COLIN IMBER

THE TRANSFER OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGY

AND TACTICS BETWEEN WESTERN EUROPE
AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, C. 1400-C. 1600

It was once common for European historians to describe the Ottomans

as inherently incompetent in military as much as in governmental and
cultural matters, and to attribute Ottoman success in war to the employ-
ment of European “renegades.” While this view is now largely discred-
ited, it still exercises a lingering influence and still tempts historians
to take an oversimplified view of intellectual, technical and cultural
exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. It also conceals
a problem with the notion of “Europe” itself. Historians generally use
the term to refer specifically to western and central Europe, but even
accepting this definition, “Europe” was not a homogeneous entity and
so to refer simply to “European” influences on the Ottoman Empire is
largely meaningless. It is necessary rather to establish where in Europe
the influences were coming from. Another tendency has been to regard
cases where the Ottomans did not adopt European technologies or prac-
tices as examples of Ottoman “failure,” without considering the context.
In the military sphere, for example, the Ottomans before 1600 “failed”
to adopt the tactic of deploying disciplined battlefield formations of pike-
men and arquebusiers which had proved effective in Western Europe.
In reality, however, this formation would have been useless for warfare
in the mountains and desert fringes on the Ottoman eastern and southern

My thanks to Professor Daniel Szechi for his invaluable comments on the first draft
of this article.

Turcica, 51, 2020, p. 9-36. doi: 10.2143/TURC.51.0.3288385

© 2020 Turcica. Tous droits réservés.
10 COLIN IMBER

borders1 or on the steppes to the north of the Black Sea; and on their
western front, in Hungary, no Ottoman army was to encounter such
a formation as the major component in an enemy army before 1596.2
“Failure,” in fact, may indicate no more than lack of need. There are
other problems, too, with the old view. It disregards the fact that the
geographical situation of the Ottoman Empire ensured that it absorbed
influences from the east as much as from the west – among the weapons
in use in Ottoman armies, Damascus steel blades and the composite bow
had their origin in Asia and not in Europe – and, secondly, it excludes
any possibility that Europeans might have learned anything from the
Ottomans.

GUNS AND GUNPOWDER

Nonetheless, however wrongheaded the lingering assessment of “the

Turk” as almost wholly dependent on European expertise, Ottoman mili-
tary technology owed much to influences coming from the west. Most
obviously, the Ottomans needed to adapt to the “gunpowder revolution”
which, during the course of the fifteenth century, was to transform the
nature of warfare. Gunpowder and incendiary weapons had appeared in
the Middle East before 1300,3 and it is not inconceivable that the Mon-
gols had brought with them firearms from China, but it was not until the
Ottomans adopted gunpowder weapons in the early fifteenth century that
their use became widespread in the region. The formula for gunpowder

1. In 1534, the Safavid Shah Tahmāsb almost annihilated the invading Ottomans by
consistently refusing to engage in battle, instead luring the sultan into a futile pursuit, until
the severe cold and snow and lack of provisions forced him to retreat, with heavy losses
of men and munitions, through the Zagros Mountains to lowland Iraq. Tahmāsb used the
same tactic to thwart the Ottoman invasions of 1548 and 1554. In 1554, he rejected advice
to make a surprise attack on the Ottoman army, on the grounds that the sultan had come
with a large army, and since a large army is “an enemy of provisions”, the sultan would
“go to hell” without his assistance. Events proved him to be correct (Tazkira-e Shāh
Ṭahmāsb, p. 69). Koca Sinan Pasha’s success in subduing Highland Yemen between 1569
and 1571 owed as much to his negotiating with and bribing tribal leaders as it did to his
skill in fighting in a hostile terrain. (al-Nahrawālī, al-Barq al-Yamānī).
2. The first Ottoman encounter with this tactic was probably, in fact, after the battle
of Mohács in 1526. For a day after the battle, when the surviving Hungarian cavalry had
fled the battlefield and the Hungarian infantry had been massacred, a company of “several
thousand” Landsknechts and Bohemian infantrymen resisted Ottoman attacks before
finally succumbing to a Janissary siege. This was presumably a pike formation that suc-
cessfully kept the Ottoman cavalry at bay (Sanuto, I Diarii, XLII, 1895, p. 647).
3. Al-Hasan, Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 106-120.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS11

seems first to have arrived in the Middle East from China,4 but its use in
firearms, if not the formula itself, evidently reached the Ottomans via the
Balkan Peninsula.5 References to the earliest Ottoman firearms are few,
but it is clear that by the second decade of the fifteenth century the Otto-
mans had begun to use cannon in sieges: in his account of Murad II’s
assault on Constantinople in 1422, the contemporary Ioannes Kananos
records the Ottomans using large, and also largely ineffective, “bom-
bards” against the walls of the city.6 He does not describe the weapons,
but they were perhaps breach loading, wrought iron cannon such as
were in use in parts of Western Europe, and may, in fact, have followed
Central European prototypes: writing in the 1460s, the Athenian historian
Chalkokondyles was to claim that Murad had with him cannoneers from
“Germany.”7
By the mid-century, Ottoman gunners were familiar with both the
production and use of cannon. The Burgundian Waleran de Wavrin who
commanded the galleys stationed on the Bosphorus in 1444 in an attempt
to stop Murad II and his army crossing the Straits to encounter the invad-
ing Hungarian army, describes how “camels came down from the moun-
tain … carrying … metal from which cannon and bombards were cast on
the following night. Next morning, they fired these at our galleys.” This
seems to be the first record of what was to become a common Ottoman
practice of casting bronze cannon in the field. At the same time Waleran
noticed that, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, the Genoese of
Pera had supplied the Ottoman grand vizier Halil Pasha with “cannon
and culverins,” which Halil’s men fired at the Burgundian and Byzantine
galleys.8 This is the first record of a transfer of Italian weapons to the
Ottomans but, given the long standing alliance between Genoa and
the Ottoman sultans, Murad II’s personal friendships with the Genoese
lords in the Aegean, and Genoese maritime assistance to the sultan in
1422 and again in 1425, it seems unlikely that this would have been
the first delivery of Genoese war materials. It is clear, however, that the

