The Ottoman Empire and Europe PDF

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Apr 06 2015, NEWGEN Chapter 23 The Ot toma n E mpi re and Eu rope Gábor Ágoston Introduction The Ottoman Empire—also known in Europe as the Turkish Empire—emerged in western Asia Minor (Anatolia) in the late thirteenth century and collapsed six centu- ries la...

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Chapter 23

The Ot toma n E mpi re and Eu rope Gábor Ágoston

Introduction The Ottoman Empire—also known in Europe as the Turkish Empire—emerged in western Asia Minor (Anatolia) in the late thirteenth century and collapsed six centuries later during the First World War. his polity was ruled throughout its existence by the House of Osman, named for the founder of the dynasty, Osman I (d. 1324). he followers of Osman called themselves Osmanlı in Turkish, which in English came to be rendered as ‘Ottoman’. While early modern Europeans saw the Ottomans as a Turkish and Islamic Empire, it is important to remember that Osman’s successors built the longest-lived multi-ethnic and multi-confessional dynastic empire in Eurasia. he ruling dynasty spoke Turkish but married across ethnic lines and included recent converts to Islam. he empire’s subjects, some 13 million in the 1520s, spoke dozens of languages and worshiped according to the teachings of Sunni and Shia Islam, various Christian Churches, and of Judaism, to name but the most important religious communities. To rule over such a diverse population required lexibility, pragmatism, and adaptation to local customs in governance. he Ottomans understood these skills from the time of their earliest conquests in the fourteenth century, and pragmatic adaptability remained the hallmark of Ottoman governance throughout the period covered in this chapter. In its heyday in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was among the militarily most formidable and bureaucratically best administered empires. It bears comparison to the better-known Mediterranean Empires of the Romans and Byzantines, to the contemporaneous Muslim Empires of the Safavids in Persia and the Mughals in India, or to Europe’s other multi-ethnic dynastic empires of the Habsburgs and Romanovs. While the inclusion of the Ottomans into the studies of comparative empires is a fairly new phenomenon, Ottomanists have now produced their surveys, syntheses, and handbooks in English.1

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From the mid-iteenth century until its demise, the Ottoman Empire was a crucial player in European power politics. From the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 through the early eighteenth centuries the Ottomans were a constant and serious military threat to their Venetian, Spanish, and Austrian Habsburg neighbours and rivals, besieging, albeit unsuccessfully, the latter’s capital city Vienna twice (1529 and 1683). Ottoman power rested on the wealth of the empire, a result of the efective management of human and economic resources across a territory of some 2.5 million square kilometres, stretching from Hungary in the north to Yemen in the south and from Egypt in the west to Iraq in the east (See map 23.1). Territorial expansion, security in the countryside, and fair taxation, along with favourable climatic conditions, resulted in a spectacular demographic explosion—a population of 20–25 million by the 1580s—and economic growth. his growth in population and economic resources was the basis for continued military might, which in turn guaranteed the Ottomans’ place among the great powers in seventeenth-century Eurasia. As the Ottomans’ military might declined vis-àvis the Habsburgs and Romanovs in the eighteenth century, the fate of the Ottoman Empire—its possible eventual partition by the Great Powers or among the emerging nation states—became one of the crucial issues in European politics, known in its day as the ‘Eastern Question’. In the early modern era, the epic rivalry between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs in the Mediterranean and Hungary played an important role in shaping the course of European history. he European rivals of the Habsburgs—from the Catholic monarchs of France to the Protestant rulers and estates of western and central Europe—sought Ottoman help, concluded trade agreements and alliances, and in some cases even coordinated their military campaigns with the ‘inidel’ sultan. Ottoman–Habsburg rivalry also inluenced the struggle for hegemony in Europe between the French and the Habsburgs, and the Franco–Ottoman cooperation earned, in the contemporaneous German propaganda literature, the disparaging title of ‘the common enemy of Christendom’ for Francis I, whereas Louis XIV’s attack on the Holy Roman Empire was likened to that of Sultan Süleyman I’s (r. 1520–66). Ottoman–Habsburg wars tied up Habsburg military manpower and resources in the Mediterranean and Hungary, and thus indirectly aided the Protestant estates’ ight against Madrid and Vienna from the Netherlands to the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. he rapid and seemingly unstoppable Ottoman advance in Europe in the iteenth and sixteenth centuries gave birth to a burgeoning literature about the ‘Turks’, with more than 3,500 titles published in the sixteenth century alone. Known collectively as ‘Turcica’, this literature included a great variety of genres from religious treatises to political pamphlets and writings by pilgrims, diplomats, and war captives. Although Europe’s image of the Turk was complex, the idea that Christian Europe was culturally superior to the Islamic ‘Orient’ appeared early on in these works, forming the foundations of later Orientalist views of the colonial era. he idea of the Islamic ‘other’ contributed to the formation of an emerging ‘European’ self-image, wherein the concept of the ‘oriental despot’ was used and manipulated by European thinkers—from Venetian diplomats through Montesquieu and Voltaire—in their ongoing dialogue about the nature

