Rumelia Eyalet
Substate | Defunct
1365 CE to 1454 CE
The Eyalet of Rumeli or Rumelia, also known as the Beylerbeylik of Rumeli, is a first-level province (beylerbeylik or eyalet) of the Ottoman Empire encompassing most of the Balkans ("Rumelia").
For most of its history it is also the largest and most important province of the Empire.The capital is in Adrianople (Edirne), Sofia, and finally Monastir (Bitola).
Its reported area in the nineteenth century is 48,119 square miles (124,630 km2).
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The regency for John V Palaiologos, paying the price for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria's support in the civil war of 1341–47, had surrendered Phillipopolis and eight other cities in 1344 after holding them for twenty years.
The Ottoman Turks under Lala Shahin Pasha in 1364 move through the Maritsa River valleys and seize Philippopolis, calling the city Filibe, a corruption of "Philip".
It will be the capital of Rumelia until 1382, when the Ottomans capture Sofia, which is to become the main city of the province.
Plovdiv survives as one of the major cultural centers for Bulgarian culture and tradition.
Control of the main sources of Constantinople's grain and tax revenues enables Murad to force the emperor in Constantinople to accept Ottoman suzerainty.
The advance of the Ottoman Turks in Europe is a far more serious problem for Serbia—and the entire Balkans—than the internal squabbling of the Serbian nobles.
Following their acquisition of Gallipoli on the European side of the Dardanelles in 1354, the Ottoman Turks had expanded into Thrace, taking Demotika from the Greeks in 1361 and Philippopolis from the Bulgarians in 1363 and finally in 1369 the major city of Adrianople.
By 1370, Turks had occupied most of Thrace to the Rhodopes and to the Balkan Mountains.
As they reached the Rhodopes they collided with Jovan Uglješa, brother of Serbian co-king Vukašin, who has extended his realm beyond the Mesta into this territory, and the threat from them becomes increasingly serious.
Vukašin, the king of the southern Serbian lands, with his brother leads a Serb army against the advancing Ottoman Empire forces, led by the beylerbey of Rumeli Lala Şâhin Paşa, at the Battle of Maritsa on September 26, 1371.
The offensive against the Turks, originally scheduled for early 1371, had been delayed, perhaps because Uglješa had hoped that Bulgaria might also join the coalition.
King Vukašin and his son Marko had been preparing for action against Nicholas Altomanovich, intending to recapture Skadar (now Shkodër) for the Serbian Empire, when they were informed of a large Ottoman army advancing from the east.
Summoned to join up with Uglješa and his army, the Mrnjavčević brothers and their troop easily penetrate into what is supposedly Turkish territory and reach Cernomen on the Maritsa River, where the Serbs do not bother to post sentries or deploy scouts.
Furthermore, they have not kept their horses or their weapons in readiness.
The Serbian army numbers twenty thousand to seventy thousand men.
Most sources agree on the higher number.
Despot Uglješa wants to make a surprise attack on the Ottomans in their capital city, Adrianople, while Murad I is in Asia Minor.
The Ottoman army is much smaller.
Byzantine Greek scholar Laonikos Chalkokondyles and other sources give the number of eight hundred men, but due to superior tactics, by conducting a night raid on the Serbian camp, Şâhin Paşa is able to defeat the Serbian army and kill King Vukašin and despot Uglješa.
Thousands of Serbs are killed, and thousands drown in the Maritsa river when they try to flee.
After the battle, the Maritsa runs scarlet with blood.
The bodies of the two Serbian commanders are not found.
The battle involves such carnage that the field will later be referred to as “the Serbs' destruction.” Ottoman sultan Murad has thus increased his own confidence and demoralized his smaller enemies, who rapidly accept his suzerainty without further resistance.
The independent South Serbian kingdom is thus destroyed; its new ruler, Marko Kraljevic (“Mark, the King's Son”), the son of Vukashin and a chieftain of Prilep, becomes a vassal of Murad and retains a nominal independence.
Albanian chieftains gather on March 1, 1444, in the cathedral of Lezhe with the prince of Montenegro and delegates from Venice and proclaim Skanderbeg commander of the Albanian resistance.
All of Albania, including most of Epirus, accepts his leadership against the Ottoman Turks, but local leaders keep control of their own districts.
Under a red flag bearing Skanderbeg's heraldic emblem, an Albanian force of about thirty thousand men holds off brutal Ottoman campaigns against their lands for twenty-four years.
Twice the Albanians overcome sieges of Krujë.
In 1449 the Albanians rout Sultan Murad II himself.
Later, they repulse attacks led by Sultan Mehmed II.
In 1461 Skanderbeg goes to the aid of his suzerain, King Alfonso I of Naples, against the kings of Sicily.
The government under Skanderbeg is unstable, however, and at times local Albanian rulers cooperate with the Ottoman Turks against him.
When Skanderbeg dies at Lezhe, the sultan reportedly cries out, "Asia and Europe are mine at last. Woe to Christendom! She has lost her sword and shield."
