Original subtitles

- From obscure beginnings as

a warrior tribe of nomadic horsemen,

the Ottoman Empire rose to become the most powerful force

in the Islamic World.

With its magnificent capitol, Istanbul,

here on the European shores of the Bosporus,

it stood as a self-styled caliphate

whose territories rivaled those of Ancient Rome.

This was an empire founded on military conquest.

And the Ottomans had a mastery of Europe in their sight.

For 500 years, the battle raged back and forth

as the Ottomans tried to establish

a permanent presence in Eastern Europe.

It's a legacy that continues to haunt

these contested lands to this day.

For all its grandeur and might,

little is known about

the Ottoman Empire's earliest beginnings.

But legend tells us something of its purpose.

And the legend goes something like this.

Osman, a young Turkoman tribal warrior

living somewhere in northwest Anatolia,

traveled to the home of Edebali,

a highly regarded religious man in the area.

Osman knew Edebali and he admired his teachings.

He also had his eye on the old man's daughter.

Edebali, for his part, wasn't quite so enamored

of his prospective son in law.

But Osman persevered.

He continued his visits.

And then one night something extraordinary happened.

Osman dreamed he saw the moon rise up

from the holy man's chest as he lay sleeping.

It crossed the sky and it set in Osman's own chest.

Then a tree sprouted from Osman's navel.

It grew large and strong.

And its branches spread across the entire sky.

Casting a cooling shade on all the land.

Streams of fresh water rushed down from the mountains

that people drank from.

Osman immediately woke up Edebali and told him his dream,

which the old man interpreted as a divine prophecy

foretelling a glorious future of Osman

and the expansion of his people.

A dream of empire, no less.

Well, the stuff of legend probably.

But Osman the Turkoman warrior was a real historical figure

and is recognized as the founder of the Ottoman dynasty.

The word Ottoman actually means the people of Osman.

And the name Osman means bone cruncher.

A rather ominous portent for the future.

Oh, in case you're wondering, yes, he did get the girl.

He married her.

- This legend is rooted in Central Asian mythology.

This is an example of the Ottoman Turk's

pre-Islamic origins.

The tree story is one of several

which are justifications for expansion and rule

and, to some extent,

you might say, universal domination.

The idea that the Turks are destined to rule the world.

- [Julian] Exploiting their legendary skills

as warrior horsemen, the people of Osman spread out

across northwestern Anatolia.

They ransacked towns and villages,

both Byzantine and Muslim.

Acquiring more territory, booty, and recruits.

But it wasn't until they captured

the Byzantine town of Prousa in 1326

that their status would change.

Setting them on a course for empire.

Prousa was little more than an outpost

on the edges of the dwindling Byzantine Empire.

Osman had his eye on the city for some time.

But it wasn't until his son Orhan came to power

that the Ottomans succeeded in taking it.

Known today as Bursa,

the city is the fourth largest in Turkey

and one of the country's historical gems.

But, for the Ottomans of the early 14th century,

it represented not the past but the future.

- Bursa was important.

When they took control of it,

it sort of altered the whole of their society.

They certainly became rulers of a significant town

for the first time.

- The Ottomans renamed the city Bursa

and they made it their capitol.

So, suddenly, we see them abandoning a tribal way of life

and adopting an urban lifestyle.

And they also acquire imperial ambitions.

A dream of empire which they realized

by rebuilding the city in their own image.

It's like their calling card.

They say, "We've arrived.

We're here to stay.

And we mean business."

And it's really a quite dramatic transformation

and it happens very quickly.

Considered by many to be the true heart

of the Ottoman empire,

Bursa is filled with impressive monuments

from the Early Ottoman Period.

Dominating the city is the grand Ulu Cami, or Great Mosque.

Built at the end of the 14th century,

its scale and beauty expresses perfectly

the empire's lofty ambitions.

But it is, perhaps,

the older Yildirim Bayezid Mosque Complex,

built about 60 years after the city's conquest,

that tells us more about the Ottoman's aims

in those nascent days of empire.

Set just outside the city center,

with its own hospital, school, bathhouse, kitchen,

it was the Ottoman's first mosque complex.

Built to attract a community that could be taxed

and thereby generate revenue.

Stepping inside this mosque,

one is immediately struck by the grandeur of the interior,

which is, of course, precisely what was intended.

This is a power statement.

But one also gets the impression that

it's not very mosque-like.

