The Reformation

by Will Durant

  The West took him seriously enough. Rome fell into a panic; Clement VII, for once resolute, taxed even the cardinals to raise funds to fortify Ancona and other ports through which the Ottomans might enter Italy. In April 1532, Suleiman marched westward once more. His departure from his capital was a well staged spectacle: 120 cannon led the advance; 8,000 Janissaries followed, the best soldiers in the realm; a thousand camels carried provisions; 2,000 elite horsemen guarded the holy standard—the eagle of the Prophet; thousands of Christian captive boys, dressed in cloth of gold and plumed red hats, flaunted lances with innocent bravery; the Sultan’s own retinue were men of giant stature and handsome mien; among them, on a chestnut horse, rode Suleiman himself, robed in crimson velvet embroidered with gold, under a white turban inset with precious stones; and behind him marched an army that in its final mustering numbered 200,000 men. Who could resist such splendor and power? Only the elements and space.

  To meet this avalanche Charles, after much pleading, received from the Imperial Diet a grant to raise 40,000 foot and 8,000 horse; he and Ferdinand provided 30,000 additional men at their own expense; and with these 78,000, gathered in Vienna, they awaited siege. But the Sultan was delayed at Güns. It was a small town, well fortified, but garrisoned with only 700 troops. For three weeks they fought back every Turkish attempt to break through the walls; eleven times these were pierced, eleven times the defenders blocked the opening with metal, flesh, and desperation. At last Suleiman sent a safeconduct and hostages to the commander, Nicholas Jurischitz, inviting him to a conference. He came, and was received with honors by the Grand Vizier; his courage and generalship were sorrowfully praised; the Sultan presented him with a robe of honor, guaranteed him against further attack, and sent him back to his citadel under a handsome escort of Turkish officers. The invincible avalanche, defeated by 700 men, passed on to Vienna.

  But there too Suleiman missed his prey. Charles would not come out to fight; he would have been foolish to forfeit the advantage of his defenses for the gamble of the open field. Suleiman reckoned that if he had failed to take Vienna held by 20,000 men with no emperor or king in sight, he would hardly do better against 78,000 inspired by a young monarch who had publicly announced that he would welcome death in this contest as the noblest worldly end to which a Christian could aspire. The Sultan turned away, ravaged Styria and Lower Austria, and took stray captives to grace his retreat. It could have been no comfort to him to hear that while he was marching uselessly back and forth across Hungary Andrea Doria had chased the Turkish fleet into hiding, and had captured Patras and Coron, on the Peloponnesian coast.

  When Ferdinand sent an emissary to Constantinople to seek peace Suleiman welcomed him; he would grant peace “not for seven years, not for twenty-five years, not for a hundred years, but for two centuries, three centuries, indeed forever—if Ferdinand himself would not break it,” and he would treat Ferdinand as a son.24 However, he asked a heavy price: Ferdinand must send him the keys to the city of Grau in token of submission and homage. Ferdinand and Charles were so eager to free their arms against Christians that they were ready to make concessions to the Turks. Ferdinand sent the keys, called himself Suleiman’s son, and acknowledged Suleiman’s sovereignty over most of Hungary (June 22, 1533). No peace was made with Charles. Suleiman recaptured Patras and Coron, and dreamed of straddling Vienna and Tabriz.

  He took Tabriz, and turned west again (1536). Putting theology aside, he agreed to co-operate with Francis I in another campaign against Charles. He offered the most amiable terms to the King: peace should be made with Charles only on his surrendering Genoa, Milan, and Flanders to France; French merchants were permitted to sail, buy, and sell throughout the Ottoman Empire on equal terms with the Turks; French consuls in that realm were to have civil and criminal jurisdiction over all Frenchmen there, and these were to enjoy full religious liberty.25 The “capitulations” so signed became a model for later treaties of Christian powers with Eastern states.

