Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Muslims by birth dominated only two professions in the Ottoman empire: the heavy cavalry and the clergy. In the sixteenth century ethnic Turks formed the cavalry (sipahis: from the Persian word meaning ‘army’), maintaining themselves and their followers with a fief (tîmâr) granted by the sultan. By 1600, however, few fiefs produced enough to support a sipahi and his retainers, and the number of cavalry troopers had fallen to around 8,000. The central treasury therefore began to pay salaries to the sipahis who formed part of the permanent garrison of Istanbul and various provincial capitals (just like the Janissaries), and their numbers rose to 20,000 by 1650. This increase placed an intolerable strain on the central treasury, which sometimes could afford to pay either the Janissaries or the sipahis, but not both, leading to rivalry and sometimes pitched battles between them.6

  The clergy, or ‘ulema (the plural of the Arabic word for ‘knowledgeable person’, ‘ālim), were all Sunni Muslims. They not only provided public worship and religious education but also administered pious foundations and served as judges. At their head stood the Şeyhulislam (Chief Mufti), appointed by the sultan and paid a state salary like the rest of the ‘ulema, who received a stream of requests from the central government to certify (usually in the form of a written opinion, or fatwā) that a proposed action or edict conformed to the sharî'a.7 On occasion, the Chief Mufti withheld such certification, producing a political crisis that might result in his deposition or, in extreme circumstances, his murder. One Chief Mufti survived for just half a day. The sultans also founded religious schools (medreses: literally ‘places of study’) and paid preceptors to provide basic education in Arabic grammar and syntax, in logic and in rhetoric, as a prelude to instruction in theology and law. The size of the ‘ulema tripled between 1550 and 1622, reflecting a rapid expansion in the number both of medreses and mosques (Istanbul had none of either when the Ottomans captured the city in 1453, but by 1600 it boasted almost 100 medreses and over 1,200 mosques). This enabled each medrese student to find a position as either preceptor, preacher or judge on graduation, and to receive a state salary.

  In the seventeenth century, however, further expansion ceased and jobs dwindled. Graduates might wait years for the chance to pass the examination to obtain a licence, without which they could neither teach nor preach; and even those who gained their licence often remained at the bottom of the hierarchy because a select group of elite families (known as the mevali) virtually monopolized the elite positions and passed them on to relatives. Thus four-fifths of the 81 Chief Muftis and senior judges appointed between 1550 and 1650 were related, and almost half came from just 11 families.8 This concentration of power in the hands of the mevali naturally created widespread frustration among other members of the ‘ulema who found their careers blocked, and some began to claim that the path to salvation required a return to the original practices and beliefs of Islam.

  Frustration also mounted among some Muslims who did not belong to the ‘ulema but nevertheless claimed supernatural powers. Some, not unlike Christian friars, wandered from one community to another, surviving on alms from the faithful; others, not unlike Christian hermits, lived in solitary ascetic devotion in one place; while others still practised as healers – like ‘Slimey’ Hüseyn in the Istanbul hippodrome, who claimed that his snot healed those on whom it landed. Many more men and women, known as sufis, believed that the path to God lay through experience rather than scholarship and therefore performed their devotions publicly, sometimes accompanied by music and dance. The majority belonged to one of Islam's religious Orders, each one headed by a sheikh, and either lived in or supported one of the Order's ‘lodges’ (not unlike Christian monasteries). Several Orders enjoyed close connections with members of the Ottoman elite: thus the Bektashi Order enjoyed a venerable association with the Janissaries, while the Mevlevi and Halveti Orders counted many followers in the imperial palace.9

  Although the Ottoman empire lacked a tradition of clerical collective action, extreme climatic events in the mid-seventeenth century, as well as the multiplicity of political and economic problems that faced the empire, provided charismatic preachers of all persuasions with convincing evidence of divine discontent and the need for rapid and radical change. Many began to take their message directly to the faithful in passionate sermons delivered in mosques during Friday services, attended (at least in theory) by all males throughout the empire. On several occasions, their preaching imperilled the Ottoman state itself.

