Chapter Seven: Ottoman Crisis and Adaptation, 1566-1768
The century that followed the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566) was a trying one for the Ottoman government. In sharp contrast to the seemingly endless success that it had heretofore enjoyed, it faced during that period a combination of vexing political, economic, and military problems, ones that seemed at times to be beyond the capacity of its existing institutions and practices to resolve. However, these issues did not, as historians once maintained, prove insurmountable for the empire or doom it to a gradual degeneration ending in its final dissolution in 1922. Instead, benefitting from a government that remained dynamic and flexible, the sultanate successfully responded to the crises of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by transforming its institutions, modifying its political practices, and reconstructing its fiscal systems. These adaptations were complex and at times imperfect, but they were also successful and ensured that the empire continued to thrive well into the eighteenth century.
The Ottoman ‘Time of Troubles,’ 1574-1656
The challenges that the sultanate faced were not immediately apparent under Süleyman the Magnificent’s immediate successors, Selim II (r. 1566-1574) and Murad III (r. 1574-1595). Indeed, during their reigns, the Ottoman Empire appeared to be as strong as ever. Domestically, its economy thrived, and its government enjoyed an unusual and envious degree of political stability. Its ongoing strength was even more apparent in the realm of foreign affairs. It continued to dominate its neighbors as it had in the past and remained the expansionary, conquest state that it had been for the prior three centuries. Most notably, between 1578 and 1590, the sultanate inflicted a series of significant defeats on its Persian rival and gained control of strategic territory in the Caucasus including the Safavid capital of Tabriz. While the empire was unable to make comparable gains in the west at that time, it nonetheless continued to raid Austrian territory regularly and posed a constant menace to the Habsburg capital of Vienna that lay just a few hundred kilometers from the border.
For a brief moment in 1571, the empire’s fortunes appeared to have taken a turn for the worse. That year, the Holy League, an alliance of the Papacy, Venice, and Spain, destroyed nearly the entire Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in Greece’s Gulf of Patras. It was a decisive victory for the league, one so total that many European observers concluded that the tide had finally turned in their long struggle against the empire. They were mistaken. Fiscally strong, the Sublime Porte was able to make good the navy’s losses within a matter of months and thus ensured that the Christians could not turn their victory into permanent control of the seas around Greece. Lepanto thus had no immediate adverse consequences for the empire and did nothing to weaken its grip on the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, thanks to its conquest of Cyprus from the Venetians in the same year as its defeat at Lepanto, the Ottoman Empire actually improved its strategic position in the region.
Beginning with the reign of Mehmet III (r. 1595-1603), however, the Ottomans experienced six decades of domestic and international problems that contemporaries referred to as the “‘time of troubles.’” This characterization was apt, for it was without question a difficult period for the empire both at home and abroad. Internationally, the sultan’s armies found themselves bogged down in a series of long, costly, and frustrating wars. Domestically, meanwhile, the empire faced a combination of debilitating political factionalism, destabilizing succession issues, and fiscally draining rebellions in Anatolia. These were serious challenges, ones that would leave it far weaker than it had been at the time of Selim II’s accession in 1566.
The Long War, 1593-1606
The “‘time of troubles’” began with the Long War that the empire fought with Austria from 1593-1606. It was a frustrating conflict for the Sublime Porte, one that followed a markedly different course than had earlier wars with Christian European states. Rather than achieving easy victories over an outmatched and outgunned foe as it had in the past, the sultan’s army instead found itself fought to a standstill by a potent, tactically sophisticated, and well-armed opponent. Indeed, the Ottomans won just a single field battle during the thirteen-year-long war, the Battle of Mezokeresztes in 1596, and did so only because Habsburg troops, having achieved a breakthrough, had lost cohesion when presented with the opportunity to loot the Ottoman camp. To a substantial degree, the problems the Ottoman army confronted were a function of the way that the conflict was fought. The Long War consisted for the most part not of decisive field engagements, but instead of long, drawn out, and costly sieges against a new, and nearly invulnerable type of fortification: the star fort. With walls too thick to be battered down by artillery, the new fortresses that the Austrian military engineers constructed prevented the Ottomans from achieving the sort of rapid victory that had been the hallmark of the sultan’s military during the prior two centuries. Thus, unlike earlier wars with the Europeans that had been quickly and easily won, the Long War turned into an expensive stalemate, one that sapped morale even as it put great pressure on the treasury.
Driven to exhaustion and near their fiscal breaking points, the Habsburgs and Ottomans agreed in 1606 to engage in talks along their common border for the purpose of bringing the conflict to an end. The result was the Peace of Zsitvatorok, which ended the war on the principle of uti possidetis, meaning that each party retained the territory that it controlled at the conclusion of the fighting. At first glance, the agreement appeared to be a favorable one for the Sublime Porte. It did not require the empire to cede any land, left it in possession of Hungary and the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldovia, and even awarded the sultan two border fortresses.
Nonetheless, European and Ottoman diplomats alike understood that the settlement was a significant symbolic defeat, one that reflected a seismic shift in the balance between the empire and the European states. To that point, treaties involving the Ottoman Empire had always been negotiated in Istanbul and presented as acts of sultanic grace between highly unequal parties. Agreed to instead at the border and explicitly acknowledging for the first time that the Habsburg emperor was of equivalent rank to the sultan, the Peace of Zsitvatorok announced in unambiguous language that the Ottoman Empire was no longer the dominant force it had been under Süleyman the Magnificent.
War with the Safavids
In the meantime, the already stretched Ottoman military had to fight a second war, this time with the Safavids. For Shah Abbas I (r. 1588-1629), this conflict was one of revenge. Smarting from the concessions he had been forced to make to the Ottomans in 1590, the Persian leader had spent the final decade of the sixteenth century busily reorganizing his army and reequipping it with a large force of cannons. By the early 1600s, as a result, he was well positioned to take advantage of the Ottomans’ preoccupation with the Habsburg Empire to start a war aimed at recovering the provinces he had been compelled to cede a decade earlier. He made his move in 1603. Striking boldly, his new military launched a coordinated series of attacks that quickly overran Ottoman forces in western Iran and the Caucasus. The Safavid invasion was a serious blow to the Sublime Porte. It not only cost the empire large amounts of valuable territory but also threatened to unhinge the entire Ottoman position in the east. In response, Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-1617) ordered a powerful counterattack in 1605 aimed at recovering Tabriz. Unfortunately for him, the offensive collapsed spectacularly when Shah Abbas I destroyed the invading Ottoman forces at Sufiyan. Thereafter, the war settled into another costly stalemate until it finally concluded with the Treaty of Serav in 1618.
The stunning victories that Abbas I’s reformed army won in the early years of the war made clear the extent to which Ottoman military dominance had evaporated by the turn of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Safavid success at that time amounted to nothing less than a complete turnaround in the balance that had obtained between the two empires for nearly a century. Since the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, Ottoman supremacy in the east had been so total that successive shahs had had little choice but to retreat when faced with the prospects of a field battle with the sultan’s army. Shah Abbas I’s riposte thus came as a great shock to the Sublime Porte and showed emphatically that Ottoman forces no longer held the upper hand along the eastern frontier. The Treaty of Serav reflected this tectonic shift in the military balance. By its terms, the Ottomans agreed to give back all the provinces they had won from Shah Abbas I in 1590 and to accept a return to the frontier that had existed prior to 1578, a huge concession for an empire that had never before yielded more than token amounts of territory.
The Jelali Revolt
The outbreak of a serious rebellion in Anatolia in 1596 significantly complicated the Ottoman Empire’s ability to wage its simultaneous wars against the Safavid and Habsburg Empires. Known as the Jelali Revolt, the uprising had its roots in the grievances of key provincial groups. It began when the central government seized timars from sipahi who had deserted in battle in 1596; angry about losing their income, the dispossessed cavalrymen responded by revolting and engaging in brigandage. Irregular, firearm-equipped peasants known as sekban soon joined them. These men had served in the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1578-1590 and expected to become members of the ruling elite at its conclusion; instead, the government had unceremoniously demobilized them in a cost-cutting move. Incensed, they engaged in local banditry until the sipahi revolt presented them with the opportunity to form a common front with the dispossessed cavalrymen through which both groups could secure concessions from Istanbul. It was the union of these disaffected elements that turned the Jelali revolt into a serious threat to Ottoman control of Anatolia in the late 1590s, particularly after the governor-general of Karaman, who had been tasked with suppressing the rebellion, instead assumed leadership of it.
