanderbeg, who was fighting in the Ottoman ranks as a Muslim, saw the defeat and deserted the Ottoman army with his men. Hunyadi’s final victory was the Siege of Belgrade against Mehmed II. Launching a raid against Mehmed II, who was besieging the fortress, Hunyadi and the Crusader alliance managed to repel the Ottoman army, though they could not annihilate it. Fearing his army would be destroyed, the Sultan drew his sword and charged into the enemy; seeing this, the army performed a controlled retreat instead of fleeing, saving the force from a total rout. John Hunyadi died a year later. Hunyadi thought he had stopped the Ottomans at Belgrade, but the system Mehmed established made Hungary the weakest link in Europe after Hunyadi's death. Following the siege of Belgrade, Mehmed completely annexed Serbia (1459), Bosnia (1463), and the Morea (1460), removing all "buffer zones" around Hungary. These advanced bases and logistics lines established by Mehmed were the cornerstones that allowed his grandson, Suleiman the Magnificent, to destroy the Hungarian army in just two hours at the Battle of Mohács.
Skanderbeg was a noble’s son brought to the Ottoman palace as a child. Trained by the Ottomans, he chose to convert to Islam. Murad II gave him the name "İskender." After successful actions within the Ottoman state, he was granted a lordship and became known as Skanderbeg (İskender Bey). Taking advantage of the chaos during the Battle of Niş, he fled to Albania and seized Albanian fortresses under Ottoman rule using "forged imperial decrees." Having kidnapped the Sultan’s secretary and seal, Skanderbeg used them to take over the castles. After seizing Krujë Castle with these forged decrees, he quickly unified the Albanian clans to form the League of Lezhë. His greatest advantage was having learned the Ottoman army's logistics network, offensive formations, and vulnerabilities to night raids firsthand as a Sanjak-bey under Sultan Murad II. For 25 years, he defeated dozens of armies sent by the Ottomans in the rugged mountains of Albania. Even after the conquest of Istanbul, Mehmed the Conqueror had to personally lead campaigns to bring Skanderbeg to heel. Skanderbeg continued his resistance until his death against Mehmed, with whom he had once been like a "brother," by using the Ottomans' own tactics against them (ambushes and hit-and-run). Upon hearing that Mehmed had arrived in Albania, Skanderbeg sought refuge with the Venetians. Realizing the castles could not be taken due to geographical conditions, Mehmed built his own fortresses at strategic points within Albania (such as Elbasan Castle) to narrow Skanderbeg's field of movement. Skanderbeg died of malaria. Immediately after his death, Mehmed personally launched a campaign to conquer Krujë and Shkodër, which had remained untaken for years. The Albanian resistance collapsed completely, and these lands entered a period of peace that lasted for centuries.
Vlad was sent to the Edirne Palace as a hostage alongside his brother Radu; by a twist of fate, he received lessons from the same tutors as Prince Mehmed. He learned Ottoman state philosophy, penal law, and military discipline in their purest forms at this palace. However, rather than loyalty, this education bred a cold-blooded hatred in him that allowed him to know his enemy from the inside. When he became the Voivode of Wallachia in 1456, he applied the "Ottoman Order" he had learned in a terrifying manner on his own lands. The infamous forests that earned him the nickname "The Impaler" were actually constructed by taking Ottoman psychological warfare techniques to an extreme. The famous Night Attack he launched against Mehmed the Conqueror in 1462 was an assassination attempt targeting the Sultan personally. Because Vlad knew Ottoman military uniforms and the language, he was able to infiltrate the camp. Mehmed defeated Vlad during the raid and had many of his most experienced units killed. Though he drove Vlad from Wallachian lands, Vlad went down in history as the bloodiest example of how a mind trained by the Ottomans could turn into such a dangerous weapon. His head was eventually taken by Mehmed’s army and displayed in Istanbul.
