The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  No attempt was made by Sobieski or Duke Charles to pursue the demoralized enemy immediately after the relief of Vienna. They lingered on the outskirts of the city until Emperor Leopold returned, on the following Tuesday. By then, Kara Mustafa had put the rivers Leitha and Raab between his army and the victorious Christians. Once he reached the Alföld, he was able to regroup his shattered cavalry and fall back upon the citadel of Buda. At the same time he looked for scapegoats in order to convince the Sultan that he was not himself at fault. He could not take vengeance on the insurgent Hungarians, for their canny leader slipped away to the north-east and was using Sobieski as an intermediary to save him from the Emperor’s wrath, with some success. But the Ottoman regimental commanders remained in the Grand Vizier’s power. They suffered for the failure in front of Vienna. More than fifty pashas were strangled by Kara Mustafa’s personal bodyguard in the week which followed the battle on the Kahlenberg.

  These deaths of course made no difference to the outcome of the campaign. Momentarily, at the end of the first week in October, the Grand Vizier’s deputy inflicted a severe check on the Poles at Parkan, a river crossing beneath Esztergom. But two days later a combined Christian army, commanded by Charles of Lorraine, reversed the decision at Parkan and finally broke Turkish resistance along the middle Danube. On 24 October Esztergom surrendered after a brief bombardment. Although earlier in the century Austrian troops had captured towns and villages in which the Turks had set up mosques, Esztergom became the first Islamicized city in Catholic Europe to be recovered by a Christian army.

  Even before the fall of Esztergom, Kara Mustafa had left Buda and set out for Belgrade. As the army retreated across the Pannonian Plain he ordered more executions, for he was determined to keep news of the disasters in Austria and Hungary from reaching the Sultan’s court for as long as possible. Geographically, the middle Danube might constitute a remote north-west frontier for the empire. But the Grand Vizier was under no illusions about the Sultan’s reaction to military failure. Mehmed IV was not a charismatic leader; like so many members of the Ottoman family, on the most solemn occasions he looked ‘a wretched contrast to his splendid trappings’, as a Venetian diplomat had commented earlier in the year; but, however unimpressive his parade horsemanship might be, Mehmed remained ‘the Grand Turk’.6 A single military defeat, even as distant from his capital as the middle Danube, signified an ominous diminution of imperial power. His Grand Vizier had failed Mehmed in the very lands where, for ten generations, the Sultans had been accustomed to expect victories from their army.

  When on 17 November Kara Mustafa reached Belgrade’s citadel, on its limestone cliff above the confluence of Danube and Sava, his expectancy of life was low. He could not execute every witness of his lacklustre generalship without confirming suspicions already circulating at the Sultan’s court; and, though he sought to bribe many survivors of the campaign, there was no certainty that money would ensure a lasting silence. His fate—and, a few years later, the fate of his sovereign—illustrates the inherent self-discipline which still shaped Ottoman ruling institutions as the Empire embarked on a long delaying action against the resilient West.

  At Belgrade Kara Mustafa was still, for the moment, Grand Vizier. In the Kalemegdan Fortress he retained the symbols of office with which Mehmed IV had invested him seven years before—the Imperial Seal and the Key to the Kaaba—and also the Holy Banner (sancaci şerif) which the Sultan had handed to him in May, here in Belgrade, on his appointment as Commander-in-Chief. But although his office ensured that Kara Mustafa still possessed a terrifying authority over his battered army and the towns and villages of Serbia, he knew that generals who suffered defeat while carrying the sancaci şerif into battle had no right to expect pardon. Old personal enemies surrounded Mehmed IV, who was holding court at Edirne, a favourite residence where Kara Mustafa had often ridden beside him on hunting expeditions. When a Grand Vizier set out to lead a campaign for his sovereign the day-to-day business he would have undertaken as chief minister was entrusted to a deputy, and as reports from the Danube seeped through to Edirne it was easy for the deputy and other members of the Divan to convince the Sultan that Kara Mustafa had shown himself unworthy of the responsibilities assigned to him. Mehmed realized that if the Grand Vizier were allowed to live, the humiliating burden of a defeat by infidel armies would pass to the Sultan-Caliph himself.

