THE TURKS IN HISTORY

When first known to history, the Turks were a nomadic people living in what is now Russian Siberia. They moved west, adopted Islam as their religion, again moved west, and built one of the world's great states. At its apogee in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Turkish State stretched from the borders of Morocco to the borders of Iran, and from southern Poland to southern Yemen. It then entered two centuries of slow decline, followed by a century of efforts to reverse the decline by a process of westernization. Finally it collapsed at the close of World War I. From its ruins sprang the Turkish Republic.

The Rise of Turkish Power

It is not certain when the Turks first used that name to describe themselves. The earliest known writing in a Turkish tongue dates from the eighth century A.D.; it was found in the Orhon inscriptions near Lake Baykal. Yet Byzantine records of two centuries earlier refer to Turks, and Chinese chronicles mention them in 1300 B.C. Nor is it clear whether the word Turk first designated one tribe or a group of tribes. The latter was true at least by the late seventh and early eighth centuries, when the expanding forces of Islam came into contact with tribal groups they called Turks. Presumably at about the same period Turks also began to call themselves collectively by that name.

The designation is primarily linguistic: Turks are speakers of Turkish. Turkish, the language

spoken by western Turks in Turkey today, is one of a large family of closely related Turkic languages; its tens of millions of speakers also inhabit parts of Iran, areas of the Russian Caucasus, and most of Russian and Chinese Turkestan. The Turkic tongues in turn are a part of the Altaic group, whose relationships are not so clear, but which includes Mongolian and perhaps Korean. Place names in Turkish are sprinkled in a vast belt from central Mongolia and western China across inner Asia through Iran, the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, and Turkey, into the Balkans as far as Yugoslavia. This indicates the route of migration and expansion of Turks in past centuries. Early in the Christian era Turkish tribes living on the fringes of Mongolia seem to have been bumped westward by stronger tribal confederations. They migrated to new homes near the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) in Central Asia. Some established urban centers. For a time in the sixth century there was an organized state in the area, which sent ambassadors to Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, and received tribute and ambassadors from the Byzantines. This little kingdom controlled the silk route from China to the West-not a road, of course, but a series of merchants and caravan stops. But the kingdom soon broke into smaller tribal units or incipient city-states.

When in the seventh century the Arabs, under the banner of their new religion, burst from their peninsula to overrun Syria, Irak, and Iran, they encountered the edges of the Turkish world in Central Asia. Through military contact, trade, and the proselytism of itinerant holy men and dervishes the Turks came to know Islam and gradually to adopt it. Some had been Buddhists, some Zoroastrians, some Christians, some Manichaeans, but most had been pagans. By the tenth century most Turks who lived in the Syr Darya region had become Muslims. They were still predominantly horsemen, and the life they led is reflected in the great Turkish epic Dede Korkut. The tales, told by Grandfather Korkut, originated among the Oguz confederation of Turkish tribes probably in the tenth century. They praise the traditional virtues of tribal life: horsemanship, heroism, loyalty. They show devotion to Islam (in both orthodox and heterodox forms) and also reveal a monogamous society in which women played a prominent role.

The Growth Period

Then there began a reverse penetration. Groups of Turks began to enter the classical world of Islam. At first some were employed as slave fighters and guards for the caliphs of Baghdad or their subordinates. Then in the eleventh century other Turks struck out on their own, taking control of eastern districts in the caliphal lands. These were Seljuk Turks, so called after a warrior leader from one of the Oguz tribes. In 1055 Tugrul, a grandson of Seljuk, led his followers to the capture of Baghdad, the seat of the caliph himself. The caliph was neither killed nor deposed but remained as religious head of the community, while Tugrul and his successors, also in the name of Islam, exercised political and military control with the title of sultan. For a half-century they ruled in the central lands of the Abbasid caliphate. The Seljuk Turks now appeared as strong defenders of orthodox Islam against the varied heterodoxies of the Shiites. Their intent was to continue expanding their control to the west, to rescue Syria and Egypt from the rule of the Fatimid schismatics. Unplanned but portentous events diverted them from exclusive concentration on this objective.

These events were the successful raids of Turkish bands into Byzantine Anatolia. The raiders were nomadic Turkish tribesmen from Central Asia, usually called Turkmens (Turcomans), whom the Seljuks had earlier shunted to fighting along the borders of Christian Byzantium in order to be rid of them. The Turkmens fought both for booty and for Islam, but an Islam of a more popular and dervish-inspired sort than the variety approved in Baghdad. It happened that the Byzantine Empire was at one of its weaker stages in the later eleventh century. The Turkmen raiders infiltrated Anatolia, as the Arabs of the seventh and eighth centuries had never been able to do. They raided as far as Kayseri. When the Byzantine emperor gathered a large army for a counterblow, Tugrul's successor, Alp Aslan, felt obliged to respond with his regular forces. The ensuing Turkish victory of Malazgirt (Manzikert) near Lake Van in eastern Anatolia in 1071 broke the Byzantine hold in the east, leaving Anatolia open to further penetration. Recently the nine-hundredth anniversary of Malazgirt was celebrated in Turkey. It symbolizes not only the military victory of the Turks but also the beginning of what would be a four-hundred-year process of Turkification of Anatolia.

Stabilization by the Seljuk

It was not soldiers of the organized Seljuk State who infiltrated Anatolia but Turkmen raiders. Calling themselves gazis (warriors for the faith) they rode in from the east in increasing numbers, some even going all the way to the Aegean coast. To stabilize the situation the Seljuk rulers sent one of their family, Suleyman, as organizer and ruler of the unruly elements. He fixed his forces and his capital far to the west, at Iznik (Nicaea), and for a few years in the 1080s it looked as if a new frontier of some stability had been secured in western Anatolia between Byzantines and Turks. But Suleyman's ambitions for more eastern lands led to his death in battle against other Seljuks in 1086, and for a decade thereafter Anatolia was the scene of many-sided conflicts among local Turkish leaders seeking power, and between them and Byzantine rulers in the west. In this situation the Byzantine emperor Alexis I appealed to the Christian West for aid. The resultant First Crusade retook Iznik for the Byzantines in 1097. The Christian successes pushed the Turkish frontier eastward, back to Dorylaeum near modern Eskisehir, where it remained for more than a century. Seljuk control in Anatolia was then limited to a region on the central plateau, flanked in the west by Byzantine territory and in the east by Lesser Armenia and the crusader state of Edessa.

Konya became the capital of the Anatolian Seljuk State, now quite independent of any control from Baghdad or elsewhere. Turks called their state the Sultanate of Rum, since it occupied territories that once belonged to Rome-although to the Turks "Rum" no longer meant Latin civilization but Greek, for the Eastern Roman Empire had long since lost what Latin veneer it once had possessed. So the Seljuk sultanate was a successor state ruling part of the medieval Greek empire, and within it the process of Turkification of a previously Hellenized Anatolian population continued. That population must already have been of very mixed ancestry, deriving from ancient Hittite, Phrygian, Cappadocian, and other civilizations as well as Roman and Greek. The Turkish language, the Arabic script that Turks had adopted, and Islam became dominant along with Seljuk rule. Among the instruments of Turkification and Islamization was the Mevlevi order of dervishes, established at Konya in the early thirteenth century by the mystic poet Celaleddin Rumi. The whirling dervishes seem to have been effective missionaries. At the same time the Greek church lost many properties, and bishops were often kept from their sees by the Turks. Thus, material difficulties and self-interest as well as conviction led to conversions

of Christians to Islam. For more than a century, from about 1100 to 1240, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum flourished. It took lands from the rival Turkmen state of the Danismends to the east. In the early thirteenth century it gained seaports on both the northern and the southern Anatolian coasts, at Sinop and Antalya, and conducted a thriving commerce with Italian city-states. The remains of Seljuk roads, bridges, mosques, hans (khans), and other monuments in Konya and elsewhere in Anatolia bear testimony to its vigorous life. Then from the outside came an anti-Seljuk blow far more shattering than the Crusades, and from the opposite direction.

Mongol hordes, still pagan, swept out of Asia into the Near East, spreading terror as they came. Even before destroying Baghdad in 1258, they invaded eastern Anatolia and defeated the Seljuk army of Rum in 1243 at the battle of Kosedag. Thereafter the Seljuk state was tributary to the Mongols, who, following a local rebellion, kept troops and a governor in Anatolia. The Sultanate of Rum became a dependency of the Ilkhanid dynasty of Islamicized Mongols who ruled from Iran. The weakened Seljuk state was further beset by new waves of Turkmen tribesmen, some driven from Central Asia or eastern Anatolia by the Mongols and some following in the Mongol wake. Here in Anatolia in the late 1200s Marco Polo encountered the Turkmens-"a rude people," he called them, who bred fine horses, sought good pastures, and revered the Prophet Mohammed. He remarked on the fine carpet and silk manufactures, and on the dependence of Konya and Kayseri on the Mongol Great Khan. He also remarked on the cities with their many Greek and Armenian inhabitants.

Though the Seljuk dynasty of Rum lingered until 1307, the newly arrived Turkmens provided the moving force in a rearrangement of power in Anatolia and in a renewed expansion of Turks into western Anatolia, where the Byzantines had ruled since the First Crusade. Again, as had occurred two centuries before, there was a period of Byzantineweakness that the gazi warriors exploited. Byzantine rulers had been evicted from their great city in 1204 by the Latins of the Fourth Crusade, who then set up their own Latin kingdom of Constantinople. Then in 1261 the Byzantines, from their base in western Anatolia, regained Constantinople-but at the expense of weakening their Anatolian defenses and of becoming involved with other enemies to the west, like the Bulgars and the Serbs. The Turks profited from this. Pushing on the Byzantine frontiers, competing with each other, Turkish emirs (local princes) with their followers carved out little emirates in former Byzantine territories. They did this also in former Seljuk territories, as the

Ilkhanid control faltered in the fourteenth century.

Next, The Ottoman's

One of the emirs was Osman (1299?-1324?), whose emirate was based on Sogut, a small town near present-day Eskisehir. His was originally one of the lesser principalities, yet it grew, surprisingly, to eclipse all its competitors. The explanation now usually accepted is this: Osman's northwestern situation, closest to the remaining Anatolian Greek territories that formed the Byzantine defense for Constantinople, not only attracted vigorous gazis to his ranks but also forced a slow, step-by-step conquest from the Christians that had to be solid and well organized. Osman became the first of a ruling dynasty that continued unbroken until 1922. From his name were derived the names both of the dynasty and of the state-"Osmanli" in Turkish, "Ottoman" in western European languages (from the Arabic form of his name, Othman or Uthman). Ottoman growth was slow for the first half-century. It was only Osman's son and successor Orhan (1324?-62?) who gained the first important cities: Bursa in 1326, Iznik and Izmit (Nicomedia) soon thereafter. Striking his own coinage a year after taking Bursa, Orhan in effect declared by this act of sovereignty that he was free of Mongol control. Bursa became his capital, which he provided with good streets, a covered market, a hospice, a bath, and a caravansaray. Here the first Ottoman sultans -as they now began to style themselves-are buried in stately mausoleums in the city that Turks today affectionately call "green" for its verdant environs, green mosque tiling, and pious Muslim atmosphere. From his capital of Bursa, Orhan annexed the lands to the west that verged on the Dardanelles. The leap across the narrow strait to Europe was first made by his forces in 1345, when they were called in as allies by a Byzantine emperor in a conflict with a rival claimant to his throne. The Ottomans took a liking to Europe, and evidently resolved to stay.

