Chapter Six: The Gunpowder Empires, 1300-1566
Following the near-concurrent sack of Constantinople in 1204 by Crusaders, the collapse of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum in 1243, and the destruction of the caliphate in 1258, the Middle East appeared to have fallen into complete disunity. While the Mamluks controlled Egypt and Syria and a rump Byzantine state held sway in far-western Anatolia and Constantinople, the rest of the region lay hopelessly divided among a vast number of squabbling principalities, statelets, and tribal confederations. Indeed, by 1300, the stability and unity that had characterized the Middle East under the Abbasid Dynasty had become little more than a distant memory, one that seemed unlikely to ever again obtain in the region.
By the early sixteenth century, however, the situation had altered dramatically. By that point, two large states had emerged to divide the region between them: the powerful Safavid Empire that dominated Iran, and the mighty Ottoman Empire that controlled Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, Iraq, and the Hejaz, as well as North Africa, Southeastern Europe, and the Black Sea littoral. What accounted for this dramatic geopolitical restructuring? What characteristics did these new empires have that permitted them to avoid the chronic instability that marked nearly all other contemporary states in the region?
In the mid-to-late twentieth century, the historians Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill provided a persuasive and widely accepted answer to these questions. These scholars located the success of these new states, as well as the similar Mughal Empire in India, in their adoption of a novel system of interrelated administrative and military practices. Dubbing these states “gunpowder empires,” Hodgson and McNeill maintained that they were able to overcome the volatility that plagued other late-medieval Muslim states by centralizing political power, by creating and maintaining efficient bureaucracies able to raise substantial revenue, and, most importantly, by establishing regional monopolies over the use of firearms. Enormously powerful, these innovative conquest states dominated the Muslim world and, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, constituted a serious and ongoing threat to the security and independence of Christian Europe in the early-modern period.
The Ottoman Rise to Power
Origins of the Ottoman Empire, 1299-1326
The Ottoman Empire emerged out of the anarchic situation that the sudden collapse of the political order in Asia Minor had created. Following the demise of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum in 1243, numerous small, competing principalities called beyliks had emerged in Turkish-controlled central and eastern Asia Minor. Each of these statelets took shape around a Turkish warlord who held the rank of bey, the lowest Turkish noble title. That the men who ruled these states possessed titles may suggest that the beyliks existed within a larger political arrangement or that their leaders enjoyed a degree of legitimacy conferred by a central government; such was most certainly not the case. On the contrary, this was a highly competitive and unstructured system wherein the power and status of a bey derived not from his title or from the legitimation that a respected authority might grant, but instead from his raw military talents and concomitant ability to attract followers. Those beys who could provide protection to peasants and merchants and who could lead warriors on successful raids gained subjects and saw their beyliks grow; those who could not suffered a decline in power as their followers deserted them in favor of their more effective rivals.
The Ottoman Empire owed its start, and its name, to one of these beys, Osman I (r. 1299-1326). Osman I may have inherited a title and a tiny beylik from his father, but his success derived far more from his innate charisma, foresight, and remarkable leadership skills than from his patrimony. A military commander with the cunning to win battles and a lord with the wisdom to keep taxes low and predictable, he possessed all of the attributes needed to win supporters and territory at the expense of the less-successful and less-dynamic lords who controlled adjoining beyliks.
As important, Osman I also had the savvy and talent to take full advantage of his principality’s serendipitous location adjacent to the Byzantine Empire’s remaining holdings in Asia Minor. The empire offered an almost perfect combination of wealth and weakness. On the one hand, its Anatolian possessions were endowed with rich pasturage, productive farmland, and small-but-important cities such as Bursa, Nicomedia and Nicaea. On the other, thanks to the more immediate threat that Western states such as Venice posed, Constantinople was compelled to deploy the bulk of its limited military forces to safeguard the empire’s European territories and was thus unable to spare any more than a tiny fraction of its already small army for the defense of its Anatolian holdings. As a result, those valuable possessions were isolated, vulnerable, and ripe for the picking.
Osman I built both his state and his reputation by preying on the empire. Grasping the weakness of its position in Anatolia, he launched attacks against it almost immediately upon taking power. He began by boldly besieging the former Seljuk capital of Nicaea. While he was unsuccessful in taking the city, his victory over a Byzantine relief army in the Battle of Bapheus in 1302 earned him a reputation as a successful military commander among the Turks of Asia Minor and drew large numbers of akinjis, frontier warriors to his banner.
In desperation, Emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus (r. 1282-1328), responded by hiring a mercenary group, the Grand Catalan Company, to defend the territory in Anatolia that Osman I threatened. This move proved to be a poor one. While the mercenaries initially won several engagements against the Turks, they soon abandoned the war in favor of plundering the Greek peasants of the region. As a result, by the time the company had departed from Anatolia, many Byzantine subjects in the area had either fled across the strait to Constantinople or had come to accommodate themselves to Turkish rule.
Osman I was quick to take advantage. Strengthened by his acquisition of new territory and subjects, He exploited the disarray that the Grand Catalan Company had created to launch annual raids into Byzantine territory. These attacks netted substantial loot, which drew yet more fighters to his cause. They in turn gave Osman I the strength first to gradually seize the Byzantine Empire’s remaining rural land in western Asia Minor and then, around 1320, to lay siege to Bursa. Well-fortified and supplied, the city proved to be beyond the power of Osman I’s warriors and managed to hold out through his death in 1326. Still, this setback aside, he had achieved a great deal. He had dramatically expanded his beylik, won a large following of akinjis, and, perhaps most importantly, had given his embryonic dynasty the imprimatur of success.
Early Expansion, 1326-1402
Osman I’s son and successor, Orhan (r. 1326-1362), proved to be every bit as capable and ambitious a leader as his father had been. Building on the stable foundation he inherited, Orhan skillfully transformed his beylik into a major power in western Anatolia. Like Osman I, he did so largely by exploiting Byzantine weakness. He began his reign by successfully concluding the siege of Bursa that Osman I had started. He followed by recruiting nearby Turkish beys to help him undertake an ambitious effort to overrun Byzantium’s remaining territory in Asia Minor. This long and ultimately successful campaign was of enormous significance for Orhan. It not only resulted in the expansion of his state and its tax base but, perhaps more importantly, also elevated him above the nearby beys and thus gave him the prestige needed to start reducing those leaders to the status of Ottoman vassals.
In doing so, Orhan pioneered what would become the dynasty’s customary approach to acquiring territory. This process involved two steps. First, the Ottomans reduced defeated rivals or dependent principalities to vassalage. Then, after the people of those states had accommodated themselves to Ottoman rule, the dynasty gradually assumed direct control. Minimizing the number of revolts during the early years of imperial oversight, this two-step progression proved to be a shrewd and highly successful strategy, one that the dynasty would employ to great effect over the next two centuries.
Orhan had been enormously successful, but his territorial acquisitions had also produced a growing problem for his state. Put simply, the crude system of government that he had inherited was not appropriate for the changed circumstances of his beylik. Now encompassing a large territory of predominantly settled rather than nomadic people, his state required a far-more complex and sophisticated system of government than the one based on interpersonal relationships that he had inherited from his father. Accordingly, after he took Bursa, he sought to establish a simple bureaucracy to administer his state and, more importantly, to manage the collection of taxes. Yet, who would organize and staff this bureaucracy? After all, neither the akinjis he surrounded himself with nor the peasants who constituted the majority of his subjects had the experience and knowledge needed to establish and run a complex administration.
Unable to secure suitable candidates within his beylik, Orhan decided to look elsewhere for bureaucrats. He found them among the Sunni religious scholars of Anatolia. Promising them that they would have the power to shape and manage his state, he succeeded in persuading a number of ulema to relocate to Bursa. This move proved to be a smart one for the Ottoman leader. Drawing on centuries of well- developed Islamic political theory and practice, the religious scholars he recruited quickly established a crude-but-effective bureaucratic structure that was capable of providing him with the efficient administration and steady tax collection that his growing state required.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the decision to rely on ulema to run the government had important if-unintended consequences for the practice of religion in Orhan’s state. To that point, the Ottomans had followed an unconventional brand of Islam that incorporated folk variants of Sunnism and Sufism into a syncretic blend of Christianity and Islam—a mix that made Orhan’s beylik a welcoming place for people from a variety of backgrounds. However, adherence to these heterodox religious practices began to ebb with the arrival of the ulema. Under their influence, Orhan and a number of his followers started to gradually abandon the loose approach to religion that they had heretofore followed in favor of an embrace of orthodox Sunnism. As we shall see, this shift would gradually accelerate under his successors.
Orhan also began the process of transforming the Ottoman military from one that consisted exclusively of nomadic frontier warriors into a more balanced force that included a substantial contingent of infantry. The key event that drove him to make this change was the siege of Bursa. Orhan learned from his early failed efforts to take the city that the akinjis’ independence, lack of discipline and, most importantly, need to secure pasturage for their horses meant that he could not concentrate his forces for a long-enough duration to reduce fortified places through siege. Accordingly, he established the yaya infantry to facilitate such operations. Based not on the nomads who continued to make up the bulk of his fighters but instead on settled recruits, this new force was able to maintain the tight blockades required to compel fortified places to capitulate. Over time, these yaya and other new types of troops would gradually supplant the nomads as the core of the evermore sophisticated and centrally directed Ottoman military.
During the final decade of his reign, Orhan focused on a new and ambitious goal: expanding across the Dardanelles Strait into the Byzantine Empire’s European territory. Ironically, his troops first crossed the strait not as invaders but instead as the invited allies of the Byzantine Emperor John V Cantacuzenus (r. 1347-1354), who was then locked in one of the many bitter civil wars that dominated Byzantium’s internal affairs during much of the fourteenth century. Orhan’s troops helped the emperor defeat his rival; in the process, however, they also seized control of the important port of Gallipoli on the European side of the Dardanelles Strait. Now in possession of a secure base in the Balkans, Orhan wasted no time in gobbling up the Byzantine Empire’s European territory culminating with the seizure of the important city of Edirne in 1361. Now ruling substantial holdings in both Europe and Asia Minor, he had vaulted far ahead of the beys that had been his peers only a few years earlier. Accordingly, Orhan assumed a new title that was more in keeping with his newfound stature and power: sultan.
Orhan’s son and successor, Murad I (r. 1362-1389), built on his father’s success. He began his reign by relocating the capital from Bursa to Edirne so that he could more easily coordinate Ottoman efforts to expand into the weak and divided Balkans. Concurrently, he dramatically accelerated Orhan’s effort to remake the government from an informal one geared primarily to ruling a small nomadic principality into a highly centralized apparatus capable of administering a large, sedentary, multiethnic empire. He was quite successful in this effort. Indeed, more than any other Ottoman leader, it was Murad I who was responsible for establishing the basic structure of the Ottoman state.