  Charles countered by forming an alliance of the Empire, Venice, and the papacy. Ferdinand joined in; so short was forever. Venice bore the brunt of the Turkish attack, lost her possessions in the Aegean and on the Dalmatian coast, and signed a separate peace (1540). A year later Suleiman’s puppet in Buda died, and the Sultan made Hungary an Ottoman province. Ferdinand sent an envoy to Turkey to ask for peace, and another to Persia urging the Shah to attack the Turks. Suleiman marched west (1543), took Grau and Stuhlweissenburg, and incorporated more of Hungary into the pashalik of Buda. In 1547, busy with Persia, he granted the West a five-year armistice. Both sides violated it. Pope Paul IV appealed to the Turks to attack Philip II, who was more papal than the popes.26 The death of Francis and Charles left Ferdinand a freer hand to come to terms. In the Peace of Prague (1562) he acknowledged Suleiman’s rule in Hungary and Moldavia, pledged a yearly tribute of 30,000 ducats, and agreed to pay 90,000 ducats as arrears.

  Two years later he followed his brother. Suleiman had survived all his major enemies, and how many popes had he not outlived? He was master of Egypt, North Africa, Asia Minor, Palestine, Syria, the Balkans, Hungary. The Turkish navy ruled the Mediterranean, the Turkish army had proved its prowess east and west, the Turkish government had shown itself as competent in statesmanship and diplomacy as all its rivals. The Christians had lost Rhodes, the Aegean, Hungary, and had signed a humiliating peace. The Ottomans were now the strongest power in Europe and Africa, if not in the world.

  IV. OTTOMAN CIVILIZATION

  1. Government

  Were they civilized? Of course; the notion that the Turks were barbarians as compared with the Christians is a self-propping delusion. Their agricultural methods and science were at least as good as those of the West. The land was tilled by tenants of feudal chieftains who in each generation had to earn their holdings by serving the sultan satisfactorily in administration and war. Except in textiles, ceramics, and perhaps in arms and armor, industry had not yet developed a factory system as in Florence or Flanders, but Turkish craftsmen were famous for their excellent products, and the absence of capitalism was not mourned by rich or poor. The merchants had not reached in sixteenth-century Islam the political influence or social position then accorded to them in Western Europe. Trade between Turk and Turk was noted for its relative honesty, but between Turk and Christian no holds were barred. Foreign commerce was mostly left to foreigners. Moslem caravans moved patiently over the ancient and medieval land routes into Asia and Africa, even across the Sahara; and caravansaries, many of them set up by Suleiman, offered the merchant and traveler resting places on the way. Moslem vessels, till 1500, controlled the sea routes from Constantinople and Alexandria through the Red Sea to India and the East Indies, where exchange was made with goods borne by Chinese junks. After the opening of India to Portuguese merchants by the voyage of Da Gama and the naval victories of Albuquerque, the Moslems lost control of the Indian Ocean, and Egypt, Syria, Persia, and Venice entered into a common commercial decline.

  The Turk was a man of the earth and the sea, and gave less thought to religion than most other Mohammedans. Yet he too reverenced mystics, dervishes, and saints, took his law from the Koran, and his education from the mosque. Like the Jews, he shunned graven images in his worship, and looked upon Christians as polytheistic idolaters. Church and state were one: the Koran and the traditions were the basic law; and the same ulema, or association of scholars, that expounded the Holy Book also provided the teachers, lawyers, judges, and jurists of the realm. It was such scholars who, under Mohammed II and Suleiman I, compiled the definitive Ottoman codes of law.

  At the head of the ulema was the mufti or sheik ul-Islam, the highest judge in the land after the sultan and the grand vizier. As sultans had to die, while the ulema enjoyed a collective permanence, these theologian-lawyers were the rulers of everyday life in Islam. Because they interpreted the present in terms of past law, their influence was strongly conservative, and shared in the stagnation of Moslem civilization after Suleiman�
��s death. Fatalism—the Turkish qismet or lot—furthered this conservatism: since the fate of every soul had been predetermined by Allah, rebellion against one’s lot was impiety and shallowness; all things, death in particular, were in the hands of Allah, and must be accepted without complaint. Occasionally a freethinker spoke too frankly, and, in rare instances, was condemned to death. Usually, however, the ulema allowed much liberty of thought, and there was no Inquisition in Turkish Islam.

