The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire

by Alan Palmer

  Over the centuries Ottoman Sultans appropriated many churches as mosques, but they never sought to enforce conversion on the whole Christian community.12 Mehmed II recognized his Orthodox subjects as a religious ‘nation’ (millet); they had to pay heavy taxes and accept discriminatory laws—no proselytizing of Muslims, no church processions, no riding of a horse, no carrying of arms, etc.—but they were permitted self-government in spiritual and secular church affairs under the leadership of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople, who was given high Ottoman rank: a Pasha with three horsetails. Later Sultans used Greeks widely in government service; almost invariably, for example, the interpreter (dragoman) to a foreign envoy would be a Greek. But it was from commerce that the Greeks grew wealthy. A Greek quarter—which included the walled residence of the Patriarch—survived in the Stamboul district of Constantinople around Phanar (Fener), the old Byzantine lighthouse above the Golden Horn. By the early eighteenth century these ‘Phanariot’ Greeks formed a mercantile aristocracy, active not only at the heart of the Empire but throughout Rumelia and the Levant as well. Their greatest commercial rivals had long been the Venetians and, to a lesser extent, the Genoese. The Phanariots presented Ahmed III with a series of appeals from Greeks under Venetian rule in the Aegean islands of the Peloponnese imploring the Ottomans to come and liberate them from Latin domination. This influential pressure group was supported by Sultan Ahmed’s Cretan-born mother, who did not die until November 1715. Military and naval action against the Venetian Republic would be more popular in Constantinople than any campaign on the lower Danube.

  By 1710 a quarter of a century of Venetian administration was bringing prosperity back to the Peloponnese after many years of neglect. The population had increased rapidly, assisted by colonization from north of the Gulf of Corinth, and in the less arid districts farming was flourishing for the first time since the Classical Age. But, despite this rising standard of living, Venetian rule was unpopular with the Greeks themselves. When the French traveller Aubry de la Moutraye landed at Methoni in the summer of 1710 he found that the people deeply resented trade restrictions which, they said, favoured Venetian merchants.13 The Greeks complained, too, of the coming of an Italian priesthood and of Roman Catholic attacks on the Orthodox Church; they thought their co-believers enjoyed greater freedom of worship in the lands still within the Ottoman Empire. This Greek Orthodox hostility to intrusive Latin rites, together with Phanariot hopes of crippling Venetian trade, ensured that the proposed war was warmly supported along the Golden Horn. Early in December 1714 occasional exchanges of fire between Ottoman and Venetian vessels in the Aegean gave the Sultan an excuse to declare war on the Republic of St Mark.

  The campaign began in the following summer, when the Grand Vizier’s army advanced into the Peloponnese. The invaders met little resistance from troops in Venetian pay and found they could count on ready support from the Orthodox clergy. At the same time Ottoman forces captured the last Venetian strongholds in Crete, at Spinalonga and Kalami, and in the Cyclades they took Tenos—Venetian for the past five hundred years, strongly Roman Catholic, and not yet the centre of Orthodox pilgrimage which was to make the island famous in the nineteenth century. With the assistance of ships provided by Pope Clement XI and the Knights of Malta, the Venetians tried to mount a counter-offensive in 1717 at a time when the Ottoman commanders were reeling from a succession of blows struck by Prince Eugene in the Banat. But this final assertion of Holy League solidarity was little more than a gesture. By the summer of 1718, when peace was made at Passarowitz, Venice had agreed to abandon the Peloponnese. Although the Republic held the Ionian islands, Kithira and four small harbours on the coast of Epirus for almost eighty more years, they were retained for commercial purposes, not as strategic bases to support a forward policy in the Aegean and the Levant.