It's a bit like a church, if that's not too sacrilegious.

It has a transept.

Except the transept is towards the door.

And I think, probably, the early architects and artisans

and builders who were responsible for this building,

they probably came from Byzantium themselves.

And that, of course, was the benchmark that

the Ottomans were pitching themselves against.

Impressive as it was, Bursa couldn't compare

with the legendary capitol

of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople,

located 56 miles to the north.

Spread out along the European side of the Bosporus,

Constantinople sat at the crossroads

of ancient trade routes between East and West,

which made the city immensely powerful and wealthy.

Known today as Istanbul,

Constantinople was once the epicenter

of the Eastern Roman Empire

and the Orthodox Christian Church.

- The Byzantine Empire had shrunk

and was no longer powerful.

But it had this cultural significance.

It had been there since the first expansion of Islam.

It had resisted attack

by the early Muslim Arabs successfully.

It had resisted attacks over centuries.

It loomed hugely in the imagination

and the political sort of landscape of the Ottomans

and, indeed, of all Muslims of the Middle East.

- By the mid-14th century,

the Byzantine Empire was embroiled

in a power struggle between two claimants to the throne.

John VI Kantakouzenos,

a close confidant of the previous emperor,

and John V Palaiologos,

the 20 year old hereditary heir to the throne.

Kantakouzenos, aware of the Ottomans'

formidable reputation as warriors,

invited Orhan's forces to help him suppress the rebellion.

So, in 1352, an Ottoman force made its way

to the Dardanelles Straights,

a narrow strip of water separating

Anatolia from the Gallipoli Peninsula

on the mainland of southeastern Europe.

Born of desperation, the Byzantine king's decision

was to have dire consequences.

Not only for the future of Byzantium.

But also the Balkans.

The backdoor to Europe had been literally

flung open to Ottoman expansion.

And the pickings were rich.

Landing on the European side of the straight,

Orhan's forces marched into Thrace

where they roundly defeated the Byzantine rebels.

This was the first major battle

the Ottomans would fight and win on European soil.

Kantakouzenos's reign was secured.

But any expectations he might have had

about Orhan's armies returning from whence they came

were quickly dispelled.

- According to Islamic law,

once some land has been conquered by Islam,

it becomes part of the Islamic World.

It was believed the Islamic World was destined, really,

to sweep over the whole of the Earth.

And so, there could only ever be an advance in this.

And, once the flag had been planted in a piece of land,

it was theirs and it was nonnegotiable.

- Orhan does seem to have used this idea

that you can't abandon territory

which has once been conquered by Muslims.

So, he can't give back this little fortress.

Gives him the base.

The Byzantines are not strong enough

to take it back by force.

And, from there, they can raid.

- [Julian] Ottoman forces swept northwards

across Thrace with breathtaking speed.

Bypassing Constantinople itself,

they pushed deeper into Europe.

Reaching the city of Adrianopolis

near the Bulgarian border in little more than a decade.

- Under late Byzantine rule,

the Balkans was a chaotic collection of little kingdoms.

Very fragmented.

And ruled by Christian feudal overlords

who oppressed their peasantry very heavily.

- You could say, really,

it was absolutely ripe for the picking.

There had been fighting between

the Byzantines, the Bulgarians, the Serbs,

various other people.

The place was in a mess.

- It really provided an opportunity

for the Ottomans to step in

and actually to provide something a little bit better.

- In some places, they were accepted.

In some places, they were even welcomed.

It's almost like a sense of relief.

"Finally," the locals might be saying,

"we've got a government that can govern."

- Named after the Roman Emperor Hadrian,

Adrianopolis was a significant conquest for the Ottomans.

It was perfectly positioned to launch

far reaching campaigns into Europe.

By the time of its capture, Orhan had died

and his more than capable son Murad had come to power.

Murad was an accomplished military leader

who understood the city's strategic potential.

So, he changed its name to the Turkish Edirne

and began to transform it into

a grand European capitol for his empire.

The Ottomans celebrated their entry into Europe

with a dazzling display of architectural magnificence.

But, for all that, Edirne was, first and foremost,

a military center.

It's a legacy that is still very much alive to this day.

(applause)

Edirne lays claim to the longest continually running

state-sanctioned sports competition in the world,

the Annual Kirkpinar Oil Wrestling Tournament.

Oil wrestling is the national sport of Turkey

and its history goes back a long way.