4. Chase, Firearms, p. 84.

5. Petrović, “Firearms,” p. 164-194.
6. On the development of Ottoman artillery in the fifteenth century and for further
references, see Heywood, “Notes on the production,” p. XVI.
7. Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army, p. 337.
8. Wavrin, Anciennes Chroniques d’Angleterre. English translation of this passage in
Imber, The Crusade of Varna, p. 125-129; Heywood (“Notes on the production”) was the
first to recognise the significance of this passage.
12 COLIN IMBER

sultan was not wholly dependent on Genoese expertise: the chief gunner
in the operation on the Bosphorus was a Turk called Saruca9 and not an
Italian, and the practice of casting cannon in the field, such as De Wavrin
had observed, was clearly not new in 1444 and was to be a standard
feature of Ottoman warfare in the second half of the fifteenth century.
Two years later, in 1446, Murad II set up another field foundry to pro-
duce the bronze cannon that destroyed the Hexamilion wall across the
Isthmus of Corinth.10
The Hungarian wars of the 1440s did, however, reveal deficiencies in
Ottoman knowledge and use of firearms. János Hunyadi’s defeat of
Şihabeddin Pasha at the battle of the Ialomiţa river in 1442 was the first
time that an Ottoman army had encountered the Hungarian tactic of form-
ing a mobile fortification – the Wagenburg – of carts, shielding field-
cannon, archers and infantrymen carrying portable firearms, and it was
this tactic that brought the Hungarians close to victory in the campaigns
of the Zlatitsa Pass and Varna in 1443 and 1444. The Ottomans, it
appears, used a limited number of gunpowder weapons during these cam-
paigns – an Ottoman soldier apparently shot Hunyadi’s horse from under
him at the battle of the Zlatitsa Pass11 – but the Hungarian superiority in
artillery was clear, and provided the impetus for the subsequent Ottoman
development of both gunpowder weapons and battlefield tactics.12
Artillery became a crucial factor in all Ottoman campaigns following
the accession of Mehmed II in 1451. Central to this development was
Mehmed’s establishment of the Imperial Gun Foundry in Galata across
the Golden Horn from Istanbul, shortly after the Genoese surrender of
the town in 1453, and very probably on the site of an earlier Genoese
foundry.13 This was not the only site for the production of cannon, but it
was, and remained, the largest. Information about the foundry and

9. Gazavāt-i Sultân Murâd b. Mehemmed Hân; English translation in Imber, The

Crusade of Varna, p. 84.
10. Aşıkpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, p. 181. Aşıkpaşazade’s comment that, after
his seizure of Kastamonu in 1423, Murad II “put its copper mines to work” hints that the
sultan wished to procure copper for the manufacture of bronze cannon: Ibid., p. 163.
11. Gazavāt-i Sultân Murâd b. Mehemmed Hân; English translation in Imber, The
Crusade of Varna, p. 60.
12. See Antoche, “Du tábor au tabur çengi.” It was the Bohemian Hussites who
pioneered the use of the tábor (German: Wagenburg) in the first decades of the fifteenth
century.
13. Heywood, “Notes on the production.” Aydüz (Tophâne-i Âmire, p. 80-85) argues
against this thesis.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS13

Ottoman cannon in the fifteenth century is limited, but what struck for-
eign observers most forcibly was, first, the Ottoman employment of
foreign masters and, second, the great size of Ottoman siege cannon:
Mehmed II’s great cannon which the Hungarian master Orban cast in
Edirne in 1453 for use at the siege of Constantinople is the most famous
example of a monster produced by a foreign artisan. Both observations
are undoubtedly, to an extent, true. Ottoman armies after 1453 continued
to use enormous cannon in sieges: the Venetian Malipiero, for example,
reports the Ottomans as throwing five very large cannon “each seventeen
feet long” into the river Vrbas after the failed siege of Jajce in 1464.14
Nevertheless, the number of giant cannon at each siege was probably
small. At the siege of Methoni in 1500, for example, Kemalpaşazade
reports on two guns being transported from the fortresses on the Strait of
Navpaktos overland to Methoni on sledges (kızak)15 – no wheels could
support their weight and the authorities considered it unsafe to send them
by sea – suggesting that only two of the cannon used at Methoni were
outstandingly large. Monster cannon were, however, the most striking
pieces of Ottoman ordnance and the ones that foreign observers noticed.
The observation that the Imperial Gun Foundry, and perhaps also
other production sites, employed Western technicians, is also correct, if
often over-stated. The demand for large bronze bells to hang in churches
and cathedrals had undoubtedly created an expertise in bronze-casting in
Western Europe that did not exist in the Orthodox and Islamic east, and
was as much applicable to military as it was to ecclesiastical use.16
Mehmed II’s cannon-founder Orban was, it is said, Hungarian and so
presumably familiar with the bell- and cannon-casting industries of
Southern Germany. So too was Jörg of Nuremberg, taken captive in
146117 and in Ottoman employment in the cannon foundry until 1480.
Jörg himself commented on the number of foreign masters in the foundry
and how “the Turks have learned from Christian masters how to cast
cannon.” 18

14. Quoted in Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 179.

15. Ibn Kemâl, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman VIII. Defter, p. 198.
16. On the technology of bell-casting and cannon-casting, see Aydüz, Tophâne-i
Âmire, p. 199-201.
17. Jörg may well have volunteered to serve the sultan, but this would not be some-
thing he could admit to a Christian readership.
18. Geschicht von der Türckey, quoted Kissling, “Baljemez,” p. 336.
14 COLIN IMBER

Jörg does not specify their nationalities but, in the following century,
the Savoyard Jérome Maurand reported that that the foundry employed
40 or 50 German cannon-casters, 19 indicating that, in the mid-sixteenth
century, masters trained in the metallurgical industries of Southern Ger-
many were still in demand. His report is unusual in specifying that the
Germans found employment specifically as cannon-casters: European
sources rarely indicate the precise role of foreign masters in a process of
manufacture based on the division of labour. 20 Apart from the Germans,
Vicente Roca and other European writers also claim that Jews expelled
from Spain had brought with them knowledge of military technologies.
It is also possible that the “Jewish blacksmiths” recorded by the foundry
accounts as working on the manufacture of wrought iron cannon in
1517-18 may have been Jews of Spanish descent.21 The Graeco-Venetian
­Theodore Spandounes goes so far as to assert that it was the marranos
expelled from Spain who taught the Ottomans to mount cannon on carts
and waggons.22
One of Jörg’s claims was that many of these masters, as he himself
was to do, found opportunities to leave Ottoman service, and so presum-
ably to bring back to their homelands technologies learned in the Otto-
man foundry. Among these, it has been suggested, was the knowledge of
how to construct a furnace where the flame does not come into contact
with the metal23 and it was evidently in part the presence of European
masters in the Imperial Gun Foundry and the transfer of knowledge in
both directions that ensured that Ottoman artillery and siege tactics never
diverged greatly from what was common in western Europe. In Europe,
for example, the use of wrought iron cannon continued into the early
sixteenth century.24 The same was true in the Ottoman Empire, although
by the second half of the century, these guns had become obsolete, as
they had in Europe: instructions to the architect overseeing the construc-
tion of the fortress of New Navarino (Pylos) in 1573 order him to re-use