In the next half-century Ottoman growth went more rapidly. By 1354 the conquerors had established themselves for good in fortress towns on the Gelibolu (Gallipoli) peninsula. In 1361 they took Edirne, which shortly became the new headquarters for the conquering sultans. Now under Murad I (1362?-89) Turkish armies advanced through Thrace and Bulgaria and up the river valleys into Serb territory. Conquering towns such as Sofia and Nish, making vassals of Bulgars and Serbs, Turkish horsemen reached the Danube. Simultaneously the Ottomans pressed eastward in Anatolia, incorporating lands of other gazi leaders. Victory over a Serb-led coalition at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 consolidated the Balkan gains, though at the cost of Murad's life. His son Beyazid I (1389-1402), "Thunderbolt" to his followers, continued the expansion both east and west. He probed into Hungary and began to besiege Constantinople itself. Europe's answer was a crusade organized by the king of Hungary, the pope, and Western knights a real threat to the fledgling Ottoman State but met boldly by Beyazid. In 1396 at the crucial battle of

Nicopolis (Nigbolu) on the Danube in Bulgarian territory, the Western knights were routed. It was the last real crusade.

But Beyazid's expansion to the east in Anatolia brought an even greater threat. It was always somewhat embarrassing for the Ottomans to fight other Muslims; religious law condoned warfare only against the unbeliever. But the Ottoman sultans did fight brother Muslims when they could not take over Turkish emirates by marriage or any sort of peaceful annexation. Beyazid had particular success against the rival Turkish emirs of the Karaman family. He then ran up against a greater rival-himself a Turk and a Muslim who had also become the champion of dispossessed Anatolian emirs. This was Timur the Lame (Tamerlane), heir to a large part of the Mongol realm. From his capital in Central Asia,Timur had conquered Iran and now appeared in eastern Anatolia. Mutual insults and threats between Timur and Beyazid were followed by the inevitable clash, and in the battle of Ankara in 1402 Timur won a major victory. He captured Beyazid, who died the next year. The Ottoman State, headless, fell into chaos as Timur restored ousted emirs to their former lands, while Beyazid's sons fought among themselves for the Ottoman succession.

The first half of the fifteenth century, however, brought Ottoman recovery. For a decade the state remained fragmented, until Beyazid's youngest son triumphed and, as Mehmed I (1413-21), began to put the pieces back together. Both he and his son Murad II (1421-51) were constantly engaged in warfare, partly against Venetians and Hungarians, but just as much against those local rulers and tribal elements who hated the curbs that a centralized state with a strong ruler would put on them. The centralizing forces won not only because of the individual ability of the two Ottoman rulers, but because the rulers enjoyed significant popular backing. Townsmen and merchants tended to favor the order and unity that a centralized state created. Peasants favored a check on the exactions of local lords. The cavalrymen, who lived on lands granted by the sultan in return for services, furnished him strength, as also did the elite infantry, the Janissaries. This corps of shock troops, the first standing army of modem Europe, had been created by Murad I

from slaves who had been prisoners of war. Now numbering 6,000 or more, they had no equal in fighting. In this period of recovery the Ottomans also began to use muskets and cannon, borrowing the best they saw in use by their Western opponents. The first use of cannon by Turks was perhaps in an unsuccessful siege of Constantinople in 1422.

The Ottoman State at its Height

When Mehmed II (1451-81) succeeded his father, his consuming desire was to win Constantinople, the prize that had for so long eluded his forebears. The conquest of this Christian stronghold would not only be a gazi deed, but would also knit together the Anatolian and Rumelian halves of the resurgent Ottoman State. In 1452 Mehmed built the great fortress of Rumeli Hisari-still standing today-to control ship traffic in the Bosporus. Then he gathered his army, perhaps 50,000 regulars and as many irregulars, outside the land walls of the city. The siege began on April 6, 1453. The world's largest cannon, one with a barrel twenty-six feet long, hurled huge stone balls at the triple walls surrounding the city. The 7,000 defenders nightly repaired the damage. To distract defenders from the land walls, a fleet of small Turkish ships was hauled up the hill behind Galata in one night and gently dropped into the harbor of the Golden Horn, behind the chain that closed off its mouth. But it was the land assault of May 29, undertaken by Mehmed against the counsel of his grand vezir, that finally broke through the city's walls. Turkish troops poured in for a day of pillage. At its end, Mehmed the Conqueror entered Constantinople to restore order and to pray in the Church of Aya Sofya, now at his order turned into a mosque. The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 has sometimes been shrugged off as historically unimportant-the conquest of an already surrounded and largely depopulated city. But for the Turks the capture of Constantinople has a triple significance. It gave them a splendid harbor and a leading commercial center, commanding the routes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and from Rumelia to Anatolia. It further gave them a new capital with an aura of imperial majesty, the second Rome, seemingly destined to be the capital of another great empire; now Mehmed added "Roman Caesar" (Rum Kayseri) to his titles. Finally the capture confirmed the Turks' position as a European power. They were no longer a frontier gazi state, no longer an Asian state with a foothold in Europe, but a state with a claim to deal equally with other great European states.

Mehmed II was a builder as well as a conqueror. He began at once to repopulate the city, bringing in craftsmen, merchants, and husbandmen of all religions from various parts of his realm. He had bazaars, hans, mosques, and other buildings constructed. Istanbul-as the Turks popularly called it, presumably from hearing Greeks say they were going, "to the city"-was again becoming the city. Mehmed also continued to enlarge the state of which it was the capital. He retook Karaman lands in Anatolia, conquered Trabzon (Trebizond) from its last Greek rulers, reconquered and absorbed some Serb lands, took some Aegean islands from Venice, overran and annexed the Morea, Bosnia, and Albania, made the Crimea a vassal, and did the same with Wallachia. Turkish power was fast extending over all the shores of the Black Sea and Aegean Sea and into the Adriatic. This Aegean and Mediterranean expansion, largely at the expense of Venice, continued under Mehmed's successor Beyazid II (1481-1512). Turkish naval units under

Kemal Reis raided as far west as the Balearic Islands. The surviving half of the world map with many marginal notations drawn in 1513 by Kemal's nephew, the admiral Piri Reis, shows in detail sections of the Caribbean and South American coastlines.

If the impression given thus far is one of almost uninterrupted warfare by the Ottomans, this is not far from wrong. By the early sixteenth century this warfare had consolidated the Ottoman position as heirs of the Byzantine Empire in Anatolia and Rumelia and as heirs of much of the Venetian maritime empire on the coasts and islands around the Balkan peninsula. The conquests had usually been achieved in two stages: first, a conquered principality or other area would be made tributary, supplying troops and money; then, sometimes after a renewed campaign, it would be put under direct Ottoman administrative control. Some areas therefore were conquered more than once. But there was also cooperation with the Ottoman conquerors. In the early days in Anatolia, numbers of Greeks, including some leaders, had voluntarily joined the Ottomans. In the Balkans the peasantry seems often to have welcomed the Ottoman advance as a release from

extortionate rule by local lords, and there too some of the leaders had joined the Ottoman

cause. In some cases the Turkish sultans appointed leading Christian fighters in the Balkans to posts in local military-civil government, giving them, as cavalrymen, grants of fief lands.

But, as repeated rebellion showed, there were also some who wanted no strong central government and who resented Ottoman control. Among these were many of the still-nomadic Turkmen tribesmen in Anatolia, who opposed not only central authority and its taxes but also its Orthodox Sunnite Islam. Turkmens tended to favor some form of Shiite heresy, usually mixed with pagan survivals, and they were encouraged by dervish leaders. Often called kizllbas (redhead) from the red caps they wore, these heterodox Anatolians were a perpetual danger to the Ottoman State. They were a danger particularly in Beyazid II's reign, because the newly resurgent Iran under Shah Ismail was also Shiite and could rouse the Anatolian discontented as a fifth column in the never-ending struggle of Ottoman State against Persian State. The great kizilbas rebellion at the end of Beyazid's reign had to be suppressed by his son Selim I (1512-20), called "the Grim" (Yavuz). Selim then marched into Iran, winning a major battle at Caldiran in 1514 and securing further territory in eastern and southeastern Anatolia as far as Diyarbakir. This success in turn brought Selim into conflict with the northern Syrian forces of the Mamluk sultanate and opened the way for the first of seven major growth drives that ensued during the sixteenth century. In 1516 Selim's forces marched south into Syria against the Mamluks. This warrior caste of Turk and Circassian slaves had ruled in Egypt since 1250. In the early 1500s the Mamluks were threatened by the Portuguese, who, having circumnavigated Africa, preyed on Muslim commerce in the Arabian Sea and nibbled at the southern Red Sea approaches to Egypt itself. Selim may have conceived of himself as a deliverer of Arabs from both the Mamluks and the Portuguese. In any case, he was welcomed by the people of Aleppo in 1516, defeated the Mamluk sultan and his army nearby at Marj Dabik, and proceeded south to take all of Syria. Continuing the long march into Egypt, Selim routed another Mamluk army near Cairo in 1517. Firearms, which the skilled Mamluk horsemen refused to use because they disdainfully considered them unchivalrous, were the key to the Ottoman victories. The result of the victories was to add to the Ottoman State a vast expanse of territory-Syria, Egypt, and also the Hijaz, which had been under Egyptian protection. More than just territory, these areas constituted a major part of the Arab heartland, including the ancient capital cities of Medina and Damascus and the modern capital of Cairo. Aleppo and Cairo were also great commercial centers, and the revenues of the Ottoman State now began to swell from the eastern trade that came through Egypt and Syria. Perhaps the most significant result of the conquest was that Selim and his successors became without question the world's leading Muslim rulers, guardians of the three holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. Sunnite orthodoxy and the Seriat (the holy law of Islam), expounded by the ulema (learned men) of the Arab world, became even more important at the Ottoman court.

This first growth drive, to the south and southeast, was followed soon by a second, to the north and northwest, under Suleyman I (1520-66). He first had to take the key city of Belgrade, which for years had resisted the Turks with Hungarian aid; he then had to secure his rear in the Mediterranean by winning the island of Rhodes from the Knights of Saint John, effective harassers of Muslim shipping. Then, urged on by Francis I of France, Suleyman advanced up the Danube in two major campaigns against the forces of the Hapsburg, whose monarch Charles V was also the Holy Roman Emperor. A great victory on the field of Mohacs in 1526 established Ottoman suzerainty over Hungary. Renewed Hapsburg opposition provoked a repeat campaign in 1529. This time the Ottoman armies went all the way to Vienna, though they lifted the siege at the onset of the autumnal equinox without taking the city. This was the high point of Turkish advance into Europe. They never were able to enter the gates of Vienna but for a century and a half kept.

Hungary and Transylvania under their control.

The third growth drive of the sixteenth century was an outgrowth of the land wars against

the Hapsburg. When Charles V's fleet threatened Turkish-held coasts in the Balkans, Suleyman's response opened a half-century of intermittent naval war in the Mediterranean. Barbaros Hayreddin Pasa, the famous Turkish corsair who al- ready had conquered Algiers, was appointed grand admiral. He led the Turkish fleet in a series of encounters with the Christians, at the end of which Tunis and Tripoli as well as Algiers and other North African ports were firmly in Ottoman rather than Hapsburg-Spanish hands. The Ottoman military success in the Mediterranean was, however, never total. In 1565, near the end of Suleyman's reign, an attempt to take Malta ended in ignominious failure. Yet Ottoman influence extended beyond the confines of the war zone to the German and Dutch Protestants who were rallied against the Hapsburg, to the Muslims and

crypto-Muslims (Moriscos), and to the Jews and crypto-Jews (Marranos) who fled from persecution in Spain to the haven of Ottoman lands. The fourth major growth drive was again to the east, in the alternating sequence characteristic of Ottoman warfare. Suleyman's armies turned against Safavid Iran in 1534-35. The campaign resulted in the conquest of Tabriz and Baghdad. Tabriz was lost in renewed warfare in the 1550s, but Irak and Baghdad remained in Suleyman's

possession. Now the Ottomans were on the shores of both the Persian Gulf and the Red

Sea. In Basra, as they had done earlier in Suez, they built a fleet to confront the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. But here again the Ottomans were halted. They could not compete with the Atlantic powers in the art of navigating the high seas, nor could they oust the Portuguese from Hormuz, control point for entrance to and exit from the Persian Gulf. Vienna, Malta, Hormuz-these marked the points at which the Ottomans remained forever blocked by the Christian European world.