But the competitions at Edirne

began in the 14th century

when the Ottoman army came to town.

Turkish historian Sana Turson is a fan of the event

and he's invited me to watch a practice match

between two of this year's strongest contenders.

Watching these gentlemen writhing around as we are,

tell me something about the rules.

- The rules are different from modern wrestling.

If the belly of a wrestler is exposed to sun,

then the wrestling is over.

Alternatively, if a wrestler grabs the other one

into the air and walks three steps,

then the wrestling is over, too.

- Well, so that was a lift.

- Yeah, good lift, but he walked forward two paces.

- Ah, right, he's gotta take three.

- Yes.

- According to legend,

oil wrestling came to Edirne in the 14th century

when a group of Ottoman soldiers began to wrestle nearby.

Two of the soldiers were so evenly matched

that they wrestled through the night

until they both died of exhaustion.

To honor them, a wrestling competition

has taken place at Edirne ever since.

Oily men in leather breeches,

where does that come from, Sana?

- It comes from Central Asia.

It was a kind of preparation for war.

So, every Turkish warrior was a wrestler at the same time.

- The Ottoman army's famous for being

very well organized and structured.

How were the forces recruited?

- The real power of the Ottoman army was the Janissary

who formed, at most, 10% of the army.

Those Janissaries were not Turks.

They were taken from Christian families in Balkans.

Their children were taken as a kind of tax.

- And these children were

forcibly removed from their families,

I understand it.

Which seems a terribly harsh imposition.

- In the beginning, it was.

But, in time, as families saw that

their children could rose to the highest positions,

most of the families gave their children voluntarily.

- So, that's rather extraordinary

that some of the highest offices in the land

were occupied by non-Turks

and originally people who were Christians.

- Yes, but of course.

They learned Turkish traditions

and, of course, they became good Muslims.

And, once they were taken from families and trained,

they were only loyal to the sultan.

(exciting music)

- [Julian] So, that's game over, is it?

- [Sana] Yes.

- Congratulations.

Great battle.

Titans.

Very spectacular.

(speaking foreign language)

- Would you like to try?

- Oh, I think I need to bulk up a bit

before I take you on, but I'll be back.

In the latter half of the 14th century,

the Ottoman army was probably the most efficient

and formidable fighting force in the Western world.

With professional salaried troops at its core,

each with its specific role to play,

it was a very modern army compared to its European rivals.

Each division was immediately recognizable

by its colorful uniforms and insignia.

Feathers, plumes, that kind of thing.

And it played a very specific role

in the Ottoman war machine.

Now, these rather fearsome bunch of desperadoes behind me,

they're from the Balkasier Carassi

Cavalry Re-Enactment Group.

And they're gonna show me exactly how

all of this fitted together.

Gentlemen, are you ready?

(speaking foreign language)

I'm out of here.

At its core were the Janissaries.

That elite force of infantrymen drawn from Balkan children.

The salaried force loyal to the sultan,

the Janissaries were highly trained fighters

likened to the Roman praetorian guards.

Their reputation for ferocious charges was unrivaled.

Just as elite were the sipahis

and the sultan's own Kapi Kulu sipahis cavalry.

They were the main attacking force of the army

leading charges from the front

and performing pincer-like attacks from the flanks.

(exciting music)

Then there were the irregular forces.

Called up in times of war,

they were unsalaried and unpredictable.

The bashi-bazouks were foot soldiers

motivated primarily by the promise of booty.

The word bashi-bazouk means damaged head in Turkish.

A reference to their complete lack of discipline

and reckless courage in battle.

Last but not least were the akinji,

a light cavalry used for surprise attacks

and lightning raids on the enemy

before the battle had even begun.

Often drawn from religiously motivated warriors,

the akinjis were the Jihadis of their day.

Known as the crazies because of their

suicidally courageous tactics,

they were respected for their horsemanship

and skilled use of weaponry.

(exciting music)

To give you a better idea of their capabilities,

these watermelons represent the heads of their enemy.

(exciting music)

These were the fighting divisions.

But the Ottomans fielded huge armies.

100 to 150,000 men.

And they all had to be provided for.

So, there was a huge contingent of camp followers.

The people who put up the tents and carried them.

The people who cooked for the army.

Water bearers, medical supplies,

people who carried the weapons.

And then there were the engineers who made the roads

and put bridges over the rivers ahead.

There was even a marching band.