19. Quoted in Heywood, “Notes on the production” and Ágoston, Guns for the Sul-
tan, p. 45.
20. On the stages of manufacture in the gun-foundry, see Aydüz, Tophâne-i Âmire.
21. Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 45.
22. Spandounes, On the Origin of the Ottoman Emperors, p. 125. The question of
why Europeans blamed the Jews for introducing new military technologies to the Ottoman
Empire is discussed in Veinstein, “The Ottoman Jews.”
23. Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, p. 193-194.
24. Işıksal, “Eski Türk Topları.”
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS15

the metal from the iron guns rusting in the adjacent fortress of Old Nava-
rino, in the construction of the new castle.25
Western Europe was also the source of one of the most important
changes in the manufacture and use of artillery in the Ottoman Empire.
In the final years of the Hundred Years War, the French had replaced
large siege cannon with trains of light artillery which, by firing more
rapidly, could throw the same weight of shot as the monsters, while hav-
ing the advantage of being easily manoeuvrable. Charles VIII’s invasion
of the Italian peninsula in 1494-5 alerted others to this tactic and it rap-
idly became widespread in Europe. The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II,
aware of the king’s intention of leading an anti-Ottoman crusade, had
watched Charles’s progress in Italy with alarm and must have become
aware of the effectiveness of French artillery. Six years later, in 1501,
the Ottomans were to experience the new tactics directly when the French
launched an amphibious assault on the fortress of Mitylene. The attack
failed but, in a report on the operation sent to the sultan, two of the Otto-
man fortress commanders commented on the effectiveness of the French
guns,26 and it was probably as a result of this experience that the Otto-
mans after 1500 adopted the French practice of using primarily light and
medium artillery in siege warfare.27 It was a change which the Graeco-
Venetian Spandounes noticed when he wrote in 1513:
“In the past [the Ottomans] had only large artillery, which they transported
with the greatest trouble in the world. They carried the said pieces and
recast them in the field, wherever they happened to be. However, not long
since, a large number of sailors and other men of war, even cannoneers and
founders have gone to Constantinople, and ever since King Charles came
to Naples … these have shown them as much how to manufacture and
mount artillery as how to use it.”28

Spandounes probably exaggerates the degree of Ottoman dependence

on oversize cannon, but is certainly correct in noting the influence of
French artillery tactics and the role of foreign technicians in introducing
them into the Ottoman Empire.

25. Kiel, “Construction of the Ottoman Castle of Anavarin-i Cedid.”

26. Vatin, “Le siège de Mytilène,” reprinted in Vatin, Les Ottomans et l’Occident.
27. But they did not abandon the use of large cannon. Some observers, and the Otto-
mans themselves, attributed the failure at Vienna in 1529 to a lack of heavy artillery. For
example, Celālzāde Mustafā, Tabakāt ül-Memālik, p. 190b.
28. Spandouyn, Petit Traicté de l’Origine des Turcqz, p. 160-161.
16 COLIN IMBER

Spandounes does not however note another development. An aspect

of the French artillery that had particularly impressed the fortress com-
manders at Mitylene was the use of cast-iron cannon balls.29 Since iron
is about three times as dense as stone, it was possible to use smaller bore
weapons to throw the same weight of shot. This, however, required a new
design of cannon to contain the explosive force of the gunpowder,30 and
this was evidently one of the secrets which foreign technicians brought
to the Imperial Gun Foundry in the years immediately after 1500 since,
from about this time, Ottoman armies regularly used iron cannon balls in
siege warfare. The great weight of iron also necessitated the use of corned
gunpowder which explodes with a greater force than the older serpentine
powders,31 but it seems that the Ottomans were already using this by
1500 and would have had no need of foreign expertise to explain the
secret of its manufacture. Corned powder had appeared in Europe in
the early fifteenth century and the Ottomans must have begun to make it
at least by the 1470s when the matchlock arquebus came into general use
in Ottoman armies since, to be effective, these weapons require corned
powder.32 In the Ottoman Empire, however, as in Europe, serpentine
powder remained in use into the early sixteenth century: corned powder
would have been too powerful for the wrought iron guns which both
Ottomans and Europeans continued to manufacture in the first two dec-
ades of the century.
In sum, while the majority of craftsmen employed in the manufacture
of Ottoman artillery were Muslims – often devşirme recruits who served
an apprenticeship in the cannon-foundry in Istanbul – the Ottoman
Empire was also a destination for European craftsmen who brought with
them, either voluntarily or as prisoners-of-war, the knowledge and skills
current in the manufacturing centres of Europe. As European craftsmen
who had worked in the Ottoman Empire returned to their homelands,
bringing back with them knowledge of Ottoman firearms, the Ottomans
themselves exported craftsmen to India, Central and South-East Asia and
China,33 making Istanbul a nodal point for the dissemination of expertise
in gunpowder weapons.

29. Vatin, “Le siège de Mytilène.”

30. Hall, “The Corning of Gunpowder.”
31. Corned gunpowder is powder that has been moistened, made into cakes and, when
dry, crumbled into granules. Serpentine powder is ground fine and not made into cakes.
32. Hall, “The Corning of Gunpowder.”
33. Fidan, Çin’de Osmanlı Tüfeği.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS17

THE OTTOMAN ORDER OF BATTLE

The main fighting elements in the Ottoman army were the timarlı
sipahis, the azabs, the cavalry of the Six Divisions (altı bölük) and the
Janissaries. These were, respectively, cavalrymen residing on and draw-
ing their income from fiefs (timars) in the provinces; infantry levies of
mainly urban youths; the élite household cavalry; and the sultan’s per-
manent infantry corps. Members of both the Janissary corps and the
household cavalry were recruited from Christian prisoners-of-war or
from non-Muslims levied through the devşirme, and were resident in the
capital, drawing their salaries directly from the Treasury. The army
developed, it seems, independently of European influence. The timars
which supported the main Ottoman cavalry army closely resemble the
military fiefs in the late Byzantine and Western Seljuk Empires, and
these were clearly models for the Ottomans. The term “Janissary” has
a western origin, denoting originally mercenaries in the service of the
Christian kings of Spain,34 but the practice of monarchs forming body-
guards of “foreign” troops, such as the Janissaries, was as much a Mid-
dle Eastern as a European practice. The western origin of the term “Janis-
sary” does not therefore have to imply a western origin for the Janissary
corps itself.
There were other elements in the Ottoman army,35 but these formed
its core, and it was these that determined its formation on the battlefield.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Janissaries occupied the cen-
tral position, protecting the sultan if he was present, with the household
cavalry to their left and right, and the azabs in front and to either side of
the central formation. To, respectively, the left and right of the azabs, the
sipahis of Rumelia and Anatolia stretched out in an extended crescent
formation.36 The Janissaries formed the stable centre of the line, the func-
tion of the azabs being, it seems, to take the shock of the first enemy
attack, while the sipahis on the wings drove the enemy against the Janis-
saries, or lured them there by simulated flight.37

34. Zachariadou, “Les ‘janissaires’ de l’empereur byzantin;” Imber, “The Origin of

the Janissaries.”
35. See for example Fodor, “Making a Living on the Frontier.”
36. Parry, “La manière de combattre;” Christensen, “The Heathen Order of
Battle.”
37. The Mamluk commander Uzbek defeated the Ottoman army at Ağa Çayırı in 1488
by attacking the Ottoman cavalry on the wings of the crescent, out of range of the
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The effectiveness of the Ottoman battle order after the mid-fifteenth