The next two growth drives of the sixteenth century came during the reign of Suleyman's son, Selim II (1566-74). Boldly envisioning a scheme for opposing the growing Muscovite power in the north, Grand Vezir Sokollu Mehmed Pas,a mounted an expedition with the Tatars of the Crimea to cut a canal from the Don River to the Volga, so that Ottoman ships could join land forces in attacking Russian-held Astrakhan and sail the Caspian Sea. But the expedition of 1568-69 failed. No canal was dug, and Astrakhan resisted siege. Then Ottoman attention turned to a smaller but more accessible prize, Cyprus, which was a Venetian colony. An amphibious assault in 1570-71 won the island by bloody fighting. During the war the Ottoman fleet lost to a combined Christian fleet a major engagement at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece, but Cyprus itself remained in Turkish hands. The last great drive-against Iran in the reign of Murad III (1574-95)-gained much territory for the Ottomans. Georgia and other Iranian provinces bordering the Caspian Sea passed into Turkish control. Ottoman ships finally were launched on the Caspian itself. Yet this victory, confirmed in 1590, was undone in the early years of the next century. Ottoman growth seems at last to have come to a halt.

Even though additional bits of territory-Crete and southern Poland-were added to the state in the seventeenth century, the elan by then was gone. The sixteenth century saw the apogee of Ottoman territorial conquest. Straddling three continents, the Ottoman State of the sixteenth century had a population that has been estimated at anywhere from twenty to fifty million-perhaps thirty million is a realistic guess-at a time when France had about sixteen million. It was composed of an extraordinary mixture of peoples. In Europe there were Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Greeks, and Turks. In Asia were Turks, Greeks, Lazes, Armenians, Kurds, Circassians, and Arabs. In Africa there were Arabs and Berbers. There were also other smaller groups. The multitude of languages and dialects was almost matched by the variety of religious sects. Muslims were probably a majority if one adds together Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Berbers, and those Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, and others who had converted to Islam. Of the Christians, the vast majority were Greek Orthodox; the next largest Christian church was the Armenian. The Jewish population, never as numerous as the others, was composed of important communities in Baghdad and other cities and during the sixteenth century was swelled by tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who fled Christendom for the toleration of Muslim rule. Salonica became a major Jewish city; Istanbul had an important Sephardic community. Some of these peoples, and some of these sects, lived in fairly compact agglomerations, but others lived intermixed in cities-a Greek or Armenian quarter side by side with a Muslim quarter-or in adjacent villages, or in scattered locations.

The mixture of peoples was more confusing than might otherwise have been the case because of two processes that had accompanied Ottoman expansion. One was conversion of other peoples to Islam when the Turks took territorial control. Most of the Hellenized population of Anatolia had become Islamic during the centuries of invasion and disruption, but important pockets of Christians remained. Most of the Greek Orthodox peoples of Rumelia, more swiftly conquered by the organized Ottoman State, retained their traditional faith. Yet numbers of Greek Orthodox did apostatize in Rumelia; an outstanding example is the Serb peasantry surrounding the Islamicized towns of Bosnia, a distinct group of Muslims embedded in the generally Christian Balkans. The second process was surgun (forced migration). Ottoman sultans not infrequently ordered the transplanting of groups of people for reasons of nomadic sedentarization, defense, security, or economic development, as Mehmed II had done in repopulating Istanbul. In the sixteenth century, for example, some 20,000 or more Turkish peasants of Anatolia were moved to Cyprus as a partial remedy for overpopulation in Anatolia and to develop Cyprus. These processes made the settlement patterns in the Ottoman State heterogeneous in the extreme.

The governing of so heterogenous a state, in an age when a man's religion was his identifying mark, was made simpler by the fact that each major religious community was also a community in civil law. All Muslims, as members of the umma (the community of the Prophet), were subject to the religious law of Islam, and their disputes were judged in the Muslim courts. The non-Muslims were members of millets (religious communities), which had their own civil law for matters of personal status-marriage, divorce, property inheritance-and their own courts. The millets, from the time of Mehmed II on, were headed by clergymen whom the sultans confirmed as civil heads of their communities: the Greek Orthodox and Armenian millets under their respective patriarchs in Istanbul, the Jewish millet under the grand rabbi of the same city. The millet organizations were responsible not only for civil status and the judicial process but also for church property, worship, education, charity, and even for the collection of some taxes to be remitted to the central government.

At the head of the central government of this vast state was the sultan of the Ottoman dynasty. The ten sultans in the line from Osman to Suleyman, individuals differing greatly in character, were men of considerable, and in some cases conspicuous, ability. Each sultan had been given experience in military and civil affairs during his teenage years as a prince guided by a tutor and advisers. Contests for the succession among brothers were not uncommon. Once on the throne, the victor usually had any surviving brother killed; the cruelty of this fratricide was accepted by religious leaders and the public as justifiable, since it helped to avoid anarchy arising from disputes as to who was rightful ruler. The sultan was in theory absolute, accountable to no one but God, and restricted only by God's law, the seriat. In fact, he was often held in check by rebellion, or the threat of it, and sometimes by the religious men who interpreted the law for him, though they were subject to his dismissal. Yet Ottoman sultans had never abandoned the orf (right of pre-Islamic Turkish rulers to legislate) and therefore often issued kanuns (regulations

having the force of law).

Except when the sultan was away from the capital, most often on a campaign, he ruled from the New Palace, so called to distinguish it from the first palace built by Mehmed II on the present site of Istanbul University. Known today usually as Topkapi Sarayi, the New Palace was a series of garden-courts and buildings erected at various times-all rather modest for the ruler of so great a state but magnificently situated on the point overlooking the confluence of the Marmara, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporus. Topkapi Sarayi included kitchens, storerooms, ateliers, reception rooms, private quarters, and of course the harem-most of whose female inhabitants were servants of various kinds rather than favored imperial concubines. In the palace chamber called the Kubbealti (Under-Dome) the sultan's council, or divan, met several days a week. Its members included the top ranks of the various branches of officialdom. The chancellor and two chief treasurers were "men of the pen," from the hierarchies of bureaucrats who did the office work of government. The two chief judges, for Europe and Asia, "men of religion," represented the hierarchy of jurists who presided over Seriat courts in various judicial districts throughout

the realm. The grand vezir, who was the sultan's alter ego and presided over the divan, was a member of the state's most peculiar institution, the system of slave officials of the sultan.

Since the time of Mehmed II the slave administrators had become the most powerful segment of the Ottoman government. Seljuk rulers and early Ottoman sultans had had officials who were personal slaves known as gulams or kuls. They usually were young men taken as prisoners of war or bought in slave markets. Since no born Muslim should, under Islamic law, be enslaved, the slaves were of non-Muslim origin. In the time of Murad II the devsirme, a system of collecting Christian peasant boys from areas within the state, became regularized. Every few years an imperial commission selected boys between eight and twenty years of age, who were sent to Istanbul for screening and training. All were obliged to become Muslims; evidently most did so willingly. Strong ones of less intelligence became Janissaries. Those of highest ability were trained in Topkapi itself, in the Palace School. After a thorough education and apprenticeship they were assigned to palace posts, provincial governorships, or military commands. By merit the slaves could advance to the highest post in the state, that of grand vezir. For more than 200 years after Mehmed II the devsirme group thus controlled the pinnacle of central government. Sultans found two advantages in this system: they could counterbalance the influence of the old leading families, the natural aristocracy, through reliance on their own men, and they could demand complete personal obedience from the slaves. For though the slaves might gain power and wealth, their careers and their very lives were at the ruler's disposition. Their children, furthermore, as freeborn Muslims, could not follow in their fathers' careers.

In the sultan's divan the governor-general of Rumelia, the European half of the state, was also privileged to take a seat. He represented "men of the sword" other than the Janissaries, since he was commander of the provincial governors and ultimately of the cavalrymen who held local fiefs. Whenever conquered land had been incorporated into the state, it had been carefully surveyed. Great defters (registers) recorded population and economic production-the oldest now surviving in the Istanbul archives dates from 1431.Units of villages and farmlands were assigned as timars (fiefs) to cavalrymen according to the expected productivity and tax revenue. The local sipahi (horsemen) then lived on the revenues of his fief, kept order, carried out the sultan's regulations, and gave military service on campaigns. This system was particularly strong in the Balkans; later conquests in the Arab areas were put under administrators who were tax-farmers rather than cavalrymen.

All of the foregoing groups-men of the pen, men of religion, men of the sword-constituted, with their families, the upper level of Ottoman society, the so-called askeriye(military) class. They served faith and state, in the Ottoman formula. They paid no taxes. The bulk of the reaya (population) were peasants, nomadic herdsmen, artisans, merchants. They were the food growers, goods producers, and taxpayers. Transfer from one class to the other was possible, but infrequent. In Ottoman theory, each person had his designated place in society; the good order of society required that he remain there. Enforcing this was sometimes difficult. In the sixteenth century great numbers of villagers migrated to the cities, almost doubling the urban population and often causing economic and political problems. At various times then and later, the government would bar their entry or deport them back to the countryside.

Among townsmen, the craft guilds played a primary role, providing religious fellowship as well as economic status and protection. Tailors, tanners, tallow chandlers, taxidermists-each trade was organized as an esnaf (guild) . It conferred economic status, regulated employment, purchased and apportioned raw materials, oversaw standards of production and fairness of prices. Istanbul had about 150 major guilds. Collectively they could be a powerful political as well as economic influence. There were guilds of small merchants as well. The great merchants who participated in the flourishing inter- national trade-with the East via Egypt or Syria, with the Black Sea regions, and with the Italian city-states and western Europe-were often individually powerful and well connected with officials of high rank; such merchants were big investors, lenders, and accumulators of capital.

The state was not only Ottoman but thoroughly Islamic, the greatest among the Islamic states of its day (which included Morocco, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India). Ottoman sultans were leaders of the Muslim community; they were defenders of the faith, of the holy cities, and of the Sunni branch of Islam in particular. This orthodox Islam was taught and interpreted by the ulema, who were teachers, preachers, judges, and juris consults. In the sixteenth century the most prominent scholar among the ulema was Ebussuud, who worked out the codified accommodation of religious law and the sultan's kanuns. For thirty years he was the Seyhulislam (chief interpreter of the law). Law, theology, and other subjects were taught in the medreses (schools attached to major mosques); of these, the highest ranking were established in Istanbul by Mehmed II and Suleyman I adjacent to themosques they had also built and which bear their names.

Medreses, their libraries, adjacent kitchens, their teachers and students were usually supported by funds from property established as a vakif (religious foundation). Such property, legally dedicated in perpetuity for charitable purposes, was in theory God's and no longer subject either to ordinary taxation or to sale. In the Ottoman State, as in all Islamic lands, the institution of vakif played a major role in supporting works which, in modern times, are customarily financed by the public fisc. Mosques, medreses, libraries, hospitals, hospices, kitchens for the needy, public water fountains, even roads and bridges were built and maintained by foundations established by sultans, high officials, and other wealthy individuals. Some of the state's major architectural monuments owe their existence to vakifs. In the sixteenth century the master builder Sinan, a product of the devsirme who started life as a military engineer, created many of them. For thirty-five years as chief architect to Suleyman and his successor, Sinan dominated the age in his field as Ebussuud did in his. Sinan is reported to have built 304 structures, from Hungary to the Hijaz; the Mosque of Suleyman in Istanbul and the Mosque of Selim in Edirne rank among his greatest and finest.

There was a popular Islam as well as the orthodox Islam of the law and the learned ulema. Sufism, the more personal and mystical path to the knowledge of God, had greater appeal for many. The two varieties of Islam often intermixed; even Ebussuud harbored some Sufi tendencies. But the common popular expressions of this path to divine knowledge, the tarikats (dervish orders), espoused beliefs and modes of worship quite different from the austere theology and prayer ritual of strict orthodoxy. The Mevlevis (Whirling Dervishes) attracted many upper-class Ottomans to their search for direct ecstatic experience of God. Other orders, particularly the Bektasis, attracted many ordinary Turks in addition to more cultivated individuals. Eclectic in their beliefs, incorporating elements of shamanism and Christianity, the Bektasis tolerated wide variation in doctrines and practices. The Mevlevi and Bektasi orders, and others, had convents called tekkes, which were not only the residences of full-time dervishes, but the centers to which on occasion the thousands of lay brothers came.