An Ottoman army on the move was a huge logistical exercise.

Now, where did everybody go?

With his well organized army,

Murad marched deeper into the Balkans.

Sweeping eastward to the shores of the Black Sea,

westward to the frontiers of Greece and Macedonia,

and northward into Bulgaria.

Taking the important trading center of Plovdiv in 1364.

Ottoman expansion seemed unstoppable.

But there was one obstacle looming on their horizon, Serbia.

At its height, the Serbian Empire stretched

from the souther border of Hungary down the Adriatic Coast

and deep into Macedonia and Greece.

- Serbia was one of the major powers

of the Orthodox Christian Balkans.

But it always seemed to be on the verge

of taking over from the Byzantine, from the Roman Empire,

becoming the new Rome.

Which would defend the Orthodox faith

and Orthodox civilization.

It didn't happen.

Why didn't it happen?

It's those rotten Turks.

They came and spoiled it all.

- [Julian] Murad's forces defeated

Serbian resistance in Macedonia,

making vassals of the local princes,

before pushing into the Serbian heartland.

Taking the city of Nis in 1385.

As the Ottomans closed in,

what remained of the once great Serbian Empire

was being held together by a regional prince,

Lazar Hrebeljanovic.

Prince Lazar managed to repel Ottoman advances for a time.

But Murad's forces launched a devastating offensive

climaxing here in fields just outside of Pristina

in what was then the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The Battle of Kosovo took place in 1389.

And it was fought here at Kosovo Polje, Kosovo Fields.

It was an epic struggle between two mighty armies

that acquired a legendary status

in the hearts and minds of the Serbian people.

Now, shortly before the battle,

Prince Lazar issued a famous proclamational curse

on anyone who didn't turn up

to defend the homeland against the infidel.

And it goes like this.

Whoever is a Serb, of Serb birth,

of Serb blood, or Serb heritage

and comes not to fight at Kosovo,

may he never have progeny born of love.

Neither son nor daughter.

And may nothing sown by his hand ever grow.

Neither red wine nor white wheat.

And may he be forever dying in filth

as long as his children may live.

Pretty potent stuff.

On June 15, an Ottoman force of some 25,000 men

under the command of Murad himself

clashed head on with a Serbian force of about 16,000

under the leadership of Prince Lazar.

The Serbs put up a good fight,

but they were ultimately no match

for the superior numbers and discipline of the Ottoman army.

As the battle turned against the Serbs,

legend holds that one of their noblemen,

a knight named Milos Obilic,

pretended to desert to the Turkish side.

When he was brought before Sultan Murad,

he pulled out a hidden dagger and slew him.

Slashing him from belly to neck.

The story continues when the sultan's son, Bayezid,

who was also at the battle,

learned of his father's murder.

He sent for his brother Yakub

and gave orders that he not be informed

of what had happened.

When Yakub arrived from the battlefield,

his father's death was revealed to him.

But what he didn't realize was that

his brother Bayezid had arranged

for him to be strangled to death.

Leaving Bayezid as the sole heir to the Ottoman throne.

It was a neat, if cynical, trick on Bayezid's part.

But one that set a dangerous precedent

for institutionalized fratricide

amongst future claimants to the sultanate.

Murad was buried at Kosovo Field.

This is his tomb.

The Ottomans had lost their sultan.

But the Serbs, they, too, had lost their leader.

Prince Lazar was also killed on the field of battle.

And both sides had suffered enormous casualties.

One can't really say it was a victory for the Ottomans

and it certainly wasn't a victory for the Serbs.

Because there is a difference.

The Ottomans had plenty of soldiers

deployed elsewhere in the empire.

But, for the Serbs, it was an entire generation

of fighting men cut short, wiped out.

They would never make a recovery.

For the Ottomans, it was but a temporary setback

in an otherwise relentless advance through the Balkans.

- The Battle of Kosovo would cast a long shadow

over Serbian memory.

It is going to be carried forward

for hundreds of years that, one day,

an extinction of Serbia's hopes of a national identity

is not going to be forgotten.

- [Julian] The Battle of Kosovo lives on

in the collective memory of Serbs today.

Every year, on the anniversary of the battle,

hundreds of Serbs pour into Kosovo,

now an independent and largely Muslim republic,

to commemorate their history at the Gazimestan,

or Hero's Monument,

situated here near the site of the battle.