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Wallachia Nikopol

Map 23.1 he expansion of the Ottoman empire, c.1300–1683.

Buda

Transylvania

Moldavia

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of their respective monarchies and styles of rulership. It is an irony that the transformation of the Ottoman sultan from ‘tyrant’ to ‘despot’ occurred in the seventeenth century and that European literature about Ottoman ‘despotism’ gained currency in the eighteenth century, that is, in an era, when the Ottoman sultans lost much of their former power vis-à-vis the empire’s elites.2 Conceptions formulated by early modern European political writers regarding Ottoman ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’ have proved persistent, as did similarly enduring stereotypes about the ‘Ottoman decline’ ater the ‘magniicent’ and just reign of Sultan Süleyman. his ‘decline’ literature was also inluenced by the readings of Ottoman sources. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Ottoman authors of advice-to-kings literature (nasihatname) complained about the ‘corruption’ of Ottoman institutions following Süleyman’s reign, which they presented as a ‘golden age’ of just and orderly rule. From the late 1980s onward these notions have been challenged. Historians questioned the previously uncritical use of the Ottoman advice literature, and convincingly demonstrated that these works cannot be treated as impartial records of the transformation of Ottoman institutions. his advice literature not only presented every deviation from an idealized ‘old order’ (nizam-i kadim) as sign of corruption and weakening, it also relected the authors’ political and personal agendas in a time which witnessed intense factionalism and changes in the Ottoman political elite and literati.3 In reality, the Ottomans were responding to challenges similar to those facing their contemporaries in Europe and Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. he adjustments that Constantinople instituted in cooperation with its metropolitan and provincial elites and pressure groups were more successful than was once acknowledged. he empire reached its largest territorial extent in the last quarter of the seventeenth century—and not under Süleyman ‘the Magniicent’ as is oten stated. he very fact that the Ottomans were able to mount a major attack in central Europe in 1683, more than 100 years ater the empire’s supposed decline had started, demonstrated the resilience and strength of the Ottoman military–iscal system. Ater all, it was the Ottomans who almost captured the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire and not the other way around. Despite military setbacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially at the hands of Russia, the House of Osman retained most of its holdings until the late nineteenth century, and survived into the irst quarter of the twentieth century, due to both changed geopolitics and the overhaul of the Ottoman ancien régime in the nineteenth century. his is especially remarkable in light of the fate of the other two Muslim Empires of Asia, Safavid Persia and Mughal India, which both disintegrated in the eighteenth century. he present chapter examines early modern Ottoman history in its Eurasian context, as the Ottomans established relations with, fought wars against, inluenced, and were inluenced by their neighbours and rivals. Evolving military capabilities played an important role in shaping the course of Ottoman history and Constantinople’s relations with her neighbours and rivals. hese capabilities in turn were made possible by continually changing socio-economic systems and institutions, which thus should be discussed, however briely, in this chapter.