The expanding Ottoman Empire overpowers the Balkan Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
At first, the feuding Albanian clans prove no match for the armies of the sultan.
In the fifteenth century, however, Skanderbeg unites the Albanian tribes in a defensive alliance that holds up the Ottoman advance for more than two decades.
His family's banner, bearing a black two-headed eagle on a red field, will become the flag under which the Albanian national movement rallies centuries later.
Five centuries of Ottoman rule will leave the Albanian people fractured along religious, regional, and tribal lines.
The first Albanians to convert to Islam are young boys forcibly conscripted into the sultan's military and administration.
In the early seventeenth century, however, Albanians will convert to Islam in great numbers.
Within a century, the Albanian Islamic community will be split between Sunni Muslims and adherents to the Bektashi sect.
The Albanian people will also become divided into two distinct tribal and dialectal groupings, the Gegs and Tosks.
In the rugged northern mountains, Geg shepherds live in a tribal society often completely independent of Ottoman rule.
In the south, peasant Muslim and Orthodox Tosks work the land for Muslim beys, provincial rulers who frequently revolt against the sultan's authority.
In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman sultans will try in vain to shore up their collapsing empire by introducing a series of reforms aimed at reining in recalcitrant local officials and dousing the fires of nationalism among its myriad peoples.
The power of nationalism, however, will prove too strong to counteract.
The Ottoman Turks had expanded their empire from Anatolia to the Balkans in the fourteenth century.
They had crossed the Bosporus in 1352, and in 1389 they had crushed a Serb-led army that included Albanian forces at Kosovo Polje, located in the southern part of present-day Kosovo.
Europe gains a brief respite from Ottoman pressure in 1402 when the Mongol leader, Tamerlane, at- tacks Anatolia from the east, kills the Turks' absolute ruler, the sultan, and sparks a civil war.
When order is restored, the Ottomans renew their westward progress.
In 1453 Sultan Mehmed II's forces overrun Constantinople and kill the last East Roman emperor.
In 1385 the Albanian ruler of Durrës, Karl Thopia, had appealed to the sultan for support against his rivals, the Balsha family.
An Ottoman force had quickly marched into Albania along the Via Egnatia and routed the Balshas.
The principal Albanian clans soon swore fealty to the Turks.
Sultan Murad II launches the major Ottoman onslaught in the Balkans in 1423, and the Turks take Janina in 1431 and Arta, on the Ionian coast, in 1449.
The Turks allow conquered Albanian clan chiefs to maintain their positions and property, but they have to pay tribute, send their sons to the Turkish court as hostages, and provide the Ottoman army with auxiliary troops.
The Albanians' resistance to the Turks in the mid-fifteenth century wins them acclaim all over Europe.
Gjon Kastrioti of Kruje was one of the Albanian clan leaders who had submitted to Turkish suzerainty.
He was compelled to send his four sons to the Otto-man capital to be trained for military service.
The youngest, Gjergj Kastrioti (1403-68), who will become the Albanians' greatest national hero, captures the sultan's attention.
Renamed Iskander when he converts to Islam, the young man participates in military expeditions to Asia Minor and Europe.
When appointed to administer a Balkan district, Iskander becomes known as Skanderbeg.
After Ottoman forces under Skanderbeg's command suffer defeat in a battle near Nis, in present-day Serbia, in 1443, the Albanian rushes to Krujë and tricks a Turkish pasha into surrendering to him the Kastrioti family fortress.
Skanderbeg now re-embraces Roman Catholicism and declares a holy war against the Turks.
The Ottomans are reduced to Mongol vassals but their empire in Europe is left largely untouched.
However, Bayezid's capture by Timur has thrown the young Ottoman state into a condition of near-collapse.
At this time, a strong European crusade might manage to push the Ottomans out of Europe altogether, but weakness and division south of the Danube and diversion to other matters to the north leaves an opportunity for the Ottomans to restore what has been torn asunder without significant loss.
Internal divisions, however, are to hinder Ottoman efforts to restore their power during a period that will come to be known as the Interregnum (1402-13), during which four of Bayezid's sons will compete for the right to rule the entire empire.
His eldest son Süleyman has assumed control in Rumelia (Balkan lands under Ottoman control), establishing a capital at Edirne, and gained the support of the Christian vassals and those who had stimulated Bayezid to turn toward conquest in the East.
Still supreme but not officially named sultan, Mûsa musters a large army by falsely charging Greek emperor Manuel II Palaiologos with soliciting Timurid aid.
He uses it to punish the Serbians for their 1406 desertion, then moves against Salonika in 1412.
Following his capture of this city and blinding of its ruler, the son of his murdered brother Süleyman, Mehmed declares himself sultan in both Anatolia and Rumelia, with his capital at Edirne, and sets himself to reuniting and restoring the shattered Ottoman empire.
The Turkish notables, in order to deprive the sultan of the only military force he can use to resist their control, require him to abandon the Kapikulu (Palace Guard), justifying the action on the basis of the Islamic tradition that Muslims cannot be kept in slavery.