  Climate and Depopulation

  Climate change did not affect all parts of the Ottoman state with equal force. The coastal plains that surrounded the Mediterranean, which formed the heart of the empire, coped best with the Little Ice Age, because farmers from Greece to Morocco normally enjoyed sufficient sun and rain to produce cereals, vegetables, tobacco and even cotton without irrigation. Here, serious food shortages would occur only when January temperatures fell below 5°C or annual precipitation below 300 millimetres. By contrast, farmers on the hills and plateaux overlooking the sea who produced cereals and a few vegetables by dry farming still needed to irrigate their fruit crops. In this zone, even small climatic changes could produce major problems. The situation was worse further inland, where farmers could produce crops only if they invested in extensive irrigation systems (Fig. 20). Here, even a short drought or unseasonable frost could ruin the entire harvest. In several regions of Anatolia, the number of rural taxpayers fell by three-quarters between 1576 and 1642, and almost half of all villages disappeared, while throughout Anatolia heavy spring precipitation in both 1640 and 1641 and droughts later in the decade destroyed many harvests and no doubt caused even more depopulation.10

  Balkan farmers also suffered intensely during the Little Ice Age. Surviving tax registers show that the population of Talanda (central Greece) fell from 1,166 households in 1570 to 794 in 1641, while that of Zlatitsa (Bulgaria), fell from 1,637 households in 1580 to 896 in 1642 – a loss of almost 50 per cent in both cases. Around Manastir (now Bitola in Macedonia), in 1641 one-quarter of all taxpaying households were abandoned; while to the east, in Serrès, farmers found an abundance of grapes when they began to harvest them in September 1641, but then came ‘so much rain and snow that many workers died through the great cold’ (Fig. 21).11 It was much the same in other parts of the empire. In Crete, rains in 1645 more intense than anything recorded in the twentieth century destroyed crops and buildings; while in Palestine, repeated droughts ruined many settlements, including the Jewish religious centre of Safed, where visitors can still see the ruins along dried-up riverbeds of 25 textile mills abandoned in the seventeenth century. Egypt, too, experienced drought when the Nile reached its lowest level of the century in 1641–3, and again in 1650, because El Niño episodes produced low summer rainfall in the Ethiopian highlands and the Sudd swamps of Sudan, which began the river's annual water cycle. Since, in the aphorism of Alan Mikhail, ‘Egypt is a desert with a river running through it’, a poor Nile flood drastically reduced the crop yields of the entire province – which in turn reduced the food available to supply Istanbul, the sultan's armies and the holy cities of Arabia. To quote Mikhail again, Egypt was ‘the caloric engine of the Empire. Its surplus energy supplies fueled the political authority and function of the Ottoman state – powering the brain of the palace and the capital, the religious heart of the Hijaz, and the Empire's military muscle.‘12 Loss of income forced charitable institutions throughout the empire to close their doors (and their soup kitchens), adding to the misery of the local poor.

  20. The climatic zones of the Ottoman empire.

  The staple crops of the eastern Mediterranean – olives, vines and date palms – can survive even where little rain falls in summer; but a shift in rainfall patterns, as occurred in the mid-seventeenth century, can cause long-term damage. The more frequent droughts and colder weather also destroyed grain and citrus fruit.

  21. Tax yields in the Balkans, Anatolia and Syria, 1640–1834.

  The dramatic fall in tax
able households after 1640 helps to explain the decline of Ottoman power. The simultaneous decline in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Syria is striking – and it proved fatal to the tax receipts of the Ottoman state.

  As usual, overpopulated areas, where supply barely satisfied demand even in good years, felt the effects of the Little Ice Age most acutely. In parts of Anatolia, for example, a benign climate in the sixteenth century allowed rural population density to reach levels that would ‘never be reached again, even by the turn of the twentieth century’. The price of land rose steeply and the size of some peasant holdings shrank until, in some settlements, landless unmarried men made up three-quarters of the total adult male population. No community like this can long survive, and from the 1590s onwards single men left their villages in increasing numbers for three destinations: the cities (where some sought employment and others entered the medreses), the army, and the outlaw bands known as Celalis. Oktay Özel suggests that ‘there were at least as many uprooted peasants-turned-Celalis in the Anatolian countryside as those who remained in the villages and were listed in the survey registers of the 1640s’.13

  Although Ottoman law forbade peasants to leave without the permission of their lord, until the 1630s emigrants only had to pay modest compensation if they did so. Thereafter, as in Russia (see chapter 6 above), landowners serving in the imperial cavalry complained that they could no longer sustain themselves while fighting for the sultan, impelling the central government to demand the forcible return of fugitives: a decree of 1636 allowed pursuit for up to 40 years after the initial flight. Soon afterwards, however, another edict reduced the period to ten years, and a third decree in 1641 restored the principle of merely paying ‘compensation’. Nothing seemed able to halt the exodus, because human agency intensified the impact of the harsher climate: pirates in coastal areas and brigands inland preyed upon those who continued to till the land. Although those who lived in poorer villages (less attractive to booty-seekers) and in communities protected by forests or mountains (less accessible to outsiders) fared rather better, the central problem of the Ottoman economy now became a chronic shortage of labour.