Just as there were two Islams, so also there were in more general terms two cultures. The

true Ottoman wrote a Turkish intermixed with many words of Arabic and Persian origin, all embedded in a complex style that was incomprehensible to the ordinary Turk. Subtle elegance of expression, rather than simple clarity, was the usual objective. Poetry flourished-for the Ottomans, usually a poetry of a Persianate sort. Suleyman himself was known as an accomplished poet. Fuzuli of Baghdad was perhaps the most distinguished of the age. To an Ottoman, a "turk" was an uneducated, rather boorish and peasantlike fellow who spoke common Turkish and was illiterate. The Turk enjoyed mystical folk poetry of the dervishes, the love poetry of wandering minstrels, the professional storyteller, the shadow play.

All classes began to enjoy coffee, which invaded the state from the south by way of the Arab provinces in the mid-sixteenth century. At first condemned as a vice by many of the ulema (though not by Ebussuud), it conquered all, even the ulema. The coffeehouses of villages and town quarters became gathering places for the men, sometimes for rabble. This was sometimes the case also with the public bathhouses, which were a necessary part of life in every city and town, centers for social gathering of women (during women's hours) as well as of men. One bathhouse built by the rather Rabelaisian poet Gazali of Bursa became so notorious as a center for dissolute characters that Suleyman ordered it destroyed. Tobacco joined coffee as a companion vice, or pleasure, around 1600; in this age, it was smoked in long pipes or water pipes, the cigarette being a more recent invention. There were also the joys of nature-streams, shady groves, flowers. The tulip was much cultivated-it was from Turkey that the Dutch first imported it in 1559.

The Decline of the Ottoman State

Though the age of Suleyman was undoubtedly one of prosperity and military victory with a reasonably well-ordered society and a high level of culture, there was evidence of both social discontent and the beginning of economic and military problems. These became quite obvious in the last decade of the sixteenth century and increased during the seventeenth, so that Ottoman writers began to comment on the decline and to call for a return to the good order of the preceding golden age. Economic, military, social, administrative, and psychological problems, more clearly seen now by hindsight, interacted to produce the decline.

Economic difficulties stemmed in part from a massive inflation in the later sixteenth century

caused by the influx of cheap silver from the newly discovered mines of Peru. Prices of staples rose, hurting all who lived on fixed revenues and taxes, like cavalrymen, bureaucrats, judges, and beneficiaries of pious foundations. The Ottoman government, accustomed to stable currency and prices, had no idea what to do; when some sultans debased their own coinage it only forced prices up faster. Revenues failed to meet needs, even when taxes were sharply increased. Shortly thereafter Ottoman profits from Eastern trade fell off, as the East India Company and other European merchants found it cheaper to import goods from India and the Persian Gulf by the all-sea route around Africa. Meanwhile Ottoman manufactures suffered from competition with European goods that came into the state under low tariffs fixed by the capitulations-treaties of privilege and commerce granted by the sultans to European states-while Ottoman exports were

themselves subject to tax to raise revenues.

These economic problems helped to create an almost permanent financial crisis for the government just at a time when it needed greater cash income to pay new troops. Cavalrymen from the fiefs were less effective in an age of gunpowder, so a corps of infantrymen with muskets was built up, composed mostly of Anatolian peasants. Some fiefs were taken from cavalrymen and made into tax-farms to get cash. Other fiefs, however, were given to palace favorites or otherwise got into private hands. As the timar system broke down, fewer cavalrymen turned out for campaigns, partly because they could no longer afford the expense. Local order, entrusted to cavalrymen, was less well kept; this in its turn adversely affected agricultural production and revenues Such was also the case when the new tax collectors in the former fields tried to squeeze too much out of their peasants. Social discontent was exacerbated by such military-economic difficulties. The new infantry units of musketmen were often turned loose at the end of campaigns, no longer on the payroll. They then became brigand bands, principally in Anatolia. Their ranks were on occasion swelled by former timar-holders who had lost their fiefs In addition, there seems to have been a marked population increase during the sixteenth century, contributing to the number of landless peasants. Migration to the cities was one result. Another result was the further swelling of brigand bands who staged, in effect, a number of revolts-the so-called celali revolts of the 1590s and early 1600s-that the government suppressed only with the greatest difficulty. Curiously, at the time of rural overpopulation there seem also to have been increasing numbers of deserted villages and farms, perhaps owing to flight from plague, from extortionate taxation, and from marauding brigands.

One way of maintaining order in the provinces was to station Janissary units there. This was done, but the total result was not always beneficial. For the Janissary corps had begun to decline even as it was increased in size. First, Janissaries on active duty had been allowed to marry. Then their sons were allowed to enroll in the corps. Then other Turks, not products of the devsirme, became members. Having family ties, not just a simple loyalty to the sultan, Janissaries looked for more money, especially in the age of inflation. They could get pay increases by threats of revolt. Many also began to lead a double life, moonlighting at jobs in the city. When Janissary units were stationed in provincial cities to keep order, they continued in their new evil ways and often became part of an unruly local ruling clique, along with notables among the ulema and the esnafs. The breakdown of discipline in the Janissary corps reflected a breakdown in the whole slave-official system. Though the devsirme was continued through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, it produced fewer recruits. More and more sons of slave officials managed to insinuate themselves into official careers. Promotion by merit became less common, replaced by favoritism and corruption. This was true among the bureaucrats as well. The corruption involved buying and selling of official posts and favors, understandable in a time when government salaries failed to keep pace with inflated living costs, but still subversive of orderly government. Judges, too, became corrupt; one of the commonest complaints of would-be Ottoman reformers was that justice was a mockery when it was bought and sold. There were still able officials, even within a corrupted system, but they were probably fewer. The most outstanding were members of the Koprulu family who occupied the office of grand vezir many times between 1656 and 1710. It is tempting to blame the decline of the Ottoman administrative system on the sultans themselves. "The fish begins to stink at the head," said a much-quoted Turkish proverb. It is tempting even to single out one ruler, Selim II, known to his subjects as "Selim the Sot" for his overindulgence in Cyprus wine. But Selim II was not without ability. It was after his reign that the real problems of the sultanate developed, owing more to a change in the system of succession to the throne than to anything else. It formerly had been the practice that a sultan's sons be sent out into the provinces to gain military and administrative experience. It also had formerly been the custom that a newly enthroned sultan kill his surviving brothers, thereby eliminating possible con- tenders and fomenters of civil anarchy. In the early 17^th century both practices were changed. Princes were no longer exposed to firsthand experiences in the field, but were kept in special apartments in the palace known as the kafes (cage or lattice). Nor were brothers any longer routinely slain (though it still sometimes happened) by a newly acceded sultan, partly because Mehmed III (1595-1603) had had nineteen younger brothers killed at his accession; this wholesale slaughter turned opinion against the practice of fratricide. Ahmed I (1603-17) on his accession allowed his brother, Mustafa, to live on in the kafes. This became the custom. Thereafter, the oldest surviving male-uncle, brother, son-would succeed on a sultan's death. Mustafa I was twice placed on the throne (1617-18, 1622-23) and twice removed because he was mentally deficient. His retardation was originally not due to internment in the kafes, but the internment undoubtedly did not help him. Nor was it a help to any potential heir to the throne. The lack of practical experience, in addition to the debilitating life of confinement, produced some sultans who were incompetent, some who were simply disinterested in government, and some who were mentally unbalanced. On the whole, the seventeenth-century sultans were not a very able lot. Ahmed I was known for his piety but also for the lack of success of his armed forces. "Mad Mustafa," as he was called, was incompetent. Ibrahim (1640-48) was also incompetent and unbalanced. Mehmed IV, whose long reign (1648-87) began at a tender age, be- came known as the "Huntsman Sultan" because the chase rather than administration became his principal occupation. Two sultans were exceptions, in that they exhibited energy and ability. Osman II (1618-22), who had been only a few months in the kafes before accession, harbored thoughts of reform but was soon assassinated by the suspicious

Janissaries, whom he had wanted to replace with new levies of more effective and more

loyal forces. Murad IV (1623-40) was equally energetic and extraordinarily cruel in punishing malfeasance or disloyalty with instant execution. But these two were atypical in a period when power generally was exercised by court officials and palace cliques. Among the most influential politicians, for such in fact they were, were a number of women of the imperial harem. Kosem Mahpeyker, mother of Murad IV and of Ibrahim, and Hadice Turhan, mother of Mehmed IV, were effectively the real rulers of the Ottoman State for considerable periods.

The weakness in the sultanate and the economic and social difficulties of the period following Suleyman might have been less injurious to the Ottoman State in the long run had there not been also an intellectual or psychological metamorphosis. Considerable numbers of ulema, backed by many of the uneducated and by poor medrese students, inveighed increasingly against innovation. A pride in Islamic achievement, combined with a strict interpretation of the Koran, worked especially against borrowing new concepts or techniques from the Christian West. There were always learned men among the Ottoman ulema, and always some who sought European knowledge in this field or that, but Ottoman Islam seems to have become generally more ingrowing and less absorptive than it had been in the early days. This prejudice-that innovation was blasphemous-spread at an unfortunate time, when western Europeans were making strides in geographic discovery, rational thought, scientific investigation, technology, and manufacture. The gap between East and West was widening; it made Ottoman decline more dangerous in the

face of relative Western superiority.

It was in warfare that the gap first became excruciatingly obvious. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Ottoman armies were less easily and less often victorious than before. Ahmed I, for example, was faced with simultaneous wars on two fronts, something that the sultans had always sought to avoid. He fought a long intermittent war against Shah Abbas I of Iran and in some of the same years fought the Austrian Hapsburg. His Iranian war was a losing proposition in the long run; his Austrian war more nearly a draw, at the end of which, in the Treaty of Zsitvatorok (1606), he had to acknowledge for the first time that the Hapsburg ruler was his equal-emperor, not just king. Ahmed's naval strength was in decline, while the Barbary corsairs ceased to obey him and independently operated out of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. At the same time fleets of small Cossack ships came down the Russian rivers and raided in the Black Sea; in 1614 they burned Sinop, though they were later defeated at the mouth of the Don. In 1621 Osman II embarked on an ill-conceived Polish campaign partly because of Cossack raids from the Polish frontier. The war was unpopular; the unenthusiastic Ottoman forces performed indifferently at best. Wars such as these were costly to support and were not compensated by booty or new taxable territory. Even the victorious campaigns in the seventeenth century, which gained Podolia from Poland and the island of Crete from its Venetian masters, exhibited neither

the old elan of the sixteenth-century armies nor a military and naval establishment rejuvenated by new Western techniques.

In 1683 it seemed for a moment that this situation might be reversed. A vast Ottoman army marched to besiege Vienna for the second time. But the siege was broken by a Hapsburg victory, aided by Polish forces. It was not simply that the Turks voluntarily retired, as they had done in 1529; they were driven into retreat. The continuing warfare brought Venice and Russia also into the anti-Turkish coalition. When peace was finally made at Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans had to abandon all of Hungary and Transylvania and were back at Belgrade on the Danube. The Russians under Peter the Great had gained Azov, their first appearance on the shores of the Black Sea. Even Venice, a declining power, had been able to seize the Morea. This was the first great Ottoman retreat from Christian lands they had earlier conquered and ruled. It gave a somewhat bitter flavor to the epithet "ever victorious" that was incorporated into the tugra (official signature) of each Ottoman sultan.

Though it was weakened from within and without, the Ottoman State still was far from total collapse. In the first half of the reign of Ahmed III (1703-30) some territories were regained. Azov was retroceded by the Russians in 1711 at the end of a short war that the Turks had entered as a result of urging by Charles XII of Sweden, who had been allowed refuge in Ottoman lands after a defeat by Peter the Great. The Morea, whose Greek Orthodox inhabitants chafed under a Roman Catholic government and sought the rule of Muslim Turks again, was reconquered from Venice. The one significant loss of these years was Belgrade, yielded up in 1718 to the Austrian Hapsburg by the Treaty of Passarowitz and regained by the Turks only in 1739.