As a result, by the early years of the seventeenth century, the situation in Anatolia had become grim for the central government. Now well led, the Jelali rebels occupied large swaths of territory, defeated a succession of armies sent against them, and besieged and extorted important cities such as Ankara. Crucially, they even briefly took control of the strategic passes that linked Syria and Asia Minor and thus threatened the sultan’s control of the Arab Middle East.
The central government’s position in Anatolia only began to improve following the conclusion of the Long War. Using troops freed up as a result of the Peace of Zsitvatorok, Grand Vizier Kuyuju Murad Pasha (r. 1606-1611) directed a massive offensive designed to finally bring the Jelali to heel. Only through the skillful use of divide-and-conquer tactics and the liberal dispensation of bribes, he bought off key rebel leaders with the promise of government offices, was he finally able to bring the revolt to a conclusion in 1610.
Succession Issues
If the Jelali Revolt and the costly wars with the Safavid and Habsburg Empires were not challenging enough, the Ottomans also confronted growing political instability in the capital. These problems first emerged in 1589 when the Janissaries revolted over a cut in their pay. Murad III suppressed their rebellion easily enough, and, to all outward appearances, seemed to have restored order to his government. In reality, he had done nothing of the sort. On the contrary, while the Ottoman state appeared to be as stable as ever during the ensuing decades, it had in fact begun to splinter into competing factions that struggled with one another for control of the levers of power and, pivotally, for influence over the sultan.
The latent conflicts between the cliques finally burst into the open in 1617 following the death of Sultan Ahmed I. One faction headed by the sheikh ül-Islam, the highest-ranked Muslim cleric in the empire, arranged to pass over Ahmed I’s sons in favor of his more-malleable, though also mentally unbalanced brother, Mustafa I (r. 1617-1618, 1622-1623). Mustafa I’s enthronement was portentous for the empire in two ways. First, it broke with the Ottoman precedent of having sons succeed their fathers as sultan. Second, and more importantly, it marked a dramatic escalation in the involvement of the bureaucratic and military factions in the selection of the ruler.
The result was a period of severe political volatility in Istanbul. Just three months after Mustafa I assumed the throne, the Janissaries deposed him on the justifiable grounds that he was mentally unstable and replaced him with one of Ahmed I’s sons, Osman II (r. 1618-1622). However, the new sultan’s reign did not mark a return to normalcy. Instead, dispensing with the obsequiousness that they had shown to previous rulers, competing cliques within the askeri, most egregiously, the Janissaries, schemed to control Osman II and challenged his prerogative to direct policy. By 1620, the exasperated sultan had had enough. Furious about the Janissaries’ heavy-handed involvement in politics, he began plotting in secret to replace them with more politically reliable musketeers recruited from the peasants of Anatolia. This maneuver was a shrewd one and might have succeeded had the Janissaries remained unaware of his efforts. Unfortunately for Osman II, however, the well-connected soldiers sniffed out his plan before he could put it into effect. Moving quickly to defend their status and position, they dethroned and executed him in 1622. They followed by briefly returning the mentally disturbed Mustafa I to the throne before once more deposing him in favor of another of Ahmed I’s sons, Murad IV (r. 1623-1640).
The empire rapidly descended into chaos following Osman II’s murder. Taking advantage of their military power and the fact that their barracks were adjacent to the palace, the Janissaries demanded and received a substantial accession donation, functionally a bribe, from the new sultan to ensure their continued loyalty. They followed by further destabilizing the already-shaky political system by deposing a succession of grand viziers. These actions benefited the Janissaries in the short term, but they were enormously unpopular and produced a backlash in the provinces. The governor of Erzurum, Mehmet Pasha (1576-1634), soon gave focus to that anger. Declaring that he sought to avenge the murder of Osman II, he raised a revolt that quickly secured control of large parts of Asia Minor including the important cities of Sivas, Bursa and Ankara. To the delight of many people, he also ordered the execution of any Janissaries found in the territory he controlled on grounds that they were complicit in Osman II’s murder.
Short of funds as a result of the accession bonus given to the Janissaries, the central government could offer no meaningful response to this new challenge. The crisis the Ottomans faced soon worsened dramatically. Taking advantage of the paralysis in the Sublime Porte and the unrest in Asia Minor, Shah Abbas I invaded Ottoman Iraq in 1623 and laid siege to Baghdad. To his delight, his soldiers took possession of the city early the next year. It was a shocking blow to Ottoman prestige, one that brought into clear focus the problems that the central government’s paralysis had created.
Murad IV and Recovery
Surprisingly, in light of the fact that he was only twelve when he took the throne, the new sultan, Murad IV, was able to provide the effective leadership needed to restore internal order and the empire’s territorial integrity. That he would be successful in doing so was far from obvious during the early years of his reign. While he had been able to quickly bring the revolt in Anatolia to heel, his effort to retake Baghdad in the early 1630s had ended in defeat. Worse, his subsequent decision to sack the popular grand vizier who had commanded the failed campaign in Iraq, Husrev Pasha had incited the Janissaries to revolt once again. Thus, by the early 1630s, the situation in Istanbul appeared to have reverted to the chaos that had obtained in the early 1620s. Indeed, most observers had come to conclude that the sultan was a weak leader who was powerless either to prevent the empire from descending further into disorder and instability, or, more immediately, from avoiding the same fate as Osman II.
In this case, however, appearances were deceiving. Murad IV in fact proved to be a remarkably effective ruler who, aidedby his capable mother, deftly outmaneuvered the Janissaries as the first step in a successful campaign designed to reassert sultanic control over the empire. His effort to deal with the soldiers’ uprising was smartly planned and executed. He initially responded with a shrewd tactical retreat in which he appeared solicitous and agreed to meet their main demands. Concluding from the episode that the sultan would not challenge them, the mollified Janissaries stood down, just as Murad IV had hoped they would. Taking advantage of the breathing space he had created for himself, he followed by quietly securing allies from among those factions that resented the soldiers’ dominance of the government. Then, having solidified his position in this way, he had the rebellion’s leaders arrested and executed.
He followed with a flurry of initiatives designed to restore internal order and to reassert the empire’s dominance of its borders. He pursued a series of reforms to the system of taxation, moved to impose stringent new moral regulations, and acted to subdue brigands who had exploited the anarchy in the capital to ravage Anatolia. He also personally led a campaign against the Safavids in 1638 aimed at reconquering Baghdad. Murad IV was successful in all of these initiatives. As a result, he was not only able to cement his control of the government, but also to end the instability that had dogged the Sublime Porte since Ahmed I’s death in 1617. Indeed, by the time of his death in 1640, he had so thoroughly reestablished order that his subjects hailed him as the restorer of the empire.
Ibrahim the Mad
Initially, the recovery that Murad IV had achieved continued under his successor, Ibrahim, (r. 1640-1648). It did so thanks not to the skilled leadership of the sultan, who was already demonstrating signs of mental instability, but instead to the tactful and effective guidance of his grand vizier, Kemankesh Mustafa (1592-1644). Sidelining Ibrahim, Kemankesh Mustafa was able to keep the factions in check and to maintain the empire’s international position. As a result, the first four years of Ibrahim’s tenure passed uneventfully.
A pair of unrelated events in 1644 shattered the calm, however, and ushered in another difficult period for the empire. First, a faction headed by Ibrahim’s charismatic, spiritualist advisor, the charlatan Jinji Hoja used its influence with the sultan to have Kemankesh Mustafa executed, thus paving the way for it to assume control of the levers of power. Interested primarily in enriching themselves, the men provided little effective leadership and imposed no check on the sultan’s increasingly erratic actions. Second, the empire started a war that year that quickly transformed into a costly quagmire. The conflict began when Maltese corsairs seized a ship carrying a high- ranking Ottoman official. Briefly stopping at the Venetian-controlled Island of Crete, the pirates issued a ransom demand before quickly spiriting their captive to Malta. The sultan and his advisors were furious. Believing that the slight could not go unpunished, they mobilized the fleet and army for a retaliatory attack. However, they did not target Malta. Instead, using the alleged complicity of the Venetians in the incident as a pretext, they invaded the valuable and strategically located island of Crete. Catching the defenders by surprise, the Ottoman army quickly overran the island save for the heavily fortified port city of Candia.
