StudentShare
Contact Us
Sign In / Sign Up for FREE
Search
Go to advanced search...

Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire - Essay Example

Cite this document
Summary
Analyze and Discuss the Wars Between Charles V and the Ottoman Empire 19 January 2010 In order to understand the extraordinary tension that arose in the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire expanded across Eastern Europe and projected its power across the Mediterranean basin, we must look at the legacy left by Suleiman I’s father, Selim I, who had ruled from 1512 to 1520…
Download full paper File format: .doc, available for editing
GRAB THE BEST PAPER91.5% of users find it useful
Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire
Read Text Preview

Extract of sample "Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire"

Download file to see previous pages

As Goffman puts it, Selim had ‘exposed the Ottomans, more directly than ever, to powerful empires’ (99). Overland to the east, Suleiman was confronted with the Persian Safavids on his frontiers in Mesopotamia and Anatolia; in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, he dispatched fleets against the ships of Catholic Portugal, busily building a commercial empire on the coasts of the Africa, the Arabian Gulf and India. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, had only really faced a much enfeebled Byzantium, a shrunken state which showed little sign of its former glory.

Selim himself had gone to war with major neighbors, but in toppling the Mamluks in Egypt, he was destroying a dynasty who were already unstable in power. However, Suleiman, in confronting Charles V in the West, faced an empire which ‘included almost all of Catholic Europe’ (Goffman, 99). The scale of the ensuing struggle, and the near-constant state of warfare in some arena or another, is thus little to be wondered at. It is worth examining the symbolic level of the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, given that the struggle was in many ways one for the succession to the Roman emperors.

For Imber, ‘rivalry between Suleyman I and Charles V was a dominant theme of the mid-sixteenth century’ (113). Ever since Mehmed II had taken Constantinople from the last of the Byzantine emperors in 1453, the Ottomans had been able to brand themselves as the legitimate successors to Rome. However, it was only in the reign of Suleiman I that much emphasis was put on this notion. During one of the military campaigns in Eastern Europe in the 1530s, Suleiman wore a crown which he had commissioned from Venetian artisans, and which employed elements of the official regalia of both Charles V and Pope Clement VII, the latter being, significantly, the pontiff who had crowned Charles as Holy Roman Emperor.

Goffman considers that ‘no Western observer could have missed the Ottoman sultan’s challenge to the emperor’s universalist claims in this choice of headgear’ (107). At the same time, Charles was busy reasserting his own imperial credentials in the West. In 1530, he travelled to Bologna where the Pope invested him with the crown of a renewed Holy Roman Empire, thus recalling the occasion on Christmas Day 1800, when Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor to receive a crown from the Pope.

Finkel suggests that for Charles, this occasion was not merely symbolic, but that he saw his enthronement as ‘reinforcing his moral authority to press forward with the consolidation of Spanish power’ (126), and thus seek military confrontation with the Islamic Ottoman Turks. Suleiman, also, made use of religious titles in an attempt to strengthen his position. Having become the guardian of Islam’s most holy cities – Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem – he commonly used the title ‘Caliph’, which Imber pertinently describes as ‘an Islamic counterweight to Charles V’s Christian title of Holy Roman Emperor’ (114).

A deeply significant moment in this rivalry, especially as far as Suleiman was concerned, came in 1547, as the two emperors made a treaty for a 5-year peace. The Turkish text of this treaty, for the first time, no longer accorded Charles the dignity of an imperial title, referring to him merely as the ‘

...Download file to see next pages Read More
Cite this document
  • APA
  • MLA
  • CHICAGO
(“Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire Essay”, n.d.)
Retrieved from https://studentshare.org/environmental-studies/1405862-analyze-and-discuss-charles-v-war-with-the-ottoman
(Analyze and Discuss Charles V War With the Ottoman Empire Essay)
https://studentshare.org/environmental-studies/1405862-analyze-and-discuss-charles-v-war-with-the-ottoman.
“Analyze and Discuss Charles V War With the Ottoman Empire Essay”, n.d. https://studentshare.org/environmental-studies/1405862-analyze-and-discuss-charles-v-war-with-the-ottoman.
  • Cited: 0 times

