The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

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  © 1992 by Alan Palmer

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  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue: Ottomans Triumphant

  1. Floodtide of Islam

  2. Challenge from the West

  3. Tulip Time and After

  4. Western Approaches

  5. The Strange Fate of Sultan Selim

  6. Mahmud II, The Enigma

  7. Egyptian Style

  8. Sick Man?

  9. Dolmabahche

  10. Yildiz

  11. The Hamidian Empire

  12. Armenia, Crete and the Thirty-Day War

  13. Ancient Peoples and Young Turks

  14. Seeking Union and Progress

  15. Germany’s Ally

  16. Sovereignty and Sultanate

  Epilogue: Ottomans Moribund

  Sultans Since the Ottoman Capture of Constantinople

  Alternative Place Names

  Glossary

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  The Ottoman Empire: European part

  The Ottoman Empire: Asian part

  The Straits

  Constantinople (Istanbul)

  PREFACE

  THE GREATEST HISTORIAN OF AN EMPIRE’S DECLINE AND FALL decided on the immense theme of his life’s work when he ‘sat musing on the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were chanting their litanies in the temple of Jupiter’. A far humbler enterprise had its origins in musings at a site no less evocative than Gibbon had chosen, but to a background of less contemplative supplications: I was seated well above the Bosphorus, while sandal-footed tourists were ordering their luncheons on the terrace of the old Seraglio.

  As I looked out from this historic palace to the long white classical façade of the Dolmabahche and the green parkland of Yildiz beyond, I thought I would write almost entirely about the Sultans themselves. But when I left Istanbul I soon realized that this would be a mistake. In retrospect the most fascinating aspect of the Ottoman past is not a succession of rarely remarkable sovereigns, but the empire’s geographical extent, and the way in which an astonishingly narrow ruling class imposed government on lands extending from the Danubian plains to the mountains of the Caucasus, the headwaters of the Gulf and the deserts of southern Arabia and North Africa. It has to be admitted that, although the Ottoman Empire was pre-eminent in the Balkans and the Near East for more than six centuries, when it collapsed in the wake of the First World War no one was surprised to see it disappear: long before Tsar Nicholas I’s casual complaint of having ‘a sick man’ on our hands, foreign observers were predicting the imminent downfall of so cumbersome an institution. But how did it survive so long? The decline was certainly not rapid, nor was it in any sense constantly progressive, a steady downward graph from the autumn of 1683 when, for the second time, an Ottoman army failed to take Vienna. The reforms which arrested the decline have a particular historical interest of their own; and so, too, do the reformers who attempted to put them into practice.

  Modern historical fashion favours analysis by topics at the expense of narrative. Over the two and half centuries covered by the main body of this book there are constantly recurring problems: secular and religious authority; the inadequacies of a unique form of military feudalism; movements of population; the greed of powerful neighbours; and above all, uncertainty whether to borrow from the West or to seek inspiration from Ottoman origins in north-western Anatolia. But it is easy to perceive at work in these centuries H.A.L. Fisher’s famous non-pattern of ‘one emergency following upon another as wave followed upon wave’; and I have therefore planned the book primarily as a work of narrative history, reflecting the form of the highly personal autocracy established in the Ottoman Empire.

  I must admit that when I began research into the material for this book, the Ottoman Empire seemed as irrelevant to what was going on around us as are the Wars of the Roses. Only in the Lebanon was there a long and sad continuity of conflict. Now, however, the Ottoman past is less remote. The dynasty may have gone, but many problems that plagued the later Sultans once more make the news. For two years the cycle of history has been spinning in top gear. Half forgotten place-names are back in the headlines: towns like Basra, Mosul, Damascus or Diyarbakir; and distant outposts in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Albania in the west and along the sea coast of the Gulf or the mountain chain of the Caucasus in the east. Once again we learn of the Kurdish struggle for survival and of Armenian aspirations for independence. We are reminded of the underlying Muslim character of Sarajevo—a place-name which for three-quarters of a century has been more generally associated with the Habsburgs than with the Ottomans. We read of rival nationalities re-emerging in Macedonia and of the clash of linguistic minorities in Bulgaria. And, more gradually, we are becoming aware of the nineteen Turkic languages which, having outlived the Soviet Union, threaten to allow an Ottoman ghost—or, at least, the shade of Enver Pasha—to disturb the early years of the new central Asian republics. With a Soviet empire falling so speedily that it had no time to go into decline, the fate of Russia’s former Ottoman rival in the Black Sea becomes strangely topical.

