ABSTRACT
Europeans were caught almost completely off-guard by the remarkably rapid rise of the Ottoman ‘menace’ (as contemporaries perceived it). But Europe’s capacity to resist the Ottoman advance was further reduced by such factors as the deep divisions between and within Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christendom, the deadly rivalries between Venice, Genoa, Ragusa and Constantinople, and the devastating effects of the Black Death. Bubonic plague spread westwards from Constantinople in 1347, decimating and terrorizing whole populations for several decades. (Bubonic plague persisted in the Balkans and Anatolia until the nineteenth century and has occasionally resurfaced in twentieth-century Russia and Kazakhstan.)
Successive waves of Turkic nomadic pastoralists, warriors and marauders had been fanning out from Central Asia into Anatolia, the Black Sea region and the Middle East since the eighth or ninth century, partly in a perpetual quest for fresh pastures and hunting grounds and partly in response to pressure on their eastern and northern flanks from the Mongols. The Seljuk Turks in particular had cleared the way for large-scale Turkic colonization and Islamicization of Anatolia since the eleventh century, gradually displacing northwards the formerly dominant Armenians and Byzantine Greeks. Indeed, Anatolia became a favourite stomping ground for large numbers of Moslem Turkish freebooters and frontiersmen known as ‘ghazis’ (‘fighters against non-Moslems’, from the Arabic word for ‘raid’).