The new sultan also made a profoundly consequential change to the Ottoman military. Intent on reducing the power of the Turkish vassals on whom Orhan had depended for much of his military force, Murad I established a new formation of slave soldiers called Janissaries or “new troops.” Tightly disciplined and highly loyal, these elite soldiers would be all-but unbeatable over the next three centuries and would prove critical in giving the Ottomans the strength to gradually end the independence of the other beyliks.
In the immediate term, Murad I used them to great effect in his campaign to solidify the empire’s control over the southern Balkans. That effort began with a great triumph over a coalition of Serbian and Bulgarian lords in 1371 on the Maritsa River. The victory permitted the sultan to take control of all of Macedonia and to turn his defeated opponents into Ottoman vassals. Two years later, he similarly reduced the Byzantine Empire to vassalage, surely a difficult pill for the heirs of the caesars to swallow. Finally, in 1389, he invaded Serbia to retaliate for the defeat of a small Ottoman army there a year earlier. Though Murad I died in the fighting, the Battle of Kosovo that marked the climax of the campaign proved to be a stunning Ottoman triumph and a battle of enormous significance. In the immediate term, the victory over a combined Serbian, Kosovan, and Bosnian army established the Ottomans as the now- unquestioned masters of the southern Balkans. The battle’s long-term consequences were less tangible but equally important. As we shall see in Chapter Eight, nineteenth- century Serbian nationalists would reinterpret their forebears’ defeat as a noble sacrifice against an unbeatable enemy and would, in so doing, transform the Battle of Kosovo into the central myth of modern nationalist conceptions of Serbian identity.
Retrenchment and Recovery, 1402-1451
Murad I’s successor, Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402), enjoyed a spectacular if ultimately unsuccessful reign as sultan. Dubbed Yidirim, or the lightning bolt, due to the quick pace of his conquests, he focused on rapidly and massively expanding the size of the empire. In the Balkans, he formally annexed Bulgaria as far as the Danube River, initiated a long siege of Constantinople, and, at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, crushed a large army of crusaders sent to check his rising power. In Asia Minor, meanwhile, he waged a series of campaigns against rival Turkish states, gained territory through marriage, and, importantly, assumed direct control of a number of beyliks heretofore ruled by vassals. By 1400, as a result, the empire had become a major power, one that thoroughly dominated the northern Balkans and completely controlled western and central Anatolia.
However impressive Bayezid I’s achievements were they ultimately proved ephemeral. Ironically, it was his aggressive campaign of territorial acquisition and political consolidation that proved to be his undoing. By abandoning his predecessors’ more cautious, two-step approach to expansion, he created enormous dissension among the recently deposed beys of Asia Minor. Intent on recovering their thrones, they appealed for assistance to Timur (r. 1370-1405), known in the West as Tamerlane, the powerful sultan of the short-lived Timurid Dynasty that dominated Central Asia and Iran. Eager to cut down a rising rival, Timur was only too happy to oblige. In 1401, he lured Bayezid I into a confrontation by invading Anatolia. In the Battle of Ankara that took place the following year, he decisively defeated the Ottoman army, in the process, capturing and deposing Bayezid I.
Despite the scale of his victory, Timur did not assume control of the Ottoman Empire or oversee its dismemberment. Instead, he imposed two significant changes on the sultanate designed to permanently weaken it. First, he reduced the power of the empire by restoring the Anatolian beys that Bayezid I had deposed. Second, he restructured the Ottoman government along traditional, nomadic lines by imposing on it the appanage model of collective rule to which the Mongols and Seljuq Turks had adhered. In keeping with that system, he divided the Ottoman territories among three of Bayezid I’s sons, Süleyman, Isa, and Mehmet.
The subsequent outbreak of a long, bitter civil war between the brothers gave the Christian rulers of the Balkans a much-needed respite. Not only did the Ottomans’ internal struggle put the wars of conquest on hold, but it also spurred the brothers to adopt conciliatory diplomatic strategies toward the Christian states in hopes of dissuading them from intervening. Emblematic of their new approach were Süleyman’s entreaties. Eager to concentrate on defeating his brothers without fear of Western action against him, he freed the Byzantine Empire from vassalage and granted the Venetians and Genoese important commercial rights. These concessions were substantial, and they made plain that the balance of power in the region had shifted dramatically against the Ottomans. Indeed, as the fighting between the brothers neared its tenth anniversary, it appeared to Christian leaders such as Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (r. 1391-1425) that the Ottoman threat had not merely crested but had begun to recede.
They were mistaken. The empire did not continue to weaken, but instead experienced a rapid recovery following Mehmet I’s victory in the civil war (r. 1413-1421). His triumph over his brothers was a product of his shrewdness and patience as a leader. Rather than going for a knock-out blow early in the conflict, he smartly hung back and let his brothers weaken themselves fighting each other before he stepped in to pick up the pieces. As a result, he emerged victorious in 1413, the sole survivor and now uncontested ruler of the Ottoman Empire.
He, and his son and successor, Murad II (r. 1421-1451), spent the next four decades overseeing the Ottoman recovery. Each faced significant challenges that complicated that effort. Between them, they had to deal with the Venetian-supported revolt of yet another brother, a large uprising organized by the popular Sufi leader Sheikh Bedreddin (1359-1420), the continued efforts of the Anatolian beys to retain the autonomy that Timur had granted them, and Christian attacks aimed at weakening the empire’s grip on the Balkans. These were serious threats, and they greatly complicated their efforts to restore the dynasty to the position it had occupied on the eve of Timur’s victory over Bayezid I. Mehmet I and Murad II were up to the challenge, however. Using a combination of skillful diplomacy and brute force, they not only successfully reestablished control of the Balkans but also fully reasserted sultanic authority over the beys of western and central Asia Minor. As a result, by the time of Murad II’s death in 1451, the dynasty had regained the position it had held in 1402 and stood poised to become a dominant power in both Europe and the Middle East.
Ottoman Dominance, 1451-1566
Mehmet II
However, before the Ottoman state could make that leap, it first needed to complete the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and, most importantly, to acquire its lone remaining city: Constantinople. Laying at the very heart of the Ottomans’ expanding realm, the city was essential to the sultanate’s continued success. Control of it would give the empire complete dominance of the lucrative trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and would ease communications between its European and Asian holdings. Successfully reducing the city also promised to dramatically enhance the standing of the sultan. Muslim tradition had long attached eschatological significance to Constantinople, holding that the person who conquered it would be the Mahdi: the expected one who would usher in the end of history. The sultan who finally succeeded in taking it would thus not merely reap the material benefits attendant in the possession of such a fabulously well-located city but would also see his prestige and legitimacy dramatically enhanced.
It was these less-tangible benefits that lay behind the new Sultan, Mehmet II’s (r. 1451-1481) bid to take Constantinople early in his reign. He could certainly have stood a boost to his political standing at that time. Only nineteen-years old when he acceded to the throne, he confronted whispered questions in the court and the army about his wisdom and capacity for leadership. Worse, many of the Turkish beys whom his father had only recently reduced to vassalage were scheming with the independent Turkish state of Karaman to take advantage of his tenuous grip on power to regain their independence. These were serious challenges, ones that Mehmet II concluded he would be unable to deal with unless he quickly legitimated his rule through a great victory. Accordingly, over the objections of his powerful and long-serving grand vizier, Candarli Halil Pasha he ordered the Ottoman army to lay siege to the city beginning in April 1453.
Even though the sultanate’s powerful military massively outnumbered the Byzantine defenders, taking the city was far from a foregone conclusion. Ringed by the massive, millennia-old triple Walls of Theodosius and able to bring in food by ship owing to its location on the Bosporus Strait, Constantinople had famously withstood over a dozen sieges including recent ones undertaken by Bayezid I, Mehmet I, and Murad II. Undeterred, Mehmet II directed a well-thought-out campaign to reduce the city. First, he ordered the erection of a castle along the Bosporus Strait called Rumeli Hisari, meaning “Strait Cutter,”from which cannons could stop the shipment of food to the city. Second, and more importantly, he authorized the construction of a new type of cannon called a bombard that was designed to destroy the city’s walls. Gunpowder weapons were already centuries old, and smaller cannons had been commonplace in the region for decades. What made the bombards that Mehmet II had commissioned different was the fact that they were of an entirely unprecedented scale. Cast by a Hungarian metallurgist named Urban, the largest one had a twenty-eight-foot-long barrel and could fire a 1,300-pound granite projectile as far as a mile.
Still, even with these awesome weapons, besieging the city was a risky bid on the sultan’s part. In effect, he was gambling that he could do with his bombards what no previous attacker had managed to accomplish: smash down the Walls of Theodosius and occupy the city. Were he to succeed, he would have the legitimacy to deal with those who challenged him; were he to fail, he would instead almost certainly be deposed and killed.
Mehmet II’s bet paid off. Over the course of April and May 1453, his bombards systematically battered down a substantial section of the city’s walls. Finally, on May 29, the Ottoman army charged through the rubble. Vastly outnumbering the demoralized defenders, they quickly occupied the city. It was a momentous victory. Not only did it mark the first time in history that cannons had succeeded in taking a major walled city, but it also dramatically raised Mehmet II’s political standing. Known ever after as “the Conqueror,” he now had the prestige needed to remake the empire and to complete the consolidation of power that his predecessors had begun.
He began with a concerted effort to transform the city, colloquially known as Istanbul, though its official name would remain Constantinople until the twentieth century. into a suitable capital for a great empire. This task promised to be a difficult one. Severely depopulated by the outbreak of the Black Death in 1347 and impoverished by its economic decline during the terminal decades of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople was as much a ruin as an urban center at the time of the Ottoman conquest. Undaunted, Mehmet II moved aggressively to restore it to its former splendor. He poured vast amounts of money into the city’s reconstruction and swelled its population by successfully encouraging whole communities to relocate to it. He also moved to link the Ottoman Empire to the city and its glorious imperial past by turning the Hagia Sophia, its greatest cathedral and a literal edifice of Roman authority, into a mosque. Finally, he relocated his government to the newly constructed Topkapi Palace, a magnificent administrative center and royal residence in Constantinople that overlooked the Bosporus Strait. These initiatives effected a startlingly rapid recovery. Within just a few short decades, the city was once again one of the world’s great administrative, cultural, and commercial centers, one that both tied the empire together and ensured its control over the main trade routes of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean.