  Writing about a past empire spread over three continents inevitably presents problems of nomenclature. Where any place has a name in common English usage, e.g., Salonika, Damascus, Jaffa, I have used that form. Otherwise I have generally used the place-name current in the period of which I am writing. For most of the book, Istanbul therefore appears as Constantinople, Izmir as Smyrna, Trabzon as Trebizond. In doubtful cases I have employed what I assume to be the form most familiar to the reader, e.g., Edirne rather than Adrianople. To help identify places I include a list of alternative place-names after the main narrative. The reader will also find there the dates of the Sultans who reigned in Constantinople, and a glossary explaining some of the Ottoman terms used in the text, although I hope that I have also indicated their meaning at the first point in the narrative where they appear. For proper names—some of which are of Slavonic, Greek, Arabic or Persian origin—I use the forms which seem to me to look best in English, rather than the standard Turkish spelling system (which, of course, updates Ottoman usage). Commonly Anglicized words are given the accepted form—e.g. Pasha, Vizier. To linguistic purists offended by all such inconsistencies, I apologize.

  My debt to earlier historians will be clear to any reader of the bibliography. I would like to thank the staffs of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the London Library, the Public Record Office and the British Library for their ready assistance. At John Murray Ltd I have profited from the good advice and editorial direction of Grant McIntyre and Gail Pirkis and I am grateful, too, for Elizabeth Robinson’s perceptive reading of typescript and proofs. My wife, Veronica, has helped me greatly: she accompanied me on every visit to the former Ottoman lands and, as well as compiling the index, has been a stimulating critic of the book, chapter by chapter. Once again she has m
y deepest thanks. The book is dedicated to my aunt, Elsie Perriam, in the hospitality of whose Devonshire home the drafts of some chapters were first written.

  ALAN PALMER

  PROLOGUE

  OTTOMANS TRIUMPHANT

  ‘THERE NEVER HAS BEEN AND NEVER WILL BE A MORE DREADFUL happening’, wrote a monastic scribe in Crete when in June 1453 reports reached the island that Constantinople had fallen to the Turk. His tone of horror was echoed in papal Rome and republican Venice, in Genoa, Bologna, Florence and Naples, and in the trading cities of Aragon and Castile as the shock-wave spread across the continent. Only in England, where the imminent loss of Bordeaux to the French seemed of greater consequence, did the news arouse little concern. Elsewhere there was consternation. Constantinople may have become depopulated, impoverished and encircled by the Turks; already it had been sacked and looted in 1204 by the knights of the Fourth Crusade; but, in a medieval society increasingly conscious of its classical heritage, there lingered an idealized concept of Byzantium as the Christian legatee of Graeco-Roman civilization. Dismay was heightened by a sense of guilt. Emperor Constantine XI had called for armed support against the Muslim enemy. He received only negligible aid, together with the prospect of a coming unity between the Latin and Greek churches.

  But Constantinople was doomed to fall. Only a massive relief expedition, together with diversionary assaults elsewhere around the Ottoman frontiers, might have saved it. Soon after sunrise on Tuesday 29 May 1453 the Sultan’s troops found a way through a small gate in the unassailable walls at the Kerkoporta. By sunset what remained of the pillaged city lay in their hands. Constantine XI Dragases, eighty-sixth Emperor of the Greeks, perished fighting in the narrow streets beneath the western walls. After more than eleven hundred years there would be no more Christian Emperors in the East.