  Such reasoning sealed Kara Mustafa’s fate. On the last Saturday in December he was at his midday prayers when two senior Court dignitaries reached the Kalemegdan citadel from Edirne. They brought with them a double command from the Sultan to his son-in-law: he must surrender to the imperial emissaries his symbols of civil and military authority; and he should then ‘entrust his soul to Allah, the ever Merciful’. Kara Mustafa completed his prayers, took off his turban and mantle of state, and allowed the executioner to throttle him speedily. There was about the timing of his death a strange irony. As the bowstring tightened around Kara Mustafa’s neck in Belgrade, far away in Vienna and Esztergom and in towns and villages which had so long feared the coming of ‘the Turk’, the church bells were ringing out to celebrate Christmas. It was on 25 December that his co-religionists executed the arch-persecutor of Christians.7

  The body was decapitated, the head skinned, stuffed, and sent to Mehmed IV as proof that the sovereign’s orders had been carried out. But Nemesis had not finished mocking the unfortunate Kara Mustafa. In later campaigns the head fell into Austrian hands. Three hundred years after the siege the curious tourist could see it mounted in a glass case on the first floor of Vienna’s Historisches Museum, a grisly relic of a turbulent age. But the skull is no longer on display. A spirit of reconciliation now prevails in the Austrian capital. Old enmities dissolve in the mystery of time past.

  CHAPTER 2

  CHALLENGE FROM THE WEST

  SULTAN MEHMED IV WAS SOVEREIGN OF MORE THAN THIRTY million subjects, twice as many as King Louis XIV and six times as many as Emperor Leopold I. Even after the disaster on the Danube, his empire remained formidable. He ruled over almost the whole of the Balkans, up to the eastern approaches to Zagreb, and his troops held outposts along the Polish river Bug and the Russian rivers Don and Dnieper. In Europe alone his lands were greater in area than France and Spain taken together, while in Asia Minor he was direct ruler over a vast region which stretched as far south as the head-waters of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and he held as tributary states the Caucasian lands eastwards to the Caspian Sea. Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus acknowledged his sovereignty; so, too, did Egypt and the lower Nile valley, and he could claim vassal authority over Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers.

  Along most of these frontiers there was, however, a clear limit to imperial expansion, well defined on the map. In the East the Ottoman advance was checked by a combination of geography and military science, to which might be added the religious hostility of convinced Shi’ites: the Safavid dynasty of Persia possessed the skill to exploit natural defences high in their mountainous central plateau; and it was never likely that the Ottomans would emulate the early Arab invaders and reach the Punjab. In the South the barrier to expansion was purely geographical: sand imposed a natural frontier, and apart from protecting the pilgrim trail to Medina and Mecca, there seemed no reason for the Ottomans to penetrate deeply along caravan routes into the Sahara or the Arabian deserts. The south-western limits were also settled long before the closing decades of the seventeenth century, for new conquests in that direction depended on sea power, and Turkish shipyards did not build vessels stout enough to face the challenge of the Atlantic. Although the Sultan’s calm-water fleet was still effective to the east of the Sicilian narrows, Ottoman maritime pretensions never fully recovered from their defeat in 1571, when Don John of Austria’s Spanish, Genoese and Venetian armada gained a decisive victory at Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. Thereafter successive Grand Viziers left naval harassment of the Sultan’s Christian enemies in the western Mediterranean to ‘Barbary pirates’, untrustwort
hy allies though these notorious corsairs often proved to be.

  Yet, while mountains, sands and ocean confined Ottoman power in three directions, there was no natural obstacle to the north of the Balkans, short of the Carpathians and the Alps. An artificial barrier, a string of fortresses built by the Habsburgs in the late sixteenth century, formed the so-called ‘Military Frontier’ across western Croatia, but the Danubian plain formed a vast arena in which generals who could master the changing techniques of military science might engage the enemy in battle. In the fifteenth century the Turks had soon perceived the value of cannon; even as early as 1453 a ‘super-gun’ twenty-six feet long lobbed stone balls against the walls of Constantinople. But they did not maintain their lead in exploiting new weaponry. The relief of Vienna and the fall of Esztergom showed the world what several foreign travellers had suspected over the past half-century: the Ottoman war machine was beginning to seize up. It may have enabled the Sultans to raise a standing army earlier than other sovereigns in Europe, but the Danubian campaign had shown that Kara Mustafa’s combination of specialist troops, feudatories, daredevil light horsemen and untrained auxiliary plodders could not match the new professional soldiery of the West. Turkish flintlock muskets remained deadly, but heavy artillery trains drawn by oxen, buffalo or camels made slow and lumbering progress across the Danubian plain.