(speaking foreign language)

As part of the ceremony,

representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Christian Church

perform mass in front of the monument

on which is inscribed Prince Lazar's famous curse.

(speaking foreign language)

(applause)

- Battle of this place between Serbian and Ottoman Empire

is very important in our history.

- Is this the first time you've come here?

- Yes, first.

And I plan to...

- [Julian] Come again.

- Come again, yes.

- You're a young person.

When you go to school, do you learn about this

in your history lessons?

- Of course, of course.

This part of history that every child have to know

that is from Serbia and from Balkan that was a big battle.

And we all know about that.

And we love our history.

We love Kosovo.

Kosovo is Serbia.

Yes, it really is.

(speaking foreign language)

- [Julian] The Battle of Kosovo

has long been a potent symbol for Serbian nationalism.

And the ceremony has, in recent times,

been used to promote the restoration

of Serbian sovereignty over Kosovo.

(speaking foreign language)

But the battle was, perhaps, most controversially invoked

by Slobodan Milosevic in 1989

when he gave his speech at the site

calling for Serbian unity in the face of

a rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia.

(speaking foreign language)

- The great Battle of Kosovo was a massive defeat

for the Serbian people.

And, put simply, it was followed by

centuries of foreign occupation and oppression.

Their history has given them

what can really be called a sense of persecution.

You know, everybody's against us.

And this was built upon and it festered.

And then it was used by politicians.

It did have roots in reality.

So, it's both justified and understandable and tragic.

- Obilic is going to reemerge.

And the curse of Lazar is going to reemerge

with Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s

and the Bosnian genocides.

(cheering)

- [Julian] In the 14th century, as in the 20th,

the defeat of Serbia was portrayed in the starkest of terms.

It was good versus evil.

Christian against Muslim.

The reality, however, was much more complicated.

- The Ottomans actually improved life

for Christian peasants.

- The local Christian population in the towns

and certainly in the countryside, they were left alone.

- They were not encouraged to convert.

In fact, they were encouraged not to convert, in a way,

because conversion to Islam

actually brought lower taxes to the Ottoman treasury.

- Most of the Orthodox Church structure

accepted the new political reality and worked with it.

- The patriarch would be in charge of

the Orthodox Christians, the Jews, and the Muslims.

And, as long as you paid your taxes,

you are all effectively the flock, the sultan's flock.

You are all protected people.

The one limitation to what you could do, for example,

permission to build churches was limited.

You couldn't ring a church bell.

- For a few centuries, you might have to give

one of your numerous children.

They had a chance of survival

if he's taken by the sultan to become a Janissary, actually.

- There probably were times of the year

during Islamic festivals and so on

when it was probably best to keep your head down a bit.

But they were not ghettoized in a kind of formal way.

And you did not have pogroms in the way that

you did in Western Europe.

- Despite a policy of religious tolerance

in the Ottoman Balkans,

many Christians did convert to Islam.

And one of the most popular engines of conversion

were the dervish orders.

Much like the Christian missionaries,

the dervishes accompanied the Ottoman army

on the Balkan campaigns and remained

after the fighting was over to help establish

a peaceful transition.

Offering a more mystical form of Islam,

dervishes were very popular

and continued to thrive in pockets of the Balkans.

Here, in the Kosovan town of Prizren,

dervishes from the Rifa'i sect

practice their faith in the time honored way.

Offering us a glimpse into religious life

during the Ottoman Period.

Today, they will be performing

an annual piercing ceremony at their lodge.

But, before it begins, Sejemali Shehu,

the lodge leader's son,

is going to help me understand

a bit more about their faith.

So, this functions like a mosque, this space?

- Yes, of course.

Because it's a mihrab up here,

it orients us to the Mecca.

_ Alright, so this is where the ceremony will take place.

- Yes.

- So, tell me something about the actual ceremony.

What's going to happen.

- Today's ceremony calls in our religion Sultananevros.

It means the birthday of Haji Imam Ali.

- He was the cousin, the nephew of the Prophet

and his son in law.

- Yes.

- Right.

These look extraordinarily sharp instruments.

Tell me about what they are and how you use them.

- First, they are the smalzars.

They called zar.

- Zar, yeah.

- Yes, this zars are piercings for childrens.

- [Julian] And what part of the body do you pierce?

- In cheek.

From the side.

And out on this side.

- [Julian] Really?

- [Sejemali] And they stay like this.

- Yeah, right.

This must be extremely painful.