  When Sultan Mehmed II rode his grey into Constantinople late that Tuesday afternoon he went first to St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, taking the basilica under his protection before ordering its conversion into a mosque. Some sixty-five hours later he returned there for the ritual Friday midday prayers. The transformation was symbolic of the Conqueror’s plans. Yet so, too, was his insistence on ceremonially investing a learned Orthodox monk to fill the vacant Patriarchal throne. For Mehmed sought continuity; the ‘dreadful happening’ was, for him, neither a terminal end of a world empire nor a new beginning for the Sultanate.1 He was to appropriate more than Christian altars for the service of Islam. The laws of the Byzantine Emperors served as a model for the codification he initiated. Significantly, he added to his titles Rum Kayseri (Roman Caesar), proclaiming himself heir to the imperial tradition which once encompassed the shores of the Mediterranean and beyond. There had been Arab empires in the Middle East but these proved transient creations. In seeking to restore Constantinople to its old greatness Mehmed the Conqueror affirmed his belief in the permanence of the Ottoman Empire by giving the Turks a capital city in European ‘Rumelia’ which looked out across the narrow waterway towards the Anatolian highlands, whence they had come.

  Originally the Turks were nomadic horsemen from Central Asia who embraced Islam in the ninth century. Under the Seljuk leader Tugrul they captured Baghdad, home of the earliest caliphate, eleven years before William of Normandy invaded England. The first major victory of Seljuk Turks over Christians followed in 1071, when a Byzantine army was defeated near Lake Van. Subsequently the Seljuks established a Sultanate, with its capital at Konya, on the site of the Greek city of Iconium. This Seljuk Sultanate survived until the first years of the fourteenth century, battered by pagan Mongol hordes. Local rulers then carved out principalities for themselves. Among them was Osman of Söüt, a settlement near modern Eskisehir in western Anatolia. His dynasty became known as the ‘Osmanli’ in Turkish and ‘Othman’ in Arabic, which was corrupted into ‘Ottoman’ in the languages of western Europe. Osman died in 1326 when his army was besieging the Byzantine city of Brusa (Bursa today), which was captured by his son and successor, Orhan. Brusa thus became the first effective capital of an Ottoman Sultanate which survived until 1922, although the city was succeeded as capital by Adrianople (now Edirne) in about 1364 and, some ninety years later, by present-day Istanbul.

  The Ottoman Turks crossed the narrow Dardanelles into Europe in 1345 at the invitation of Emperor John V Paleologus, who sought their military aid against a usurper. So formidable were the Turkish horsemen that they speedily made vassals of the Bulgars and Serbs, consolidating their Balkan gains by a decisive victory over the southern Slavs in June 1389 at Kossovo. As early as 1366 the rapid growth of Islamic power in south-eastern Europe had led Pope Urban V to proclaim a crusade, but the Ottoman advance seemed irresistible. The ‘Turks’—as the multiracial subjects of the Sultan were collectively misnamed in Central and Western Europe—were soon feared as ‘wild beasts’ and ‘inhuman barbarians’, much as the ‘Norsemen’ had been in the age of the Vikings. Even before the fall of Constantinople the Ottomans had penetrated deeply into Europe, mounting devastating raids across the farmland of southern Hungary. They were checked by János Hunyadi in Transylvania in 1442 and outside Belgrade in 1456, but seventy years later the full weight of the Ottoman armies was concentrated in Central Europe. At Mohács, on 29 August 1526, Sultan Suleiman I inflicted a terrible defeat on the Magyars: 24,000 dead were buried on the battlefield; 2,000 prisoners were massacred; thousands more were carried back as slaves to Constantinople.

  Suleiman the Magnificent, tenth Ottoman Sultan and the fourth to take up residence in the conquered city, is historically the best known of all Turkey’s rulers. His reign—from 1520 to 1566, the longest of any Sultan—marks the apogee of the Ottoman Empire. He was a splendid show-pageant prince, like his near contemporaries in the West, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France (who formed an anti-Habsburg alliance with the Sultan). The Turks remember Suleiman primarily as a lawgiver who was also a poet and scholar and a patron of the arts; fittingly, his permanent monument is the Suleimaniye mosque complex which Mirman Sinan, the finest of Ottoman architects, built on the hillside looking out across the Golden Horn. Above all, Suleiman was a ghazi warrior, a soldier victorious on the Tigris as well as on the Danube, the conqueror of Belgrade, Buda and Rhodes. He ruled directly over much of southern Russia, over Transylvania, Hungary and the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and most of modern Iraq, Kuwait and the western shore of the Gulf. He was protector of Jerusalem and the Muslim holy places in modern Saudi Arabia and the overlord of Aden, the Yemen and all the North African coast from the Nile delta to the foothills of the Atlas Mountains.