century owed much to the experience of the Hungarian wars. After com-
ing close to defeat and realising that the use of the Wagenburg was the
key to Hungarian success, the Ottomans rapidly adopted a similar tactic.
At the battle of Kosovo in 1448, the Hungarians confronted a fortification
of carts, shields and artillery, evidently modelled on the Hungarian
Wagenburg, at the centre of the Ottoman line,38 and this was to become
the standard Ottoman battle order for the next hundred and fifty years.
Konstantin Mihailović, who served the Ottoman sultan from the mid-
1450s to 1463 describes the central fortification as consisting, not of
wagons, but of a ditch and a palisade of wooden stakes and shields with
embrasures for the guns, set out on an earth embankment thrown up from
the ditch.39 A Greek Ordo Portae, compiled apparently in the 1470s,
describes this enclave as “fortified with ditches and chains, with all
around camels, donkeys and mules, as well as war-machines, and a mul-
titude of cannon, arquebuses and similar weapons.”40 However, this style
of fortification with defensive trenches and earth embankments clearly
went out of use: later accounts of the Ottoman battle order describe
a fortification of carts linked together with chains, more closely resem-
bling the Hungarian Wagenburg. What the Ottomans had done was to
incorporate the Wagenburg into their own crescent formation. From
1448, the Janissaries fought from behind a fortified position, but still in
the centre of the battle line, with the Rumelian and Anatolian cavalry still
arrayed on each wing.
The Hungarian wars had also taught the Ottomans the effectiveness
of gunpowder weapons. From the mid-fifteenth century, the Janissaries
began to carry handguns although as in some European countries, these
did not rapidly displace the bow. Side by side with the matchlock arque-
bus, they continued to use both the composite bow and the crossbow: the
inventory of war-materials for use by the Janissaries at the siege of Rho-
des in 1522 included 20 composite bows and 40 crossbows, as against
1,000 “long arquebuses for the ships” and “4,500 small arquebuses.”41

Janissaries’ firearms in the central formation. See Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 212-
213; Ibn Kemâl, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman VIII.Defter, p. 112.
38. Uruc b. Ādil, Tevārīh-i Āl-i Osmān, p. 62-63.
39. Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, p. 165; Christensen, “The Heathen Order of
Battle.”
40. Ordo Portae, p. 10-11.
41. Vatin, L’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem, p. 481 and 487, p. 484 and 488.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS19

Their weaponry for the Mohács campaign included 42 crossbows and

about 6,000 composite bows, as against 1,000 high-quality, 3,000 stand-
ard, and 60 long arquebuses.42 The continuing use of the composite bow
into at least the 1520s is perhaps a reflection of its effectiveness: it was
more portable, and had a greater range and greater penetrating power
than European bows.43 During the course of the sixteenth century, how-
ever, bows went out of use. The anonymous early seventeenth-century
author of the Laws of the Janissaries notes that “now arquebuses have
come into use, and since then, crossbows have not been used.” However,
like English nostalgists of the sixteenth century urging the retention of
the longbow, he adds: “Knowledge of the crossbow is still necessary.
It should not be abandoned on the grounds that we now have firearms,
because they are necessary in fortresses. They are there in most infidel
fortresses.”44 On occasions the Janissaries might add to their repertoire.
A report from the battle of Mohács in 1526 records them igniting gre-
nades in front of the central Wagenburg, covering the field in smoke and
causing confusion among the attackers.45
But it was, above all, the Janissaries’ use of firearms that secured
Ottoman victories on the battlefield and especially, it seems, the practice
of volley fire. In field battles, they stood in rows behind the fortification
of carts and artillery, with each row firing in turn as the others re-loaded.
Probably the earliest description of this tactic appears in an account of
the battle of Chaldiran in a chronicle completed in 1523 by the Cretan
Rabbi Elijah Capsali:
“Then the king commanded his guards, that is, his Janissaries, and they
deployed hand cannon[s] against them, more than 30,000. And the janissar-
ies divided themselves into two groups so that when half of them shot to
fire… and deployed the hand cannon[s], the rest were preparing and filling
them [the cannons] in order to shoot. And when they finished firing, the
next group began to load in order to fire in turn, and so on. And they did
so a few times so that the hand cannon[s’ fire] did not cease to fall on the

42. Emecen, Osmanlı Klasik Çağında Savaş, p. 214. The discrepancy in the numbers
of composite bows in use at Rhodes and on the Mohács campaign is probably a quirk of
accounting. I am assuming that what appear in the inventories as “caka/cığa (?) bows”
are composite bows: miniatures of the Mohács campaign depict Janissaries carrying these
weapons.
43. For details, see Klopsteg, Turkish Archery and the Composite Bow.
44. Kavānīn-i Yeniçeriyān, IX, p. 237-343.
45. Sanuto, I Diarii, XLIII, 1895, p. 276.
20 COLIN IMBER

Safavids continuously … And all the Safavids died at the hand of the
Janissaries.”46

Twelve years later, at the battle of Mohács, Celalzade describes the

Janissaries as “arranged in 9 rows, in the customary sultanic battle order
(ceng-i sultānī).”47 A further description of the technique of volley fire
appears in Abdülkadir Efendi’s account of the Ottoman siege of Eszter-
gom in 1605:
“The Janissaries stood in three ranks … the first rank fired its arquebuses,
then the second rank. Then [the soldiers] in the rank that fired first bent
double and began to fill their arquebuses. When the third rank fired, the
second rank bent down and prepared their arquebuses. Then the first rank
stood up again and fired …”

The practice which Abdülkadir describes of each row of Janissaries

firing in turn while the others reload is very similar to the scheme which
William Count of Nassau devised in the 1590s to allow a body of arque-
busiers to deliver continuous salvoes,48 suggesting that his inspiration
came not, as was claimed, from the tactics of the Roman army, but from
reports of contemporary Ottoman practice.49 It was, however, only the
Janissaries who carried firearms before the 1590s. Other troops carried
bows, swords and a variety of contact weapons including a particular
type of iron cudgel (bozdoğan),50 a weapon which the warring parties in
Italy had, by the early 1500s, adopted from the Ottomans,51 possibly
because they found it especially effective in stunning men wearing plate
armour.
While the Ottomans were on the whole receptive to military technolo-
gies and tactics coming from Western Europe, in one area east and west
remained sharply divided. Articulated plate armour became widespread
in Western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with the

46. My thanks are due to Vera Moreen for introducing me to Capsali’s text, and for
allowing me to quote from her unpublished translation.
47. Celālzāde Mustafā, Tabakāt ül-Memālik, p. 146b.
48. Tallett, War and Society, p. 24-25.
49. Börekçi, “A contribution to the military revolution debate.” For an extended
discussion of the Janissaries’ use of volley-fire and further references, see Emecen,
Osmanlı Klasik Çağında Savaş, p. 52-58.
50. The inventory of Janissary equipment for the Mohács campaign includes
25 bozdoğan, which it distinguishes from the 511 “special and ordinary cavalry maces”
(atlı külünk-i hāss ve harcī). The bozdoğan was evidently a specialised form of mace,
distinct from the more common külünk.
51. Giovio, Famous Men and Women of our Time, p. 155.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS21