At the same time, Mehmet II used the newfound prestige and wealth he had acquired through the conquest of Constantinople to complete the centralization of the Ottoman government, known thereafter as the Sublime Porte, that his predecessors had begun. He first acted by purging high-ranking officials whose fealty he doubted. Most notably, just three days after his troops had stormed Constantinople, he ordered his heretofore powerful grand vizier, Halil Pasha, executed. He followed by replacing unreliable officials with Christian converts to Islam who were, as such, dependent on the sultan and thus loyal. Indeed, of the six grand viziers who succeeded Halil Pasha, five were Christian-born men who had adopted Islam.
Mehmet II also effected a series of important symbolic changes designed to enhance his and his successors’ authority following his victory at Constantinople. The most important of these involved the transformation of the position of sultan from that of a first-among-equals who, like Osman, ate and socialized with his soldiers, into an aloof, near-divine figure who stood apart from his subjects as the embodiment of power and dignity. In keeping with this new approach, Mehmet II ceased running or even attending the four-times-per-week imperial council meetings with his viziers; instead, he observed them from behind a curtained grill called the Eye of the Sultan.
Though he focused a great deal of attention on reforming his government, Mehmet II did not neglect the traditional Ottoman pursuit of territorial expansion. Here, too, he enjoyed enormous success. He assumed direct control over Serbia, reduced Bosnia and Herzegovina to vassalage, seized the remaining Byzantine successor states in Greece, and annexed the troublesome Turkish Karaman principality. He also successfully besieged the strategic Genoese trading center of Caffa on the Crimean Peninsula; in the process, he not only gained control of this valuable commercial city but also reduced the region’s powerful Turkish Tatar nomads to vassals. Finally, he set off alarm bells in the West when he briefly seized the city of Otranto on the heel of the Italian peninsula in 1480.
Selim I
Mehmet II’s successor, Bayezid II (r. 1481- 1512), focused largely on consolidating his father’s gains and did not acquire substantial territory. In contrast, the next sultan, Selim I (r. 1512-1520), returned with a vengeance to the traditional Ottoman pursuit of expansion. His initial conquests came in response to a new menace that the empire confronted at the start of his reign: the establishment and growth of the powerful Safavid Dynasty in Iran. Its emergence had substantially and adversely altered the power dynamics on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern frontier and posed a serious danger to the sultanate’s security. The Safavid threat took two forms.
First, the Iranian state possessed a powerful military that constituted a direct menace to the Ottoman Empire’s control of eastern Asia Minor. Second, and more dangerously, the Safavids articulated a populist Shiʿa ideology that encouraged the nomadic Turkmen of far-eastern Anatolia to resist the sultanate’s ongoing effort to impose direct control on them.
While Bayezid II had taken a cautious approach to the Safavid Empire, Selim I instead adopted an aggressive policy toward it aimed at ending the threat it posed to the Ottoman Empire once and for all. He began by brutally suppressing the Turkmen, sources claim that he executed as many as 40,000 prisoners, after which he invaded Iranian territory. It was a risky but ultimately successful maneuver. Owing substantially to the fact that the Safavids had not yet adopted gunpowder weapons, the Ottomans won a decisive victory in the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514; as a result, the Safavid military threat faded, and the Turkmen quickly, if grudgingly, came to accept Ottoman rule.
Emboldened, Selim I followed by moving against the Mamluks. Doing so proved far trickier than going to war with the Safavids owing to the fact that the Mamluks, like the Ottomans, adhered to Sunni Islam. This fact proved to be a problem for many of the sultan’s troops. Leery of fighting their fellow Sunnis, they made clear that they would not take part in a campaign against the Mamluks. Selim I dealt with this challenge by asserting that the Mamluks had been aiding the Shiʿa Safavids and were thus not good Sunnis. Though the evidence for collaboration between the regimes in Egypt and Iran was wafer thin, his claim was sufficient to quell dissent in the ranks and to permit him to go forward with the invasion. The resulting campaign was an overwhelming success.
Once more facing an enemy that was literally outgunned, the Mamluks had only recently and tentatively embraced firearms, Selim I’s army seized Syria by winning a decisive victory at the Battle of Marj Dabiq near Aleppo in 1516. A second triumph the following year finished the Mamluk state and permitted Selim I to add Egypt and the Hejaz to his now much-enlarged empire.
Selim I’s military success against the Mamluks did not merely add territory and subjects or enhance his political standing but also profoundly altered the character and identity of the empire. It did so in two ways. First, the acquisition of Syria and Egypt transformed what had been a Muslim-ruled but Christian-majority empire into one in which Sunnis predominated. More importantly, the triumph over the Mamluks gave the Ottomans possession of Mecca and Medina and thus made the sultans the protectors of the Holy Places. Selim I and his successors were quick to grasp that their newfound status as the protectors of the Holy Cities promised to greatly enhance their legitimacy in the eyes of their now-majority Sunni subjects, but only if the dynasty adhered scrupulously to orthodox Sunni beliefs and practices. This was especially important because the conquest also gave the Ottomans control over the last (puppet) Abbasid caliph, a title that would be absorbed by the Turkish rulers. Accordingly, from that point forward, the Ottomans presented the empire as the leading Sunni Muslim state and acted to legitimate their rule through the promotion and embrace of traditional Sunnism. In this way, the shift from heterodoxy to orthodox Sunnism that had begun under Orhan reached its culmination.
Selim I’s conquests also dramatically altered the Ottoman state’s foreign policy and its perception of the sultanate’s role in world affairs. Control of Egypt, the Hijaz, and Syria turned what had been an empire of great regional significance in Anatolia and southeastern Europe into a truly global power, a three-continent behemoth that dominated all its frontiers. In response, the dynasty began to adopt a more-coherent, global strategy in its relations with other state.
Süleyman the Magnificent
This global approach was evident in the reign of Selim I’s successor, Süleyman (r. 1520-1566). Known as the Magnificent in the West and as the Lawgiver in the Muslim world, Süleyman pursued a complex global strategy that saw the empire reach dizzying new heights. In Europe and the Mediterranean, he sought consolidation and security. To achieve those ends, he began his reign by taking two fortresses that had defied Mehmet II: the city of Belgrade, which had blocked the Ottomans from expanding into Central Europe, and Rhodes, an island that had long served as a base for piracy against Ottoman shipping. He followed with a crushing triumph at the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 that turned Hungary into an Ottoman-controlled buffer state. Three years later, he solidified his position in Central Europe by easily defeating Habsburg Emperor Charles V’s (r. 1519-1556) attempt to retake Hungary and by briefly besieging Vienna, the capital of Habsburg Austria. Finally, taking advantage of an alliance he had struck with Charles V’s dynastic rival, French King Francis I (r. 1515-1547), Süleyman was able to complete the conquest of Algeria in the 1530s. Thus, by the time of his death in 1566, the Ottoman Empire had fully secured its position in both Central Europe and the Mediterranean.
Süleyman ‘s strategy in the Indian Ocean was less successful. In that region, he sought a largely defensive goal: the preservation of Ottoman commercial dominance from growing European competition. Direct Western involvement in the Indian Ocean was a recent and troubling phenomenon for the Ottomans. In 1498, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama (c. 1460s-1524) had arrived in Calicut, India after a long, perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, inaugurating, in the process, the first direct connection between the spice-growing regions of South and Southeast Asia and the markets of Europe. It was a major commercial and nautical accomplishment.
However, the Portuguese were not content merely to establish this link or even to hold a monopoly on the direct trade between Europe and the Indian Ocean. Instead, they followed da Gama’s voyage with a shrewdly designed campaign to assume a dominant position over long-distance trade in the east. They seized control of key bottlenecks such as the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia, the Bab al-Mandab Strait at the opening to the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf and then used their command of those passages to deny competitors access to the Indian Ocean’s sea lanes. It was a savvy if hard-ball strategy, and it helped to turn Portugal into a serious threat to the Ottoman Empire’s commercial position.
The sultan’s government responded with a complex, two-stage military campaign designed to eject the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean. Launched in the 1530s, its first phase was a success. Ottoman armies established control over Yemen as a preliminary step for an assault on Portugal’s bases near the Bab al-Mandab Strait and took control of Iraq and the strategic port of Basra from the Safavids in preparation for a move aimed at driving the Portuguese from the Strait of Hormuz. However, the second phase was far-less successful. Despite launching coordinated assaults on Portuguese forts at the mouth of the Red Sea, at Hormuz, and even at key locations in India, Ottoman forces proved unable to overcome determined resistance. As a result, Süleyman had to abandon the effort to force the Portuguese out of the region in favor of a diplomatic approach that ended with the two parties agreeing to respect each other’s trade interests in the Indian Ocean.
Despite his lack of success in countering Portugal’s commercial threat, Süleyman’s reign is widely acknowledged as the high point of the Ottoman Dynasty. And what a zenith it was. Fiscally, the empire occupied an enviable position thanks to its robust agricultural economy, control of lucrative long-distance trade routes, and efficient system of tax collection. In the realm of religion, the dynasty enjoyed tremendous legitimacy and authority in the Muslim world owing to its embrace of orthodox Sunni Islam and its status as the protector of the Holy Cities. Militarily, its mighty Janissary regiments were universally regarded as the most formidable formations in existence. Finally, geopolitically the empire had no peer on the global stage. It controlled the Middle East and North Africa, had turned the eastern Mediterranean and Black Seas into Ottoman lakes, and had even assumed a position as a major player in the international order then taking shape in Europe. It was, in sum, an empire without equal, the most powerful state on the planet.
The Historical Debate: The Ghazi Thesis
The above account of the Ottoman rise from frontier beylik to major power reflects a longstanding consensus among historians who have studied the empire. That is, in contrast to the debates over the emergence of Islam or the Arab Conquest, there have been no doubts raised about the chronology of the early Ottoman state or whether key figures described in the sources actually existed. Agreement on these fundamental points is not to suggest, however, that historians have held uniform views of the sultanate. On the contrary, scholars who focus on the Ottoman Empire have engaged in vigorous debates about a number of issues, particularly ones related to its nature and identity during its early years. What kind of state was it? Whom did the Ottomans permit to join its ruling class? What motivated the wars of expansion? Most importantly, what purpose did Osman I and his successors claim their state was fulfilling?