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Gábor Ágoston

The Emergence of the House of Osman he Ottomans were one of the many Turkic principalities that emerged around the turn of the fourteenth century in northwestern Asia Minor, ater the Mongol invasion of the 1240s brought to an end the rule of the Rum (Anatolian) Seljuk Turks, leaving a power vacuum. he eventual rise of the House of Osman to prominence was neither foreseeable in 1300, nor unchallenged in the decades and centuries to come. In the early years, Ottoman rule was contested by the neighbouring Turkish principalities and popular uprisings, as well as by regional powers, both Christian and Muslim. In fact, twice in the course of the iteenth century, in 1402–13 and 1444, the very existence of the Ottoman polity was at stake. By the middle of the fourteenth century Osman’s successors had established their irst bridgehead on the European shores of the Dardanelles, and their third ruler, Murad I (1362–89), tripled their realms. Ottoman territories were by then evenly distributed in Anatolia and Europe, known to the Ottomans as Rumeli, that is, ‘the land of the Romans [Greeks]’. Murad also relocated his capital from Bursa in northwestern Anatolia to Edirne (Adrianople) in eastern hrace, indicating that the Ottomans’ interest lay as much in Europe as in Asia. Bayezid I (1389–1402) continued the Ottoman expansion on both continents, extending his rule up to the banks of the Danube and the Euphrates. While the crusades of Nicopol (1396) and Varna (1444) failed to halt Ottoman advance in Europe, the victory of the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) over Bayezid (1402) temporarily checked Ottoman expansion, and resulted in a decade of civil war among Bayezid’s sons. Fortunately for the dynasty, important institutions of Ottoman rule had already taken root. he Ottoman prebendal system, based on the so-called timar revenue grants or military iefs, developed under the irst Ottoman rulers, following pre-existing Byzantine and Seljuk patterns of land tenure. hese conditional revenue grants inanced thousands of cavalrymen (sipahi), who collected taxes and dues from their respective villages in return for their military service to the ruler. heir commander was also the governor of his respective district, named sanjak (lit. banner) ater the banner he received from the ruler as a symbol of his authority. Under Bayezid I, the districts were organized into the provinces of Rumeli and Anadolu (western Anatolia), whose governors were the commanders-in-chief of all the timar-holding cavalry forces. he timariot army strengthened the ruler’s position vis-à-vis the frontier lords and their mounted frontiersmen, as did his personal guard, which evolved into the famous janissary corps. he government recruited its future janissaries through a child levy or ‘collection’ (devshirme), by which Christian boys (primarily from the Balkans) were periodically ‘collected’, converted to Islam, Ottomanized, and trained for military and governmental service. In order to keep records of revenues and soldiers the Ottomans instituted a bureaucratic surveillance system via cadastral surveys, registers of prebends, and salary pay lists. he upshot of all this was that by the early iteenth century a range of institutions and bureaucratic mechanisms had emerged to mobilize