centres of manufacture located in Lombardy, Southern Germany and the

Netherlands. The Ottomans probably first encountered it in the Hungar-
ian wars of the fifteenth century and were clearly aware of the benefits
that it could offer in battle. It was a factor that had favoured the Hungar-
ians in the wars of the 1440s and continued to offer advantages in the
following decades and century. At the battle of Mohács, for example,
Yahyapaşaoğlu Bali Bey who, as a governor on the Danube frontier, was
well aware of Hungarian capabilities, advised the grand vezir Ibrahim
Pasha that it was pointless for the Rumelian sipahis to try to resist the
Hungarian cavalry, as these wore plate armour and armoured their horses,
making them impervious to all weapons. The only possible strategy was
to divide the ranks and let them pass through.52 Nonetheless, despite its
advantages, the Ottomans never adopted this type of armour for their own
troops. They seem, instead, to have tried to manufacture armour-pene-
trating weapons. In April 1530, the Venetian “orator and vice-bailo,”
Piero Zen, reported that he had seen “some very bold Janissaries in
[­Ibrahim] Pasha’s court[yard] experimenting with firing an arquebus
(schiopeto) that would penetrate armour, and that the sultan had given
much support (provision) to such as these.”53
There are several possible reasons for the Ottomans’ apparent lack of
interest in manufacturing articulated plate-armour. First, the weight
of armour would probably have been too great for their horses: in the
fifteenth century, both the Spaniard Pero Tafur and the Serb Konstantin
Mihailović commented on the small size of Turkish horses in comparison
with western warhorses.54 Second, heavy armour did not suit Ottoman
cavalry tactics which valued speed and mobility. Mihailović in fact
advised against wearing heavy armour when fighting the Ottomans:
“Their horses, because of their great lightness are always swift: but you,
even with your horses, are always slow because of the great burden of
armour: for having much on your head, you are short-winded. Moreover,
you cannot hear or see well. Because of the weight of the armour you can-
not manage your hands or yourselves either.”

52. Celālzāde, Tabakāt ül-Memālik, p. 146a; Kemalpașazade, Histoire de la Cam-

pagne de Mohacz, p. 89-90.
53. Sanuto, I Diarii, LIII, 1898, p. 213.
54. Petersen, “The Heathen Order of Battle;” Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary,
p. 171.
22 COLIN IMBER

Furthermore, he says, the Ottoman tactic was to attack the horse and
not the man:55 it was by disabling his horse that the Janissaries brought
down and killed the heavily armoured king of Hungary at the battle of
Varna in 1444. Third, even if they had wished to produce articulated
armours, Ottoman craftsmen would have faced a technological problem.
The wootz – that is, Damascus steel – that they used to make steel plates
was less malleable than the medium carbon steels in use in the European
centres of production, and so unsuitable for the manufacture of articu-
lated suits of armour.56
Instead, Ottoman troops continued to use the types of armour which
had been in common use throughout the Islamic world since the four-
teenth century. A statute of around 1500 requires a sipahi to bring with
him on campaign a bürüme, that is, a mail shirt with iron rings, usually
with lamellar steel plates on the front, back and sides.57 The same statute
requires him also to provide horse armour, consisting of a shaffron to
protect the front of the face, and bards in the form of rectangular lamellar
plates protecting the side of the animal’s neck and flanks. 58 Sipahis with
lower value timars, sipahis’ retainers, and volunteers probably came to
war with less elaborate armour, for example, simple coverings of mail
for the head rather than forged steel helmets.59 A particular type of Otto-
man helmet, with a peaked skull, which might be rounded or conical,
a sliding nose-bar, and cheek- and neck- guards apparently became the

55. Mihailović, Memoirs of a Janissary, p. 172.

56. Williams, “Ottoman Military Technology.” Williams also notes that the same
medium-carbon steel was used in making clock-springs, and that the Ottomans in the
sixteenth century used imported springs. The references in Ottoman inventories to “Euro-
pean” (frengī) and “Hungarian” (üngürüsī) armours refer perhaps to cuirasses, single
plates covering the front and the back. Emecen, Osmanlı Klasik Çağında Savaş, p. 213;
Vatin, L’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem, p. 481 and 487. However, the Ottomans may
also have used captured and recycled armours. Reporting on the Ottoman troops at the
siege of Constantinople in 1453, Tedaldi records: “A quarter of them were equipped with
coats of mail or leather jackets. Of the others many were armed after the fashion of France,
some after the fashion of Hungary and others again had helmets of iron …” Quoted in
Bartusis, The Late Byzantine Army, p. 129. After the battle of Mező-Keresztes in 1596,
two çavuşes showed the English ambassador Barton around the site of the battle, Barton
reporting: “There was all the Ordnance left behind, and much Armour which the Chris-
tians that had fled cast away, to go with more speed when the Turkes pursued them so
neere”. See Barton’s eyewitness account of the battle in Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus,
p. 312-320.
57. Stanley, “Men-at-arms,” p. 331-363.
58. Royal Armouries, Leeds, XXVIA.116; XXVIA.222; XXVIH.33; Stanley, “Men-
at-arms;” Beldiceanu, Villain-Gandossi, “Gečim.”
59. Royal Armouries, Leeds.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS23

prototype for the zisschagge-helmet used in Europe during the period of

the Thirty Years War.60

SIEGES AND FORTRESSES

By the end of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans had already

become expert in conducting sieges and, during the course of the fif-
teenth, adapted their tactics to accommodate the use of gunpowder weap-
ons. The contemporary chronicler Tursun Bey61 records how, at the open-
ing of the siege of Constantinople in 1453, “they at once began work on
the trenches [leading] to the places where the cannon were to be set up,
and here and there established mangonels” – here probably meaning
mortars62 – “constructed shelters (mencū yirler) and covered galleries
(tonuz damları), and assigned an appropriate spot to the miners,”63 whom
the sultan had brought from the silver mines of Serbia.64 In the centre of
the army were archers and “European and Turkish” (frengī ve türkī)
crossbowmen, arquebusiers and cannon (darbuzen), with azab archers to
the left and right, and the cavalry to the rear.”65 The novelty at the siege
seems to have been the use of mortars: the fact that Kritovoulos should
attribute the invention of the weapon to Mehmed II during the course of
the siege itself suggests not only that he wished to flatter the sultan, but
also that the weapon itself had previously been unknown to him.66
There were further developments in Ottoman siegecraft in the century
and a half after 1453. Immediately after 1500, while not totally abandon-
ing the use of very large “castle-smashers” seen at the siege of Constan-
tinople, the Ottomans adopted the French practice of using more mobile
batteries of light and medium size cannon, firing cast-iron shot against
fortress walls.67 A further refinement appeared at the siege of Eger in
1596, when Lala Mehmed Pasha adopted an Austrian practice which he
had observed at the siege of Esztergom in the previous year, firing his