For much of the mid-twentieth century, the Austrian-Jewish historian Paul Wittek’s Ghazi Thesis dominated understandings of the empire. First articulated in a series of lectures given at the University of London in 1938 and later published as The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Ghazi Thesis took issue with the then-prevailing idea that the early empire was, at heart, ethnically Turkish in nature. Wittek rested his critique on a careful study of two key pieces of evidence from the early, ill-sourced years of the empire, a stone inscription in Bursa dating to 1337 and a work attributed to the Turkish poet Ahmedi (1334-1413), that characterized the early Ottomans not in ethnic terms as Turks but instead in religious ones as ghazis: Muslim warriors who, motivated by religious zeal, fought ceaselessly to expand the realm of Islam. Based on this evidence and on corroborating secondary-source accounts written by religious scholars in the sixteenth century, Wittek concluded that ethnicity did not define the early Ottoman state; instead, religion, by which he meant the waging of holy war in the name of Islam, was the Ottoman’s dominant idea and it remained so until just before the empire’s demise in the early-twentieth century.
Wittek’s Ghazi Thesis dominated interpretations of the early Ottoman Empire for four decades. Indeed, it was only after his death in 1978 that scholars began to seriously question both his conclusions and the evidence on which they rested. The historian Rudi Paul Lindner was one of the first to do so. Focusing on the action of the early Ottomans rather than on what legal scholars wrote about them in the sixteenth century, he observed that they routinely fought against neighboring Muslims, practiced heterodox rather than orthodox Islam, welcomed the participation of Greek Christian soldiers and commanders on their raids, and refrained from forcing conquered people to convert, actions that were hardly consistent with the behavior of the sort of hardened zealots that Wittek had described. Then, having dispensed with the idea that religion defined the early Ottoman state, Lindner followed by articulating a new interpretation of their motives based on anthropological theories about the nature of tribal groupings. Drawing on recent research that holds that tribes are a function of shared interests rather than ethnicity or common bloodlines, he argued that the Ottomans were an inclusive tribal group consisting of both Muslims and Christians bound together by a shared interest in raiding and territorial expansion for the purpose of obtaining loot. In his view, it was only after the ulema that Orhan had recruited began to promote the ghazi ideal that the Ottomans abandoned their early religious inclusivity in favor of an embrace of holy war aimed at the territorial expansion of Islam.
While Colin Imber has recently contended that the absence of evidence renders the early Ottoman Empire a “black hole” to scholars seeking to uncover its true nature, other historians have instead amplified Lindner’s view that the sultanate was remarkably inclusive. Drawing attention to the astonishing number of Byzantine and Balkan nobles who held prominent positions in the state, for example, the historian Heath Lowry argues that the early Ottoman Empire is best understood as a highly meritocratic confederacy open to all rather than as an Islamic-based state dedicated to holy war. In his view, it was the demand for manpower that sparked this inclusive approach. Needing soldiers for their profitable raids and wars of expansion, the Ottomans willingly accepted Christian nobles into their military; eager to gain loot and slaves, the latter were only too happy to join. As a result, the Ottoman state developed an elite that was an amalgam of Muslim Turks and Greek Christians. Lowry concludes that it was only much later, when the dynasty had begun to see value in using orthodox Sunni Islam to legitimate its rule following the acquisition of the Holy Cities, that Muslim writers, projecting an Islamic past back in time, reimagined the early Ottomans as ghazi warriors.
Sources of Ottoman Success
Regardless of the motives that animated its expansion, the speed of the dynasty’s rise is astonishing. A crude, frontier beylik in 1300, the Ottoman confederacy had become an expansive and powerful empire with complex institutions and sophisticated political ideologies by the time Mehmet II conquered Constantinople. What accounted for this remarkable transformation? What characteristics and circumstances set the Ottomans apart from rival states? Most importantly, why did the Ottomans and not some other group come to dominate the Balkans and Middle East in the Early Modern Period?
Contingency
To a significant degree, Ottoman success was a matter of good fortune. With the near-simultaneous fracturing of the Byzantine Empire, shattering of the Seljuq Sultanate, and demise of the Abbasid Caliphate, much of the Middle East had become a vast power vacuum. As a result, rather than standing in the shadow of a nearby great power, Osman I’s tiny beylik existed in a world of similarly small states, precisely the sort of environment in which a charismatic and able military leader could thrive. The dynasty also enjoyed the added good fortune of possessing a beylik that bordered a soft frontier in the form of the weak but wealthy Byzantine Empire rather than ruling a territory surrounded entirely by other aggressive Turkish beys. As we have seen, raiding and seizing territory from the Byzantines was both profitable and comparatively easy and allowed Osman and his successors to build the kind of military reputation that would attract growing numbers of frontier warriors to the Ottoman banner. Thus, just as had been the case for the Arabs who had conquered the Middle East in the seventh century and for the knights of the First Crusade who had taken Jerusalem four centuries later, luck played a substantial part in the early empire’s achievements.
Luck can only go so far in explaining Ottoman success, however. Many of the contemporary Turkish beyliks were considerably larger and fielded many more soldiers than did Osman I’s tiny state in 1300. Likewise, his beylik was hardly the only one with the good fortune to share a border with the vulnerable Byzantine Empire. Luck was thus an important precondition for the dynasty’s astonishing rise, but it cannot explain why Osman I and his descendants rather than a different Turkish dynasty came to dominate the region and, thus, cannot alone account for Ottoman success. Ultimately, answering the question of why the empire rose so quickly from such humble origins requires an examination of its internal structures, for it was the ideologies, practices, and evolving institutions of the Ottoman ruling class that ultimately explain the dynasty’s remarkable achievements.
Strong Leadership
One of the most obvious sources of Ottoman success was the empire’s unusually effective leadership during its early centuries. As we have seen, from its founding at the turn of the fourteenth century through the end of Süleyman’s reign in the mid-sixteenth century, the sultanate benefited from a remarkable string of particularly effective rulers. Nearly all the men who served as sultan during that period, the Ottomans did not permit women to hold the throne, were wise and charismatic rulers who provided able administration and effective military command. As the writer Jason Goodwin notes, the nicknames they earned pay testament to their leadership abilities: the Grim, the Conqueror, the Lawgiver, and the Great are hardly the epithets of weak leaders. Moreover, the sheer length of their tenures in office, the first ten sultans enjoyed average reigns of a remarkable twenty-seven years, lent a degree of stability that was invaluable to the early Ottoman state.
How did the dynasty come to have such a remarkable succession of capable and far-sighted rulers? Chance once again surely played a part, but far more important was the dynasty’s rejection of primogeniture in favor of a brutal, but effective practice known as fratricidal succession. It was the anarchic interlude that followed Timur’s defeat of Bayezid I in 1402 that pushed the dynasty to embrace fratricidal succession. As we saw earlier, Timur had imposed the traditional, Turko-Mongolian appanage system of shared family governance on the Ottomans following his victory, an arrangement that, unsurprisingly, produced a decade-long civil war. The victor in that conflict, Mehmet I, was determined to ensure that the dynasty avoided a repeat of that debilitating conflict; accordingly, not long after he had defeated his brothers, he embraced the practice of fratricidal succession as a necessary if unpleasant way of ensuring a stable succession.
The arrangement had two provisions. First, based on the prevailing view that each of the sultan’s sons possessed an equal claim to the throne and was thus a possible future monarch, it stipulated that all of the heirs should learn how to rule effectively by first serving as provincial governors. Second, upon the death of the reigning sultan, it called for the sons to engage in a brief struggle for power. That contest would end when one of them made his way to the capital, secured the backing of the bureaucracy and military, and assumed the title of sultan. Once in power, the new ruler would then ensure that he faced no future challenge to his authority by having any surviving brothers executed.
The Ottomans rigorously adhered to this system for the entirety of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At times, the results were shocking. For example, Mehmet II’s first act as sultan was to command one of his assistants to suffocate his fifteen-month- old brother. Some of his successors went even further. Selim I had two of his brothers killed upon acceding to the throne while Murad III (r. 1574-1595) had all five of his brothers, four of whom were infants, executed. However, it was Mehmet III (r. 1595- 1603) who set the dubious record of having the most siblings killed: upon taking power, he ordered his royal executioners to strangle all nineteen of his brothers.
The system of fratricidal succession may have been cruel, but it was also highly effective. Indeed, it provided four substantial benefits that, collectively, constituted the primary reason that the empire enjoyed a succession of strong leaders during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. First, having heirs gain experience by serving as provincial governors worked as intended: with great consistency, those who became sultan possessed the administrative and military experience needed to rule effectively. Second, fratricidal succession’s Darwinian nature generally resulted in the most capable son emerging victorious, and, thus ensured that the strongest candidate became the new sultan. Third, the arrangement’s winner-take-all principle proved effective in helping the empire avoid both the decentralizing tendencies of the traditional Turco-Mongolian appanage system and the debilitating strife that accompanied internal conflicts such as the civil war that had followed Bayezid I’s reign. Finally, the system ensured that a pretender did not survive to become a leader around whom disaffected elements could rally against the reigning sultan.
The one instance during this period in which fratricidal succession failed to eliminate a rival claimant to the throne made clear the system’s benefits. It occurred when Bayezid II’s defeated brother, Cem (1459-1495), managed to evade the sultan’s executioners by fleeing into exile in Western Europe. For much of Bayezid II’s reign, Cem’s presence in Europe constituted a genuine danger to the stability of the empire. The issue was his ability to rally disaffected elements to his cause. Aware that Cem enjoyed broad support among the recently dispossessed Anatolian beys, his Western hosts used the threat of helping him raise a revolt in Asia Minor as leverage to successfully block Bayezid II’s efforts to expand at their expense. Fortunately, for Bayezid II, Cem proved to be only a transitory menace and never produced the mass uprising that the sultan feared. Nonetheless, his mere existence had succeeded in handcuffing the empire for a substantial period, a fact attested to by Bayezid II’s failure to expand the sultanate.
Thereafter, and for the next century, the system of fratricidal succession did what the Ottomans had designed it to do. It ensured that the sultanate would not be hamstrung by a pretender like Cem. Likewise, it all but guaranteed that the empire would benefit from the rule of highly effective leaders like Selim I and Süleyman. Thus, brutal as it was, the system of fratricidal succession functioned as intended: it made certain that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed a stable succession, something that could not be said about many contemporary states
The early sultans proved successful not merely because they were capable leaders, but also because they oversaw a peculiarly effective central bureaucracy. Loosely patterned after the now-venerable Muslim tradition of slave-recruited militaries, the imperial administration of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a uniquely Ottoman innovation that had no parallel in any other state. Staffed by men who were utterly loyal to the dynasty, it gave the sultans a remarkably efficient and sophisticated instrument through which they could implement their policies.
Initially, it did not vary appreciably from longstanding Islamic structures and practices. The religious scholars that Orhan had recruited to run his expanding government were well versed in the Muslim administrative tradition that dated to the Abbasid Dynasty, and the bureaucracy that they established reflected that system. Through the late-fourteenth century, as a result, the Ottoman system of administration did not differ substantially from those of other contemporary Muslim states.
