Ottoman Empire Gunpowder Essay

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, once said, "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." This quote can be applied to the Ottoman Empire. The innovation of the use of gunpowder allowed the ottomans to maintain and grow their empire. Ottoman Empire started by virtue of its innovative weapons that use gunpowder to propel projectiles at enemies. The Ottoman Empire in Turkey was first established in 1299, but it fell to the conquering armies of Timur the Lame in 1402. Thanks in large part to their acquisition of muskets, the Ottoman rulers were able to drive out the Timurids and reestablish their control of Turkey in 1414. Before gunpowder, the Ottomans were a loose confederation of states. With gunpowder technology, the Ottomans were able to become a unified empire, and able to challenge the Byzantine Empire led by Constantinople. The Ottoman victory in 1453 represented the end of a thousand year control by the West. With gunpowder, the East stood as an equal to the West. A balance of power had been established. The Ottomans innovated the use of gunpowder with large cannons to defeat the Byzantine Empire.

After the Mongols invaded China in the early 13th Century, they continued their conquests into India.

In 1221, when the Mongols invaded India, they brought with them the knowledge of gunpowder from China. When the Mongols had conquered India, they helped to facilitate more open trading between China and India. This trade is what brought even more ideas and innovations of gunpowder into India. From India, the gunpowder spread to the Middle East between 1240 and 1280. Early Ottoman sultans such as Murat I (1362 – 1389) and his successors were quick to grasp the significance of gunpowder, perhaps because they already excelled in the use of ranged weapons, such as the composite bow, and it was a natural step

to
embrace gunpowder as an upgrade to their current ranged weapon technology. In the late 14th century, Sultan Murat I created the Janissaries Corps: a standing, mostly infantry army, nicely suited for equipment with firearms. The real question is not who first used firearms, but who used them first effectively enough to have significant impact
on the outcome of battles and sieges. Most of the earliest dates with regard to the first
use of firearms in the Ottoman Empire (1354, 1364, 1386, and 1389) remain highly disputed.
Though this one gun—the Basilisk—was by far the largest, the Ottoman army was equipped with further batteries of heavy gunpowder artillery, the like of which had never been seen on a battlefield before. This represents both a revolution in technology, with the first mighty cannon capable of devastating heavy masonry, and tactical thinking, as the expertise required to move and handle such a weapon must have proven a unique challenge for engineer and general alike. How the Ottoman artillery fared in the battle becomes an important question, as its effectiveness is an important issue in evaluating its revolutionary value. Though one might have thought that the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople was easily achieved due to numerical superiority, in personal and naval combat the Christian forces proved superior. It was only because of the work of Turkish gunpowder artillery that the siege was successful; Ottoman.
The Ottoman empire was able to succeed because of their innovation of gunpowder weapons, but the downfall of the Ottomans was that they did not try to innovate after they made those weapons. The lack of innovation during 1800-1900 led to the demise of the ottomans when world war one happened they were beaten because of their lack of innovation in weapons. They were not able to fight other countries with less sophisticated weapons leading to the end of the Ottoman reign. The ottoman able to be the leaders ended up being the follower which lead to the demise of their long-lasting empire.