60. Robinson, Oriental Armour, p. 62, p. 80.

61. Tursun Bey’s text reads as though he was an eyewitness to the siege. See, howe-
ver, Vatin, “Tursun Beg assista-t-il au siège de Constantinople?”
62. Like the mangonel, mortars fire shot in a parabolic trajectory, leading some Otto-
man writers to refer to them as mancanik (mangonel).
63. Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 51.
64. Ibid., p. 47.
65. Ibid., p. 48-49.
66. DeVries, “Gunpowder Weapons.”
67. See above.
24 COLIN IMBER

eight cannon simultaneously at a single spot on the fortress wall.68 At

Constantinople, the Ottomans had brought siege-towers against the city
walls, but these seem to have gone out of use in the following decades.
Instead, in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans became expert in erecting
earth bastions opposite the fortress, allowing them to mount artillery,
archers and arquebusiers at a height overlooking the enemy. At Rhodes
in 1522, the garrison commander, Gabriele Tadini da Martinengo,
watched in amazement as the Ottoman attackers advanced “in a manner
hitherto unseen. Starting about a mile from Rhodes, they go forward,
carrying soil ahead for the defence, something you would never believe
if you had not seen it.” In places, the earth fortification which they con-
structed overlooked the ramparts by ten of twelve feet.69 Ottoman troops
used a similar tactic in later sieges, for example at Szigetvár in 1566,
where the Janissaries filled sacks with soil and dung to build a fortress
opposite the inner citadel,70 or at Nicosia in 1570.71 An advantage of such
temporary fortifications was that they simply absorbed the shot coming
from the fortress. As gabions (metris sepetleri) to protect the cannon, the
Ottomans used wickerwork drums filled with earth72 or, as Nicolas de
Nicolay observed at the siege of Tripoli in 1551, constructed lozenges of
hinged planks, three inches thick enclosing an earthen core, and so
arranged that enemy shot would glance off their diagonal surfaces.73
In most sieges, mines played as important a role as artillery. In the
fifteenth century Ottoman miners had used the technique of bringing the
mine up to the fortress walls and setting fire to the props. In the following
century they used explosive charges. An account of the siege of Rhodes
in 1522 describes the Ottoman miners as bringing the tunnel up to the
bulwark below the St Athanasios tower, supporting the chamber with
props and building an oven-like structure. They filled this with sacks of
gunpowder, sealed it and brought the fuse to the entrance of the mine
before firing.74 Where mining was impossible, the besiegers resorted to
other means. At Akkerman in 1484, after bombarding the walls and using
mortars to spread destruction in the interior of the fortress, they built

68. Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, II, p. 193.

69. Sanuto, I Diarii, XXXIII, 1892, p. 488-489.
70. Selânikî Mustafa, Tarih-i Selânikî, I, p. 31.
71. Hill, A History of Cyprus, III, p. 967-985.
72. Selânikî Mustafa, Tarih-i Selânikî, I, p. 30.
73. Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman le Magnifique, p. 83.
74. Sanuto, I Diarii, XXXIV, 1892, p. 76.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS25

three bridges over the moat, which was too deep either to fill in or to
undermine.75 At Szigetvár in 1566, the lake surrounding the fortresses on
three sides and the waterlogged ground made mining impossible, forcing
the besieging Ottoman army to try to drain the water and fill in the moat:
before the assault on the inner fortress, the army spent eight days filling
the moat with logs, dung and sackfuls of straw.76 The army, in fact, had
to adapt its tactics according to the nature of the ground and the situation
and strength of the fortress.
None of these tactics would have been unfamiliar on European bat-
tlefields. Wars with Venice, Hungary and the Austrian Habsburgs
between 1453 and 1600 would have familiarised the Ottomans with
European weaponry and styles of fortress warfare and, equally, influ-
ences would have travelled in the opposite direction. Fortress warfare,
however, involves fortress design and defence as much as siegecraft, and
here there does seem to have been a divergence during the course of the
sixteenth century. From the fifteenth century, the challenge facing archi-
tects was to construct fortresses strong enough to resist enemy cannon-
fire, and spacious enough to accommodate gun embrasures on several
levels, designed to allow as wide a field of fire as possible, with sufficient
ventilation to prevent the smoke suffocating the gunners. Castles of this
kind became widespread in Western Europe during the fifteenth century,77
and began to appear in the Ottoman Empire immediately after the siege
of Constantinople in 1453. The castle of Rumeli Hisarı, which Mehmed II
constructed in 1452, has no piercings for large guns in the towers, and
with a thickness of about two metres, the inner walls are too thin to pro-
vide a platform for artillery.78 They could have accommodated hand-
gunners, but the heavy artillery at the castle was placed in semi-circular
embrasures in the curtain at sea-level. In contrast to Rumeli Hisarı, in the
castle of Yedi Kule, built into the city walls of Constantinople immedi-
ately after the conquest, the platform of 3½ metres at the upper level of
the three angle towers, and the continuous 5 metre-wide platform on the
four curtain walls were sufficiently spacious to allow the emplacement
of artillery.79

75. Ibn Kemâl, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman VIII. Defter, p. 75.

76. Ferîdûn Bey, Les Plaisants Secrets, p. 210-211.
77. Purton, A History of the Late Medieval Siege, p. 388-399.
78. Rumeli Hisarı was built at great speed, which may account for this.
79. Purton, A History of the Late Medieval Siege, p. 341; Pepper, “Ottoman Military
Architecture.”
26 COLIN IMBER

The same need to accommodate cannon also determined the design

of Mehmed II’s two fortresses on the Dardanelles – Kilidülbahr on the
European and Sultaniye on the Asian shore – both, it seems, completed
after 1460. Sultaniye was built on a rectangular plan, with round corner-
and semi-circular intermediate towers, the outer wall enclosing a rectan-
gular keep, built on the foundations of an older tower, with a broad plat-
form for mounting artillery.80 Embrasures in the curtain wall on the
seaward side housed batteries of cannon which fulfilled the fortress’s
primary purpose of blocking the unauthorised passage of ships through
the Dardanelles. Kilidülbahr, by contrast, had a central keep, apparently
six stories high, on a trefoil plan, with a triangular curtain wall. There
was a tower at the apex of the triangle to defend the castle from any
attack coming from the hill behind.81 The plan of the central tower and
the curtain provided overlapping fields of fire, and is somewhat reminis-
cent of Henry VIII’s south coast castles built in the following century.
As at Sultaniye, a wall across the front of the fortress at shore level
provided cover for the gun batteries.82 The tall keep at Kildülbahr was
one of several artillery towers defending coastal positions. Mehmed II,
Tursun Bey informs us, “had a strong castle built opposite the port of
Istanbul, on a reef in the sea off the Anatolian shore”83, a reference pre-
sumably to the sultan’s fortifying the Maiden’s Tower (Kız Kulesi) at the
southern entrance to the Bosphorus. After the conquest of Methoni in
1500, the Ottomans constructed an octagonal tower on an island at the
entrance of the harbour, with an elevation similar to Kilidülbahr, enclosed
within a curtain wall.84 The influence of Kilidülbahr is also evident in the
Strait of Navpaktos where, in 1499-1500, the Ottomans constructed two
artillery towers, one on either shore at the entrance of the Strait,85 and
also the nearby castle of Patras, on the Peloponnesian side. This was
lower and squatter than Kilidülbahr or the harbour tower at Methoni, but