Stephen III (Stephen the Great) was the only one in this group of four who did not pass through Ottoman education. However, unlike his rivals, he was a Prince who knew the Ottomans not from the "inside," but from the "front lines." The tactics he used while defending Moldavia were successful. At the Battle of Vaslui in 1475, he ambushed a numerically superior Ottoman army in a narrow valley, inflicting one of the heaviest defeats of the Mehmed era. In response, Mehmed the Conqueror launched a campaign of vengeance. In the battle that took place around Valea Albă (Akdere), Stephen's army was completely destroyed. Stephen fled to the mountains, and Moldavia was captured. Although Stephen tried to resist until his death, the strategy of Mehmed turned the Black Sea into a "Turkish Lake," and Moldavia's strategic ports (Kilia and Akkerman) fell under Ottoman control, severing Stephen's connection to the outside world.
Sources: Aşıkpaşazade Tarihi, Tursun Bey "Tarih-i Ebül Feth", Oruç Bey "Tevarih-i âl-i Osman" , Franz Babinger - "Fatih Sultan Mehmed ve Zamanı
Mürur tezkeresi, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda iç seyahat için zorunlu tutulan resmî izin belgesidir. Kelime anlamı olarak “mürur” geçiş demektir. dolayısıyla “mürur tezkeresi” Osmanlı’da bir tür iç pasaport işlevi görüyordu. Bu belge, Osmanlı toprakları içinde bir yerden başka bir yere seyahat etmek isteyen herkesin hem yerli hem de yabancı olmak üzere alması gereken resmî bir izin olarak kullanılmıştır. Belgenin temel amacı, devletin iç göçleri, nüfus hareketlerini ve güvenliği kontrol etmesini sağlamaktı.
Mürur tezkeresi uygulaması, klasik dönemde ortaya çıkan “yol hükmü” belgesine dayanır. 19. yüzyıla gelindiğinde, bu belge resmî olarak “mürur tezkeresi” adıyla yaygınlaşmış ve özellikle İstanbul gibi büyük merkezlere yapılan göçlerin düzenlenmesinde kilit rol oynamıştır.
Belge; sahibinin adı, baba adı, tabiiyeti, ikametgâhı, gideceği yer, seyahat amacı ve fiziksel özellikleri gibi bilgilerle doldurulurdu. Belgenin düzenlendiği tarih ve mührü ile birlikte yol boyunca geçilen yerlerde çıkış şerhi düşülerek mühürlenir ve tarih atılırdı.
Mürur tezkeresi, Osmanlı idaresinin asayiş ve nüfus kontrolü amacıyla geliştirdiği araçlardan biriydi. Başkent İstanbul gibi büyük şehirler, doğal olarak göç akınına uğradığı için devlet, mürur tezkeresi ile şehirdeki nüfusun kayıt altına alınmasını sağlıyor ve toplumsal düzeni koruyordu. Belge ayrıca yolcuların güvenli geçişini garanti ederek devletin idari denetimini ve kamu güvenliğini güçlendiriyordu. Seyahat edenin belgesini ibraz etmesi zorunlu olduğu için, belgeler bir anlamda hem kimlik hem de seyahat izni niteliğindeydi.
Mürur tezkeresi, Osmanlı’da 20. yüzyıla kadar yaygın olarak kullanılmıştır. Ancak zamanla Mürur tezkeresine duyulan ihtiyaç azalmıştır. II. Meşrutiyet’in ilanı (1908) sonrası, kişisel özgürlüğü kısıtladığı gerekçesiyle Mürur Tezkeresi zorunluluğu tamamen kaldırılmıştır.
Özetle, Mürur Tezkeresi Osmanlı’da seyahat özgürlüğünü devlet kontrolüyle dengeleyen, hem asayiş hem de göç kontrolü aracı olan bir belgedir. Ayrıca güvenliği sağlama ve büyük merkezlerde nüfus dengesini koruma amaçlarına hizmet etmiştir.