However, the fortunes of war soon turned against the Ottomans. Venice may not have been the power it once was, but it still possessed a formidable fleet that could ferry a steady stream of supplies to the garrison in Candia; as a result, the city was able to hold out for an astonishing twenty-five years despite being besieged by a huge Ottoman army. More damagingly, in 1647 and 1648, the Venetians used their powerful navy to blockade the critical Dardanelles Strait that connected the capital to the Aegean Sea. The closure of the waterway was a huge blow to the empire. It not only prevented Ottoman soldiers on Crete from receiving desperately needed supplies but also inflicted serious economic hardship and food shortages on the people of Istanbul.
Meanwhile, as the empire was suffering setbacks against the Venetians, Ibrahim’s sanity began to deteriorate rapidly. The decline in his mental health came in the context of his effort to meet a pressing dynastic need. Social and political order in the empire depended on the unifying symbol of the Ottoman family; as Ibrahim was the sole remaining Ottoman male, however, the dynasty on which stability rested was in danger of ending. Accordingly, to ensure that the line did not die out, his advisors pressed him to make siring sons a high priority. Sexual relations were a pleasant obligation for Ibrahim at first; after 1644, though, they evolved from a dynastic necessity into an all-consuming personal fetish. Ignoring his official duties, the sultan soon spent all of his time in the harem, the part of a Muslim household reserved for women and children, in the company of a growing roster of concubines recruited to meet his particular sexual tastes. Given his mental-health issues, the sultan’s absence from the divan would likely have been more of a help than a hindrance to the Ottoman state. However, his desire to lavish costly gifts on his sexual partners, such as giving a palace to one of his favorites and insisting on carpeting it with fabulously expensive sable furs, posed growing problems because they could only be met by raising taxes on the empire’s already overburdened subjects.
Those levies contributed to a spectacular crash in the support that Ibrahim had enjoyed. Coming at a time of blockade-induced food shortages and lurid rumors of the sultan’s sexual excesses, the imposition of new taxes to pay for the luxuries he showered on his concubines soon cost him the backing of the residents of the capital. More importantly, the sultan’s fumbling rule and his government’s inability to bring the war with Venice to a successful conclusion increasingly alienated key factions in the government and led many to conclude that the sultan had to go. Once again, it was the Janissaries who took the lead. Fed up with Ibrahim’s poor rule, the soldiers secured a fatwa, or legal ruling, from the sheikh ül-Islam in August 1848 authorizing them to depose and kill the increasingly unbalanced sultan. They followed by arranging for his six-year-old son, Mehmet IV (r. 1648-1687), to succeed him.
While a great relief to the people of the capital, the murder of Ibrahim did not result in a return to the stability of Murad IV’s reign. Instead, the empire experienced eight more years of upheaval in what seemed like a replay of the anarchic 1620s. Mounting resentment of the Janissaries’ dominance of the government resulted in the outbreak of yet another rebellion in Asia Minor while stepped-up factional infighting in the capital left the central government incapable of providing effective rule. Even the streets of the capital experienced disorder. Angry over new taxes and a costly debasement of the currency, the residents of the city repeatedly vented their anger by rioting.
By 1656, the crisis had reached a boiling point. Factionalism and instability in the government had grown to the point that the grand vizirate had become a revolving door. Indeed, no fewer than seven different men occupied the post between May 1655 and October 1656 including one, Zurnazen Mustafa Pasha, who served for a mere four hours. Meanwhile, the soldiers chose this difficult period to launch yet another revolt, one that, predictably, further paralyzed the central government. Finally, and most shockingly, Venice inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottoman fleet in the summer of 1656 that permitted it to seize the islands of Lemnos and Bozcaada and, with them, control of the Dardanelles Strait. Times were very dark indeed.
Sources of Ottoman Weakness
The Venetian victory in 1656 made clear to observers both inside and outside the Ottoman Empire that the sultanate was no longer the dominant power it had once been. What accounted for its reversal of fortune? How did a state so overwhelmingly strong in 1566 that it could dominate all its frontiers find itself facing defeat at the hands of tiny Venice not even a century later? Paradoxically, the difficulties that the Ottomans experience during the first half of the seventeenth century were related to the peculiar characteristics that had facilitated the empire’s meteoric rise. Put simply, many of the strengths that had fueled the sultanate’s stunning growth and transformation during its early years had, by the seventeenth century, become relative or absolute liabilities.
Economic and Fiscal Issues
The first area of strength that transformed into a weakness was the economy. As noted in Chapter Six, the early Ottoman Empire had benefited from several centuries of steady economic expansion. Its rising population, the development of new trade routes, the cultivation of new land, and the shift from barter to cash-based transactions had combined to produce substantial growth. Following Süleyman the Magnificent’s reign, however, the empire’s economy began to stagnate. The rise in population slowed, trade plateaued, and, as the marginal utility of new land brought under the plow steadily decreased, the growth in agricultural productivity stalled.
Making matters worse, the Ottoman economy began to experience at that time what scholars refer to as the Price Revolution: a general period of inflation in western Eurasia caused by the influx into Europe of large quantities of gold and silver from the Americas. While the effect of the sudden rise in the supply of precious metal on the empire was substantially more limited than its impact on Western Europe, and far-less consequential than historians once believed, it nonetheless fueled a steady rise in prices that further contributed to the dampening of commercial activity in the sultanate.
Unsurprisingly, the Ottoman government began to experience significant fiscal shortfalls at this time. As we have seen, these deficits had little precedent. Through the early 1580s, the Sublime Porte had regularly enjoyed substantial budget surpluses and had thus found itself in an unusual and envious fiscal position. Thanks to the sultanate’s subsequent economic stagnation, however, the tax receipts that had steadily grown in earlier times now stopped rising. Worse, since the empire levied taxes on a nominal basis, meaning that its assessments did not rise along with inflation, the Price Revolution meant that existing tax revenue declined in real terms.
Three other issues further exacerbated the Ottoman Empire’s worsening fiscal situation. First, beginning in the early-seventeenth century, the growing oceanic exchange between Asia and Europe that had started with Vasco da Gama’s (c. 1460s- 1524) arrival in Calicut in 1498 finally began to eclipse the Silk Road trade that passed through the Ottoman Empire. As a result, the customs revenue that the overland trade had heretofore provided began a long, gradual decline. Second, in contrast to the earlier wars of expansion that had generated a steady inflow of loot to the treasury and had thus largely paid for themselves, the conflicts of the late-sixteenth century constituted a significant drain on the exchequer. The Long War with the Habsburgs, the conflict with the Safavids, and, especially, the naval contest with the Holy League from 1570-1573 were all extremely costly ventures that rapidly consumed the treasury’s surplus even as they failed to generate compensatory revenue in the form of plunder.
Finally, thanks to the empire’s worsening fiscal situation, an existing but heretofore manageable peculiarity of the Ottoman fiscal calendar began to pose a serious, if periodic, challenge to the exchequer in the late-sixteenth century. This problem was a function of an unusual disparity between the treasury’s receipt and disbursement of funds. It collected taxes on a solar calendar, a necessity in an agricultural economy, but paid salaries to its troops and officials on a quarterly basis according to the Muslim lunar calendar. As the lunar calendar is eleven days shorter than a solar year, the Ottoman treasury thus had to pay roughly thirty-three years of salary every thirty-two years; in other words, every eighth year, it had to come up with a fifth quarter’s worth of salaries. During the sultanate’s astonishing rise, this issue had been a manageable one for the treasury. Finding the extra funds every eighth year had simply not been an issue when the sultan’s army was bringing in vast extra revenue in the form of loot. However, since the sultanate had stopped growing in the late-sixteenth century, the octennial need to find the excess funds to pay an extra quarter’s worth of salaries would constitute a serious challenge for the increasingly strapped treasury.
Aggravated by the long and expensive Ottoman-Safavid War of 1578-1590 and by the lingering costs of the new fleet it had to construct after the Battle of Lepanto, the bill finally came due in the mid 1580s. Desperate to secure enough coinage to meet its expenses, the treasury instituted a draconian 44 percent debasement of the currency, the silver akçe coin, in 1585-1586. This devaluation gave the government the funds it needed to meet its obligations, but it also produced a destabilizing surge in inflation that hit bureaucrats and soldiers, including the Janissaries, with peculiar severity. More importantly, the dramatic depreciation of the currency set in motion a vicious fiscal- economic cycle. Thereafter, debasement and monetary instability produced inflation that depressed the economy; the resulting decline in economic activity in turn reduced real tax receipts, which then exacerbated the fiscal crisis and impelled the treasury to pursue further debasements.