- No, it's not painful.

We don't have pain.

Just because, when you know for who you are doing

and why you are doing,

you don't feel nothing.

- What age were you when you did this ceremony

for the first time?

- [Sejemali] First time when I was six.

- Really, that young?

- Yes.

- And how do you feel after you've performed this ritual?

It must be an extraordinary experience.

- I feel really powerful.

Really good feelings.

Really happy.

Because I am doing with love.

And this is it.

(speaking foreign language)

- [Julian] The ceremony begins with

the arrival of the lodge's spiritual leader, Sheik Shehu.

As the devotees sing and dance,

the sheik decides when the time is right

for the piercings to start.

There is no set order to the proceedings.

Sheik Shehu spontaneously chooses those he feels are ready.

Blessing the implements with his lips, he begins.

(speaking foreign language)

The Rifa'i piercing ritual originated centuries ago

with the order's founder Sayyid Ahmad ar-Rifai.

He wanted to demonstrate the miracle of God's power

by showing that one could overcome pain

through faith and devotion to God.

You know, this ritual,

in the context of the dervish community,

it's all about devotion.

Devotion to Allah.

But I can see how this kind of mystical Islam

might have also had an appeal

to Christian communities in the Balkans, as well.

There's that sort of element of flagellation,

self-mortification,

that kind of thing which you find in the Christian church.

And it also maybe even ties in earlier

with pagan beliefs, as well.

So, I can see the appeal when the Ottomans

first came into this area.

This might have been picked up upon

by local communities, as well.

(speaking foreign language)

There may have been a degree of religious harmony

in the Ottoman Balkans.

But the Battle of Kosovo raised alarm bells

across many of the Latin Christian nations

in Central Europe.

In particular, Hungary.

At Buda, part of today's Budapest, as its capitol,

14th century Hungary was one of Europe's

largest and most powerful kingdoms.

Controlling much of present day Austria,

the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Romania,

Hungary was acutely aware of the Ottoman menace

now threatening its southern borders.

- The medieval kingdom of Hungary was huge.

It was also emphatically Catholic Christian.

Hungary is the frontier between Catholic,

that is, Latin and Christendom, and the Orthodox world.

The Hungarian state, a bit like the Serbs,

they expected to become the dominant power

of this very large region.

All of a sudden, there's another dominant power

that seems to have come from nowhere.

So, we've got to stop them.

- Hungary was regarded by the pope

as an eastern bulwark of Latin Christianity.

So, Hungary's King Sigismund,

based in his palace here in Buda Castle,

campaigned vigorously for

a united front against the Ottomans.

And managed to persuade Pope Boniface IX

to back a new Crusade.

Despite enthusiastic support from across Europe,

it would turn out to be the last of the big Crusades

and end in appalling disaster.

In a real moment of European unity,

an alliance of Crusader knights

from France, Burgundy, Germany gathered here

in the Castle of Buda in the summer of 1396

to join forces with King Sigusmund's Hungarian army.

King Sigusmund himself was so enthused by the assembled host

that he wrote excitedly,

"Their lances could have upheld the sky."

In July of that year,

the Crusader army headed south along the Danube River

towards the Balkans where they would join up

with local forces to route the Muslim invader

from Europe once and for all.

Then, it was on to the Holy Land

to liberate Jerusalem from the sword of Islam.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

- The Crusaders say, "It's gonna be easy.

We can fight Turks.

They don't hardly wear any armor

and they just shoot with feeble little bows.

Their blood is sin, which is why they won't come into

close contact with us red blooded Frenchmen.

And we can go out there with our full armors

and our lovely big horses and great big swords.

And we're gonna all come gloriously home again.

And the ladies are gonna love us."

- The Crusaders' chosen course, the Danube,

was a hugely important waterway and trade route

that flowed from southern Germany past Vienna and Budapest

and down through the heart of the Balkans to the Black Sea.

And it formed a natural border

between Serbia, Bulgaria,

and the Romanian province of Wallachia.

By the 14th century, the river had become

the frontline in a war between

Hungary and the Ottoman Empire

that would last for years to come.

Whoever held the Danube held the advantage.

The Ottomans occupied a number of fortified positions

along the Danube River,

which the Crusader army was keen on liberating.

The most important of these

was the garrison town of Nicopolis,

which lay downstream from here.

A few hundred kilometers through these gorges.

And, in order to get there,

they had to pass through treacherous enemy territory

with the threat of ambush at every bend in the river.