  Catholic Christendom sought speedily to exploit the advantage won by Sobieski and Charles of Lorraine by weaving, for the first time, a grand strategic design against ‘the Turk’.1 In March 1684 emissaries from Venice, Poland and Austria came together, with the backing of Pope Innocent XI, to create a new ‘Holy League’, an offensive coalition which would threaten other frontiers as well as the Danube basin. During these discussions in Venice the earliest provisional plans were outlined for partitioning the Ottoman Empire in Europe and—more vaguely—in the Middle East, too. Louis XIV, whose ministers maintained profitable relations with successive Grand Viziers, was disinclined to associate France with any crusading Holy League, but it was hoped Orthodox Russia, Protestant Germany and even Muslim Persia would act in concert with the three Catholic Powers.

  These plans were over-ambitious: Persia failed to respond to the Capuchin missionaries who served as envoys from Venice; German Lutheran participation was minimal; and another two years passed before the Russians went to war, then only to mount an expedition against Mehmed’s tributary ruler, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea. But, although the coalition remained incomplete, the Holy League was able to attack Mehmed IV in rapid succession on several fronts. These operations marked the start of thirty-five years of almost continuous warfare, in which the Sultan’s enemies sought to roll back the frontiers of Islam and prove that the great empire built up by Suleiman was set in fatal decline.

  The fighting began where it had ended in the previous autumn. Duke Charles of Lorraine continued the war in the Alföld, securing Pest and most of northern Hungary in two summer campaigns, taking Buda after a month’s siege on 2 September 1686, and defeating the Turks heavily eleven months later near the historic battlefield of Mohács. Charles’s victory allowed Habsburg armies to clear the Ottomans from most of Croatia and Transylvania. In the first week of September 1688 the Austrians carried the war into the Balkans by storming Belgrade, the capital of a provincial pashalik for more than a century and a half. In the following summer they advanced to Niš and Skopje, penetrating to within four hundred miles of Constantinople by the autumn.

  Meanwhile Venice, too, opened up a battle front in the Balkans. Raids on Ottoman outposts along the southern Dalmatian coast and in Bosnia were followed in 1685 by a new campaign in Greece. Francesco Morosini, a former Doge in his late sixties, landed at Tolon in the Peloponnese—the ‘Sanjak of the Morea’—and encouraged revolts in Epirus and the Mani. By August 1687 this ‘Venetian’ force, which included Lutheran mercenaries under the Swedish adventurer Count John Königsmarck, had ejected the Turks from all the Peloponnese except the defiant rocky promontory of Monemvasia. A month later Morosoni’s men swept across the isthmus of Corinth and thrust forwards, by land and by sea, to the Piraeus. They then attacked the tumbledown cluster of homes and shops around the Acropolis which was all that remained of the greatest of classical cities. After ten days of intermittent bombardment the Ottoman troops surrendered. Not, however, before irreparable disaster had hit Athens.2 On the evening of 26 September 1687 a German mercenary fired a mortar from the Mouseion Hill which blew up a Turkish powder magazine in the Parthenon; the frieze and fourteen columns crashed to the ground. A few days later Morosini ordered the carved horses and chariot of Athena to be removed from the west pediment and shipped to Venice as a trophy of war, following the marble Lion of the Piraeus which was already on its way to embellish the gates of the Doge’s arsenal. The task of lowering the group proved too hard for Morosini’s unskilled labourers. Horses and chariot fell to the ground, in ruins. The classical heritage of Athens suffered more from Morosini’s expedition than from any depredations inflicted during the past two centuries of Ottoman rule—although it was, of course, the Turks who used the Parthenon as a gunpowder store.