Thus, by the early-seventeenth century, the empire’s fiscal and commercial position had grown bleak. Its once-expanding economy had stalled, and its treasury officials grappled with steadily worsening budget deficits that they only belatedly grasped could not be resolved through further debasements. It was a difficult situation for the sultanate, one made worse by virtue of the fact that both the economy and the state’s fiscal standing had so recently been among its core strengths.
Weak Sultans
The empire might have had greater success resolving the fiscal crisis of the late- sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries had it continued to enjoy strong leadership. Unfortunately, the succession of highly capable rulers that began with Osman I (r. 1299- 1326) ended following the death of Süleyman the Magnificent. Indeed, after a brief stretch of merely lackluster sultans, Murad IV excepted, the empire would experience a nearly unbroken, century-long string of weak rulers who were unable to provide effective direction of the Sublime Porte.
On the surface, two factors explain the decline in sultanic leadership. First, as we have seen, two of the sultans who reigned during the next century, Mustafa I and Ibrahim, suffered from severe mental instability. As such, they proved incapable of directing the affairs of state. Second, nearly all the others who reigned during the seventeenth century came to power as children. Mehmet IV was seven when he became sultan, for example, while Osman II and Ahmed I were each thirteen at the time they acceded to the throne. Unsurprisingly, the child sultans had a difficult time asserting themselves over the factions that had come to dominate the bureaucracy and court. Murad IV, of course, had broken this pattern and had enjoyed a successful reign despite becoming sultan at the age of nine; however, he was very much the exception. Indeed, he was the only genuinely effective ruler between Mehmet III’s death in 1603 and Süleyman II’s (r. 1687-1691) accession to the throne more than eighty-years later.
Youth may have been a contributing factor in the decline in sultanic leadership, but a fundamental change in the succession process in the early-seventeenth century proved far-more consequential. Beginning with the accession of Ahmed I in 1603, the askeri adopted a new system for selecting sultans that ended the practice of fratricidal succession that had worked so effectively since the late-fourteenth century to ensure that the empire enjoyed strong leadership. Where the old system had involved a Darwinian contest among the heirs that ended with the winner executing his fraternal rivals, the new arrangement instead spared the sultan’s brothers by giving the bureaucrats and courtiers the power to select the new leader. To ensure that the passed-over heirs did not possess powerbases from which they could challenge the recently installed ruler, the new system also ended the practice of having the sultan’s sons gain administrative experience by serving as provincial governors. Instead, all of the heirs, including the next sultan, led pampered lives of ease and pleasure in the luxurious, unreal atmosphere of the imperial harem, where they acquired no sense of the real world and easily fell under the influence of powerful courtiers.
Why did the Ottomans adopt this new method of succession if it failed to produce leaders of the same caliber as the fratricidal system? They did so for two reasons. First, at only thirteen-years of age, Ahmed I had not yet fathered any heirs when he became sultan; killing his brother Mustafa I thus ran the risk of ending the dynasty and sparking a period of anarchy and crisis. Second, popular revulsion at the practice of royal fratricide had begun to surge in the late-sixteenth century. The line of five, child-sized coffins wheeled out of Topkapi Palace on the day that Murad III acceded to the sultanate, and, even more so, the train of nineteen caskets that emerged when Mehmet III took the throne shocked the people of Istanbul and compelled the askeri to adopt the new system.
While the new arrangement may have been more humane, it was also much less effective at producing capable rulers than the fratricidal system it replaced. Raised in the luxurious, fantastical environment of the harem, the sultans of the seventeenth century were ill-equipped to respond effectively to the increasingly serious challenges confronting the empire. Bereft of practical experience or even a realistic grasp of the world in which they lived, they were figureheads rather than actual rulers, the creatures of competing factions of bureaucrats, ulema, Janissaries, eunuchs, and courtiers rather than leaders in their own right. Thus, thanks to the abandonment of the system of fratricidal succession the sultanate, another of the empire’s early sources of strength, had become a significant source of weakness.
Military Problems
As the Long War and the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1603-1618 made clear, even the empire’s vaunted military, its most obvious strength during its rise to power, had lost its edge. This change marked an enormous shift in the military balance. During the conflicts of the early- and mid-sixteenth century, the sultan’s army had easily dominated its enemies on every front. By the turn of the century, in contrast, the balance between the Ottoman military and the armies of its rivals had shifted to such a degree that Habsburg forces had been able to fight the sultan’s soldiers to a draw while Shah Abbas I’s Safavid troops had outright trounced them. What had happened during the late-sixteenth century? Why was the Ottoman military no longer able to defeat its enemies as it had in the past?
First, to be clear, the change in the military balance between the empire and its rivals was not indicative of a general decline in the efficacy of the sultan’s army. The Ottoman military of the early-seventeenth century remained a potent, well-led, and well- supplied force. Indeed, it was every bit as powerful as it had been when Selim II had triumphed so spectacularly over the Safavids at Chaldiran in 1514 or when Süleyman the Magnificent had crushed the Hungarians in 1526.
Rather, the empire experienced a relative decline in military power, due not to its shortcomings or lack of discipline but instead to significant improvements in the armies of its European and Persian rivals. As earlier noted, Shah Abbas I had modernized the Safavid military in the 1590s in part by dramatically increasing the number of cannons it employed. As a result, by the early-seventeenth century his troops were able to go toe-to-toe with Ottoman forces. European armies improved to an even greater degree relative to the Ottomans due to the Military Revolution, a series of technological and organizational changes among European armies that dramatically altered the way wars were fought. It involved four major changes: the deployment of much-larger armies, the use of powerful new weapons such as muskets and field guns, the adoption of innovative and devastating new tactics such as volley fire, a technique that permitted a formation to shoot continuously, and the construction of new, star-shaped bastion forts, which, as the Ottoman military discovered during the Long War, were nearly impervious to artillery fire. These were dramatic changes. They not only allowed European militaries to close the gap with the Ottoman army by the turn of the seventeenth century but gave them the ability thereafter to fight it on an even footing. Thus, while the sultan’s armies were as strong as ever, they no longer enjoyed the relative advantage that the empire’s early adoption of gunpowder weapons had previously afforded.
That said, two critical components of the Ottoman military, the sipahis and the Janissaries, did decline in effectiveness between the early-sixteenth and the start of the eighteenth centuries. The sipahis were the first to lose their edge. The bow-armed provincial cavalry had gradually become obsolete over the course of the sixteenth century as a result of the growing adoption and increasingly sophisticated employment of gunpowder weapons. However, the continued success of Ottoman armies masked their decline. It was only during the Long War that their military ineffectiveness, particularly in the face of massed formations of musket-armed infantry, fully manifested itself and made clear that they were rapidly becoming an anachronism on the battlefield.
The Janissary corps’ decline was more gradual. Its devolution began in 1566 when the Janissaries won the right to marry and to produce legal heirs. Eager to ensure that their children inherited their askeri status, they followed by winning modifications to the traditional system of recruitment that permitted their sons to join the corps. These changes gradually transformed the Janissaries over the next century. Indeed, by the time Sultan Ahmed III formally abolished the devshirme in 1703, the corps had long since completed its shift from a meritocratic institution beholden to the sultan into a hereditary one dedicated to furthering its parochial interests.
The debasement-induced inflation that began in the late-sixteenth century accelerated the Janissary corps’ decline. As we have seen, the series of debasements that the treasury had undertaken beginning in the late-sixteenth century had brutally eroded the purchasing power of the Janissaries’ salaries. In response, the soldiers began to supplement their pay by taking jobs as porters or butchers or by opening small businesses. Ostensibly, the Janissaries were employed in those positions on a part-time basis for the purpose of offsetting the decline in their wages. In reality, their side jobs were full-time obligations that left scant time for them to train or otherwise fulfill their official duties.