80. Belon du Mans, Voyage au Levant, p. 234. Belon, however was not impressed
with the fortress describing it as “very weak, seeing that it is the key to Turkey.”
81. Belon du Mans, Voyage au Levant, p. 234-235. Belon considered Kilidülbahr to
be vulnerable to an attack from the hill on the landward side. Both castles, he said, were
“provided with good artillery pieces, ready to fire if needs be” on any vessel entering or
leaving the Dardanelles without permission.
82. These are clearly visible in Piri Reis’s map of the entrance to the Dardanelles. See
Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, p. 96.
83. Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth, p. 75.
84. Harrison, “Castles and Fortresses of the Peloponnese.”
85. Piri Reis, Kitabı Bahriye, p. 316.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS27

its triangular plan, like the trefoil plan of Kilidülbahr, allowed for all-
round flanking fire, while the rounded surfaces of the merlons on the gate
towers served to deflect shot.86
Between 1453 and 1500, therefore, the Ottomans adapted their mili-
tary architecture to mount and resist artillery. The names of the architects
and masons who worked on the fortresses remain unknown, but wars in
the north-west against Bosnians, Serbs and Hungarians, and on the
Aegean frontier against the Venetians must have familiarised the Otto-
mans with influences coming from the west. In particular, the use of tall
towers suggests the absorption of knowledge gained in wars along the
Danube frontier.87 It is likely, too, that experts in fortress design and
construction, as much as experts in cannon-casting and other war-related
crafts, would have crossed the border as captives or in search of better
pay and, voluntarily or involuntarily, entered Ottoman service. The most
important lessons, however, would have been learned when re-building
after sieges. When the Ottomans captured an enemy fortress, they either
demolished it or simply reconstructed what was there before, as the
Frenchman Belon du Mans noted in 1546 in describing the rebuilt for-
tress of Rhodes: “I wish to add,” he remarked, “that the Turks have
always had the custom that they leave any castle or fortress which they
capture in exactly the same state as they found it, demolishing nothing
of the edifices or carvings.”88 While adding nothing to the science of
fortification, this practice of rebuilding would, during their period
of expansion, have acquainted the Ottomans with different styles of
defensive architecture which they could themselves apply when building
new fortresses.

86. For a detailed analysis of Sultaniye, Kilidülbahr and the Castle of Patras, and for
an unusually upbeat assessment of Ottoman military architecture, see Pepper, “Ottoman
Military Architecture.” This article also discusses the Ottoman castle at Mytilene. It is
likely however that the Ottomans simply repaired the pre-existing Genoese castle at
Mitylene after conquering Lesbos in 1462, rather than building it ab initio. A picture by
a Netherlandish artist, depicting Henry VIII’s departure to the Field of the Cloth of Gold
in 1520 (Royal Collection, RCIN 405793), shows coastal fortifications consisting of two
squat artillery towers, with respectively two and three storeys, the merlons on the two-
storied tower having rounded surfaces. The similarity with Ottoman coastal artillery tow-
ers is striking.
87. Pepper, “Ottoman Military Architecture.”
88. Belon du Mans, Voyage au Levant, p. 257. See Gilles Veinstein’s comments on
the preservation, with very little change, of the Genoese fortifications in Caffa. Veinstein,
“From the Italians to the Ottomans.”
28 COLIN IMBER

From about 1500, however, the artillery tower became obsolescent.

In the late fifteenth century, a new style of fortress had appeared in Italy
and, by 1600, spread to most parts of Western Europe, including the
Ottoman-Habsburg frontier in Hungary. This was the trace italienne for-
tress whose lower, thicker walls, with an earth and rubble core, were
more resistant to cannon fire than the old towers, and which allowed
enfilading fire along the ditch from triangular bastions.89 The Ottomans
encountered the trace italienne at the siege of Nicosia in 1570 and then
in Hungary during the Long War of 1593-1606, but did not themselves
adopt its principles. This is perhaps because the modernised fortresses
were expensive to construct, and the relative ease with which the Otto-
mans conquered Nicosia in 1570 and Esztergom in 160590 showed that
they were not necessarily as effective as their designers imagined. There
was probably also another reason. The design of the trace italienne for-
tress rested on fairly complex geometrical principles and, in the course
of the sixteenth century, had increasingly become the province of profes-
sional fortress designers and the subject of architectural treatises.91 It is
possible, therefore, that knowledge of this kind crossed the border into
the Ottoman Empire less easily than the workshop practices that came
with the migration of skilled craftsmen. It is, however, surprising that
apparently no European engineers specialising in fortress design and
siegecraft chose to enter the sultan’s service.
The conservatism of Ottoman fortress design in the sixteenth century
is, however, in some cases, simply a reflection of function. For example,
the forts along the Syrian hajj route are simple rectangular stone enclo-
sures with embrasures for small cannon, and machicolations – a feature
of mediaeval castle architecture – over the doorways,92 and however
inadequate these would have been against an army with gunpowder
weapons, they perfectly fulfilled their task of protecting pilgrims and
their goods from marauding Bedouin. Nonetheless, the design of for-
tresses on the Ottoman western frontiers also remained conservative.
In 1573, the orders to the architect at New Navarino required him build
a fortress in “the European (frengī) style,” with the towers by the sea

89. Hale, Renaissance Fortification.

90. Ibrahim Peçevi, however, records how the Ottoman commander Lala Mehmed
Pasha rejected the advice to bypass Esztergom, given on the grounds that the fortress was
impregnable. Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, II, p. 301.
91. Hale, Renaissance Fortification.
92. Petersen, “The Ottoman Conquest of Arabia.”
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS29

capable of mounting culverins and basilisks, and with walls 2 zirā‘ – that
is less than 2 metres93 – thick. Although at the architect’s request, the
order was emended to allow for walls 10 zirā‘ high and 3 zirā‘ thick,
with a line of recessed arches carrying the wall-walk,94 the high and rela-
tively thin walls, further weakened by the arcading, would not have been
able to withstand a sustained assault with artillery. This, however, was
probably not the intention. The purpose of the fortress was to prevent
enemy shipping from entering Navarino Bay, rather than to withstand an
attack from the land more serious than what could be expected during
local uprisings. This was probably true also of Seddülbahr and Kumkale,
the fortresses constructed on the command and at the expense of the
Queen Mother Turhan Sultan, at the entrance to the Dardanelles in
1658.95 In plan, they were similar to Sultaniye, built two centuries earlier,
but again perhaps adequate for their purpose of sheltering the shore bat-
teries aimed at enemy warships. Whether, however, any of these for-
tresses could have withstood an artillery barrage from an enemy fleet is
questionable.
The greatest concentration of Ottoman fortresses was on the Ottoman-
Habsburg border in Hungary. None of these has survived, but it seems
that here, too, Ottoman fortress construction was conservative, with
armies either rebuilding pre-existing stone fortresses, or constructing
palankas of beams and compressed earth.96 As a style of fortification, the
palanka was more vulnerable than the new-style European fortresses, but
had the advantages of being cheap, quick to build and able, with the
earthen core of its walls, to absorb some of the shock of cannon fire. Its
use in the Ottoman Balkans was to survive into the nineteenth century,97
outlasting the use of trace italienne fortress.