Beginning in the early-fifteenth century, however, the Ottoman state broke radically with Muslim tradition with the introduction of a new system of recruitment called the devshirme. Meaning literally “‘collection’” but typically referred to in the West as the “‘levy of boys,’” the practice likely originated in the early-fifteenth century when the Ottomans moved to create new military and administrative structures aimed at freeing the dynasty from a dependence on the Turkish nobles. The system that they developed to achieve that end was a highly innovative one that centered on the enslavement, conversion, and education of Christian boys. Every three years, a caravan of tribute officers traveled from settlement to settlement in Greece and the Balkans seeking suitable candidates for service to the sultan among the Christians of the region. After assembling the boys in each village, the officers selected only the brightest and most capable among them at a rate of about one in forty. They then brought the boys to Constantinople, where they had them converted to Islam, a violation of Islamic law justified on grounds of raison d’état, and divided them into two groups. The more physically capable ones were selected to serve in the famed Janissary corps, which we will treat in more detail in a moment, while the ones who demonstrated the highest intellectual capacity were reserved for the bureaucracy. Both groups then received years of physical and intellectual education in the empire’s rigorous palace schools.
The devshirme has for a long time equally fascinated and repulsed Westerners. The separation of children from their parents, their enslavement, and their forced conversion offend modern sensibilities and seem to suggest that the Ottomans were peculiarly ruthless. Such views are ahistorical, however, and lie rooted in a facile understanding of the world from which the boys came. In fact, the new system offered substantial benefits to the people recruited through it and was far less arbitrary than it appears at first blush. Such was certainly the case with regard to the boys’ conversion to Islam. Those selected in the devshirme were uneducated peasants living in isolated villages where people practiced folk variants of Christianity that bore little resemblance to Orthodox Christian doctrine; conversion to Islam was thus a case more of introducing them to organized religion than of compelling them to abandon deeply held beliefs.
Selection through the devshirme also offered opportunities to the boys that were wildly beyond a Balkan peasant’s most outlandish dreams. Joining the bureaucracy or the Janissary corps meant going from being one of the tax-paying masses, or raya, to becoming a member of the askeri, or ruling class, and involved trading the parochial world of the village for the cosmopolitan culture of the court and capital city. Like al- Mutasim’s slave soldiers, moreover, the devshirme-recruited slaves, or qul, were, while technically the property of the sultan, hardly chattel slaves as commonly understood in the West. Instead, they were respected and powerful people who drew a salary and enjoyed access to the levers of power. Recruitment through the devshirme thus not only came at little cost to the boys, but also opened unparalleled opportunities to them.
If the devshirme system was good to its recruits, it proved even more beneficial to the sultans. they derived three critical advantages from it. First, they benefited from the fact that the bureaucrats were utterly devoted to them. Dependent entirely upon the Ottoman rulers for their position and subject to dismissal or worse should they displease their patron, the bureaucrats were, in sharp contrast to the independently minded Turkish nobles, completely loyal to the dynasty. Second, as the boys lacked powerful family connections and as their children, born Muslim, could not succeed them in government service, the ability of a bureaucrat to rise in the administration was dependent almost entirely on his ability. In other words, the devshirme system produced a central administration that was unusually meritocratic and thus highly competent and efficient.
Finally, the devshirme system provided the dynasty with a way out of a predicament that stemmed from its growing embrace of Islam beginning in the fifteenth century. As we have seen, the Ottoman state had gladly and profitably employed Christians from the very start of the empire; indeed, its willingness to do so had been a key source of its strength. However, the dynasty’s increasing inclination to legitimate its rule in orthodox Sunni terms had begun to make the practice of employing Christian bureaucrats and, especially, soldiers increasingly hard to justify. The sultans thus found themselves caught on the horns of a dilemma: if they continued to rely on the Christians that had proven so essential to the dynasty’s early success, they would undermine the legitimacy that their embrace of Sunnism had provided; if they instead refused to employ those subjects, they would risk losing a vital source of highly effective soldiers and bureaucrats.
The devshirme system offered a way to resolve this predicament. It allowed the dynasty to continue to use Christian-born subjects in the military and bureaucracy without raising doubts about the sultans’ religious bona fides or their status as the protectors of orthodox Sunnism. The results were nothing if not ironic. By formalizing a system that put Christian-born people in charge of the government and the military, the devshirme system ensured that the conquered gradually came to displace Muslim-born Turks as the backbone of the ruling class.
The Ottoman Military
The empire’s powerful army was perhaps the most obvious contributor to its rapid rise to dominance. From the very beginning, when Osman’s military abilities had attracted akinji frontier warriors to his banner, the dynasty had enjoyed a steadily widening quantitative and qualitative advantage over its enemies that consistently gave it the edge needed to expand at their expense. That gap continued to gradually widen over the course of the next hundred years. By the early-fifteenth century, however, the empire’s military advantage no longer rested primarily on the prowess of its leaders or their ability to attract nomadic fighters. Instead, from that point until the end of the sixteenth century, it stemmed chiefly from the empire’s embrace of innovative military practices including, most notably—, ts precocious adoption of gunpowder weapons and attendant development of groundbreaking new tactics that facilitated their effective use in battle.
Even before their wholesale embrace of firearms, Ottoman leaders had aggressively pioneered the development and financing of new, highly effective types of soldiers. Indeed, much of the dynasty’s early success had stemmed from its ability to quickly replace the fearsome-but-unreliable akinji raiders on whom Osman I had relied with more dependable and disciplined troops. The most important of those new soldiers during the dynasty’s early years were the sipahis. Though far-less famous than the gun- armed Janissaries, the sipahi horsemen were a key part of the Ottoman military from the time they displaced the akinji as the core of the army in the 1360s through the end of the sixteenth century. Able to move quickly thanks to their light armor, they could outmaneuver or outrun heavier cavalry such as the knights that the European states fielded while still packing a formidable punch. Indeed, using the powerful Turkish recurved bow, the typical sipahi could successfully strike an enemy horseman two- hundred-and-fifty meters away an astonishing one time in four. This combination of mobility and firepower was all-but unmatched in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, for a time, it gave the Ottomans a substantial military edge that allowed them to consistently win pitched battles.
What really set the sipahis apart, however, was not their tactical abilities but instead the innovative administrative arrangement, the timar system, that the dynasty developed to raise them. With obvious antecedents in the older iqta structure of land grants, the new arrangement derived its name from a unit of agricultural land or pasturage known as a timar. Individual sipahi received a share of the revenue generated by a standard timar for their upkeep, while district governors known as sanjakbeys and provincial governors called beylerbeys enjoyed a portion of the income produced by larger territories in accordance with their greater power and responsibilities. To vouchsafe against recipients establishing roots that might result in them acquiring hereditary control over their grants, the Sublime Porte regularly rotated sipahis and other officials to new timars. This novel new organizational arrangement allowed the empire to sidestep a common problem that premodern states experienced in financing their militaries.
Lacking the administrative capacity to tax agricultural land directly, such regimes could only raise large forces by ceding substantial independence to powerful and frequently unreliable local subordinates. As a result, they often found themselves facing the dilemma of having to choose between maintaining a high degree of central political control or possessing a large army. The timar system was a successful response to this predicament, a case of the Ottomans having their cake and eating it too. By devolving the power to raise taxes to local leaders while simultaneously retaining control of the land, the arrangement permitted the Sublime Porte to raise a large military force even as it continued to uphold its authority in the provinces.
While the sipahis remained an important part of the Ottoman military through the end of the sixteenth century, they increasingly found themselves eclipsed by the Janissary foot soldiers after 1440. Recruited through the devshirme system and thus, technically, in thrall to the sultan, the Janissaries may appear at first glance to be figures of relatively low rank in the Ottoman hierarchy. They could not marry, were barred from taking up a trade, and had to live in the barracks for their entire adult lives. However, such an impression is entirely misleading. In reality, the Janissaries were, like the bureaucrats, high-status members of the askeri who enjoyed a unique position in the government.
What accounted for their power and prestige? At root, their privileged position stemmed from their adoption of firearms in the mid-fifteenth century. Guns had existed for some time, but, to that point, no one had yet found a way to overcome their intrinsic shortcomings as battlefield weapons. Those limits were substantial. While they packed a powerful punch, firearms were also heavy, slow to reload, and remarkably inaccurate. Perhaps most importantly, they did not integrate effectively with longstanding battle tactics that centered on bows and melee weapons. Through the early-fifteenth century, as a result, they remained more of a novelty than a mainstay in field engagements.
The Ottomans were the first to devise new tactics that could render early guns effective battlefield weapons. They determined that soldiers marching in a tightly organized formation and firing simultaneously could not only overcome the weaknesses intrinsic to early firearms, but could, if sufficiently disciplined, enjoy a decisive advantage over armies using traditional weapons. There was one snag, however. Firearms required not merely well-disciplined troops, but also ones willing to abandon millennia of military practices centered on traditional weapons in favor of radically new tactics and arms. For reasons we will explore in a moment, most soldiers were reluctant to do so. Here, the Janissaries were a notable exception. Beholden to the sultan and trained from an early age to follow orders without question, they broke ranks with their comrades in arms and willingly took up the new weapons in the 1440s.
The results were revolutionary. Wearing uniforms, itself an innovation at the time, and marching into battle at a pace set by an accompanying military band, the Janissaries were the first real professional army since the Romans. Grim, disciplined, and full of pride, they gave the Ottomans an incalculable advantage and proved to be the difference in pivotal battles such as Chaldiran and Marj Dabiq. They were no flash in the pan, moreover. On the contrary, the Janissaries would retain their commanding lead in gunpowder weapons and related tactics for well over a century. Indeed, only with the maturation of a series of changes to warfare in the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries so far reaching that historians refer to them collectively as the Military Revolution would the empire finally begin to face comparably powerful rivals along its European borders.
Fiscal Strength
The early Ottoman Empire also enjoyed the enormous advantage of being in a consistently strong fiscal position. Despite the vast cost of the bureaucracy, standing army, and palace, the Sublime Porte only occasionally found itself facing fiscal shortfalls and, in sharp contrast to nearly all contemporary states, frequently ran a surplus. What accounted for this unusual situation?