The end of the devshirme system and the Janissaries’ adoption of wage-earning work proved doubly harmful to the empire. First, the transformation of the Janissaries from elite soldiers into full-time workers led to a dramatic decline in their military effectiveness between 1600 and 1750. Abandoning the training and discipline that had been so critical to their earlier success in order to work their civilian jobs, the Janissaries devolved into a completely ineffective military force and eventually stopped going on campaign altogether. Paradoxically, even as the corps’ military capabilities declined, its political influence reached new heights. No longer bound to the sultan as they had been when they were slaves recruited through the devshirme system, they were now in a position to use their monopoly over military power in the capital to raise and overthrow sultans at will. This they did with abandon. Between 1618 and 1730, either alone or in conjunction with other cliques, they deposed Mustafa I, twice, Mehmet IV, Mustafa II (r. 1695-1703), and Ahmed III; meanwhile, they had not merely dethroned Osman II and Ibrahim the Mad but had also executed them.
In recent decades, scholars have significantly complicated this understanding of the Janissaries. While still acknowledging the corps’ declining martial abilities and its destructive meddling in the succession, they have shown that it also served an important social role in the capital as the populist protector of the urban common people. Two peculiar characteristics allowed it to do so. First, in contrast to nearly all other groups, the Janissaries were members of both the askeri elite and the urban working class. As such, they were in a unique position to mediate between their lower- class brethren and the Sublime Porte. Second, they held a monopoly on military power in the capital and were thus well positioned to compel the sultan’s government to alter policies perceived as harmful to urban workers. The corps began to assume its role as a populist intermediary body early in the eighteenth century. Thereafter, it frequently exploited its dominant military position in the capital to compel the Sublime Porte to abolish laws and policies that impinged on the welfare of the urban lower class, particularly those that harmed the interests of the artisan guilds that employed many of the Janissaries.
The corps’ new role as an intermediary body may have been important, but it could not offset the fact that the Janissaries and their sipahi comrades no longer dominated the battlefield as they had during the Ottoman rise to power. By the end of the seventeenth century, the decline of those forces had become obvious. The sipahis, who had once nimbly outmaneuvered heavier cavalry and routed infantry during the empire’s early years, were now almost completely obsolete. More dramatically, the Janissary corps had not merely lost its military dominance but had shifted from being a terror on the battlefield to a danger to the sultans themselves. In short, two more institutions that had been vital to the dynasty’s early success had, by the eighteenth century, instead become liabilities.
Capitulations
Meanwhile, though they had little immediate impact, a series of bilateral trade agreements called capitulations that the Sublime Porte entered into with several European states beginning in the late-sixteenth century would have important long-term ramifications for the empire. Based on earlier Byzantine commercial treaties, the capitulations provided merchants from signatory states with special privileges while operating in the sultanate. Thanks to those treaties, they enjoyed extraterritoriality, or immunity from Ottoman laws, and exemption from the payment of local taxes.
The capitulations served the Sublime Porte’s interests in two ways. First, they provided a means of locating European traders within the broader social, political, and economic structure of the empire. As non-Ottoman subjects, merchants from the capitulatory states were neither entitled to the benefits of Ottoman law nor permitted to access the courts of the empire’s recognized socioreligious communities, the millets. They thus lacked legal standing and protection while operating in the sultanate. The capitulations solved this problem by creating what were in essence new millets headed by the monarchs of the states from which the merchants came. Second, the agreements were an attractive concession that the Sublime Porte could grant to European states with which it hoped to conclude diplomatic agreements. Indeed, the Ottoman state granted the first capitulation to France in 1569 as a reward for allying with the empire against their common Habsburg enemy. For similar reasons, the Sublime Porte entered into a capitulatory agreement with Britain in 1579 that opened trade in the empire to the royally chartered Levant Company.
At the time they were signed, the capitulations did not appear to be terribly significant politically or even economically. The volume of trade was small, and the empire was much stronger than the capitulatory states. As such, the Sublime Porte could easily abrogate the agreements at no cost if it wished. However, unbeknownst to Ottoman officials in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the capitulations posed a latent, long-term threat to the empire’s political independence and economic health. Were the balance between the sultanate and the European kingdoms to reverse, those states would not only be able to use the capitulations to assume a dominant position in the empire’s economy but would have the military strength to prevent the Sublime Porte from revoking the agreements. In other words, the capitulations constituted a ticking time bomb for the empire, one slated to explode if and when, paradoxically, the Sublime Porte was too weak to end them.
The Historical Debate: Decline or Adaptation?
For a long time, the “Ottoman decline thesis,” the view that the Ottoman Empire experienced a gradual, inexorable degeneration that began with the conclusion of Süleyman the Magnificent’s reign and that ended with the sultanate’s dissolution in 1922, dominated the historical literature. While Western scholars of the mid-twentieth century are most commonly associated with this interpretation, it is in fact a very old idea that originated in the empire itself. Indeed, the people who first advanced it were the seventeenth-century writers of Nasihatname, or Advice of King, literature, political commentaries designed to influence how the Ottoman Dynasty governed. Coming largely from the bureaucratic class, these authors argued that the “‘time of troubles’” was a direct product of the ineffective leadership of the sultans who succeeded Süleyman the Magnificent. Interpreting the world through the lens of the Circle of Justice, they maintained that the rulers of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries were degenerate, pleasure-seeking men who had failed to rule justly or to maintain order. As a result, the peasants suffered, tax receipts fell, and the strength of the military waned. How could the empire regain its equilibrium? The Nasihatname writers argued that the answer was obvious: it could do so only through the return of effective, moral leadership at the top.
Initially, the Nasihatname concept of Ottoman decline was not widely known. Written by a modest number of officials for an equivalently small audience of sultans and top leaders, it remained confined largely to the bureaucratic class. However, the idea that the empire was in decline gradually spread, first to a wider audience within the Ottoman world and then, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to Europe. There, with the Ottoman Empire’s relative weakness as a backdrop, it soon began to shape Western interpretations of the sultanate’s troubles.
It was not until the mid-twentieth century, however, that the Ottoman decline thesis fully took shape. Seeking to explain the empire’s apparent failure to modernize, Western scholars writing after World War II drew heavily on the Nasihatname literature to argue that a shift from strong to weak sultans beginning in the late-sixteenth century inevitably led to the decentralization of political power and to the broader degeneration of the empire. The most influential of these writers was the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis. He contended that the lack of effective leadership in the late-sixteenth and early- seventeenth centuries resulted in the gradual and irreversible decay of key structures and institutions within the empire. The bureaucracy slid into venality and corruption, the military lost its discipline, the local elites carved the provinces into semiautonomous fiefdoms, and the economy gradually stagnated under the weight of corrupt tax collectors until, unable to defend its territory from the increasingly dynamic and modern West, the empire finally collapsed in 1922. Thus, to proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis such as Lewis, the empire’s demise was the inevitable result of the military, economic, bureaucratic, and even cultural decadence that had begun with the shift to weak sultanic leadership in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.
While the Ottoman decline thesis dominated understandings of the empire in the 1950s and 1960s, it began to face mounting criticism from a new generation of scholars after 1970. They started by critiquing the logic that underlay it. Most pointedly, they noted that the idea that decline in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries led directly to the empire’s collapse in the 1920s was a teleological fallacy: a flawed form of reasoning that interprets all past events as the causes of an inevitable final outcome. In their eyes, such thinking ignored the many obvious ways in which the Ottoman situation improved after 1650, and, more problematically, denied agency to people living in later times.
Those scholars followed by reexamining the primary sources of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. Here, they concluded that the evidence simply did not sustain the idea that the empire had degenerated. Most notably, they found that the writers who composed the Nasihatname literature were not offering unbiased or even realistic assessments of the issues that the empire confronted during the “time of troubles.” Rather, their arguments reflected either the broader complaints of the bureaucratic class, or, more frequently, their own personal grievances; as such, their claims of imperial decay cannot be taken at face value. These scholars similarly saw success rather than weakness or degeneracy in the military’s performance in the conflicts of the early-seventeenth century. They acknowledged that the empire’s inability to achieve a decisive victory over the Habsburgs, the Safavids, and the Jelali demonstrated that its overwhelming dominance of the battlefield had become a thing of the past. At the same time, however, they also contended that the very fact that the sultanate could wage war simultaneously on three fronts was indicative of the Ottoman state’s ongoing strength and resilience rather than a sign of its stagnation or weakness.
