Muslim Resurgence from 1301 to 1453 Culminated in the fall of Byzantine Empire at the hands of Ottoman Turks

The Fall of Constantinople 1453

The revival of Islam after 1300 and the great wave of Muslim expansion that followed, dominated the next four centuries, far more so than European expansion, which had only marginal effect before 1700. After 1354 the Christian west stood on the defensive, while the Turks conquered the whole of Europe east of the Adriatic and south of the Danube. The progress of Islam in the east was equally remarkable. By 1500 northern India was under Muslim rule, and most of the south after 1565 when last of the Hindu state, Vijayangar, succumbed. It prevailed also in the oasis of central Asia, in the outlying provinces of Ming China, and was making rapid headway in Java.

The amazing revival was the more remarkable because in 1258, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad and overthrew the caliphate, the Muslim world was in disarray. The Seljuk sultanate had broken up after half a century, and only the Mamelukes of Egypt and Syria maintained any political stability. Two factors transformed the situation. One was the revitalization of Islam itself under the impact of Sufi mysticism. The other was the infiltration, with or in the wake of the Mongols, of Turkic peoples from central Asia, who, after conversion and assimilation, became the spearhead of Muslim advance. It was they who in 1206 set up the Delhi Sultanate, the leading Indian state until the appearance in 1526 of Babur, another warrior from inner Asia. In the west Turkish warriors settled around 1265 in the Anatolian borderlands, and here in 1301 their leader Osman, founded a state which became the core of the future Ottoman empire. By 1354 the Turks had crossed the Dardanelles to Gallipoli and their victory at Kosovo (1389) and repulse of a christian counter-offensive at Nicopolis (1396) left them masters of the Balkans. Only the invasion of Timur and his destruction of the Turkish army at Ankara (1402) gave hard-pressed Byzantium respite. But the renewal of expansion under Murad II and Mehemmed II sealed its fate. In 1453 Constantinople fell and Mehemmed went on to extend control over Moldavia, the Crimea and Trebizond, turning the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake.