2. How were the three Muslim early modern empires similar? The largest of the three empires, the Ottoman, stretched at its peak in the 17th century from north Africa to southern Russia, and from Hungary to the port of Aden on the southern end of the Red Sea. To the east in what is now Iran and Afghanistan, the Safavid dynasty arose to challenge the Ottomans for leadership of the Islamic world. Finally, yet another Muslim empire in India, centered like most of the earlier ones on the Delhi region of the Ganges plain, was built under the leadership of a succession of remarkable Mughal rulers. …show more content…
The Ottomans conquered Constantinople and ended the Byzantine Empire in what year? For seven weeks in the spring of 1453, the army of the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed II, “The Conqueror,” which numbered well over 100,000, assaulted the triple ring of land walls that had protected the city for centuries. The outnumbered forces of the defenders repulsed attack after attack until the sultan ordered his gunners to batter a portion of the walls with their massive siege cannon. Wave after wave of Ottoman troops struck at the gaps in the defenses that had been cut by the guns, quickly overwhelmed the defenders, and raced into the city to loot and pillage for the three days that Mehmed had promised as their reward for victory.
8. Describe Ottoman naval power. In the two centuries after the conquest of Constantinople, the armies of a succession of able Ottoman rulers extended the empire into Syria and Egypt and across north Africa, thus bringing under their rule the bulk of the Arab world. The empire also spread through the Balkans into Hungary in Europe and around the Black and Red seas. The Ottomans became a tough naval power in the Mediterranean Sea. Powerful Ottoman galley fleets made possible the capture of major island bases on Rhodes, Crete, and …show more content…
On the sea, the Ottoman galleys were eclipsed by Western power as early as…the 16th century.
20. What European nation first threatened the Ottoman monopoly of trade with East Africa and India? Portuguese.
21. What were the results of the Ottoman loss of monopoly over the Indian trade? Direct carriage of eastern goods to ports in the West implied loss of revenues in taxes in Muslim trading centers. The trading goods, particularly spices, that the Portuguese carried around Africa and back to Europe enriched the Ottomans’ Christian rivals. In addition, the fact that a large part of the flow of these product was no longer transmitted to European ports through Muslim tradin centers in the eastern Mediterranean meant that merchants and tax collectors in the Ottoman Empire lost critical revenues.
22. Which group represented such extreme conservatism within the Ottoman Empire that reform was frustrated? The intense conservatism of powerful groups such as the Janissaries, and to a lesser extent the religious scholars, reinforced this fatal attitude. Through much of the 17th and 18th centuries, these groups blocked most of the Western-inspired innovations that reform-minded sultans and their advisors tried to