By the 1980s, historians arguing along these lines had fully repudiated the Ottoman decline thesis. While acknowledging that the empire experienced a period of instability in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries as it transitioned to a new, decentralized political system, they persuasively showed that the devolution of power was a successful response to the military, economic, and diplomatic challenges that the empire confronted during its “‘time of troubles.’” Thus, by the 1990s, a new historical consensus had emerged that characterized the period from the death of Süleyman to the mid-eighteenth century not as a time of decline but instead as a period of successful adaptation to the empire’s changed circumstance.
Ottoman Adaptation
What did this transformation encompass and when did it occur? First, to be clear, it was not a lagging response to the challenges that began to emerge in the late- sixteenth century. Instead, while the evolution of the empire peaked between the 1650s and 1690s, the process of adaptation started almost immediately after the “‘time of troubles’” began. Second, the empire’s evolution was far reaching and impacted nearly all aspects of the Ottoman system. The distribution of political power in the capital, the governance of the provinces, the collection and disbursement of taxes, and the structure of the military all changed in response to the empire’s new circumstances. The result was a very different state than the one that Mehmet II or Süleyman the Magnificent had ruled, one that was far-better suited to the conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Military Reforms
Unsurprisingly, the empire first acted to reform its army. It did so as a direct result of the frustration it had experienced fighting the Long War. Unaware of the impact that the Military Revolution was having on the armies of the Christian European states, Ottoman generals had assumed at the start of the conflict that their soldiers would easily defeat Habsburg forces just as they had so many times in the past. Instead, to their shock, the army had found itself bogged down in a long, costly, and frustrating stalemate against a vastly improved enemy. Most alarmingly, the Austrian military had not merely closed the gap that had long existed between it and the sultan’s army but had actually surpassed Ottoman forces in several key areas including the quantity and quality of field guns deployed and the use of advanced tactics such as volley fire.
In response, the Sublime Porte initiated a campaign designed to restore the military’s qualitative superiority. Though it touched on everything from logistics to grand strategy, that effort focused on three key areas: bringing Ottoman battlefield tactics and weapons in line with contemporary Western practices, matching the European states’ shift to larger militaries, and replacing obsolete forces with more effective ones. Accordingly, the government ordered the rapid adoption of European-style field guns and muskets as well as the volley-fire system that the Austrians had used with such effect in the Long War, and it increased the size of the central standing army from 20,000 soldiers in 1567 to 37,000 at the conclusion of the war with the Habsburgs. Finally, the reform campaign made sweeping changes to the army’s composition by raising substantially the proportion of soldiers that consisted of musket-armed Janissaries and sekban and by severely reducing the share composed of the increasingly ineffective provincial sipahis.
The military reforms undertaken in the early-seventeenth century proved quite successful. The quick adoption of the strategies, tactics, and weapons of the Military Revolution substantially improved the Ottoman army’s capabilities and ensured that it did not fall behind its European peers. The reforms ensured that the sultan’s army remained roughly equivalent in strength and capability to the forces of its two primary rivals, Russia and Austria, at least through the turn of the eighteenth century. In other words, the sultan’s military did not continuously weaken beginning in the seventeenth century as proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis once argued, but instead successfully evolved to meet the needs and challenges of a different time.
Fiscal Changes
While these reforms ensured that the Ottoman military enjoyed at least parity with its European rivals in the seventeenth century, they also contributed to the fiscal difficulties that bedeviled the empire at that time. Most obviously, the expansion of the army imposed new costs on the exchequer; after all, more troops inevitably meant greater expenditures. However, the increased size of the military was only part of the story. Indeed, changes to the army’s composition likely played a more important part in increasing the fiscal burden than did the numerical expansion of the military. Put simply, shifting from a cavalry-heavy army to one in which infantry predominated was not merely an exercise in swapping one set of troops for another. Instead, it required the sultanate to make fundamental changes in the way that it raised and funded its military forces. Most notably, it involved replacing the provincial sipahis, whose expenses had been met through the timar system, with musket-armed Janissaries and sekban, whose costs were instead borne by the treasury.
To secure the required revenue, the central government began to gradually replace the timars with iltizam, or tax farms, overseen by tax farmers called multezim. Common in Europe in the Early Modern Period and with antecedents in the Muslim world stretching back to the Buyid Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate, tax farming was a decentralized and privatized revenue system in which the state auctioned the right to collect taxes to private individuals. The Ottoman system was fairly typical of tax-farming regimes in the Early Modern Period. The winning bidder to an iltizam was obliged to pay the government an initial lump sum and then to forward to the treasury periodic tax payments raised during the three-year term of the contract; any excess revenue raised was the multezim’s to keep. The Sublime Porte began the shift to tax farming in 1596 when it seized and converted into iltizam the timars of those cavalrymen who had deserted during the Battle of Mezokeresztes. Thereafter, as the share of infantry in the army steadily rose, the government gradually dispossessed more and more sipahi from their timars in order to create the additional revenue-producing iltizam needed to pay for the new foot soldiers.
Tax farming was a mixed blessing for the empire. In the immediate term, it proved able to supply the Ottoman government with revenue desperately needed to pay for the reformed and expanded army and thus helped to ease the fiscal crisis. At the same time, however, the short duration of the iltizam contracts encouraged the multezim to impose crushingly high tax rates and to use brutal methods to collect revenue in order to maximize short-term profits. As such, the system discouraged the economic growth on which future tax-revenue depended.
More importantly, substantial as they were, the tax receipts that the iltizam generated proved insufficient by themselves to offset the Sublime Porte’s myriad fiscal problems. The central government responded in two ways, one modest and one substantial. First, in 1677, bureaucrats arrived at a way of resolving the budgetary issue created by the asymmetry between the solar and lunar calendar; thereafter, the treasury no longer had to deal with the crisis that arose every eight years when it needed to secure the extra revenue required to pay an additional quarter-year’s-worth of salaries. Second, and more significantly, sometime between the start of the Long War and 1620, the government made permanent the avariz tax: a special assessment imposed during times of conflict to pay for the extraordinary costs of maintaining an army in the field. Bringing in substantial income for the state, the avariz went a long way toward easing the fiscal crisis that had plagued the empire since the late-sixteenth century.
Provincial Decentralization
The fiscal reforms of the seventeenth century did not merely benefit the treasury’s bottom line but also fostered a transformation in the structure of provincial government and a related relaxation of the central state’s control of the periphery. These changes marked a substantial break with past practice. Keenly aware that centrifugal political forces had grievously weakened earlier empires, the Sublime Porte had traditionally worked to maintain a tight grip over the provinces. To do so, it had periodically rotated governors to new positions in order to prevent them from establishing patronage networks with local notables that might permit them to rule autonomously. More importantly, it had maintained close ties with the semi-feudal sipahis, whose strength in the provinces acted as a check on local officials and ensured that they could not raise illegal taxes or hire mercenary armies composed of demobilized sekban.
For two reasons, however, those restraints weakened and then collapsed in the early-seventeenth century. First, growing factionalism in the capital not only diverted attention from the provinces but also impelled officials in the central government to grant concessions to provincial governors in order to win their support against rival cliques. Second, and more importantly, the demise of the sipahis meant that the Sublime Porte no longer had a military force in the provinces to curb the ambitions of the governors and local notables. Increasingly, as a result, provincial officials were able to negotiate new arrangements with the central government that accorded them greater autonomy. Initially, the accommodations that they secured were limited ones such as the right to remain in their posts permanently and thus to establish patronage networks. Soon, however, they were able to win more far-reaching concessions including the power to impose new taxes, the legal sanction to create private armies, and, ultimately, the right to transform their territories into permanent, hereditary fiefdoms over which the central government could exert only limited control. By the mid-seventeenth century, these changes had become irreversible. Thereafter, local autonomy rather than central control characterized the administration of the provinces.
It is important to note that the growing independence of the provinces neither weakened the empire nor constituted a sign of its degeneration. Ties between center and periphery remained strong, and the new system in no way interfered with the empire’s ability to function. Indeed, provincial governors did not typically have antagonistic relationships with the court, but instead retained close patronage connections with officials in the capital. They also continued to forward tax revenue to the exchequer and contributed troops from their private armies for service in the empire’s wars. In other words, the hierarchical system of provincial administration that had existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had not degenerated into a weaker, decentralized system as proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis had once argued; instead, it had transformed into a cooperative arrangement, one that that functioned effectively over the next two centuries.
Decentralization in the Capital
With the growing weakness of the sultans, power devolved in the central government as well. As we saw earlier, the succession of child rulers and mentally unbalanced sultans who reigned in the first half of the seventeenth century had created a power vacuum in the court. In response, shifting factions composed of harem eunuchs, queen mothers, Janissaries, viziers, ulema, and powerful bureaucrats assumed a steadily increasing share of power. While these groups often competed with each other, sometimes violently, they increasingly worked cooperatively, and soon came to provide the empire with an effective system of collective leadership.
What of the sultans? How did they fit into this new structure of shared rule? Some, such as Murad IV and Mehmet IV, participated in the running of the empire, albeit more as first-among-equals than as absolute monarchs on the model of Mehmet II (r. 1451-1481). However, these leaders were very much the exception. For the most part, the sultans of the seventeenth century reigned rather than ruled, serving as unifying symbols that legitimated the collective system rather than as executives who actually directed the administration of the empire.
As we have seen, proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis once argued that the shift from strong, sultanic rule to factional governance during the early-seventeenth century marked the moment that the empire began its inexorable degeneration. According to this school of thought, the early Ottoman state had prospered and expanded under the effective leadership of powerful sultans such as Mehmed II, Selim II and Süleyman the Magnificent. After 1566, in contrast, it endured the rule of a rotating cast of venal and corrupt courtiers, pashas, and viziers. More interested in accumulating personal power and wealth than in providing wise leadership, the new ruling class failed to respond effectively to foreign threats, ignored the empire’s gradual economic, diplomatic, and military degeneration, and set the sultanate on a path that led, ineluctably, to its dissolution.
There is a grain of truth to this argument. The early period of collective rule was indeed an anarchic time, one marked by violent riots in the capital, political paralysis in the Sublime Porte, and rebellions in the provinces that, collectively, left the Ottoman government poorly equipped to deal with external challenges. The empire’s enemies were quick to exploit the instability. Most notably, it was the chaos that followed the deposition and execution of Osman II that gave Shah Abbas I the opportunity to seize control of Baghdad in 1624.
In recent decades, however, scholars who argue that the empire transformed rather than degenerated have persuasively rebutted this interpretation. They contend that the Ottoman decline thesis vastly overstates the role that the early sultans had played in the government, which unrealistically assumes that the empire’s fortunes were entirely a function of the competence of its top ruler, and, most importantly, ignores the many successes that the Sublime Porte enjoyed after the “‘time of troubles.’” Indeed, directly contradicting the Ottoman decline thesis, they maintain that the system of collective rule that took effect in the early-seventeenth century provided capable governance. In particular, they argue that the empire was especially well led during two successive periods: The Sultanate of Women from the 1620s to the 1650s and the Koprulu Era from 1656 to 1703.
The Sultanate of Women
During the Sultanate of Women, the valide sultans, or queen mothers, provided strong leadership in what proved to be a peculiarly rocky period for the Ottoman Empire. The preeminent force in the government from the death of Osman II in 1622 until her assassination in 1651, Kosem Sultan (1689-1651), mother of Murad IV and Ibrahim, was the most important of the valide sultans. She proved pivotal in seeing the empire through a peculiarly difficult period. Serving as regent from 1623 to 1632, she was instrumental in helping Murad IV to put down a Janissary revolt and to restore central control of the sultanate. Later, she played a key role in bringing Ibrahim’s disastrous reign to a close.
Turhan Sultan (1627-1683), the mother of Mehmet IV, offered similarly effective direction of the empire during hard times. Serving as regent and co-ruler from 1651 to 1656, she succeeded in maintaining some semblance of order in the capital, no small task given the anarchy that prevailed at the time, and oversaw the reconstruction of many of the empire’s critical defensive bastions. Undoubtedly her most important action came in 1656. Confronting defeat at Venetian hands, she made the bold decision that year to elevate an obscure and elderly bureaucrat named Koprulu Mehmet Pasha (1575-1661), to the position of grand vizier, a move that not only demonstrated her wisdom and decision-making abilities but that also launched the highly successful Koprulu Era.
The Koprulu Era
Like the valide sultans, the members and dependents of the Koprulu family who controlled the grand vizirate from 1656 to 1703 provided wise and effective rule. That they were able to do so was critically important, for the Koprulu era began during a peculiarly dark time. The issue was the ongoing war with Venice. As we have seen, the Venetians had followed their victory over the Ottoman fleet in 1656 by reinstituting their blockade of the Dardanelles Strait. As a result, Istanbul experienced serious food shortages that produced periods of civil unrest as well as destabilizing revolts among the soldiers. Upon becoming grand vizier, Mehmet Pasha moved aggressively to restore the situation. He began by organizing a naval campaign in 1657 that succeeded in defeating the Venetian fleet and in reopening the strait to commerce. This victory proved critical both because it ended the immediate crisis, and because it dramatically enhanced Mehmet Pasha’s stature, affording him the political capital needed to arrest and execute the leaders of the rebellious soldiers and to purge the bureaucracy of officials from rival cliques. Now firmly in command, he followed with a series of further successes, including putting down a rebellious vassal in Transylvania, defeating the Habsburgs, and efficiently and quickly reconstructing the capital after a devastating fire.
Mehmet Pasha’s brief tenure as grand vizier was an unalloyed success. By the time he passed away in 1661, he had not only resolved the crises of the 1650s but had also left the empire on its most stable footing since Murad IV’s death in 1640. Indeed, his direction of the sultanate had been so effective that he was able to compel Mehmet IV to name his son, Koprulu Fazil Ahmed Pasha (1635-1676), as the empire’s next grand vizier, a move that institutionalized Koprulu control of the Sublime Porte for the next three decades.
Strong leadership continued under Fazil Ahmed Pasha and his successor as grand vizier, his adopted brother, Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634-1683). They were so effective in addressing the problems of the “‘times of trouble,’” in fact, that, under their leadership, the sultanate was able to wage wars of conquest for the first time in nearly a century. Fazil Ahmed Pasha set the Koprulu era of expansion in motion by finally completing the conquest of Crete in 1669 and by taking Podolia from the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1672. Kara Mustafa followed suit by securing suzerainty over the semi-nomadic Cossacks of Right Bank Ukraine, thereby shoring up the Ottoman position along the border with the increasingly aggressive Russian Empire.
These victories were substantial and earned the Koprulu much acclaim. Indeed, as contemporaries approvingly noted, the empire had never before controlled as much territory as it did under Kara Mustafa.
The grand viziers of the Koprulu Era enjoyed similar success implementing much-needed domestic reforms. They restored discipline to the military, struck absentee troops from the rolls, and began to offset the declining efficacy of the Janissaries by making greater use of Albanian, Circassian, and, especially, Tatar auxiliaries. Most importantly, successive Koprulu viziers implemented sweeping fiscal reforms that put the treasury on a solid footing for the first time since the 1570s. Central to that effort was the issuance in 1688 of a new silver coin, the kurus, to replace the now completely depreciated akce. Stable in value, the kurus quickly brought an end to the inflation that had plagued the empire for much of the prior century and thereby helped spark a long period of prosperity.
Malikane
The Koprulu also oversaw a far-reaching reform of the tax system in the 1690s that would have enormous ramifications both for the central government’s fiscal situation and for the administration of the provinces. Mounting dissatisfaction with the iltizam form of tax collection prompted this move. By the end of the seventeenth century, treasury officials had become well aware that the three-year terms of the iltizam contracts were encouraging the multezim to seek short-term gain at the expense of the empire’s long-term economic well-being. They also understood that the iltizam system had never provided the state with the consistent tax payments it needed in peacetime let alone during its frequent foreign conflicts. Such was the case during the long and costly War of the Holy League in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, which we shall explore presently. Indeed, it was the need for additional funds to pay for that conflict that would serve as the catalyst for a complete overhaul of the tax system.
The centerpiece of that reform program was a comprehensive change to the system of tax farming that went into effect in 1695. That year, the treasury began to replace the iltizam system with a new form of tax farming called malikane that it hoped would deliver the revenue needed to finance the war. The malikane tax farms were superficially similar to the iltizam ones that they replaced. They required the winning bidder to pay an initial lump sum and thereafter to forward a share of the annual tax receipts they collected to the treasury. The malikane system differed from the iltizam arrangement in one significant way, however: The leases on them were for the lifetime of the holder rather than for three years.