In the time of Ahmed III the atmosphere in the Ottoman State seemed to change, at least superficially. The first man of the pen to become grand vezir took office in 1703. The grand vezir's residence, the Sublime Porte (Bab-i Ali), in the eighteenth century began to rival the palace as the center of government. The change in atmosphere was especially marked in the years of peace following 1718, when the sultan gained a reputation for avoiding war and cultivating luxurious tastes. In these pursuits he was vigorously aided by his grand vezir, Nevsehirli Ibrahim Pasa, who had married a daughter of the sultan, one of Ahmed's thirty-one children. Festivities celebrating his sons' circumcisions and his daughters' marriages were frequent in his reign. Nedim, the poet laureate of his day, expressed the new tone with his familiar line, "Let us laugh, let us play, let us enjoy the world to the full." The pleasure seeking of Ahmed's court was often directed into artistic channels. Music, poetry, and literature were cultivated. Five libraries were established in Istanbul, and Nedim was put in charge of the sultan's own. Growing tulips became a craze, which has given to the last twelve years of Ahmed's reign the name of Lale Devri, the Tulip Period. Some of the new inspiration of the time came from the West, either directly or by way of the Greek community of the Fener quarter of Istanbul. The Ottoman ambassador Yirmisekiz Mehmed Celebi was sent to Paris to investigate French institutions that might be useful for the state. The most important innovation was the establishment of the first Turkish printng press in 1724 by Ibrahim Muteferrika, originally a Hungarian; the ulema agreed to sanction it if secular works alone were printed. A fire brigade of pumpers was organized in Istanbul by a French convert to Islam. There was some interest in

Western military techniques, not seriously pursued until later, although in the 1730s aFrench renegade, Count Bonneval, turned Ahmed Pas,a, helped reorganize the bombardiers.

There was, however, no major transformation in the Tulip Period. The superficial westernisms, though they affected court tastes and some of the architecture of the period, did not penetrate deeply. In fact, popular antagonism was aroused against Frankish manners at a time when there were economic hardship and new rural migration from villages to lstanbul. When Ahmed III'S military weakness was revealed in a losing campaign on the Iranian frontier in 1730, a revolt in Istanbul led by Patrona Halil, a junk dealer and Janissary associate, expressed the popular indignation. Grand Vezir Ibrahim was sacrificed to the mob, and Ahmed III abdicated. So ended the Tulip Period and its somewhat liberal atmosphere.

Throughout the next half-century there were intermittent attempts to profit from Western knowledge and techniques. But the "long peace" lasting from 1739 to 1768 resulted in more complacency and in less military rebuilding and reform than was needed. Peripheral provinces continued to slip from effective central control the North African provinces were long gone into almost independent corsair hands, while Egypt, Irak, Lebanon, and many tribal areas oozed from the sultan's grasp into the control of local strongmen. In Anatolian and Rumelian provinces ayans (local notables), professing allegiance to the Ottoman Dynasty, were still on occasion able to defy or disregard the sultan's authority. War with Russia from 1768 to 1774, and particularly the treaty that concluded it, ended Ottoman complacency. Though both sides fought poorly, the Russians won the final campaign. The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774 sealed the Ottoman defeat with consequences felt ever after. The Crimea was detached from Ottoman control and made independent. Russia gained a strategic coastal strip to the north of the Black Sea, her first

permanent foothold there. For the first time Russian ships were allowed to trade freely in that sea, through the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and in all Ottoman ports. A permanent Russian embassy in Istanbul and Russian consulates throughout the Ottoman State were permitted. In a few years Catherine II annexed the Crimea and seized more Black Sea coast; after renewed war the Porte was also obliged to recognize this in 1792. The Russian advances served to spur Ottoman efforts at reform, first of all reform of the military establishment.

The Era of Ottoman Reform

Between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, the Ottoman government initiated many changes, all in the direction of westernization. The process of changing established ways was inherently difficult. Progress was also hindered and interrupted by two parallel sets of events: a series of foreign attacks, many of which resulted in loss of Ottoman territory, and a series of risings among minority peoples of the state who sought self-government or independence. Napoleon's invasion of the province of Egypt in 1798 made it clear that even the central parts of the Ottoman realm were not immune from foreign attack. Thereafter, the Turks fought four wars against Russia (1806-12, 1828-29, 1853-56, 1877-78), only one of which - the Crimean War of the 1850s- resulted in victory; in each of the others, Russia gained Ottoman territory. France seized Algeria in 1830 and Tunis in 1881; Britain occupied Cyprus in 1878 and Egypt in 1882; Austria took Bosnia in 1908; and Italy seized Tripoli (Libya) in 1911. Finally, in 1912-13 a coalition of Balkan principalities took from the state all its remaining European territory except the region immediately surrounding lstanbul. Over the same period

Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Albania had gained independence,

while among Armenians and Arabs of the state there were also nationalist stirrings. Under

such conditions reform was difficult and the progress made was fitful rather than steady.

Yet war and rebellion were also added spurs to reform. By the early twentieth century the

cumulative effects of the reform efforts were enormous.

Westernization and Reform of the 1800's

Abdulhamid I (1774-89) had attempted some measures of military reorganization, but it was his successor Selim III (1789-1807) who plunged wholeheartedly into the effort. Despite fifteen years in the kafes, Selim had acquired some knowledge of govern- mental affairs and also of Europe. On ascending the throne, he asked his top advisers for memoranda on needed reforms and then began to improve Ottoman weapos, military organization, and technical military schools. In the process, the door to Western influence was opened wider than it had ever been. Several hundred Europeans were in Ottoman employ, many of them French. Some Western styles, even some secular concepts, began to penetrate the top levels of Ottoman society. The first porcelain works were established in lstanbul. The printing press, which had been closed in 1742, was again set to work producing books about military and other useful matters. Selim's major project was to recruit and train fresh troops for a modern army more efficient than the corrupt Janissaries. The new recruits were equipped with imported guns, uniformed in tight red breeches and blue berets, and drilled by instructors with Western experience. But a combination of reactionary forces, Janissaries and ulema among them, threatened Selim. He lost his nerve and yielded, disbanding his new corps of 20,000 in 1807. The reactionaries deposed Selim anyway. Had he resisted, he might have been able to go on to further westernization. Instead, traditional prejudice and vested interest triumphed against the perceived threats of innovation and godless French influence.

Mahmud II (1808-39), a determined reformer, had to be cautious at the start because of the strength of the reactionaries. He was also plagued by Greek and Serb revolts and by the rebellion of the ambitious Muhammed Ali, governor of Egypt. Finally, in 1826 Mahmud completed plans to rid himself of the Janissary danger by retraining the old corps, unit by unit, in modern tactics. Though the Janissary command had approved the plan, the corps again revolted. Then Mahmud, unlike Selim, gathered all available loyal forces, even arming theological students in the medreses, and crushed the rebels. Eight executioners thereafter worked for weeks carrying out orders of courts-martial. The Janissary corps was abolished after this "auspicious event," as Turks call it, and a new westernized army was slowly built up. The Prussian army captain Helmuth von Moltke was secured as military adviser; the Italian composer Giuseppe Donizetti was hired to train military musicians; the American master shipbuilder Henry Eckford was brought from New York to produce the world's finest frigates in Istanbul dockyards. Western methods, Western books, sometimes Western instructors appeared in the new military academy and military medical school. The French language became the usual vehicle for transfer of new ideas and techniques, as more and more Ottoman officers, diplomats, and bureaucrats learned it. Those fluent in French began to-constitute a new westernized elite in the Ottoman government.

The central government itself was reshaped by Mahmud. He abolished old sine- cures and established the first Western-style ministries: war, foreign affairs, interior, treasury. He deprived the ulema of some official functions. He founded the fir gazette, the Moniteur Ottomane, soon followed by its Turkish counterpart, Takvim-i Vekayi, which represents the start of Turkish journalism. Mahmud's most w move was to oblige his officials to give up flowing robes and turbans for black the stambouline (istanbulin) frock coat, and the fez. As its use spread, that conical red felt cap became the symbol first of the new bureaucracy, then of Ottoman subjects generally. What Mahmud did was often superficial. The fez did not guarantee Western thought processes in the head that wore it. Mahmud nevertheless launched his country firmly in the course of westernizing reform and reestablished the power of the central administration not only as the governing but as the reforming agency.

His successor, Abdulmecid I (1839-61), pursued a similar policy under the urging of Res,id Pas,a, a westernizing French speaker who was first a diplomat, then foreign minister, then grand vezir. The imperial edict of 1839 that Resid inspired, the Hatt-i Serif of Gulhane, set the tone of Ottoman affairs for the next forty years, a period known as the Tanzimat-te Ordering. It promised reforms in conscription, taxation, and justice; further, it promised that reforms would apply equally to all in the state, regardless of religion. This was a big step toward secularism, toward thinking of each individual as an Ottoman subject rather than as a member of a millet.

From 1840 to 1871 Resid Pasa and two of his disciples, Ali Pas,a and Fuad Pasa, pushed ahead with reforms whenever circumstances allowed. A scheme of secular education, patterned on French models, was elaborated; the most famous of the schools established was the Galatasaray lycee, where instruction was in French. Commercial and penal law codes were recast, also on French models, though the reformers dared not touch the Islamic law of personal status. A revised system of provincial administration, the vilayet (province) system, copied many aspects of France's organization by departments. These and other secular, westernizing changes were superimposed on the traditional society; in some cases two sorts of institutions existed side by side the old medreses and the new Western schools, traditional religious law and courts and modern secular law and courts. For some Ottoman subjects the changes were confusing, for others they were abhorrent, and for others they were insufficient. Among the critics of the Tanzimat reformers were journalists writing for the news- papers that began to burgeon in the 1860s and 1870s. Some journalists, along with some government officials, were members of a group calling themselves the Yeni Osmanlilar (New Ottomans). They criticized Abdulaziz (1861-76) as irresponsible and authoritarian and demanded a parliament to curb autocracy. Discovered in conspiracy, the most prominent New Ottomans had to flee to Paris. Namik Kemal, the writer whose fiery play Vatan (Fatherland) still awakens patriotic sentiments a century after its first performance in I 873, is the most renowned of the group.

A Balkan crisis in 1875-76 gave reformers, including some of the New Ottomans, a chance to get their parliament. Abdulaziz was deposed, and the leaders of the coup enthroned Abdulhamid II (1876- 1909) only after he promised support for a constitution. A comission headed by Midhat Pasa, one of the leaders of the coup, and including Namik Kemal, then hammered out a constitution. It was promulgated on December 23, 1876. Thereafter elections were held for the chamber of deputies, and two sessions of the new parliament took place in 1877 and early 1878. But when the deputies became too critical of Abdulhamid, he dismissed the chamber and called no new elections for thirty years.

For those thirty years Abdulhamid ruled as an autocrat. He became increasingly fearful and oppressive, censoring the press, forbidding meetings, relying on spies to ferret out opposition. Ottoman intellectuals led two lives, one open, one secret; proscribed works and anti-Hamidian poems circulated from hand to hand. Abdulhamid was, however, not unpopular with the masses. He emphasized religiosity, called himself caliph of all Muslims, and pushed building the Hijaz railway from Damascus to the holy city of Medina. He was progressive in a technical sense, for he encouraged expansion of the telegraph and railway lines that had first come to Turkey during the Crimean War-the Baghdad Railway is the major example. He also continued to build the army with the advice of a German military mission. But inevitably the political and intellectual repression bred opposition. This time the opposition was led by the Young Turks, as they often called themselves, who wanted the constitution restored. A secret society, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), grew up among younger officers, officials, and writers. Some were exiled and had to flee, smuggling propaganda back into the state from Europe. Cells of opposition also sprang up among army officers, especially in the Salonica region, and they were in touch with the CUP members in Paris. In the summer of 1908 some army units began revolting, and the CUP leaders in Salonica demanded by telegraph that Abdulhamid restore the constitution. Frightened, he yielded on July 24, calling new elections.