  ‘The Ottoman tragedy’

  Against this backdrop of rural crisis, a series of political upheavals called by one contemporary historian ‘the Ottoman tragedy’ rocked the empire between 1617 and 1623.14 The ‘tragedy’ began with an unprecedented dynastic crisis. All male members of the Ottoman dynasty normally lived in sealed apartments in the imperial palace, appropriately known as ‘the cage’ (kafes), until one of them became sultan and executed all the others. In 1595 Sultan Mehmet III had followed tradition and executed all 19 of his brothers, some of them infants, as well as pregnant slaves in the harem, and he later executed the crown prince on suspicion of treason, so that at his death in 1603 only two male members of the Ottoman dynasty survived: his sons Ahmed (aged 13, who became the new sultan) and Mustafa (aged 4). Prudence dictated that Mustafa should be allow to live (even if, some speculated, he was ‘nurtured like an innocent little sheep who must soon go to the butchers’) and he was still alive when Ahmed died in 1617.15 His survival created unprecedented confusion: should the next sultan be Mustafa, now aged 18, or Ahmed's oldest son Osman, aged 14? Initially, supporters of the former prevailed but he behaved so erratically that, after three months, a household faction imprisoned him – the first sultan to be deposed by a palace coup – and engineered the proclamation of Osman in his stead.

  Osman also ruled erratically. His preceptors had instilled in him a determination to follow the Prophet Mohammed's injunction to ‘enjoin right and forbid wrong’, and the new sultan soon forbade the cultivation and use of tobacco (on the grounds that it wasted money, induced laziness and, above all, imitated a habit introduced by infidels). He also punished the senior religious leaders who had supported Mustafa's succession, especially the elite mevali families, by abolishing their salaries during periods of unemployment and in retirement, as well as their right to appoint a successor (usually one of their relatives). Osman thus made the most powerful Muslim clerics his bitter enemies – an especially unwise move, given the severity of the winter of 1620–1.16 For 40 days the Bosporus froze over (an unprecedented event) and ice floes prevented grain from reaching Istanbul: the vast city, totally dependent on imported food for its survival, began to starve. Osman exacerbated the shortages by mobilizing troops and supplies for a campaign against Poland, which had attacked one of his vassals in the Balkans. They left the capital in May 1621 but severe cold and torrential rains (this was an El Niño year), combined with unexpectedly tenacious Polish resistance, forced the sultan to conclude a humiliating truce. When he and his demoralized troops returned to Istanbul in January 1622, they found it in the grip of ‘famine and high prices’. According to an Ottoman eyewitness, ‘Among the people such hardship and misery appeared that it was thought the Day of Judgement had arrived or that it meant death for the entire people'; according to an English contemporary, ‘Everyone complained, and though it was remedilesse by the pollicy of man’, the sultan himself ‘did not escape scandall and calumniation’.17

  The poor performance of Osman's troops in Poland convinced him of the need to replace the elite Janissaries and sipahis, who formed the core of both the field army and the garrison of Istanbul, with troops from Anatolia, Syria and Egypt. At first the sultan stated that he would undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca, but then he ordered the principal institutions of government, and the imperial treasury, to cross the Bosporus to Asia. Once again the sultan's timing proved unfortunate. Unprecedented Nile flooding had ruined the harvest in Egypt in 1621, and then came drought, reducing the food supply even further. According to a chronicler, the sultan's troops protested that they ‘could not go into a desert without water, and without doubt their animals will perish too'; according to another, they asked rhetorically ‘After the Polish campaign, what fool among the soldiers would go now?‘18 On 18 May 1622, the appointed day for the sultan's departure, the Janissaries of the city garrison demanded that Osman remain in the capital and hand over to them those who had advised him to move. They returned the following day, this time accompanied by the Chief Mufti and other mevali, and when the Grand Vizier came out to negotiate, they murdered him and burnt down his residence (and those of some other advisers). Osman and the rest of his counsellors procrastinated until some alienated officials opened the gates of the Topkapı Palace complex and the mutineers swarmed in. One group found Mustafa (who had languished in the ‘cage’ in the four years since Osman's accession) and took him to the Janissaries’ mosque, where they proclaimed him sultan again, while another found Osman and dragged him through the crowded streets of the capital in a cart, subjecting him to public insults, and cast him in prison where he was first mutilated and then strangled – the first regicide in Ottoman history.