(dramatic music)

The Crusaders made good progress.

And everything seemed to be going to plan

until they entered northwest Bulgaria

where the local population were Orthodox Christians.

Here, the French and the Burgundian troops

behaved appallingly.

Basically, they ran amok laying waste

to Ottoman-held towns and villages

and slaughtering the Christians, as well as the Turks.

This really angered the local

Wallachian and Bulgarian militias

which, in turn, upset King Sigusmund.

He'd been relying on them for support.

Worryingly, it revealed serious divisions

in the Crusader camp before they'd even

engaged the Ottomans in a major battle.

The Crusaders persevered.

Reaching Nicopolis, today's Nikopol,

in September of 1396.

These days, Nikopol is a sleepy Bulgarian town

with a sizable Muslim minority.

But, in the 14th century, it was an important Ottoman

stronghold on the fringes of their empire.

Sultan Bayezid had fortified the town well.

Manning it with both Ottoman troops

and Orthodox Christian vassals.

But he and the bulk of his army

had yet to reach the city before the Crusaders arrived.

Sigusmund's forces lay siege

to Nikopol's sturdy fortifications,

including its citadel, which stood here

on a bluff overlooking the river.

But they failed to take the town

before the sultan turned up with his reinforcements.

The ensuing battle would be a humiliating disaster

for the Crusaders on many levels.

- The Crusaders had been misbehaving themselves

not just with the raping and pillaging,

but having a fair number of whores and prostitutes

with the army feasting and carousing

and generally not behaving life

as sort of a pious Christian army.

They were caught with their trousers down.

In many cases, literally.

- King Sigusmund tried to organize

some kind of plan of attack.

He suggested that his own troops,

who were experienced at fighting the Ottomans,

should lead the order of battle with the French following.

bUt the French weren't having any of that.

They weren't going to follow

some Hungarian peasants into battle.

So, they charged off in their rather drunken stupor

and, instead of meeting their

great, glorious battle with the sultan,

they met their deaths.

- The Burgundians, they wanted to just get in there

and get stuck in.

Because this is the way they fought.

Massive cavalry charge busting through the enemy.

They were quite convinced they could just

push aside anything.

Well, in actual fact, they did.

They pushed aside the first line of defense.

They smashed into and through the second line of defense.

They're exhausted.

They're absolutely exhausted.

And then, all of a sudden,

there's another Turkish army charging downhill

against a bunch of sweaty, exhausted, thirsty,

and, very often, wounded or injured men in heavy armor.

And there was a certain amount of fighting.

But they just bowled the Burgundians over.

- [Julian] Angered by the Crusaders' slaughter

of Ottoman prisoners in the lead up to the battle,

Bayezid ordered his own captives beheaded.

The resulting bloodbath was reported to be so violent

that the sultan himself became sickened

and stopped the massacre halfway through.

- It was picked out by the Christian propagandists

portraying the Muslims as ruthless barbarians

who slaughter their prisoners.

And, on the other side, propagandists say

precisely the same thing about the Christians,

because they had already slaughtered many of their prisoners

just before the battle started.

So, this is feeding into the mythology

of fear, mistrust, and eventually hate on both sides.

- For Christian Europe,

the defeat of the Crusader army at Nicopolis

was more than just a military disaster and a humiliation.

It put religion at the center of the conflict.

Stories of Sultan Bayezid's

merciless massacre of prisoners of war

spread across the continent like wildfire.

The Ottomans were not just a foreign invading army.

They were evil incarnate.

And their sultan the antichrist.

By the end of the 14th century,

Ottoman control of the Bulgarian Danube was secure.

But Bayezid had a much bigger prize in his sights.

One that he was in the process of capturing

before the Crusaders of Nikopol distracted him.

Known as the Red Apple was the capitol

of Eastern Christendom itself, Constantinople.

Surrounded on all sides by Ottoman territory,

it was only a matter of time

before the famed city would fall.

But fate intervened.

The mighty armies of

the legendary Mongol warrior King Tamerlane

attacked eastern Anatolia.

War ensued.

Bayezid was taken prisoner and died.

Even the very future of

the Ottoman sultanate in question

as rival sons fought for the throne.

The conquest of Constantinople would have to wait

some 50 years when an ambitious new sultan,

Mehmed II, came to the throne.

- Mehmed's ambition was to gain legitimacy

within the Islamic World.