The news that the constitution would be restored brought Ottoman citizens pouring out into the streets amid unbelievable scenes of rejoicing and fraternization. Many were not sure what "constitution" meant, but all seemed sure that a new day of liberty had arrived. In a way, it had. The press was now free; newspapers, political comment, cartoons flourished. Exiles returned from abroad. Elections were held, and the first session of parliament opened in December 1908. The new regime survived an attempted counterrevolution by disgruntled common soldiers and political reactionaries in April 1909; loyal CUP troops from Salonica suppressed the rising. Since Abdulhamid seemed to have been involved in the counterrevolution, the chamber decided that he must be deposed. For the first time in history an elected body dismissed a sultan of the line of Osman. Abdulhamid's successor, Mehmed v (1909-18), furthermore, was permitted only to be a figurehead. The Ottoman house still reigned, but it no longer ruled.

In the next half-dozen years the political life of the Ottoman State was anything but smooth. The parliament was usually dominated by the CUP, which finally became an open political party. Opponents, especially the Liberals, felt that the Unionists, as cup members were called. were in their turn becoming too authoritarian. By 1913 this certainly was true. Enver Pasa, a Unionist hero of 1908 and now minister of war, and Talat Pasa, minister of the interior, were the dominant government figures. The Unionist domination came at a time of external crisis, when Italy had made war for Tripoli and when the Balkan principalities also had attacked. Some 200,000 Turkish refugees from the Balkans flooded into Istanbul. Ethnically, the shrinking state was perforce becoming less heterogeneous and more Turkish. Ideologically, this also began to be true. The egalitarian Ottomanism of the Tanzimat period was giving way to a greater emphasis on Turkishness. The most prominent advocate of Turkishness was Ziya Gokalp, a sociologist and popular writer. For Turks, he insisted, culture must be Turkish. The traditional Persianate-Arabic-Islamic culture and the nineteenth-century Europeanized culture were artificial, "like flowers raised in hothouses." Ziya would abandon neither Islam nor the best aspects of European civilization but maintained that they would have to contribute to and merge into a basic Turkishness.

Then, largely through Enver's negotiation of a secret anti-Russian alliance with Germany, the Ottoman State became engulfed in the Great War of 1914. During the four-year ordeal Turkish armies fought on several fronts, usually on the defensive. On only one front were they clearly victorious. This was the defense of Gelibolu and the Dardanelles in 1915 against an Anglo-French attack trying to break through to Istanbul. In 1916 an Arab revolt, supported by the British, began in the Hijaz. By the time of the armistice on October 30, 1918, all the Syrian and Iraki conquests of Selim I and Suleyman had been torn from Ottoman rule. The war also ended the Unionist regime, whose leaders fled abroad. British, French, Italian, and Greek occupation forces controlled strategic areas, including Istanbul and the straits. The new sultan, Mehmed VI (1918-22), was not popular and hardly of leadership caliber. There was an atmosphere of despair. Meanwhile, Allied statesmen dictated to the Ottoman government the Treaty of Sevres,

signed on August 10,1920. It confirmed the total dismemberment of the Ottoman domain,

leaving only central Anatolia under unrestricted Turkish sovereignty and imposing foreign

control in various areas, including a Greek zone around Izmir.

The Ottoman Impact on Europe

There is much evidence that during the 15th and 16th centuries the peasant populations of the Balkans and central Hungary often welcomed and frequently assisted the Ottoman advance. The explanation lies in the more primitive and less exacting character of Turkish feudalism in comparison with its European counterpart. The methods and attitudes of the hereditary gentry and nobility of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia in the 15th century and of Hungary in the 16th were distinguished from those current in central and western Europe only by a greater degree of brutality. Ottoman feudalism, in contrast, was based on the social institution of the timar, an uninheritable fief made over to the sipahi, the mounted warrior, in return for his services in war. From the point of view of the peasants the advantages of this system were considerable....

The uninheritable character of the timar,...made the Ottoman sipahi far less interested than

his Christian counterpart in making increased provision for his descendants by such practices as rackrenting.

There was therefore less opportunity and incentive for landlords to practice extreme exploitation than in European feudalism. They were further inhibited, at least until the seventeenth century, by the absence of manorial courts on the western model. Judicial administration was monopolized by a watchful and omnipotent central government whose agents at all levels were usually slaves of Balkan origin who retained a residual loyalty to and compassion for the village societies from which they sprang...

Certainly the child tribute exacted from the remote regions of the western Balkans, which maintained the manpower of the imperial household and the janissary corps from the 15^th century until it discontinuation in 1638, occasioned comparatively little resentment. This is understandable if we contrast the conditions and opportunities of life in the royal training establishments of Constantinople with the miseries and privations of Bosnian and Albanian

village existence.

If the condition of the peasantry in the Turkish-occupied Balkan and Danubian lands deteriorated in the course of the 16th century, it probably remained--with the exception of central Hungary, which was exposed to particular afflictions--superior to that of the serfs

in most Christian states of eastern and central Europe.

Especially notable, when contrasted with the missionary passion and sectarian intolerance

of contemperory Europe, was the very high degree of religious toleration accorded to their

alien subjects. Islamization proceeded slowly in the Balkans, where the process of conversion seems to have been linked much more closely to the considerations of private social or economic advantage--particularly the anticipation of freedom for the convert from certain forms of taxation or obligatory government service-- than to any strenous proselytizing policy followed by the Ottoman administrators. On the other hand, the very absence of an energetic policy of conversion perpetuated a gulf in religious sensibility and practice between Christian subjects and Moslem rulers. This fundamental lack of sympathy and contact between the two groups, 'who met', according to one historian, 'only in vice', was to prove in the long run, fatal to the Turkish prospects of establishing their power permanently in south-eastern Europe.

Visions, which may still be current in popular imagination, of the Christian peoples of the Balkans languishing in total and hopeless subjection to bloodthirsty conquerors are the products either of the propaganda put out at the time by the spokesmen for 'crusading' interests, notably the Hapsburgs and the papacy, or of a modern tendency to impose on the sixteenth century a picture of the situation derived from the very different conditions of the nineteenth, when the dying Ottoman Empire was desperately seeking to stamp out the flames of Balkan nationalism. These are grotesque caricatures of the truth. Yet recent historians, rightly searching for a more balanced verdict, have perhaps allowed themselves to be over-impressed by the evidence that in many areas the Turks were welcomed as liberators rather than feared as aggressors.

The impression of the Turks current among the sixteenth-century Europeans varied from class to class and from country to country. We have seen how the Turks were frequently welcomed as liberators by Balkan peasants and GREEK ISLANDERS. But these were populations belonging to cultures which were already half-eastern in character, habituated over generations to the proximity of the Ottoman empire and subject to severe economic exploitation by their European masters. Echoes of their readiness to accept Ottoman rule were heard in some towns in mainland Italy, in Ancona in 1480 and in Ravenna during the early sixteenth century, when a deputy from the city told Cardinal Giulio Medici, the papal legate: "Monsignore, if the Turk comes to Ragusa we will put ourselves in his hands.' This was a desparate final resort of medieval communal patriotism in the face of the centralizing policy of the Renaissance popes. In general, as one moved westwards into the heartlands of European society the Ottomans became increasingly the object of loathing and fear. The apparently irresistable progress of their arms contributed to the profound and superstitious pessimism which marked the popular psychology of the age...

It was, indeed, as a crowning tribulation willed by a wrathful God upon backsliding

Christian peoples that Martin Luther, who knew better than most how to play on the fears

and bewilderment of a mass audience, pictured the Turks in his War Sermon of 1529....

The reaction of many influential and articulate men was equally emotional. Authors and clerics revived and refurbished the diatribes against the infidel which had characterized the period of the Crusades. The Turks, it was argued, were beyond the pale, not merely of Christianity but of civilization itself. Cardinal Bessarion, writing to the doge of Venice after the fall of Constantinople, set the tone for a century of abuse:

A city which was so flourishing...the splendour and glory

of the East... the refuge of all good things, has been

captured, despoiled, ravaged and completely sacked by the

most inhuman barbarians...by the fiercest of wild beasts..Much

danger threatens Italy, not to mention other lands, if the

violent assaults of the most ferocious barbarians are not checked.

The tradition was maintained and extended to a popular audience during the sixteenth century buy the crude war propaganda of Bartholomew Georgievich of Croatia, whose best-selling 'Miseries and Tribulations of the Christians held in Tribute and Slavery by the Turks' (1544) appeared in many editions and numerous languages....

Medieval writers had been able, with no sense of absurdity, to envisage 'the World's Debate' as a conflict between Islam on the one hand and the 'common corps of Christiandom' on the other. 'Christendom', had always been a term more expressive of ideals and aspirations than of realities. The political and religious developments of the 15^th and 16th centuries finally drained it of significance. Not only was the term empty; worse, it was embarassing......

This transition from 'Christendom' to 'Europe' from a religious to a secular term of identification, did not involve the elimination of the Christian element. Profession of the Christian element was still a necessary--and in th eyes of the most people much the most important--part of being European. The real extent of the change can perhaps best be conveyed by recalling the title of the first volume in the series of which this book forms a part. Professor Trevor-Roper's theme was 'The Rise of Christian Europe'. Turkish pressure during the late 15th and 16th centuries stimulated a process of self-examination which led members of the societies concerned increasingly to identify themselves and to distinguish themselves from the Ottoman enemy by reference to the second rather than the first term of Professor Trevor-Roper's equation.

A small number of level-headed commentators refused to join in the general chorus of European denunciation of the Turks. Most of these were diplomats who had crossed the frontiers of the Ottoman world and had seen for themselves, or scholars capable of making a dispassionate study of the development and structure of the Turkish empire. Notable among them was Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperail ambassador at Constantinople from 1554 to 1562, who wrote with open admiration of the Ottoman military and administrative system:

It is by merit that men rise in the service, a system which

ensures that posts should be assigned only to the competent..

Those who receive the highest offices from the Sultan are for the

most part the sons of shepherds or herdsmen, and so far from

being ashamed of their parentage, they actually glory in it,

and consider it a matter of boasting that they owe nothing to

the accident of birth; for they do not believe that high

qualities are either natural or hereditary, nor do they think

that they can be handed down from father to son, but that they

are partly the gift of God, and partly the result of good

training, great industry, and unwearied zeal...Among the Turks,

therefore, honours, high posts, and judgeships are the rewards

of great ability and good service...

This is the reason that they are succesful in their undertakings,

that they lord it over others, and are daily extending the

bounds of their empire. These are not our ideas, with us

there is no opening left for merit; birth is the standard for

everything; the prestige of birth is the sole key to advancement

in the public service.

Machievelli had accustomed Europeans to regard war as a natural relationship between states and to venerate the martial practices of the ancients. His humanist successors singled out the Ottoman military arrangements for special praise. Paolo Giovio in his 'Turcicarum Rerum Commentarius' of 1539 wrote: 'Their military discipline has such justice and severity as easily to surpass the ancient Greeks and Romans.'

In contrast, it was the quality of Ottoman civil administration which impressed the French dimplomat, Phillipe du Fresne-Canaye.... For Jean Bodin, whose 'Six Books of the Republic' (1576) was composed during the bitterest phase of the French Wars of Religion, toleration was the chief Turkish claim to admiration and respect:

The King of the Turks, who rules over a great part of Europe,

safeguards the rites of religion as well as any prince in this

world. Yet he constrains no one, but on the contrary permits

everyone to live according as his conscience dictates. What is

more, even in his seraglio at Pera he permits the practice of

four diverse religions, that of the Jews, the Christian

according to the Roman rite, and according to the Greek rite, and

that of Islam.