  Christians and Jews received a large measure of religious freedom under the Ottomans, and were permitted to rule themselves by their own laws in matters not involving a Moslem.27 Mohammed II deliberately fostered the Greek Orthodox Church because the mutual distrust of Greek and Roman Catholics served the Turks in countering crusades. Though the Christians prospered under the sultans, they suffered serious disabilities. Technically they were slaves, but they could end that status by accepting Mohammedanism, and millions did. Those who rejected Islam were excluded from the army, for Moslem wars were ostensibly holy wars for the conversion of infidels. Such Christians were subject to a special tax in lieu of military service; they were usually tenant farmers, paying a tenth of their produce to the owner of their land; and they had to surrender one infant out of every ten to be brought up as a Moslem in the service of the sultan.

  The sultan, the army, and the ulema were the state. At the sultan’s call each feudal chieftain came with his levy to form the sipahis or cavalry, which under Suleiman reached the remarkable figure of 130,000 men. Ferdinand’s ambassador envied the splendor of their equipment: clothing of brocade or silk in scarlet, bright yellow, or dark blue; harness gleaming with gold, silver, and jewelry on the finest horses that Busbeq had ever seen. An elite infantry was formed from captive or tributary Christian children, who were brought up to serve the sultan in his palace, in administration, and above all in the army, where they were called yeni cheri (new soldiers), which the West corrupted into Janissaries. Murad I had originated this unique corps (c. 1360), perhaps as a way of freeing his Christian population from potentially dangerous youth. They were not numerous—some 20,000 under Suleiman. They were highly trained in all the skills of war, they were forbidden to marry or engage in economic activities, they were indoctrinated with martial pride and ardor and the Mohammedan faith, and they were as brave in war as they were restlessly discontent in peace. Behind these superlative soldiers came a militia of some 100,000 men, kept in order and spirit by the sipahis and the Janissaries. The favorite weapons were still the bow and arrow and the lance; firearms were just coming into use; and at close quarters men wielded the mace and the short sword. Suleiman’s army and military science were the best in the world at that time; no other army equaled it in handling artillery, in sapping and military engineering, in discipline and morale, in care for the health of the troops, in the provisioning of great numbers of men through great distances. However, the means were too excellent merely to serve an end; the army became an end in itself; to be kept in condition and restraint it had to have wars; and after Suleiman the army—above all, the Janissaries—became the masters of the sultans.

  The conscripted and converted sons of Christians formed most of the administrative staff of the central Turkish government. We should have expected that a Moslem sultan would fear to be surrounded by men who might, like Scanderbeg, yearn for the faith of their fathers; on the contrary, Suleiman preferred these converts because they could be trained from childhood for specific functions of administration. Very likely the bureaucracy of the Ottoman state was the most efficient in existence in the first half of the sixteenth century,28 though it was notoriously subject to bribery. The Diwan or Divan, like the cabinet in a Western government, brought together the heads of administration, usually under the presidency of the grand vizier. It had advisory rather than legislative powers, but ordinarily its recommendations were made law by a kanun or decree of the sultan. The judiciary was manned by qadis (judges) and mullas (superior judges) from the ulema. A French observer remarked the diligence of the courts and the promptness of trials and verdicts,29 and a great English historian believed that “under the early Ottoman rulers the administration of justice was better in Turkey than in any European land; the Mohammedan subjects of the sultans were more orderly than most Christian communities, and crimes were rarer.”30 The streets of Constantinople were policed by Janissaries, and were “probably freer from murders than any other capital in Europe.” 31 The regions that fell under Moslem rule—Rhodes, Greece, the Balkan—spreferred it to their former condition under the Knights or the Byzantines or the Venetians, and even Hungary thought it fared better under Suleiman than under the Hapsburgs.32