To be the one who fulfilled prophecies

which are attributed to the Prophet.

And to take the Red Apple, the Turks called the city.

This has been the most powerful city in the world

for a thousand years.

And, to give himself legitimacy.

His role model was Alexander the Great.

He was going to be the Muslim Alexander the Great.

- Mehmed's ambitions were lofty, to say the least.

But he set about achieving his goal

with steely determination.

In 1452, less than a year after he'd come to the throne,

Mehmed began constructing this fortress

on the European side of the Bosporus

a few miles northeast of Constantinople.

Now, directly opposite, on the other side of the Bosporus,

there was an earlier Ottoman castle

built by Bayezid I when he tried to take the city in 1394.

And, between them, these two fortifications

effectively gave Mehmed control of all sea traffic

passing up and down the Bosporus.

Thereby denying Constantinople reinforcements and supplies.

He had the city by the throat.

- The other thing he does is that

he's the first Ottoman sultan to construct a fleet.

And he builds a fleet of about 25 ships at Gallipoli.

And these appear outside the walls of the city.

And these completely stun the defenders.

- [Julian] But Mehmed had another trick up his sleeve.

A secret weapon he had specially commissioned

to bring Constantinople to its knees.

It was a new super cannon.

Larger and more powerful than anything seen before.

- The iconic weapon brought to the world

was an enormous cannon.

Big enough for a man to climb inside.

Which he had created at his capitol, Edirne.

There was a great PR thing around this, really.

He had it hold outside the city walls at Edirne.

He had the cannon loaded and fired and the huge shot,

which weighed about half a ton,

shot across the land for about a mile

and buried itself in the earth.

And he made sure the news of the coming of this cannon

preceded it so that it was a psychological weapon,

as well as actually a weapon of war.

- [Julian] With Constantinople's sea approaches sealed off,

Mehmed surrounded the landward sides of the city

with a force of over 100,000 men.

And an enormous range of artillery.

Constantinople's legendary walls had withstood

numerous sieges in the past.

But this was a new kind of threat

of a size and capability never seen before.

As the guns began to fire from all directions,

it became abundantly clear Constantinople was doomed.

- The scale of this thing, the size of the army

along a four mile front.

Cannons dug in all the way along.

The banners, the tents,

the huge numbers of people and animals.

The call to prayer, the nighttime chanting,

particularly as they approach the final attack,

the line of fire ringing the front line

all the way across this four mile front,

it certainly frightened the Byzantine defenders.

They thought the end of the world come.

- [Julian] Mehmed's forces relentlessly bombarded the city

for nearly two months.

Until, on May 29, 1453, they ordered a full scale assault.

Ottoman troops surged.

Overwhelming the defenders and breaking into the city

where they sacked and burned everything in sight.

Constantinople, the symbolic heart

of Eastern Christendom for over a millennium,

had fallen.

- It was almost like the beginning of the end of days.

What did it mean?

What would happen?

Would this mean the final triumph of Islam

which was followed by the day of judgment?

- It was, if one can make a crude analogy, a 9/11 moment.

People could remember where they were

when they heard the news.

And people wept in the streets of Rome.

Because this city had been there for so long.

It had been there for 1300 years.

And it was one of the fixed realities of the world.

Even as far away as England and Sweden,

people were appalled by this alien presence

coming into the European arena

and destroying what seemed like

one of the cornerstones of Christendom.

- For the Muslim world, the fall of Rome, Eastern Rome,

Constantinople, the bastion of Christianity

against Muslim expansion was hugely significant.

'Cause this catapult the Ottoman state

into the center of the perception of the Islamic World.

All of a sudden, this sort of nouveau bunch of characters

suddenly become the center of power.

Center of cultural perceptions in the Middle East.

This was really, really profound.

- [Julian] In little more than 150 years,

the Ottomans had emerged from a rabble of nomadic warriors

to become one of the great powers of the day.

Now, the empire would enter into a golden age.

A flowering of cultural and artistic achievements.

But the Ottomans were not about to put away their sword.

As self-styled defenders of the Muslim faith,

their rapidly expanding frontiers

ran smack into the eastern borders of Christendom.

Christian Europe, both fascinated and fearful,

braced itself for a titanic struggle with an implacable foe.

Part two of Ottomans Versus Christians,

we follow the Ottoman campaign into the heart of Europe

and the great siege of Vienna.

(dramatic music)