There are elements of exaggeration and misinformation in these panegyrics. Commentators

like Busbecq and Bodin were perhaps more concerned to promote reforms at home than

to provide a wholly accurate picture of Ottoman customs. They represented nevertheless

an important section of minority opinion which refused to be stampeded into conventional

hysterical abuse.......

All empires are to some extent plunder machines, but few have matched the

thouroughness and deliberation with which the Ottomans pursued this objective. And in

none has the assimilation and employment of alien manpower been carried to such

lengths.....

Khurrem, the favorite wife of Suleiman the Magnificant and mother of Selim II, was a

south Russian. Selim II's favorite consort came from a Greek family of Corfu....

The Turks practiced a high degree of religious toleration, whereas European governments did not. The Turkish military and economic systems provided men of obscure origin with avenues of rapid social and political advancement, whereas Europe did not. The Ottoman empire was a lavish provider of booty for daring and resourceful employees. This attractive power was recognized and understood by European contemperories....

In 1573 a French nobleman, Phillipe du Fresen-Canaye, accompanied the ambassador, Francois de Noailles, to Constantinople...Du Fresne was present at a review of the new fleet before its departure to action stations in the Aegean. From his account it is evident that the master planner was the Grand Vizier, Mehemet Sokolli, himself a slave of Bosnian Christian origins. The details of constructing, provisioning and manning the galleys were entrusted to the newly appointed Grand Admiral or 'Pasha of the Sea', Ucchiali, sometime viceroy of Algiers. When the armada sailed it was commanded by Piali, the 'Second Pasha'. The rearguard squadron was commanded by Hassan Agha, treasurer and paymaster of the fleet. Ucchiali was a Calabrian, Piali a Hungarian and Hassan a Venetian renegade....

To 'turn Turk' did not necessarily mean the end of all friendly contact with one's homeland.

The correspondance, preserved in the State Archives of Genoa, of Battista Ferrari, 'agent'

of the republic in Constantinople from 1562 to 1567, includes for the year 1564 alone

detailed reports on Ottoman diplomatic activity and naval preparations from 'Mocat Aga',

"Mostaffa Rais', and 'Ferrato Beij', all three renegade Genoese in the sultan's service. Some renegades returned to Europe after a period in Ottoman pay....

Refugees provided a second stream of European emigration into Turkish society. The moriscos, the forcibly converted Moorish New Christians of Spain, fled in considerable numbers to the NOrth African pirate kingdoms. But the most important refugee group was that of the Iberian Jews. The career of one of these, Joseph Nasi, is worth following in some detail...

The religious bigotry of the Iberian powers found expression during the late 15th century in a policy of expulsion and enforced conversion. Joseph Nasi was born about 1520 into a family of Jewish merchants and physicians who were expelled from Spain in 1492 and underwent forcible conversion in Lisbon in 1497. The establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal...decided the widowed matriarch Gracia Nasi to remove...Joseph to Antwerp. Joseph became a wealthy and respected businessman...He was knighted by Charles V and befriended by Charles' nephew, the future Emperor Maximilian II. A revival of racial prejudice and increasing suspicion that the Christian professions of the Nasi family were more formal that sincere obliged them to migrate to Venice in 1544....to Constantinople in 1553. Joseph joined them.. and immediately declared himself a convert to Judaism. In the years which followed he became famous as a merchant specializing in the wine trade, as a trusted diplomatic advisor to the Ottoman government and a lavish patron of Hebrew literary circles in Constantinople and Salonika...A period of considerable influence and power opened with the accession of his friend and patron Selim II to the throne in 1566. Selim named him the Duke of Naxos, a fief which comprised a cluster of a dozen Aegean islands of considerable commercial and some strategic importance. He built up a network of diplomatic and commercial contacts in Poland, Moldavia and Wallachia. Selim later

granted him the monopoly of wine imports to Constantinople. At court he was a prominent

member of the war party which maitained the tradition of Khaireddin Barbarossa, preaching ceaseless hostility against all Catholic Mediterranean powers. He aspired to the throne of Cyprus when Ottoman forces invaded the island in 1570.

Joseph Nasi's influence waned after the conclusion of peace with Venice in 1573 and the death of Selim in 1574, when he retired... His role of courtier, businessman and foreign policy adviser was promptly assumed by another Jew, a refugee of German origin, Solomon Nathan Ashkenazi, Allaman Oglu to Turkish chroniclers. But the tide of Ottoman favor was running out for European Jewish refugees...Their ascendancy had depended on two advantages which they brought with them to Constantinople; continuing contacts with friends, relations and commercial agents..and possession of certain technical and financial skills...

As the years passed, the closeness of their European contacts and hence the accuracy and reliability of their information deterioriated. Simultaneously, in the great towns and the agricultural supply centres of the empire Greek merchants of Orthodox Christian faith challenged and during the 17th century overthrew the Jewish monopoly of banking andmoney-lending. The Jewish community declined into subordinate status as craftsmen,

shopkeepers, pawnbrokers and quack doctors. The subject peoples of the Balkans were

acquiring for themselves the skills which had enabled the refugees of European origin to

perform in the Ottoman empire....

Ottomans created the modern civilization of religious tolerance and multi-ethnic,

multi-religious societies and saved Europe from the narrowminded intolerant barbarity of

the Middle Ages.

THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE

..no analysis of the temporary incapacity for further European conquest which overtook the formidable Turkish war machine and imperial system from the death of Suleiman the

Magnificant to the middle of the 17th century can entirely neglect the evident decline in the

personal qualities of the line of Ottoman sultans....

In Europe, the growth of bureacracy enabled many a state of the 17th and 18th centuries

to survive without serious consequences the worst eccentricities of kings who were

madmen or minors....

The central importance of slavery in the Ottoman military and administrative system placed

enormous powers and responsibilities of decision-making in the monarch's hands. The

strongest Grand Vizier was still a creature of the sultan....

In 1569 a Turkish expeditionary force penetrated as far as Astrakhan and began to construct a canal connecting the Don with the Volga. But Russian resistance at Astrakhan, the reluctance of the Crimean Tartars to cooperate with Ottoman troops in an enterprise which, if succesful, would have hemmed in the wide ranging Tartars as never before, and the deserted countryside itself, which made living off the land impracticable, combined to inflict a heavy defeat on the Turks. Of the 30,000 men who sailed from Constantinople in 1569 only 7,000 returned next spring...

The year 1570 signifies the temporary exhaustion of Ottoman capacity for expansion both

in Danubian and Pontic Europe....Expansion on these eastern borders did not

cease....even more impressive were the Turkish conquests in Azerbaijan and

Georgia....Azerbaijan was already Moslem and the local landowners and tribal chieftains

were not superseded; while Georgia remained under its Christian rulers in a condition of

suzerainty analogous to that of the principality of Transylvania......

Under Selim II (1566-74) a quota was established for admission of janissaries' sons to the

muster rolls; and in 1638 Sultan Murad IV finally abolished the traditional method of

recruitment to the imperial slave household through child tribute exacted from the villages

of the western Balkans. This enactment gave legal recognition to an already accomplished

fact. The sons of office holders had for a long time been seeping into the priviliged ranks of

the royal household; all available posts could be filled without the necessity of recourse to

forcible recruitment from remote Balkan villages.

This evolution of Ottoman institutions conspicously favoured urban populations at the

expense of the peasants in the heartlands of the empire. While a majority of the ruling

caste was drawn from enslaved village boys vestigial sympathy for the peasant population

from which they sprang held townsmen and the landlord class in check. No such

charitable sentiments affected the conduct of officials who had grown up in towns and

entered the royal slave household through family influence or the purchase of office....

A wide gap thus opened between town and country. Village populations became alienated

from the Ottoman establishment....

The strain imposed upon Ottoman institutions by the cessation of territorial expansion and

the decline in booty income produced a long series of disturbances and palace revolution

in Constantinople, usually inspired by the janissaries and other household troops or by the

students and officials of the religious establishments of the city.

The earliest sign of a reviving appetite for wars of agression against Europeans came in the

Mediterranean in 1645, when the Ottomans invaded Crete, one of the most jealously

guarded remaining outposts of the republic of Venice. Turkish troops quickly cleared the

Venetians from the island, but their failure to take the citadel of Candia entangled both

sides in a long and painful siege war. The unimpressive military performance of the

Ottoman forces in the early stages of the Cretan campaign has diverted the attention of

most historians from one incidental development of far-reaching importance. Resistance

was offered only by the Venetian garrison, which was supplied and reinforced from the

mother-city. The Greek islanders at first welcomed the Turks as liberators from the

oppressive rule of Roman Catholic Italians; then in succeeding years, they began to

undergo conversion to Islam in substantial numbers.

This was a startling reversal of Ottoman experience during the sixteenth century. With the

exception of the forcible conversion of Balkan slave boys recruited to staff the imperial

household, the Ottomans had shown little interest during the reign of Suleiman the

Magnificant and his immediate successors in spreading their religion among the conquered

peoples of eastern Europe. The rigid Sunnite orthodoxy which was espoused by the

government , while enjoining toleration of Christianity upon true believers, emphasized the

difference between Moslem belief and that of other religions; and the proscription of fringe

groups of dervish heterodoxy supressed one of the means by which adherents of other

faiths had traditionally been coaxed into acceptance of Islam.

All ecclesiastical systems experience rhythmic alternations of puritanical orthodoxy with

eclectic, heterodox attitudes....

The Cretan conversions suggested that certain remote and poverty-stricken communities

among the subject Christian peoples of the empire might respond to the opportunities

inherent in this changed situation... This possibility was confirmed as mass conversions

among the Albanian and Montenegrin mountaineers and among the Bulgars of the

Rhodope mountains gathered momentum throughout the remainder of the century.

Albanian converts were destined to play a crucial role in the revival of the Ottoman

empire. Avenues of advancement still lay open in the Ottoman army and administration to

thrusting and capable careerists of humble peasant origin. Albanians swarmed down from

their mountains in the middle of the 17th century to undertake functions which had been

fulfilled during the 16th century by Bosnian and Serbian slaves.....

Seventeenth-century Ottoman rulers in common with their counterparts in Moscow,

Cracow and Vienna, had no choice but to replace plunder by regular taxes as their

essential source of supply....

...developments were the fruits of collaboration between merchants-- in Turkish Europe

generally Greeks, Jews, Armenians and Serbs, with Greeks predominating in the 17th

century--and enterprising landlords or local officials, and dated back to the Middle Ages

in geographically fortunate and accesible regions....

The fundamental weakness of 17th century Ottoman society lay in the complete failure of

mutual understanding between the governing class on the one hand and commercial and

financial interests on the other, especially when measured against the societies of western

Europe, where government and capital, force and money, entered into a more equable alliance based on shared values and goals which were almost totally lacking in Turkey. ...and from 1716 Ottoman officials were making sporadic efforts to recreate Turkish armies on European models. But for more than a century the adamant conservatism of the janissaries and the ulema made every such project abortive. Changes initiated by a reforming sultan or Grand Vizier were repeatedly undone by popular riots or janissary mutinies. Recurrent rebellion at home and continued disasters in war against European powers distracted the sultans from the effort needed to strengthen their military establishment...The vast majority of Moslems were in a state of catalepsy, unable to cope either intellectually or in practice with the new conditions created by European military and cultural superiority. A blind conservatism, clinging to the crumbling landmarks of a vanishing social order, dominated the Ottoman world until well past the middle of the 19^th century.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Vintage Books,1989

The story of the "rise and fall of the Great Powers"

But the greatest Muslim challenge to early modern Europe lay, of course, with the

Ottoman Turks, or rather, with their formidable army and the finest siege train of the age...

Almost as alarming, in many ways, was the expansion of Ottoman naval power....

