Introduction

From the conquest of Constantinople (1453) to the treaty of Zitvatorok (1606), the Ottoman Empire was a world power, capable of directly challenging both the Austrian Habsburgs in central Europe and their Spanish relatives in the western Mediterranean. We will here use 1606 as our cut-off point because the end of the Long War with the Habsburgs of Vienna (1593–1606) had much greater financial and economic importance than the death of Mehmed III in 1603, which otherwise serves as a period limit for this volume. Among the enemies of Habsburg Spain, we find the newly emerging Protestant nations of England and the Netherlands as well as Catholic France. In addition to this involvement with the Western powers, the sultans also projected their power towards the East, across the Indian Ocean all the way to Sumatra, where they aided the Muslims of that region against the Portuguese.

Ultimately, the fierce rivalry between the Ottomans and the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs originated in the conquest of Constantinople. Mehmed II (the Conqueror) and his entourage considered the acquisition of this once magnificent city, which had been the capital of the Roman Empire for a period of 1123 years (11 May 330 to 29 May 1453), as the rebirth of the dominion of the Caesars. The young sultan officially used the title Kayser-i Rum, “Caesar of the Romans”. Calling their new emperor “Sultan Basileus”, the Orthodox people of Constantinople accepted this claim, combining his two attributes, Muslim and imperial, in a single title. In 1466, the philosopher Georgios Trapezuntios legitimised this acceptance as follows: “No one should doubt that you are the Emperor of the Romans. The person, who legally holds the capital city of the Empire, is the Emperor and the capital city of the Roman Empire is Constantinople”. Not only Greek, Italian and Austrian but also Arab and Persian authors considered the new empire as the continuation of its Roman predecessor. For these people, the Ottoman Turks were the Romans of modern times.