Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

Ottomans started to grow prior to the Black Death, the most important—and unlikely—conquests occurred afterward. In 1354, the Ottomans seized the fortress of Gallipoli on the western side of the Dardanelles after it had been damaged by an earthquake. This marked the beginning of their expansion into Europe. In the 1360s they captured Adrianople, 240 kilometers west of Constantinople, which became their capital, Edirne. Within a couple of decades, the Ottomans had conquered much of the Balkans. These conquests reduced the size of the area ruled by the Eastern Roman emperor. For almost a century before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 it was an imperial capital without an empire, with the Byzantines controlling only a small territory around the city plus parts of the Peloponnese. The final capitulation was hardly surprising, but it still caused dismay among Christians. As the Pope put it, the Ottomans had “plucked out one of the two eyes of Christendom”—the other being Rome.[43] Threatening to expand far into Europe’s heartlands, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1529, which began a century and a half of military tension. They attacked again in 1683 but were defeated by the combined forces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire. By then, however, the emergence of the Ottomans had forever altered the character of Europe.