The Ottoman Empire was, of course, much more than a military machine. A conquering

elite (like the Manchus in China), the Ottomans had established a unity of official faith,

culture, and language over an area greater than the Roman Empire, and over vast numbers

of subject peoples. For centuries before 1500 the world of Islam had been culturally and

technologically ahead of Eruope. Its cities were large, well-lit, and drained, and some of

them possessed universities and libraries and stunningly beautiful mosques. In mathematics,

cartography, medicine, and many other aspects of science and industry--in mills, guncasting, lighthouses, horsebreeding--the Muslims had enjoyed a lead. The Ottoman system of recruiting future Janissaries from Christian youths in the Balkans had produced a dedicated, uniform corps of troops. Tolerance of other races had brought many a talented Greek, Jew and Gentile into the sultan's service--a Hungarian was Mehmet's chief gun caster in the Siege of Constantinople. Under a succesful leader like Suleiman I, a strong bureacracy supervised fourteen million subjects--this at a time when Spain had five million and England a mere two and a half million inhabitants. Constantinople in its heyday was bigger than any European city, possessing over 500,000 inhabitants in 1600.

Yet the Ottoman Turks, too, were to falter, to turn inward, and to lose the chance of world domination, although this became clear only a century after the strikingly similar Ming decline. To a certain extent it could be argued that this process was the natural consequence of earlier Turkish successes; the Ottoman army, however well administered, might be able to maintain the lengthy frontiers but could hardly expand without enormous cost in men and money; and Ottoman imperialism, unlike that of the Spanish, Dutch and English later, did not bring much in the way of economic benefit. By the second half of the sixteenth century the empire was showing signs of strategical overextension, with a large army stationed in Europe, an expensive navy operating in the Mediterranean, troops engaged in North Africa, the Aegean, Cyprus, and the Red Sea, and reinforcements needed to hold the Crimea against a rising Russian power. Even in the Near East there was no quiet flank, thanks to disasterous religious split in the Muslim world which occured when the Shi'ite branch, based in Iraq and then in Persia, challenged the prevailing Sunni practices and teachings. At times, the situation was not unlike that of the contemporary religious struggles in Germany, and the sultan could maintain his dominance only by crushing the Shi'ite dissidents with force. However, across the border the Shi'ite kingdom

of Persia under Abbas the Great was quite prepared to ally with European states against the Ottomans, just as France had worked with the "infidel" Turk against the Holy Roman Empire. With this array of adversaries, the Ottoman Empire would have needed remarkable leadership to have maintained its growth; but after 1566 there reigned thirteen incompetent sultans in succession.

External enemies and personal failings do not, however, provide the full explanation. The system as a whole, like that of Ming China, increasingly suffered from some of the defects of being centralized, despotic, and severely orthodox in its attitude toward initiative, dissent and commerce...Without clear directives from above, the arteries of the bureacracy hardened, preferring conservatism to change, and stifling innovation. The lack of territorial expansion and accompanying booty after 1550, together with a vast rise in prices, caused discontented Janissaries to turn to internal plunder...

To a distinct degree, the fierce response to the Shi'ite religious challenge reflected and anticipated a hardening of official attitudes toward all forms of free thought....

Why was it among the scattered and relatively unsophisticated peoples inhabiting the western parts of the Eurasian landmass that there occured an unstoppable process of economic development and technological innovation which would steadily make it the commercial and military leader in the world affairs ? This is a question which has exercised scholars and other observers for centuries, and all that the following paragraphs can do is to present a synthesis of the existing knowledge. Yet however crude such a summary must be, it possesses the incidental advantage of exposing the main strands of the argument which permeate this work: namely that there was a dynamic involved, driven chiefly by economic and technological advances, although always interacting with other variables such as social structure, geography, and the occasional accident; that to understand the course of world politics, it is necessary to focus attention upon the material and long-term elements rather than the vagaries of personality or the week-by-week shifts of diplomacy and politics; and that power is a relative thing, which can only be described and measured by frequent comparisons between various states and societies...

For this political diversity Europe had largely to thank its geography. There were no enormous plains over which an empire of horsemen cold impose its swift dominion; nor were there any borad and fertile river zones like those around the Ganges, Nile,Tigris and Euphrates, Yellow, and Yangtze, providing food for masses of toiling and easily conquerable peasants. Europe's landscape was much more fractured, with mountain ranges and large forest separating the scattered population centers in the valleys; and its climate altered considerably from north to southand west to east. This had a number of important consequences.For a start, it both made difficult the establishment of unified control, even by a powerful and determined warlord, and minimized the possibility that the continent could be overrun by an external force like the Mongol hordes. Conveseluy, this variegated landscape encouraged the growth, and the continued

existnece, of decentralized power, with local kingdoms and marcher lordshipsand highland

clans and lowland town confederations making a political map of Europe drawnd at any time after the fall of Rome lool like a patchwork quilt. The patterns on that quilt might vary from century to century, but no single color could ever be used to denote a unified empire.

Europe's differentiated climate led to differentiated products, suitable for exchange; and in time, as market relations developed, they were transported along the rivers or the pathways which cut thorugh th eforests between one area of settlement and the next. Probably the most important characteristic of this commerce was that it consisted primarily of bulk products timber, grain, wine, wool, herrings, and so on caterin to the rising population of the fifteenth century Europe, rather than the luxuries carried on the oriental caravans. Here again geography played a crucial role, for water transport of thesegoods was so much more economical and Europe posssessed many navigable rivers. Being surrounded by seas was a furtherincentive to the vital ship building industry, and the later Middle Ages a flourinshing maritime commerce was being carried out between the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. This trade... in general continued to expand, incresing Europe's prosperity and enriching its diet, and leading to the creation of new centers of wealth like the Hansa towns or the Italian cities. Regular long distance exchanges of wares in turn encouraged the growth of bills of exchange, a credit system,

and banking on an international scale. The very existence of mercantile credit, and then bills of insurance, pointed to the basic predictability of economic conditions which private tradershad hitherto rarely, if ever, enjoyed anywhere in the world. (ratherslow and inelegant) vessels capable of carrying large loads and finding their motive power in the winds alone. Although over timethey developed more sail and masts, and stern rudders, and therefore became more maneuvarable. North Sea "cogs" and thier successors may not have appeared as impressive as the lighter craft which plied the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian ocean; but as we shall see below, they were going topossess distinct advantages in the long run. The political and social consequences of this decentralized,largely unsupervised growth of commerce and merchants and portsand markets were of the greatest of significance. In the first place there was no way in which such economic developments couldbe fully suppressed. This is not to say that the rise of market forces did not disturb many in authority. Feudal lords,suspicious of towns as centers of dissidence and sanctuaries of serfs, often tried to curtail their priviliges. As elsewhere,merchants were frequently preyed upon, their goods stolen, their property seized. Papal pronouncements upon usury echo in many ways the Confucian dislike of profit making middle men and money lenders. But the basic fact was that there existed no uniformauthority in Europe which could effectively halt this or that commercial development; no central government whose change inpriorities could cause the rise and fall of a particular industry; no systematic and universal plundering of businessmen and entrepreneurs by tax gatherers, which so retarded the

economy of Mogul India..

The fact was that in Europe there were always some princes and local lords willing to tolerate merchants and their ways even when others plundered and expelled them; and as the record shows,oppressed Jewish traders, ruined Flemish textile workers,persecuted Huguenots, moved on and took their expertise with them. A Rhineland baron who overtaxed commercial travelers would find that the trade routes had gone elsewhere, and with it his revenues. A monarch who repudiated his debts would have immensedifficulty raising a loan when the next war threatened and fundswere quickly needed to equip his armies and fleets. Bankers andarms dealers were essential, not peripheral members of societ.Gradually, unevenly, most of the regimes of Europe entered into asymbiotic relationship with the market economy, providing for itdomestic order and a non arbitrary legal system (even forforeigners), and receiving in taxes a share of the growing profits in trade...

Probably the only factor which might have led to a centralization of authority would have been such a breakthrough in firearms technology by one state that all opponents were crushed oroverawed. In the quickening pace of economic and technological development which occurred in fifteenth century Europe as the "gunpowder empires" were established elsewhere. Muscovy, Tokugawa Japan, and Mogul India provide excellent examples of how great states could be fashioned by leaders who secured the firearms and the cannons with which to compel all rivals to obedience.

Since furthermore, it was in late medival and early modern Europe that new techniques of warfare occurred more frequently than elsewhere, it was not implausable that one such breakthrough could enable a certain nation to dominate its rivals. Already the signs pointed to an increasing concentration of military power. In Italy the use of companies of crossbowmen, protected when necessary by soldiers using pikes, had brought to a close the age of the knight on horseback and his accompanying ill trained feudal levy; but it was also clear that only the wealthier stateslike Venice and Milan could pay for the new armies officered by the famous condottieri. By around 1500, moreover, the kings of France and England had gained an artillery monopoly at home and were thus able, if the need arose, to crush an overmighty subject even if the latter sheltered behind castle walls. But would not this tendency finally lead to a larger and transnational monopoly, stretching across Europe? This must have been a question many asked around 1550, as they observed the vast concentration of lands and armies under Emper or Charles V.

..Once again, the existence of a variety of economic and military centers of power was fundamental. No one Italian city state could strive to enhance itself without the others intervening to preserve the equilibrium; no "new monarchy" could increase its dominions without stirring its rivals to seek compensation....religious antagonisms were added to the traditional balance of power rivalries, thus making the prospects of political centralization even more remote. Yet the real explanation lies a little deeper; after all, the simple existence of competitors, and of bitter feelings between warring groups,was evident in Japan, India and elsewhere, but that in itself hadnot prevented unification. Europe was different in that each of the rival forces was able to gain access to the new military techniques, so that no single power ever possessed the decisive edge. The services of the Swiss and other mercenaries, for example, were on offer to anyone who was able to pay for them.There was not a single center for the production of crossbows,nor for that of cannon whether of earlier bronze guns of the later, cheaper cast iron artillery; instead such armaments werebeing made close to the ore deposits on the Weald, in central Europe, in Malaga, in Milan, in Liege, and later in Sweden.Similarly, the proliferation of ship building skills in variousports ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea made it extremely difficult for any one country to monopolize maritime power, which in turn helped prevent the conquest and elimination of rival centers of armaments production lying across the sea. The forces possessed by the new monarchies in 1500 have seemed puny if they had been deployed against the enormous armies of the sultan and the massed troops of the Ming

Empire... For the explanation of this shift one must again point to the decentralization of power in Europe. What it did, above all else, was to engender a primitive forms of arms race among the city states and then the larger kingdoms... But because the Ming government had a monopoly of cannon, and the thrusting leaders of Russia, Japan, and Mogul India soon acquired a monopoly, there was much less incentive to improve such weapons once their authority had been established... Clinging to the traditional methods of fighting, the janissaries of Islam scorned taking interest in artillery until it was too late to catch up to Europe's lead. Facing less advanced peoples, Russian and Mogul army commanders had no compelling need for improved weaponry, since what they possessed overawed their opponents. Just as in the general economic field, so

also in this specific area of military technology, Europe, fueled by a flourishing arms trade, took a decisive lead over the other civilizations and powercenters. The fairer aspects of this increasing commercial and colonial rivalry was the parallel upward spiral in knowledge in science and technology. No doubt many of the advances of this time were spin offs from the arms race and the scramble for overseas trade;but the eventual benefits transcended their inglorious origins.Improved cartography, navigational tables, new instruments....The cumulative effect of this explosion of knowledge was to buttress Europe's technological and therefore military superiority even further. Even the powerful Ottomans, or at least their frontier line soldiers and sailors, were feeling some of the consequences of this by the time of the sixteenth century. Another, less active societies, the effects were to be far more serious....

In most cases, what was involved was not so much positive elements, but rather the reduction in the number of hindrances which checked economic growth and political diversity. Europe's greatest advantage was that it had fewer disadvantages than other civilizations...

..It was a combination of economic laissez faire, political and military pluralism, and intellectual liberty however rudimentary each factor was compared with later ages which had been jincethe miracle was historically unique, it seems plausable to assume that only a replication of all its component parts could have produced a similar result elsewhere.

Because that mix of critical ingredients did not exist in Ming China, or in the Muslim Empires of the Middle East and Asia, or in any other of the societies examined above, they appeared to stand still while Europe advanced to the center of the world stage.