  Suleiman was more than a secular potentate. As de facto Caliph, he possessed a spiritual primacy among Muslim princes. He may also have been de jure Caliph; for the Caliphate, first held by the rulers of Baghdad and re-established in Egypt, had long been in eclipse. When Suleiman’s father, Sultan Selim I, captured Cairo in 1517 the last Abbasid Caliph became an Ottoman pensionary, and he is said to have transferred the shadow dignity to his new sovereign.2 This may well have been mere legend; no Sultan claimed the caliphate de jure until the Ottoman Empire was in decline. But Suleiman and his heirs certainly possessed authority in the Muslim world; the Sherif of Mecca had sent Selim the keys of Medina and Mecca, placing the Holy Cities—and the pilgrim routes serving them—under his protection. On the other hand, the Sultans’ religious authority was never acknowledged by zealous Shi’ites in Persia and Mesopotamia. Their divinely guided leaders claimed descent from Ali ibn Ab’Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law (whose shrine is in the modern Iraqi city of Najaf).

  The Ottoman Empire was, in origin, a military institution dedicated to fulfilling the sacred obligation of extending the ‘Abode of Islam’ by conquering the lands of the unbelievers. Even before the fall of Constantinople the warrior Sultans had begun to bolster their personal despotism by developing a system under which selected Christian-born slaves, converted to Islam, became an imperial bodyguard. From within this priviliged
caste the Sultans came to find most of their ministers (viziers) and military commanders (agas). Suleiman I completed the work of Mehmed II in modifying this machine, geared for continous frontier war, into an imperial administration run by personal slaves through what were, in effect, armies of occupation.

  ‘Whoever assaults the Turk must be prepared to meet his united forces . . . because those near the ruler’s person, being all slaves and dependent, it will be more difficult to corrupt them.’ This grudging admiration for Ottoman rule in Machiavelli’s The Prince, written shortly before Suleiman’s accession, points shrewdly to the basic source of strength in the imperial autocracy.3 It could not function without total reliance on ‘those near the ruler’s person’. For the efficient administration of his empire a strong Sultan could turn confidently to the divan-i hümayun (a council of ministers, and a court of law) and especially to his chief minister, the Grand Vizier, who was generally the most privileged of imperial slaves. But within this centralized state, the Sultan also had to depend on the loyalty of each governor (beylerbey or, later, vali) whom he appointed to a province (beylerbik or vilayet). Beneath the governor would be several beys, heads of each county (sanjak) in the province. Rank was shown by the title of Pasha accorded to governors and symbolized by the bestowal of ceremonial horsetails: one to a bey; two to a governor; three to the Grand Vizier; four to the Sultan himself.

  A Sultan was more than an all-powerful sovereign. He was the greatest of land-owners; all newly conquered territory passed into his possession. In the cities, especially in the capital, most landed property constituted vakif, a pious foundation (plural evkaf) under the control of a religious institution, but when Suleiman came to the throne, almost ninety per cent of land outside the towns was, technically, crown property and therefore under state ownership. By using this crown land as a basic source of revenue for his government, Suleiman built up an Islamic counterpart to Western feudalism, exploiting the slave basis of the empire, even at the lowest level in the social scale. In the Balkans and Anatolia a fief (timar) of land would be allocated to a mounted soldier (sipahi) who, while having no rights of ownership, became the Sultan’s representative on the ‘estates’ assigned to him. The sipahi was charged with the maintenance of order, and with encouraging agriculture so as to raise the yield from the fields; but, above all, he was responsible for collecting agreed taxes from the peasants which, after deducting a sum for the upkeep of himself, his horse and his family, he would forward to the central government. It was a cumbrous system, needing the maintenance of a co-ordinated discipline across the empire in order to intimidate the feudatories into collaboration. Under Suleiman this timar system worked; he died with a full treasury.4 Less skilful Sultans did not.