Three broad factors explain the empire’s fiscal good fortune. First, the Sublime Porte benefited from a robust, expanding economy during its first three centuries. To a substantial degree, this growth was a function of the order and security that the Ottomans brought to the heretofore fractious regions of Anatolia and the Balkans. The sultan’s powerful government quickly ended the constant warfare and brigandage endemic to the region and freed the people it ruled from the confiscatory taxes that the local nobles had imposed following the Fourth Crusade and the collapse of Byzantine authority. The results were impressive. Once again able to keep a large share of any additional wealth that they produced, farmers responded by putting new land under the plow and by intensifying the cultivation of existing fields, while merchants and craftspeople reacted by aggressively investing in commercial ventures that were once again profitable. The result was an economic and demographic boom over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one that produced a concomitant rise in the tax receipts that the central government collected.
Second, the Sublime Porte enjoyed substantial revenue derived from the duties it assessed on trade. From early on, the empire enjoyed steadily rising customs receipts thanks to its fortuitous location between the West and the sources of the Eastern goods that Europeans craved. The Ottomans began to tap into this revenue stream in the late- fourteenth century when Bursa supplanted the Byzantine city of Trebizond as the primary entrepôt for Asian goods being transshipped to Europe. Later, the conquest of Constantinople cemented Ottoman control of the western end of the Silk Road, while the extension of the imperial writ to the northern Red Sea in the 1510s gave the sultanate a lock on the traditional maritime trade routes that linked the Mediterranean region to India. As a result, over the course of the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries, the Ottoman government enjoyed steadily rising customs receipts from goods transshipped through the empire.
Even Vasco da Gama’s establishment of a maritime connection between Europe and the Indian Ocean barely dented the amount of customs revenue that the sultan’s government received. Two factors explain the limited impact of that new commercial link. First, Ottoman tax receipts remained high because of the limited extent of direct trade between Europe and India. Indeed, the volume of commerce that went around the Cape of Good Hope remain comparatively small relative to the amount that went through the sultan’s territory through the end of the sixteenth century. Second, the establishment of profitable sugar plantations in Egypt and the growing involvement of Ottoman merchants in the shipment of Yemeni coffee to Europe generated new streams of tax revenue that more than offset any decline in customs receipts that may have resulted from the direct trade between India and Europe.
Finally, the very act of conquest itself dramatically improved the fiscal health of the central government. That imperial expansion generated revenue may seem counterintuitive at first look. After all, the army that acquired those territories consumed the vast bulk of the state’s revenue. Still, even when accounting for the cost of the sultan’s military, and that expense was substantial, the empire’s nearly unbroken string of victories between 1299 and 1566 proved enormously profitable for the Sublime Porte. The key was the way that the Ottomans divided the loot acquired in conquest.
Longstanding Islamic custom decreed that the sultan received a hefty one-fifth of all booty taken in war. Coupled with the Ottoman military’s near-constant success, this provision ensured that the state received enormous and regular infusions of wealth, massive surpluses that more than offset the cost of the wars of conquest.
Thus, the Sublime Porte only rarely faced fiscal challenges during its rise to power. Thanks to the general growth in economic activity, the steady increase in customs duties, and the regular influx of enormous quantities of loot, the Ottomans consistently received more than adequate revenue to cover the empire’s substantial expenses during its rise to dominance. It was, to say the least, an unusual and highly enviable position.
The Circle of Justice
While a strong central government, favored fiscal position, and powerful military made possible the acquisition of an empire, it was the Ottomans’ tolerant approach to the subject peoples they governed that permitted them to retain it. The dynasty’s mild rule reflected its adherence to an older Islamic ideology of just government called the Circle of Justice. This doctrine held that if the monarch was a beneficent ruler who kept taxes reasonable and predictable and who maintained order, the peasants would thrive, and the treasury would obtain adequate tax revenue each year. In turn, those strong tax receipts would underwrite a powerful and effective army that would complete the Circle of Justice by ensuring that the ruler’s position remained secure and unchallenged. If, in contrast, the sultan did not rule justly, then the peasants would fail to prosper, tax receipts would gradually slip, the army would inevitably weaken, and, eventually, the ruler would be overthrown. Thus, just rule ensured not merely the well-being of society, but also the continued success of the ruling dynasty.
Ottoman sultans well understood the implications of the Circle of Justice, and they approached the administration of their empire in accordance with its dictates. For their Muslim subjects, doing so was straightforward: the government merely needed to keep taxes at a reasonable rate and ensure the stability and order required for shariʿa law to function. The empire’s substantial non-Muslim population, it remained majority Christian through the 1510s and possessed nearly as many Christians as Muslims even after Selim I’s conquest of the Middle East, was a different matter, however. How could the Ottoman dynasty provide its non-Muslims subjects with the just rule on which prosperity and the well-being of the state depended?
It did so by expanding and codifying the empire’s longstanding system of religious toleration. Established by Mehmet II and later formalized as the Millet System, this arrangement extended formal recognition to religious minorities by granting them the power to administer their own legal, educational, and charitable affairs under the aegis of their leading ecclesiastical figure. For example, the Patriarch of Constantinople oversaw the administration of the Greek Orthodox community. His office provided the sultan’s Greek subjects with education through church-run schools, maintained social order within the community by overseeing issues such as marriage and inheritance through its ecclesiastical courts, and aided poor Greeks through religiously based charitable organizations. At sharp variance with the structure of nearly all modern states, the Millet system worked remarkably well for both the confessional groups and the Ottoman government. By ceding autonomy to the different religious communities, the Millet System not only satisfied their needs and desires, but, in keeping with the Circle of Justice, also ensured that they enjoyed the just rule on which the fiscal health of the state depended.
The sultanate’s tolerance of the empire’s Jewish community was particularly notable and proved highly beneficial to both parties. The empire manifested its acceptance of the Jewish population in two ways. First, it accorded them official status as a sanctioned religious community. Beginning with Mehmet II, the government recognized the Grand Rabbi of Constantinople as the head of the Jewish Millet and gave his office authority over its legal, educational, religious, and charitable affairs. As a result, Jewish subjects of the empire enjoyed legal protection, educational opportunities, and, should they fall on hard times, access to social welfare benefits through institutions that their community controlled. Second, the Ottoman government did not merely tolerate the existing Jewish community in the empire, but also gladly welcomed Jewish refugees fleeing discrimination in Christian Europe. Most notably, when the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree in 1492 requiring Sephardi Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave Spain, Bayezid II instructed his officials to welcome them in the Ottoman Empire. Settling largely in Salonika, the Sephardi Jews brought with them profitable industries that soon, in keeping with the Circle of Justice, paid the sultan back for his tolerance by generating substantial tax revenue for the state. Bayezid II was well aware of the benefits he was accruing thanks to this policy. Gleeful about his gain, he reputedly mocked Ferdinand II for kicking Jewish people out of Aragon, declaring that “‘[h]e is impoverishing his country and enriching my kingdom.’”
The Ottoman state also demonstrated a remarkable willingness to adopt new and effective cultural practices regardless of their provenance. Indeed, in sharp contrast to its often chauvinistic and prejudiced contemporaries, the dynasty unabashedly embraced ideas, methods, and even people from other cultures as well as disruptive new technological innovations. Doing so greatly strengthened the Ottoman Empire and played no small part in facilitating its rapid expansion.
The Ottomans’ cultural openness is most evident in three ways. First, the dynasty was unusually receptive to having non-Turks and non-Muslims hold important leadership positions. As we have seen, during its early centuries, the Ottomans did not make membership in the askeri contingent on being Turkish or even following the Islamic faith. Instead, it gladly welcomed substantial numbers of Jews and Christians. Thus, a Jewish refugee from Spain was an important advisor to Süleyman and later became the Duke of Naxos. Similarly, a converted nephew of the final Byzantine emperor became one of Mehmet II’s grand viziers while a second served as the powerful Ottoman governor of the Balkans. Indeed, Greeks, both Christians and converts to Islam alike, were so common in the administration of the early empire that the historian Dimitri Kitsikis characterizes the Ottoman state of that period as a “Turkish-Greek Empire.”
Second, the Ottomans readily adopted practices and methods from other cultures, including, notably, non-Muslim ones. For example, while the timar system had obvious antecedents in the semi-feudal iqtas that the Buyids and many subsequent Muslim states had adopted, they also drew on a similar late-Byzantine fiscal arrangement called a pronoia. Ottoman architecture, particularly the design of monumental buildings such as the Blue Mosque, likewise made clear the empire’s openness to foreign ideas. Those structures may have adhered to longstanding Muslim architectural traditions, but they also borrowed in obvious ways from the design of grand Byzantine buildings such as the Hagia Sophia.
Finally, Ottoman openness to new ideas and technologies was central to its precocious adoption of gunpowder weapons. Firearms were not new when the Janissaries began to use them. On the contrary, so-called hand cannons had existed since the late-thirteenth century. For two reasons, however, they had not yet gained widespread acceptance among the armies of Europe and the Middle East. First, as we have seen, military leaders found them to be difficult to integrate into established battlefield tactics that centered on traditional weapons such as bows, swords, and lances and were thus reluctant to use them in large numbers. This hesitance was important, but the second reason was likely more critical in explaining the limited adoption of gunpowder weapons in the fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries: broadly speaking, soldiers in most armies perceived firearms to be incompatible with longstanding masculine military ideologies and traditions. Nearly everywhere, both the rank-and-file and their leaders believed that killing at a distance using arms as crude as guns violated the warrior code of bravery to which they adhered and preferred to fight in hand-to-hand combat using traditional melee weapons. For these reasons, nearly all military forces in both Europe and the Middle East had only incompletely adopted guns by the early-fifteenth century.
However, the Ottomans were not burdened with such hidebound views. On the contrary, they were happy to adopt effective new technologies even if they upset existing practices and values. Indeed, as we have seen, once they had devised tactics for their effective use, the Ottomans quickly embraced gunpowder weapons and began to employ them on a mass scale. As a result, for a brief but critical period, the sultan’s forces enjoyed a near-monopoly on the use of massed firearms. That advantage proved to be decisive. As we have seen, the empire’s deployment of siege cannons was the deciding factor during Mehmet II’s successful siege of Constantinople, while the use of gunpowder weapons against Safavid and Mamluk armies, which had vigorously resisted the adoption of firearms, had made possible the victories at Chaldiran and Marj Dabiq that had allowed the sultanate to seize vast swaths of territory in the Arab Middle East.
The Safavid Empire
While the Ottoman Empire was the dominant state in the Middle East during the Early Modern Period, it faced for a time a powerful rival in the region in the form of the Safavid Dynasty (1501-1722). Controlling the Iranian plateau for more than two centuries, the Safavid state bore many similarities to the Ottoman Empire. Both reached their apogee as a result of their adoption of gunpowder weapons, and both used longstanding Muslim administrative practices to centralize power. As a consequence, historians have typically treated the Ottoman and Safavid states as a pair of similar, gunpowder-based empires. This characterization is not without merit. As we shall see, those states did indeed resemble each other in a number of critical ways. At the same time, however, many of their commonalities were surface ones that obscured fundamental differences in their political systems, methods of military recruitment, and, especially, religious policies.
