Rise of The Ottoman Empire - Mehmed I and The Balkans

Mehmed I and The Balkans

Further information: the Sultan's personal information Mehmed I

When Mehmed Çelebi stood as victor in 1413 he crowned himself in Edirne (Adrianople) as Mehmed I. His was the duty to restore the Ottoman Empire to its former glory. The Empire had suffered hard from the interregnum; the Mongols were still at large in the east, even though Timur had died in 1405; many of the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans had broken free of Ottoman control; and the land, especially Anatolia, had suffered hard from the war.

Mehmed moved the capital from Bursa to Adrianople. He faced a delicate political situation in the Balkans. His Bulgarian, Serbian, Wallachian, and Byzantine vassals were virtually independent. The Albanian tribes were uniting into a single state, and Bosnia remained completely independent, as did Moldavia. Hungary retained territorial ambitions in the Balkans, and Venice held numerous Balkan coastal possessions. Prior to Bayezid's death, Ottoman control of the Balkans appeared a certainty. At the end of the interregnum, that certainty seemed open to question.

Mehmed generally resorted to diplomacy rather than militancy in dealing with the situation. While he did conduct raiding expeditions into neighboring European lands, which returned much of Albania to Ottoman control and forced Bosnian King-Ban Tvrtko II Kotromanić (1404–09, 1421–45), along with many Bosnian regional nobles, to accept formal Ottoman vassalage, Mehmed conducted only one actual war with the Europeans — a short and indecisive conflict with Venice.

The new sultan had grave domestic problems. Musa's former policies sparked discontent among the Ottoman Balkans’ lower classes. In 1416 a popular revolt of Muslims and Christians broke out in Dobruja, led by Musa's former confidant, the scholar-mystic Şeyh Bedreddin, and supported by Wallachian voivod Mircea I. Bedreddin preached such concepts as merging Islam, Christianity, and Judaism into a single faith and the social betterment of free peasants and nomads at the expense of the Ottoman bureaucratic and professional classes. Mehmed crushed the revolt and Bedreddin died. Mircea then occupied Dobruja, but Mehmed wrested the region back in 1419, capturing the Danubian fort of Ciurgiu and forcing Wallachia back into vassalage.

Mehmed spent the rest of his reign reorganizing Ottoman state structures disrupted by the interregnum. When Mehmed died in 1421, one of his sons, Murad, became sultan.