  The Ottoman chronicler Ibrahim Peçevi, an eyewitness to these events, marvelled that ‘the streets were full of people’ and ‘the world full of rebellion and disorder'; while Sir Thomas Roe, the British ambassador in Istanbul, recorded his amazement that, although thousands of men served in the palace expressly to protect the sultan, not one of them had done so. ‘Thus one of the greatest monarchs in the world is first affronted by mutinied troops, his own slaves, almost unarmed, and few in number, no man taking up the sword to defend him; and they who began this madness, not meaning to hurt him, by the increase of their own fury, which has no bounds, depose him … and at last expose his life’. Moreover, as Roe accurately predicted, given Mustafa's nature (which Roe considered ‘fitter for a cell, than a sceptre’), ‘they have set up another [sultan] that in all likelihood they must change for disability’. Roe also predicted that the troops in Asia would ‘attempt some revenge for that [sultan] who was their martyr; or that some great pashas, far removed from court, will apprehend this occasion not to obey a usurper, set up by treason’. He was right.19

  Several provincial governors in Anatolia, including those whom Osman expected to provide the tr
oops for his new army, refused to recognize the coup and turned on the Janissaries and sipahis in local garrisons. The capital too remained in uproar as food prices rose to the highest levels recorded in the entire seventeenth century. In desperation, the government paid new bribes to retain the loyalty of the Janissaries and, when this created an unacceptable budget deficit, reduced the silver content of the currency to its lowest level of the century. The next few months saw five Grand Viziers come and go (some of them murdered). As the Venetian ambassador observed, ‘It is impossible to portray the confusion and disorders that occurred in the ten months that Mustafa reigned, while the soldiers who committed the crime went around unrestrained, full of anger and pride, absolute masters of affairs.’ Meanwhile shops and markets stayed closed, food ran short and plague spread. Finally, in January 1623, the coalition of mutineers and mevali who had engineered Mustafa's restoration deposed him again: the Chief Mufti declared that a madman could not be sultan, and proclaimed Osman's oldest surviving brother, the 11-year-old Murad, as his successor – the fourth sultan in six years.20

  Several groups now vied for control of imperial resources and power: Murad IV's Greek mother, Kösem Sultan; the senior palace officials, especially the eunuchs; the Janissaries and sipahis of the Istanbul garrison; and the mevali. Thanks to their intrigues, the average tenure of a Grand Vizier in the 1620s fell to four months. Meanwhile, in the provinces, rebellions and roaming bandit gangs in Anatolia deprived the central treasury of revenues, while the unpaid garrison of Baghdad mutinied and betrayed the city and most of southern Iraq to Iranian troops.

  Murad IV's ‘Personal Rule’

  The nadir of Murad's rule occurred in 1630, another El Niño year, when over 10 feet of rainfall flooded Mecca, a city that normally sees virtually no rain, destroying two walls of the Kaaba (those that stand today were rebuilt by the sultan during the following decade). Extreme weather also disrupted operations by the Ottoman army fighting in Mesopotamia: in January 1630, according to one chronicler, ‘the Tigris and Euphrates all overflowed and floods covered the whole Baghdad plateau’, while another compared the torrential rains to ‘the times of Noah’. The following August, by contrast, he noted that the waters of the Tigris sank so low that no ships could use it, leaving the army ‘desperately in need of munitions and provisions’.21 In 1630, 1631 and 1632 the Nile fell far below the level needed to irrigate the fields of the delta, causing a major famine accompanied by lethal epidemics. In Istanbul, drinking water ran short in summer 1630.22 Reports of poor harvests abound; so do reports of rural insurrection. The Ottoman government's ‘Registers of Important Affairs’ (Mühimme Defteri) in 1630 and 1631 recorded an unusual number of petitions arising from provincial unrest, while the sultan's council issued over 150 orders in response to complaints about brigands and peasant revolts, almost 70 arising from abuse by provincial officials, and over 50 more about local elites who colluded with brigands.23