Origins
Those differences stretched back to the two dynasties’ sharply contrasting origin stories. Unlike the Ottomans, the Safavids began not as a military or political group but instead as a populist, Sufi religious order that found appeal with some of the Turkish tribes of eastern Anatolia and western Iran. Established at the turn of the fourteenth century by its namesake, Safi ad-Din (c. 1252-1334), the family at first oversaw a fairly typical mystical, Sufi order. However, it did not retain that orientation for long. On the contrary, like a number of similar orders in the region, the Safavids’ theological position grew more extreme and heterodox in response to the political disorder and the collapse of Sunni institutions that occurred following the demise of the Ilkhanate and the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum. Indeed, within just a few decades, it had transformed into a militant organization that embraced ghuluww: a term that connoted an extremist, nomadic opposition to centralized authority and a belief that certain charismatic leaders possessed a direct link to the divine.
The pivotal moment in that transformation came under Safi ad-Din’s great grandson, Junayd (r. 1447-1460). Facing a challenge from one of his uncles who enjoyed the backing of the powerful Qaraquyunlu, or Black Sheep confederation of Turkish tribes, Junayd abandoned the Safavids’ heretofore narrow focus on spiritual concerns in favor of an aggressive approach that would fundamentally restructure the order. Advancing messianic claims to justify his new role, he assumed the political and military leadership of the tribes that adhered to his teachings and forged an alliance with the Qaraquyunlus’ rivals, the Aqquyunlu, or White Sheep confederation of Turkish tribes. These moves proved consequential. They not only resulted in the defeat of Junayd’s uncle, but, more fundamentally, also completed the Safavid order’s metamorphosis from a mystical organization into a militant movement driven by ghuluww ideology.
Further dramatic changes followed under his son and successor, Haydar, (r. 1460-1488). Not long after taking power, he abandoned Sunnism in favor of Shiʿism and began to assert that the Safavid family descended from the Prophet Muhammad through the line of Ali and Fatimah. These were bold moves, ones that would have significant consequences. In the immediate term, they inspired a number of Haydar’s more-devoted supporters to follow his lead and adopt Shiʿism. To demonstrate their commitment to their new sect, they began to wear a distinctive, twelve-folded red turban, each fold representing one of the twelve Imams, called the Qizilbash, a term used thereafter to denote the tribes that supported the Safavid order. Later, as we shall explore further in a moment, they led to the people of Iran adopting Twelver Shiʿism, a change of enormous significance that would reverberate to the present day.
Ironically, however, the success of Haydar’s religious claims would also create serious problems for the Safavid Dynasty. The issue was the growing appeal of his revolutionary mix of Shiʿia and ghulat ideology among the Turkmen of eastern Anatolia and western Iran. Fearing that the Safavid leader’s surging appeal would reduce him to vassalage, the Aqquyunlu leader Yaqub (r. 1478-1490), broke with Haydar in 1488 and went to war with the Qizilbash. The conflict went disastrously for the Safavids. Not only did the Qizilbash tribes suffer a serious defeat at the hands of Yaqub’s soldiers, but Haydar himself died in the fighting. Taking advantage of the ensuing chaos, the Aqquyunlu followed their victory by systematically killing or imprisoning all of the remaining members of the family save for Haydar’s seven-year-old son, Ismail (r. 1501- 1524), who managed to escape into hiding in 1494. It was a major setback for the Safavids, one that appeared to have doomed the dynasty to irrelevance.
Shah Ismail
Instead, the dynasty achieved a remarkable revival under the youthful Ismail. Reemerging in 1499 at the age of twelve, the charismatic Safavid leader rallied a confederation of Qizilbash and disaffected Aqquyunlu tribes to his banner. Eschewing moderation, he declared himself to be Ali reincarnate, the Hidden Imam, and a descendant of the Seventh Imam. Under his messianic leadership, the Qizilbash seized the Aqquyunlu capital of Tabriz in 1501, which Ismail made his own, and then defeated its army in 1503. Having eliminated their most powerful regional opponent, the Qizilbash followed with a lightening campaign that resulted in Ismail assuming control of the entirety of the Iranian plateau. He followed by declaring himself ruler of all Persia. In so doing, he did not assume a conventional title such as sultan. On the contrary, seeking to legitimate his rule by connecting his state to Persia’s distinct identity and history and perhaps to obscure his Turkish background, Ismail adopted the ancient Persian title of shah.
Flush with success, he next moved to extend his influence among the tribal Turkmen of Ottoman-controlled eastern Anatolia. Wielding the Safavids’ revolutionary mix of Shiʿa and ghulat ideas as a subversive, ideological cudgel, he sent missionaries into the region and made contact with key Turkish leaders in hopes of detaching the tribes from the Ottoman Empire. While his message found a welcome reception among the many Turkmen who wished to regain their autonomy, his initiative ultimately ended in disaster. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Sultan Selim I was determined to maintain his grip over eastern Asia Minor and opted to respond to Ismail’s provocation by invading Iran. Ismail and his Qizilbash soldiers met the Ottoman army at Chaldiran in the far-northwest part of the Iranian plateau. Genuinely believing that he was the Hidden Imam, the shah was blithely unconcerned that Selim I’s army enjoyed a substantial numerical advantage or that its troops possessed firearms while his army instead relied on bows, swords, and lances. Indeed, Ismail was so confident that he enjoyed divine favor that he personally led a cavalry charge against the center of the Ottoman line. The results were disastrous. Inflicting heavy casualties, the massed fire of the Ottoman cannons and gun-armed Janissaries decimated his horsemen and turned the Battle of Chaldiran into a bloody rout. With Ismail’s army all but destroyed, the victors followed by briefly occupying Tabriz before retiring from Safavid territory.
The Qizilbash Interlude
Selim I’s withdrawal rescued Ismail but could not obscure the fact that Chaldiran had been a crushing setback, one that fundamentally altered the political balance in Persia. The most immediate result of the defeat was the shattering of Ismail’s confidence. Depressed by his failure, he never again led an army in battle and instead spent the remaining decade of his reign drinking and otherwise indulging himself in the pleasures of his position. His withdrawal from leadership would have serious ramifications for the Safavids. No longer believing after Chaldiran that Ismail was divinely ordained, the dynasty’s onetime Qizilbash supporters took advantage of his distraction to assert their autonomy. Controlling valuable pasturage that permitted them to field a large force of horsemen, they quickly assumed a dominant position over Iran and its central government that they would retain for the balance of the sixteenth century. As a result, Ismail’s successors found themselves in a difficult situation, too weak either to defend the country from Ottoman depredations or to curb the power of the Qizilbash.
Shah Abbas I
It was only at the very end of the sixteenth century that a new and dynamic leader, Ismail’s great grandson Abbas I (r. 1588-1629), would emerge to restore the dynasty’s position. That he was able to do so was surprising in light of the trying circumstances that he faced at the start of his reign. In the years immediately preceding his accession to the throne, Ottoman forces had exploited his father’s weak rule to take substantial territory along Iran’s western border. Worse, Qizilbash factions had begun to engage in destabilizing civil conflict and to intervene in the affairs of the central government. This last challenge was especially dangerous for the Safavids. The tribes not only killed the queen in 1579 and the grand vizier in 1583 but had also taken to meddling in the succession. Indeed, Abbas I himself had become shah at the behest of a Qizilbash leader, Murshid Quli Khan Ustajlu, who hoped to rule from behind the throne.
The sixteen-year-old monarch quickly proved that he was up to these challenges.Taking advantage of worsening factionalism among the Qizilbash, he first acted by lining up the political support needed to have Murshid Quli Khan executed. Having secured his autonomy, he followed by centralizing power in his hands. Key to this effort was his creation of a royal monopoly over the production and export of silk, Iran’s most valuable product. It was a characteristically shrewd move on his part, one that provided him with the revenue needed both to develop an efficient central administration and to turn the firearm-equipped slave army that his grandfather, Tahmsap (r. 1524-1576), had established into a force powerful enough to check the Qizilbash.
Abbas I followed by relocating the capital to the city of Isfahan. Doing so came with two substantial advantages. First, the move put his government in a central location from which it could more easily control Iran. Second, and far more important, relocating the capital made possible the construction of a new palace complex of monumental architecture that could serve as the symbolic centerpiece of a renewed and strengthened Safavid state. The results were, and are, impressive. Arranged around the Naqsh-I Jahan, a massive and beautiful new maidan, or square, that measures one hundred and sixty meters by five hundred meters, the complex of structures he built was stunning. It included the Ali Qapu Palace, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, and, above all, the magnificent Shah Mosque and its attendant madrasas. Befitting his state’s dependence on revenue derived from trade, it also featured a new bazaar.
The palace complex and the reconstructed city of Isfahan served a number of ends. The buildings accommodated the administrators on whom Abbas I’s centralizing plan depended, while the new neighborhoods in Isfahan supported the fiscal key to his state: the silk workers and their workshops. Meanwhile, the grandness of the architecture and the brilliance and orderliness of Isfahan proclaimed the glory of Abbas I and the Safavids and suggested that the stability embodied in the orderly, planned city of Isfahan depended on the continuation of the dynasty. Isfahan thus constituted not only the physical center of Abbas I’s powerful new administrative state, but also the symbolic core of his effort to legitimate Safavid rule.
Abbas I’s domestic accomplishments soon led to success abroad. His powerful new army recovered Tabriz in 1603 and Armenia in 1604 and decisively repelled an Ottoman counterattack in 1605. After a lull, it scored a number of further victories. In 1622, it succeeded both in retaking the important eastern city of Qandahar from the Mughal Empire and, in conjunction with the British East India Company, in ejecting the Portuguese from the Island of Hormuz. This last triumph was especially significant. It gave the delighted shah control over both the entrance to the Persian Gulf and the trade that passed through it. Finally, in 1624, his armies not only seized Baghdad but managed to hold it in the face of a concerted Ottoman counterattack.
Thus, by the time he died in 1629, Shah Abbas I had fully restored Safavid rule. He had ended Qizilbash dominance of the government, restored control of the border, and affirmed the idea that a powerful monarch should rule over Iran. Importantly, he had also replaced tribal rule with a strong, centralized bureaucracy and turned the firearm- equipped slave army that his grandfather had pioneered into a powerful force comparable to the Ottoman Janissaries.