The shift from iltizam to malikane tax farms paid substantial dividends for the Sublime Porte. The new system not only provided the steady collection of tax revenue the empire needed but also indirectly benefitted the exchequer by helping to boost the broader Ottoman economy. The key here was the duration of the malikane contracts. Lasting for the life of the holder, the agreements encouraged the multezim to make investments in infrastructure and to set taxes at rates designed to encourage long-term economic growth rather than to generate quick profits. As a consequence, the new system helped to establish the conditions that would see the empire experience a steady agricultural and commercial expansion over the course of the eighteenth century and a concomitant rise in tax receipts.
Advocates of the Ottoman decline thesis once maintained that the shift to lifetime tax farming marked another critical inflection point in the empire’s decline. Characterizing the adoption of the malikane system as a desperate grab for short-term cash, they argued that, like the iltizam practice that it replaced, it not only produced a decline in long-term tax receipts but also had the unintended consequence of accelerating the ongoing process of decentralization that allowed the more distant parts of the empire to become fiscally and politically autonomous. To proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis, in other words, the malikane system incurred a double cost to the Sublime Porte, failing to provide the treasury with adequate revenue even as it weakened the government’s control of peripheral provinces.
More recently, scholars who argue that the empire experienced transformation rather than decline have persuasively rebutted this interpretation. While acknowledging the centrifugal political implications of the new arrangement, they contend that by maintaining control of the bidding process and by regulating the collection of revenue, officials in the capital ensured that the state retained a significant degree of authority over the provinces. In addition, they show that the attraction of lifetime tax farms, they were quite lucrative for the lease holders, and the Sublime Porte’s continued monopoly over the bidding process combined to strengthen patronage links between local notables and officials in Istanbul. Coupled with the provincial governors’ desire for formal recognition, only the sultan could grant them the legitimacy they needed, the malikane system thus ensured that center and periphery would remain bound together for the next century and that the provincial notables would continue both to forward tax revenue to the treasury and to provide troops for the defense of the empire. In other words, while the new system of tax collection that the Koprulu put in place and the new relationship between the Sublime Porte and the provinces differed substantially from past practice, they did not weaken the power of the central government as scholars once argued.
Wars of Contraction
The War of the Holy League, 1683-1699
The achievements of the Koprulu era, the establishment of the malikane system, the resolution of the crisis of the 1650s, and the expansion of the empire, were substantial and went a long way toward restoring the sultanate following the “‘time of troubles.’” However, the Koprulu family’s many successes must be balanced against the disastrous war into which it dragged the empire in 1683. That conflict was a product of Kara Mustafa’s desire to continue the renewed drive to expand the sultanate. Seeking to take advantage of a revolt by Protestant dissidents in the Habsburg-controlled part of Hungary, he invaded Austria in 1683. However, he was not content merely to take a few border fortresses as the Ottomans might have done in the recent past. Instead, seeking greater glory, he marched his army deep into Austrian territory and laid siege to Emperor Leopold I’s (r. 1658-1705) capital, the city of Vienna. Vastly outnumbering the defenders, the Ottomans appeared poised in the late summer of 1683 to achieve the empire’s greatest victory since the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. Instead, the campaign ended in disaster. On September 12, a Polish-Habsburg relief force under the command of Polish King John Sobieski (r. 1674-1696) decisively routed the Ottoman army and broke the siege. The battle was a major setback for the sultan’s military and a fatal one for Kara Mustafa: blaming his grand vizier for the defeat, Mehmet IV had him executed on Christmas Day, 1683.
The situation rapidly deteriorated from that point. Following the victory at Vienna, the Habsburg Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Venice, and Russia formed a powerful alliance against the Ottomans called the Holy League. Bereft of Kara Mustafa’s effective leadership and gripped by political instability, thirteen men served as grand vizier between 1683 and the conflict’s conclusion in 1699, the empire found itself outnumbered and outmatched. On the Austrian front, Habsburg forces repeatedly pummeled the Ottoman army and won a victory of substantial strategic and symbolic significance at Mohacs in 1687, the site of Süleyman the Magnificent’s greatest triumph. Concurrently, Venice took possession of the Morea in Greece and Russian troops seized the fortress of Azov at the mouth of the Don River, the linchpin of the empire’s defensive line north of the Black Sea. The loss of that bastion was a serious blow to the Ottomans and made clear just how tenuous the empire’s position had become by the late 1690s. Indeed, the fall of the strategic fortress was so shocking that it finally compelled the Sublime Porte to sue for peace.
The Treaty of Karlowitz, 1699
The Treaty of Karlowitz that emerged out of the subsequent negotiations made clear the extent of the Ottoman Empire’s defeat. Based on the principle of uti possidetis, meaning that each party retained the territory that it controlled at the conclusion of the fighting, the agreement cost the sultanate substantial amounts of territory. By its terms, Istanbul ceded Hungary and Transylvania to the Habsburg Empire, Podolia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Morea and the Dalmatian coast to Venice. A separate treaty signed with Russia in 1700 recognized the loss of the fortress of Azov and in a stipulation pregnant with symbolic significance, acknowledged that the Russia tsar, once clearly the Ottoman sultan’s diplomatic subordinate, was now of equivalent rank.
Proponents of the Ottoman decline thesis once cast the War of the Holy League and the treaty of Karlowitz as the first clear, outward manifestations of the empire’s accelerating internal decay. They argued that a century of weak leadership, venal corruption, military indiscipline, and provincial decentralization had weakened the empire and left its army incapable of fighting off the militaries of its increasingly dynamic and sophisticated European rivals. As a result, Ottoman forces endured a string of defeats in the war that ended only when the Sublime Porte accepted a peace agreement that cost the empire most of its territory in Central Europe.
In recent years, historians critical of the decline paradigm have persuasively countered this interpretation of the conflict. While acknowledging the extent of the Ottoman defeat, they dispute the view that the empire lost the war as a result of a broader process of cultural, political, economic, and military degeneration. Instead, maintaining that the Ottoman army was every bit as effective as those of its enemies, they argue that the problem was one of quantity rather than quality. At war with a broad alliance of enemies on a series of fronts that stretched from Hungary in the west to the Don River in the east, the Ottoman army found itself overwhelmed and outgunned by a numerically superior coalition. In the view of these historians, in other words, the empire lost the war not because of internal decline but instead because its soldiers were badly outnumbered.
Continued Military Success
Those scholars also point to the continued effectiveness of Ottoman military forces in the decades following the War of the Holy League as evidence that the sultan’s military had not declined relative to those of its main rivals. For example, they note that Ottoman forces succeeded in ending the Fourth Russo-Ottoman War in 1711 by surrounding and compelling the surrender of a Russian army under the command of Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725), a victory that briefly returned the critical fortress of Azov to Ottoman control. Led by the Crimean Tatars, who had emerged as the sultan’s best troops, the Ottoman military likewise performed competently in a conflict the empire fought with Russia and Austria between 1736 and 1739. While the sultan’s troops had at best mixed success against the tsar’s armies in that war, it routinely battered Habsburg forces in Central Europe. Thus, the wars of the early-eighteenth century made clear that while the Ottoman army had long since lost the commanding edge that it had enjoyed in the days of Selim II and Süleyman the Magnificent, it nonetheless showed no signs of decline or degeneration and remained comparable in capability to the militaries of its Habsburg and Russian rivals through the middle of the eighteenth century.
Conclusion
As the ongoing success of its military demonstrated, the Ottoman state had, after a difficult start, succeeded in addressing the challenges of the “‘time of troubles.’” It had neither degenerated as scholars once claimed nor clung blindly to the institutions and practices that had proven so successful in its rise. Instead, it had undertaken a sweeping reform program that, while far from perfect, nonetheless resolved many of the empire’s problems and ensured that it continued to thrive well into the eighteenth century.
After that point, however, the Ottoman Empire found itself in an astonishingly different and far-more dangerous world. With the onset of the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions, the Western states that the Ottomans had once dominated were undergoing an unprecedented economic transformation that was rapidly rendering them vastly stronger than the empire. By the early-nineteenth century, the gap in power between the sultanate and the European states had become so great and so dangerous that the Sublime Porte felt compelled once again to embark on a far-reaching reform program. This time, however, it was not acting alone. Throughout the empire, officials and subjects alike debated how Muslim states could best respond to the growing threat emanating from Europe. It is to the challenge of the West and to the Ottoman Empire’s manifold responses that we shall now turn.