  Most of the administrative offices of the central government were located in the serai or imperial quarters—not a palace but a congeries of buildings, gardens, and courts, housing the sultan, his seraglio, his servants, his aides, and 80,000 of the bureaucracy. To this enclosure, three miles in circuit, admission was by a single gate, highly ornamented and called by the French the Sublime Porte—a term which, by a whimsy of speech, came to mean the Ottoman government itself. Second only to the sultan in this centralized organization was the grand vizier. The word came from the Arabic wazir, bearer of burdens. He bore many, for he was head of the Diwan, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the army, and the diplomatic corps. He supervised foreign relations, made the major appointments, and played the most ceremonious roles in the most ceremonious of European governments. The heaviest obligation was to please the sultan in all these matters, for the vizier was usually an ex-Christian, technically a slave, and could be executed without trial at a word from his master. Suleiman proved his own good judgment by choosing viziers who contributed a great deal to his success. Ibrahim Pasha (i.e., Abraham the Governor) was a Greek who had been captured by Moslem corsairs and brought to Suleiman as a promising slave. The Sultan found him so diversely competent that he entrusted him with more and more power, paid him 60,000 ducats ($1,500,000?) a year, gave him a sister in marriage, regularly ate with him, and enjoyed his conversation, musical accomplishments, and knowledge of languages, literature, and the world. In the flowery fashion of the East Suleiman announced that “all that Ibrahim Pasha says is to be regarded as proceeding from my own pearl-raining mouth.” 33 This was one of the great friendships of history, almost in the tradition of classic Greece.

  One wisdom Ibrahim lacked—to conceal with external modesty his internal pride. He had many reasons to be proud: it was he who raised the Turkish government to its highest efficiency, he whose diplomacy divided the West by arranging the alliance with France, he who, while Suleiman marched into Hungary, pacified Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt by reforming abuses and dealing justly and affably with all. But he had also reason to be circumspect; he was still a slave, and the higher he raised his head the thinner grew the thread that held the royal sword above it. He angered the army by forbidding it to sack Tabriz and Baghdad, and trying to prevent its sack of Buda. In that pillage he rescued part of Matthias Corvinus’s library, and three bronze statues of Hermes, Apollo, and Artemis; these he set up before his palace in Constantinople, and even his liberal master was disturbed by this flouting of the Semitic commandment against graven images. Gossip charged him with despising the Koran. Sometimes he gave entertainments surpassing those of Suleiman in cost and magnificence. Members of the Diwan accused him of talking as if he led the Sultan like a tamed lion on a leash. Roxelana, favorite of the harem, resented Ibrahim’s influence, and day by day, with feminine persistence, filled the imperial ear with suspicions and complaints. The Sultan was finally convinced. On March 31, 1536, Ibrahim was found strangled in bed, presumably as the result of a royal command. It was a deed whose barbarism matched the burning of Servetus or Berquin.

  Far more barbarous was the law of imperial fratricide. Mohammed II had phrased it frankly in his Book of Laws: “The majority of the legists have declared that those of my illustrious children who shall ascend the throne shall have the right to execute their
brothers, in order to ensure the peace of the world; they are to act accordingly”;34 that is, the Conqueror calmly condemned to death all but the eldest born of his royal progeny. It was another discredit to the Ottoman system that the property of a person condemned to death reverted to the sultan, who was therefore under perpetual provocation to improve his finances by closing his mind to an appeal; we should add that Suleiman resisted this temptation. As against such vices of autocracy we may acknowledge in the Ottoman government an indirect democracy: the road to every dignity but the sultanate was open to all Moslems, even to all converted Christians. However, the success of the early sultans might have argued for the aristocratic heredity of ability, for nowhere else in contemporary government was so high an average of ability so long maintained as on the Turkish throne.