Dissolution
Unfortunately for the Safavids, however, the dynasty was unable to maintain the bureaucratic and military system that Abbas I had established. Two issues prevented it from doing so. First, none of Abbas I’s successors possessed his creativity, charisma, or leadership skills. Indeed, they were, for the most part, his polar opposites. For example, the penultimate shah, Safi II (r. 1666-1694), spent most of his time drinking and pursuing sexual conquests and thus provided little guidance during what was a difficult period. Remarkably, his successor, Sultan Hussein (r. 1694-1722), was even worse. Thanks to his excessive alcohol consumption and, ironically, the intense piety that monopolized his time, he failed to provide any effective direction of the state whatsoever.
The second issue, the empire’s worsening fiscal situation, proved to be even more problematic. Importing more goods than it exported, Persia experienced steady specie drain and inflation in the decades following Abbas I’s reign. Exacerbated by the decision to end the state monopoly on silk exports, the worsening trade balance resulted in the steady decline of tax receipts. Making matters worse, the dynasty failed to maintain the tenuous control that Abbas I had established over Persia’s agricultural regions; as a result, successive shah’s saw those lands, and the tax revenue that they generated, revert to the increasingly restive and independent tribes.
The results were catastrophic for the state. With tax receipts steadily falling, Abbas I’s successors had little choice but to let his bureaucracy and his once-vaunted military gradually wither. Relative peace along Persia’s borders obscured the decline of Safavid power for some time. By the 1710s, however, the dynasty could no longer disguise the feebleness of its position, and foreign powers began to peel off its outlying territory. The coup de grace finally came in 1722 when the tribal Ghalzay Afghans seized Isfahan and compelled the final Safavid shah to abdicate, thus bringing the dynasty to an ignominious end. The demise of Safavid rule was a real blow to Persia and initiated a period of hard times for the country’s people. Indeed, as we shall see in a later chapter, there would follow costly invasions, seven decades of civil conflict, and precipitous economic decline before the country was finally able to reunify.
Persian Shiʿism
Concurrent with their efforts to create a powerful, centralized state, the Safavids successfully imposed Shiʿism on a people that had heretofore largely adhered to Sunnism. The dynasty had done so for the purpose of legitimating its rule and had thus retained tight control over the religious establishment. However, that dominance did not las,. Taking advantage of Safavid weakness, Shiʿa religious leaders would gradually carve out a fully autonomous position and would achieve vast, independent authority over lay Shiʿa. Together, these developments would powerfully influence Iran’s culture and the subsequent course of its history.
As we have seen, Shiʿism had been a core element of the dynasty’s early efforts to secure legitimacy in Iran. Initially, the Safavids had promoted a heterodox variant that held that Shah Ismail was the Hidden Imam and the Murshid-i Kamil, or perfect master, who had to be obeyed by his followers without question. For a time, this claim had earned the dynasty the unquestioned fealty of his Qizilbash supporters. As we have seen, however, Ismail’s stunning defeat at Chaldiran in 1514 had demolished the carefully developed myths that he and his supporters had crafted during his rise to power. The battle had thus been a double blow to the Safavid Dynasty, one that had cost it not merely territory and prestige, but, more importantly, the religious legitimacy on which its rule ultimately rested.
The dynasty’s response to this setback was shrewd and effective. The Safavids quickly discarded Ismail’s claim to be the Murshid-i Kamil and began to throw their support behind orthodox Twelver Shiʿism in hopes of using it to legitimate their continued rule. As part of that effort, the government brought Shiʿa ulema from Bahrain and Lebanon to Iran over the next few decades and tasked them with converting Iranians to Twelver Shiʿism and with establishing a state-dominated religious hierarchy. Financially dependent on the government, the Shiʿa ulema worked diligently to achieve these ends. They dutifully upheld Safavid legitimacy, preached that the people should obey the dynasty, accepted successive shahs’ claims to be the Hidden Imam incarnate, and acted to bring Shiʿism to the people of Iran. Their efforts were successful. Abetted by the state’s vigorous persecution of Sunnis, the ulema succeeded in converting nearly the entire Iranian population to Shiʿism by the early-seventeenth century.
The close relationship between the dynasty and the Shiʿa ulema did not endure for long, however. Instead, as the dynasty weakened following Abbas I’s reign, the religious scholars became less-and-less inclined to slavishly support the Safavids. This change took place very gradually. It started with the clerics reasserting their commitment to the traditional view that the Hidden Imam would only reemerge from Occultation at the end of time. This position was a clear repudiation of one of the fundamental justifications for Safavid rule: that the shahs were themselves the Hidden Imam incarnate. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the religious scholars substantially broadened and deepened their challenge to royal dominance of the clergy. Central to this effort was the development of a new claim that it was not the shahs but instead the mujtahids, the most learned ulema and the precursors of the ayatollahs, who were the legitimate heads of the Shiʿa community until the Hidden Imam returned, a position that directly challenged the monarch’s authority. While that idea gained broad acceptance among the clergy, a minority advanced an even more extreme position: that the shah should not hold authority over the mujtahids but should instead serve as the instrument through which those clerics effected their rulings.
The ulema went much further in asserting their independence in the eighteenth century. Political and economic conditions were key to the success of this effort. Politically, the absence of a central government following the collapse of the Safavid Dynasty permitted the ulema to turn the autonomy that they had won following Abbas I’s reign into outright independence. As a result, in contrast to their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire who received their salaries from the state and were thus dependent on it, the Shiʿa clerics of Iran had achieved complete autonomy from state authority by the middle of the eighteenth century. Economically, meanwhile, their ability to exploit agricultural land they either owned outright or controlled through a waqf (pl. awqaf), an inalienable piece of endowed property that supports a religious institution or charitable cause, ensured that they would remain financially independent even if royal authority returned to Iran.
The clerics had not merely secured their financial and political autonomy, moreover, but had also dramatically increased their religious, moral, and legal sway over Iran’s Shiʿa majority. Their ability to win broad recognition of two significant theological innovations accounted for this enhancement of their authority. First, they gained widespread acknowledgement of their claim that the mujtahids were sufficiently learned and wise that they could exercise ijtihad; that is, they secured acceptance of the idea that the leading clerics were so well grounded and accomplished in fiqh, or jurisprudence, that they were capable of rendering new interpretations of the Shiʿa shariʿa code in the name of the Hidden Imam. Second, the ulema gained popular adherence to their position that since lay Shiʿa were incapable of grasping the hidden, esoteric core of the faith, they had to follow, or emulate, a mujtahid and to abide by his rulings.
Thus, by the time that Iran reunified at the end of the eighteenth century, the clergy had established themselves as a potent, independent force. Their recognized right to engage in ijtihad, their autonomy from the state, their success in advancing the claim that the clerics were the leaders of the Shiʿa community during the Occultation, and their insistence that lay people had to emulate one of the mujtahids afforded them substantial, if still latent, political power. In other words, the door was now open for them to assert themselves in political affairs if they wished. For the time being, they refrained from crossing that threshold. Instead, they remained focused on issues of religion and the law while regarding questions of politics as the prerogative of the shah. As we shall see in a later chapter, however, their restraint had its limits, and internal disputes arising from the West’s growing dominance of Iran in the nineteenth century would eventually spur them to intrude into political affairs.
A Gunpowder Empire?
At first look, the Safavid Empire seemed to have been very similar to its Ottoman rival. Like its Turkish contemporary, the Iranian dynasty built its regime on the core elements of a gunpowder state: a highly centralized government based on traditional Muslim administrative methods and a centrally directed, firearm-equipped army. In two fundamental ways, however, the Safavid Empire broke with the gunpowder model that the Ottoman Empire embodied, indeed, its differences with the Ottoman state were so significant that they raise questions about whether it in fact met the definition of a gunpowder state.
First, unlike Osman and his descendants, the Safavids were unable to fully centralize political power in their hands. In part, this failing was fiscal in nature. As impressive as Abbas I’s monopoly over silk exports had been, it could not supply his government with all of the revenue it needed to pay for his army. As a consequence, the Safavids relied heavily on tuyul, a fiscal device similar to the Ottoman timar or the Buyid iqta, designed to sustain soldiers using land grants rather than share tax revenue. This dependence was not in itself significant; after all, the Ottoman sultans raised a large part of their army in a similar fashion. However, in contrast to the Sublime Porte’s ability to prevent timar holders from making their land grants hereditary, Abbas I’s government lacked the administrative capacity to stop the possessors of tuyuls from assuming ownership of the land that the state had assigned them; as a result, while the Ottomans retained tight control over the timar holders, the Safavid state proved unable to prevent the gradual devolution of power to those who held tuyuls.
Second, the Safavids differed substantially from the Ottomans in their adoption of gunpowder weapons. While their Turkish rivals acquired the vast bulk of their empire as a direct result of their precocious embrace of firearms, the Safavids instead gained nearly all of their territory before they began to use guns. Indeed, they only reluctantly adopted firearms after their disastrous defeat at Chaldiran had demonstrated the effectiveness of such weapons.
These are significant divergences. Indeed, they are so substantial as to suggest that the substantive differences between the two empires outweighed their apparent surface similarities. As a result, many scholars today conclude that the Safavid state was a gunpowder empire only under the most generous definition of the term and only during the latter half of its existence.
Legacy
The Safavid state may not have been a full-fledged gunpowder empire, but it did play a vital role in shaping Iran’s future development. The dynasty established the rough outlines of the country’s modern borders and left it with a tradition, albeit a weak one, of centralized, bureaucratic government. Above all, the Safavids established Twelver Shiʿism as the dominant religion in Iran. This last development would turn out to be particularly momentous. It not only resulted in Shiʿa Islam becoming a central component of the country’s national identity, but it also left Iran with a powerful, organized, and, above all, independent religious establishment, one that was poised to exploit its strong position to exert a powerful voice in political affairs.
Conclusion
Gunpowder weapons and the political centralization and efficient bureaucracies they required permitted the Ottomans and, to a lesser degree, the Safavids to remake the map of the Middle East. Gone were the unstable principalities, beyliks, and tribal confederations of the late-medieval period. In their place, there instead stood highly centralized empires that were able to maintain control over large territories using sophisticated, firearm-equipped military forces.
For a time, these regimes were mighty. In particular, as we have seen, the Ottoman Empire stood without question as the most powerful state on Earth for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By the end of that period, however, the empire’s dominance would begin to slip in the face of an increasingly powerful and assertive West. The result would be a peculiarly trying period for the dynasty, one, as we shall see in the next chapter, that would compel it to make significant changes to the empire’s political, economic, social, and military systems.
