Most of the contemporary figures available for Ottoman armies are fairly inevitably the inventions of
Chroniclers eager either to exaggerate a victory or to excuse a defeat, or — even worse — are the fantastic inventions of men who were as far away as possible from the battlefields that they describe. However, there nevertheless remain a few accounts where the integrity of the chronicler remains seemingly unblemished by hysteria or political expediency. We are told, for instance, that there were only 5,000 Turks at the Battle of Baphaeon in 1302, and 8,000 at Pelekanon in 1329, while the Damascene geographer Shehab ed-Din, who died in 1349, reported that Orkhan ‘has an army of 40,000 cavalry and a large force of infantry. But his troops are neither particularly effective, nor as formidable as their numbers would seem to indicate’, adding that ‘he has 25,000 horsemen in the field daily against the lord of Constantinople’. From the mid-14th century on, however, realistic figures become harder and harder to find until, describing the Battle of Ankara in 1402, Schiltberger asks us to believe that the Ottomans mustered 1.6 million men! In fact, Ottoman and Christian sources alike so often claim huge figures for Turkish armies that we have to accept there may be a grain of truth in all their ‘big battalions’ stories, particularly since it is clear from all the details given above that, as their Empire grew, so the resources of the Ottoman military machine did indeed expand to an impressive size. Even the generally reserved Bertrandon de la Brocquiere is forced to admit at one point that ‘their armies, I know, commonly consist of 200,000 men’, though he qualifies this by adding that ‘the greater part are on foot, and destitute... of tarquais [quivers], helmets, mallets, or swords; few, indeed, being completely armed.’ There may then be some truth in the account of an eye-witness who describes the Ottoman army at Nicopolis in 1396 as comprised of a vanguard of 24,000, main battle of 30,000, and rearguard and Porte of 40,000; but two Turkish chroniclers put Ottoman stength at the same battle as only 10,000 men, and the real truth probably lies somewhere between.
On the whole it seems likely that most armies raised by the Ottomans numbered 20-40,000 men, while the largest they fielded comprised some 60-80,000. The Ottoman sources even say that the army raised for the final siege of Constantinople only numbered about 80,000, though Christian accounts give figures that range right up to 700,000. Certainly all the sources on both sides agree that the army Mehmed II raised in 1453 was of an exceptional size, and the Ottoman figure on this occasion seems too low; Barbaro’s claim of some
160.000 men (which tallies with Doukas’ reference to the Ottomans outnumbering the defenders by 20 to 1) may therefore be a fairly good guess. The composition of one of the more t)q)ical larger Ottoman field-armies is provided by Francesco Philelpho, who saw that which marched against Trebizond in 1461; he says this was made up of 25,000 Rumelian sipahis, 15,000 Anatolian sipahis, 8,000 ’azabs and 12,000 Janissaries (doubtless including the rest of the Porte in the last figure). A mid-15th century Ottoman source describing the army that fought at Kossovo in 1389 says it was 50-60,000 strong including 10,000 Anatolian sipahis,
10.000 Rumelian ’azabs and 20,000 irregular horse, the balance of 10-20,000 presumably comprising Rumelian sipahis and the troops of the Porte.
World History