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resources and to administer conquered lands. he beneiciaries of these institutions had vested interests in restoring the power of the House of Osman ater the debacle against Timur. Until the late 1970s, most scholars understood the Ottoman polity as a quintessential Islamic warrior state, whose raison d’être was the ‘holy war’ (gaza) against the ‘inidels’ and the continuous expansion of the Islamic state’s borders at the expense of its Christian neighbours. Formulated in the 1930s by the Austrian Ottomanist scholar Paul Wittek, the gazi thesis served as an all-embracing elucidation of the rise, evolution, and nature of the Ottoman Empire. Situated on the frontier of Byzantium—what remained of it—the Ottoman Turks were strategically positioned to wage such ‘holy wars’, and the opportunities for glory served as a magnet for the mighty warriors of the neighbouring Turco–Muslim principalities. he ostensibly inexhaustible supply of ‘holy warriors’ under the banner of the early Ottoman rulers seemed to explain their military successes.4 Scholarship from the late 1970s has questioned Wittek’s thesis, and demonstrated that gaza was a more inclusive enterprise than Wittek suggested. In addition to Muslim Turks, one inds among the early Ottoman ighters Orthodox Christian Greeks and recent Christian converts to Islam. Osman and his successors repeatedly made alliances with their Christian neighbours, and cleverly exploited the internal divisions in the adjacent polities. In fact, the Ottomans irst crossed the Dardanelles Straits into hrace in the mid-iteenth century as allies of John VI Kantakouzenos (1347–54), who enlisted Osman’s help in his ight against emperor John V Palaiologos (1341–91) during the Byzantine civil wars. Kantakouzenos married his daughter to Osman’s son Orhan, and gave the town of Tzympe, on the European shores of the Dardanelles, to his Ottoman son-in-law. Until the mid-iteenth century the Ottomans regularly used inter-dynastic marriages as a tool for subduing their Byzantine, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Anatolian Turkic neighbours and incorporating their lands into the nascent Ottoman polity.5 Historians have long noted the political fragmentation of Anatolia and southeastern Europe and the opportunities it created for the emergence of the Ottomans. However, geopolitics ofers only opportunities, and it was the Ottoman political elite that cleverly exploited the internal power struggles in the neighbouring polities, leading to the subjugation and eventual conquest of Serbia, the Morea, the principality of Karaman in central Anatolia, Herzegovina, Wallachia, and the Crimea. For example, the Ottomans conquered Serbia in 1459 ater a pro-Hungarian faction in that country deposed the pro-Ottoman co-regent, Michael Angelović. he conquering Ottoman army was commanded by grand vizier Mahmud Pasha Angelović (d. 1474), Michael’s brother, who was raised in the sultan’s palace ater Ottoman frontier raiders had captured him as a boy in 1427.6 Emphasis on Ottoman pragmatism and political shrewdness and the inclusiveness of the early Ottoman enterprise should not overshadow the importance of religious fervour. he spirit of gaza, although understood diferently by the various segments and generations of the society, remained important. Similarly, numerous sui brotherhoods and religious fraternities of cratsmanship and chivalry (futuwwa, akhi)

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played a signiicant role in fourteenth-century Anatolia. What is emerging from the research of specialists is a need for a more holistic approach to early Ottoman history. In addition to geopolitics and Islamo–Turkic, Mongol–Ilkhanid, and Byzantine inluences on Ottoman socio-economic developments and institutions, one should also take into account the inluence of climate, environment, and epidemics of disease.7

Constantinople– Kostantiniyye– Istanbul For the Ottomans, the conquest of Byzantine Constantinople in 1453 was signiicant for a number of reasons. It eliminated a hostile wedge that separated the Ottomans’ European and Asian provinces, frustrated the crossing of the sultan’s Asian troops to Europe, and had long inspired anti-Ottoman crusading projects. Constantinople was also one of three port cities in the Mediterranean, along with Venice and Barcelona, that was capable of serving a large galley leet, thanks to its wealthy hinterland and natural harbour, the Golden Horn. Not surprisingly, ater 1453 the Ottomans evolved into a naval power, eclipsing their Venetian rivals by the early sixteenth century and competing with Spain for dominance in the Mediterranean for most of the sixteenth century. Equally important for the Ottoman economy, the masters of Constantinople controlled and taxed the lucrative trade between the Black Sea littoral and the Mediterranean, through which Genoese and Venetian ships carried wheat and silk to Europe, and slaves to Mamluk Egypt. he conquest gave the young Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) unparalleled prestige in the Muslim and Christian worlds. He was now the ‘Conqueror’ (Fatih), the irst Muslim ruler to accomplish the old dream of the Muslims who irst besieged the city under the Umayyad Caliph, Muawiyya (661–680). Mehmed’s claim that he was lord of ‘two lands’—Rumeli and Anatolia—and ‘two seas’—the Aegean and the Black Sea, suggested that the sultan regarded his empire irmly rooted in both Europe and Asia. More importantly, by adopting the Roman–Byzantine titles kayser/Caesar and basileus, along with the old Turkish and Islamic titles of kaghan and sultan, Mehmed signalled his claim to universal sovereignty. Increased revenues from trade and territorial expansion and enhanced prestige enabled the sultan to gradually transform the Ottoman frontier polity into a patrimonial empire, where the ruler’s household troops and the timar-holder cavalry became the backbone of the military. his rendered the frontier raiders secondary, and gradually transformed their lords, the traditional Turkish aristocracy, into provincial governors, loyal to and dependent on the rule...