  Alarming rumours of the Holy League’s strategic counter-offensive filtered through to Constantinople. So, too, month after month, did thousands of hungry and desperate refugees. There was no escaping the effects of the war in the capital or on either shore of the Bosphorus. Bread prices doubled in 1686 and again in 1687; banditry flourished in Rumelia; fields went untilled in the fertile regions because labourers had been conscripted into Kara Mustafa’s army. Sultan ‘Mehmed the Hunter’ chose to remain as long as possible at Edirne, fearing for his life in the capital. Early in his reign Mehmed had been well served by two members of the Köprülü family. Now a third, Ahmed’s younger brother Mustafa, became the natural leader of an opposition group, intent on checking the decline of the Sultan’s authority in the Empire’s outlying provinces.

  Mehmed was hopelessly discredited and it was too late for Mustafa Köprülü to save him. Defeat at Mohács, followed closely by news of Morosini’s advance into Attica, cost him the Sultanate. Four predecessors had already been cast from the throne in the first half of the century. Last of them was Mehmed’s father Ibrahim ‘the Mad’, deposed on 8 August 1648 after an eight-year reign made memorable by a frittering-away of harshly extorted funds, and by tales of one terrible night on which he was said to have ordered the drowning of two hundred and eighty concubines. No one grieved for Ibrahim when, ten days after losing his throne, he was strangled by his own cellad (Chief Executioner). Now, in 1687, with angry and underpaid soldiers flocking into the capital, it seemed probable that Mehmed would suffer his father’s fate. But neither the Divan nor the ulema wished to weaken further the twin institutions of Sultanate and Caliphate by a second murder. Mustafa Köprülü favoured bloodless deposition, with Mehmed IV surrendering sovereignty to his forty-five-year-old half-brother Prince Suleiman.

  Abdications seldom go smoothly, even among the dynasties of monogamous societies, and in the Ottoman Empire the structure of the harem system constantly raised succession problems.3 Before the nineteenth century it was rare for there to be an heir-apparent, a well-groomed prince ready to come forward immediately after a Sultan’s death or deposition. Most Ottoman rulers favoured several Sultanas, as well as concubines lower down the harem hierarchy who might have borne them sons. So intricate was the problem that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the brothers and half-brothers of a new Sultan were generally strangled on his accession day, thus eliminating rival claimants who might become the centre of palace intrigue: five brothers of Murad V had perished by the bowstring on 21 December 1574; and on 28 January 1595 the killing of a record eighteen brothers of Mehmed III left the dynasty so short of males that religious leaders began to question the morality and wisdom of mass fratricide. It was accordingly decided that close male relatives should henceforth be confined to a kafe (cage), one of several small apartments in the Fourth Courtyard of the Sultan’s
principal palace, the Topkapi Sarayi. Apart from Mehmed himself, who acceded at the age of six, all fifteen Sultans between 1617 and 1839 awaited the call to the throne in this small world, with its marble terrace looking out across a garden to the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus.4

  Some princes suffered no more than nominal confinement. But Suleiman, only three months younger than Mehmed, entered the kafe at the age of six and reached middle age knowing nothing of the world beyond what he could see from the Fourth Courtyard. Thirty-nine years in the kafe, out of touch with public affairs, was no preparation for a reign. Nevertheless, on 9 November 1687 the Viziers duly produced the dazed, puzzled and half-forgotten Prince from the inner apartments of the Topkapi; he was, a Frenchman noted, of ‘long, lean and pale appearance’.5 The Viziers waited on Mehmed IV with a fetva requiring his abdication. He accepted his deposition fatalistically and was duly transferred to the kafe, while Suleiman II was ceremonially girded with the sword in the sacred mosque at Eyüp, an occasion corresponding to a coronation. At least Mehmed’s life was spared. But a final irony was reserved for him. Eventually he left the Topkapi and, under close escort, journeyed northwards, back to Edirne and the favourite palace from which he had so often ridden out hunting. But there were to be no more ‘sporting campaigns’ for Mehmed. His life ended in a virtual imprisonment which denied him all pleasure. When he died in January 1693 some said it was of gout, some of poison, but many maintained that it was from melancholia.