CHECK THESE SAMPLES OF Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire

Nationalism and the Modern World

In doing so, the paper starts with the prelude to nationalism in early modern Europe and goes through the separatist and unification forms of nationalism worldwide in the nineteenth century, including Arab nationalism in the ottoman empire.... Anderson, in turn, considers nationalism, along with nation and nationality, rather difficult for one to define let alone to analyze, and suggests that nationality and nationalism are cultural artifacts which have been transplanted to a variety of social terrains as well as merged with a corresponding variety of political and ideological constellations (3-4)....
6 Pages (1500 words) Essay

Formation of the kindom of saudi arabia

Introduction: One of the most effective ways of defining a national system is seeking to understand and describe the events that occurred in past history that helped to define it.... Ultimately, the maturity and development of any nation is contingent upon the level and extent to which violent conquest, democratic reform, colonial dominance, or other geopolitical forces acted upon it as a means of defining and plotting a future course for the given state/nation in question....
15 Pages (3750 words) Essay

Contemporary Middle East History

hellip; Colonized by the ottoman empire during the 17th century and much of the 18th centuries and during much of the 18th and 19th centuries by Britain and France, the Middle East has endured the reign of foreign influences affecting its modern day political realities.... While not completely Western but also combined with Islamic ideals, the ottoman empire presented different challenges for the Middle East than the British and French Empires.... the ottoman empire under the absolute rule of Sultan Seleyman had the responsibility of guaranteeing complete justice or adala among the governed....
25 Pages (6250 words) Essay

Middle East History: the Ottoman Turks and Safavids

The Safavid Empire differed from the ottoman empire because it was an authoritatively Shiite empire.... the ottoman empire declined, as a consequence of both in-house ineffectiveness and pressure from its outside antagonists in Europe and Asia while the Safavid Empire collapsed due to invasion by Afghans in 1722.... The author also identifies the factors brought about the end of "military-patronage states" and the rise of the ottoman Turks and Safavids and finds some weaknesses in these two great Empires....
10 Pages (2500 words) Assignment

The Causes of the Crimean War: the Allies Goals

The war was fought between Russia on the one side, and Turkey's ottoman empire, Great Britain, France, and Sardinia on the other.... The Crimean War (1853-1856) resulted from the decline of the Turkish ottoman empire which “encouraged Russian imperialism and stoked the British nightmare of Russian interference in India” (Cavendish 55).... The French emperor had obtained the right of representation and protection of Christians, as against the ottoman power....
12 Pages (3000 words) Essay

Neoottomanism in Turkey and the Role of Turkey in the new formation of the Arab world

However, neo-Ottomanism implies the dominant influence of Turkey not only on Turks, but even more - non-Turkic peoples and countries that were part of the ottoman empire at different time.... Ottomanism is a political doctrine, first appeared in ottoman empire; it was launched in the second half of the XIX century by the young Turkish officers, so-called "Young Turks", planning to make a revolution against the regime of Abdul Hamid II. Originally, the doctrine… But after Young Turks' rise to power in 1908, this doctrine became an instrument of their struggle against national demands of the non-Turkish Thus, ottomanism transformed into the ideology of pan-Turkism....
15 Pages (3750 words) Essay

A Basic Principle of the International Order Nationalism: Nationalism in Italy

The following essay analyzes the linkages between nationalism, violence and aggressive political behaviour.... An analysis of the nationalist roots of fascism in Italy is complemented by an overview of Kurdish terrorism, perpetuated in large part by the PKK against the Turkish state.... hellip; Ethnicity is an incredibly fluid yet salient identity with important ramifications for a people....
17 Pages (4250 words) Research Paper

Why Has Democracy Failed to Develop in the Middle East

The paper "Why Has Democracy Failed to Develop in the Middle East?... discusses that hardly any dictatorial regimes in the region permit, let alone promote, civil society to flourish and mobilize the people, political parties and associations to contribute positively to final democratization....
22 Pages (5500 words) Dissertation
sponsored ads
We use cookies to create the best experience for you. Keep on browsing if you are OK with that, or find out how to manage cookies.
Contact Us