THE 1590S

The twenty-seven years between the siege of Szigetvár in 1566 and

the outbreak of the “Long War” with the Habsburgs in 1593 was a time
of peace between the Ottomans and the European powers, broken only

93. Estimating a zirā‘ at 0.758 m. See Ágoston, “Guns for the Sultan,” p. 247.
94. Kiel, “The Construction of the Ottoman Castle of Anavarin-i Cedid;” Harrison,
“Castles and Fortresses;” Andrews, Castles of the Morea, p. 49-57.
95. Thys-Şenocak et al., “Understanding Archaeology.”
96. Hegyi, “The Ottoman Network of Fortresses.”
97. Özgüven, “Palanka Forts.”
30 COLIN IMBER

by the war of Cyprus between 1570 and 1573. During this period, the
Ottomans fought wars in Yemen in the south and against the Safavids in
the east, but their experience in these conflicts had not prepared them for
a new style of warfare which had developed on the battlefields of West-
ern Europe and, by 1593, spread to the Habsburg frontier in Hungary. It
was not the unfamiliar trace italienne fortress that proved to be a problem
for the Ottomans in the Long War, but the increased number of arquebu-
siers98 and new types of firearm. In the words of one of the most success-
ful Ottoman commanders in the war, Lala Mehmed Pasha: “Most of the
accursed ones’ troops are infantrymen firing arquebuses, while most of
the Muslim soldiers are cavalrymen. Not only are infantrymen few, but
experts in the arquebus are also rare, and we suffer great difficulties in
battle and sieges.”99
A particular problem to which Lala Mehmed was referring was the
Habsburg use of infantry formations combining pikemen and arquebus-
iers, by now with a much higher proportion of shot to pike than earlier
in the century.100 As was to become evident at the battle of Mező-
Keresztes in 1596,101 the Ottoman cavalry was ineffective against these
formations. It was, however, not only the number of firearms that caused
such difficulties for the Ottomans, but also the new types that they found
the enemy using. In his account of Mező-Keresztes, Ibrahim Peçevi
describes Austrian culverins with a range long enough to reach the sul-
tan’s encampment, and muskets – heavier weapons than the arquebus,
with tripod supports – able to fire balls of 5 dirhems.102 He also noticed
the ranks of “German, Bohemian and Polish” cavalrymen carrying “at
least three and at most five arquebuses.”103 Another participant in the
battle, Abdülkadir Efendi is more specific, describing these weapons as

98. Firearms had earlier played a major role in the Ottoman defeat at the sea-battle
of Lepanto in 1571, during the War of Cyprus. The Ottoman response had been to levy
men from the general population who were practiced in the use of firearms. See Imber,
“The Reconstruction,” p. 85-102. Similar levies were made during the Long War, when
Habsburg superiority in firearms had become apparent.
99. Orhonlu, Telhîsler (1597-1607), p. 71-72.
100. Kelenik, “The Military Revolution in Hungary.”
101. For an English account of the battle and the siege of Eger which preceded it, see
Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, p. 312-320. On the sources for this campaign and their
discrepancies, see Schmidt, “The Egri Campaign of 1596.”
102. Probably about 16 g., assuming 1 dirhem = 3.207 g. See Ágoston, Guns for the
Sultan, p. 247.
103. Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevi, II, p. 198-199.
 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY AND TACTICS31

“wheel-guns” (çarkī tüfek),104 that is wheel-lock pistols or carbines

which a cavalryman could pre-load and which were light enough to allow
him to carry several at a time and fire in succession.105 Among the new
equipment for sieges which the Ottomans encountered was the petard for
blowing in the doors of fortresses, a weapon which Peçevi describes at
length.106 Lala Mehmed, for his part, was intrigued to find “unusual guns
and weapons” inside the fortress of Esztergom after his successful siege:
“They had positioned against the breaches [guns for firing] grapeshot and
small cannon (zarbzens) [attached] one over the other …”107 apparently
a reference to multi-barrelled cannon.
The difficulties that the Ottomans faced during the “Long War” are
an indication that the most important forum for the transmission of mili-
tary tactics and technology was the battlefield. At the outbreak of the
war, they had not fought the Habsburgs in Hungary for almost thirty
years and were clearly unaware of the new forms of warfare that they
would encounter.108 Since these involved in particular the greatly
increased use of infantry and firearms, it is not surprising that during the
course of the war the Ottomans expended great effort in increasing their
own infantry numbers and insisting on their proficiency in handling fire-
arms. The change in Ottoman military tactics and their adoption of new
types of weapon came from direct battlefield experience.

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Colin Imber, The Transfer of Military Technology and Tactics between Western
Europe and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1400-c. 1600

Although the once widely-held view that the Ottomans owed their mili-
tary successes to European ‘renegades’ is now largely discredited, it remains
36 COLIN IMBER

important to recognise the role of Europeans craftsmen, technologies and tactics

in the development of the Ottoman army. However, it is also important to rec-
ognise that ‘Europe’ is not a homogeneous entity and that European influences
arrived at different times and from different areas of the continent. While fire-
arms and their associated technologies arrived in the Ottoman Empire through
multiple routes, the use of iron cannon-balls and the tactic of using trains of
manoeuvrable cannon rather than giant guns during sieges followed the French
example. The Ottoman adoption of the Wagenburg in field battles after the mid-
fifteenth century, followed Hungarian practice. The transfer of these and other
technologies and tactics was facilitated both by direct battlefield experience, and
by the use of foreign craftsmen who had entered Ottoman service either voluntar-
ily or as prisoners-of-war. These might then return to their homelands with
knowledge of Ottoman practice. As a result, before the late sixteenth century,
there was no great divergence between east and west. When war with the
­Habsburgs broke out in 1593, the Ottomans had not fought a war in central
Europe for thirty years and confronted new weapons and unfamiliar tactics that,
at times, brought them close to defeat.

Colin Imber, Les transferts de technologie et de tactiques militaires entre l’Europe

occidentale et l’Empire ottoman, env. 1400- env. 1600

Quoiqu’on ait largement abandonné aujourd’hui l’idée naguère très répandue

que les Ottomans devaient leurs succès militaires à des «  renégats  » européens,
il demeure important de reconnaître le rôle des artisans, des technologies et des
tactiques d’Occident dans le développement de l’armée ottomane. Mais il est
également important de reconnaître que l’« Europe » n’était pas une entité homo-
gène et que les influences européennes arrivèrent à des époques différentes et en
provenance de différentes zones du continent. Tandis que les armes à feu et les
techniques qui leur étaient liées arrivèrent dans l’Empire ottoman par diverses
routes, c’est l’exemple français qui amena l’emploi de boulets de fer et la tac-
tique de sièges avec des trains de canons mobiles plutôt que des canons géants.
L’adoption ottomane du Wagenburg sur le champ de bataille, après le milieu du
xve siècle, procédait la pratique hongroise. Le transfert de ces technologies et
tactiques (ainsi que d’autres encore) était facilité par l’expérience directe sur le
champ de bataille et par l’emploi d’artisans étrangers entrés au service des Otto-
mans soit de leur plein gré, soit comme captifs de guerre. Lesquels pouvaient
ensuite rentrer chez eux en rapportant une connaissance des pratiques ottomanes.
En conséquence il n’y avait guère de différence entre l’est et l’ouest avant la fin
du xvie siècle. Quand le conflit avec les Habsbourg éclata en 1593, cela faisait
trente ans que les Ottomans n’avaient pas mené de guerre en Europe centrale  :
ils se trouvèrent confrontés à de nouvelles armes et à des tactiques qui ne leur
étaient pas familières, ce qui les mena parfois tout près de la défaite.