  Even though the settlement went almost unnoticed in Western Europe, the Peace of Passarowitz marked the close of an epoch in Mediterranean history. The Ottomans had gained a final strategic victory, checking the earliest of the maritime challenges from the West. Never again would the lion of St Mark roar across the waters off Lepanto or break the mournful silence of Soudha Bay. Yet as a sign of sustained Ottoman recovery, these events in the Peloponnese were unconvincing. They were made possible by an identity of interest between Muslims and Orthodox in defeating papal endeavours to proselytize the eastern Mediterranean. Relations between the thirty Sultans and more than a hundred and fifty Patriarchs who followed the fall of Byzantium were based on a mutual abhorrence of the Latin religious practice and the hope of mutual respect for the office which each dignitary held. This hope was not always realized; two out of every three Patriarchs were deposed upon Ottoman insistence after relatively minor deviations in policy; six more grievously offending Patriarchs were hanged, drowned or poisoned. Yet both the Sultanate and the Patriarchate were naturally conservative institutions, not entirely blind to reform, but instinctively suspicious of beliefs which might disturb the delicate balance of authority between them. Neither consciously promoted nationalism: the Patriarch maintained the Byzantine tradition of universalism within an ecumenical church; the Sultan ruled a multinational empire of which ‘Turks’ were only one component, the socially underprivileged Turcoman Anatolian peasantry. The war to recover the Peloponnese showed that the two institutions could achieve an operational partnership against the Latin church. It remained to be seen how their relationship would respond to any show of missionary crusading zeal among Orthodox believers beyond the Ecumenical Patriarch’s spiritual jurisdiction.

  That challenge was closer to hand than either Sultan Ahmed or the Patriarch realized. After rebuffing the Russians on the Pruth in 1711 Ahmed and his Viziers affected a careless contempt for Tsar Peter, who had vainly attempted to stir up a Balkan Christian revolt. To underestimate what was happening in Russia was a mistake. Within three years of the Peace of Passarowitz, Peter sought to elevate his status by assuming the title of Emperor of All the Russias; and in the same year, by his ‘Spiritual Regulation’, he subjected the church of Muscovy to a state control more binding than that imposed by any other European sovereign on a religious hierarchy. Soon new Russian agents, emissaries of Holy Church as well as of an imperial State, began to infiltrate the Sultan’s Balkan lands where they encouraged a latent patriotic sentiment, especially in the districts which had shown the greatest hostility to Venetian rule. With Holy Russia assuming the role of militant guardian of the True Faith, it became increasingly difficult for Orthodox believers within the Ottoman Empire to maintain their passive acceptance of second-class citizenship under the Sultan’s rule. In 1452 a Byzantine official, critical of his Emperor’s attempts to reunite the Eastern Church with Rome, is said to have remarked, ‘It would be better to see the royal turban of the Turks in the midst of this city than the Latin mitre’; and in 1710 that view still prevailed among most Greek churchmen.14 But, however much they might mistrust the Latins, respect for the turban was wearing thin. By the second half of the century there were many Greeks who hoped that the finest of their dreams would soon become a reality: to hear the Holy Liturgy sung once more in Constantinople’s domed Basilica of the Divine Wisdom no longer seemed an impossibility.

  CHAPTER 3

  TULIP TIME AND AFTER

  THE DECLINE OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE WAS NEITHER RAPID NOR continuous. By 1700 the age of Islamic conquest in Europe was over; frontiers had contracted after lost or indecisive campaigns; and peripheral provinces, acquired somewhat haphazardly in North Africa and the Yemen, would soon be slipping into virtual independence. From the closing years of the seventeenth century outsiders predicted the collapse of the Sultanate time and time again. Yet, against all expectancy, the Ottoman Empire outlived imperial Spain, republican Genoa and republican Venice, the elective monarchy of Poland, British colonial America, the vestigial Holy Roman Empire, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, and the temporal power of the Papacy; it even survived by a few years the Habsburg and Romanov empires, so long
its apparent residuary legatees, and the Hohenzollern empire which had aspired to overtake France as its chief creditor.

  It is easier to identify signs of decay in the Ottoman Empire than to discover why it became such a durable institution. Undoubtedly one source of vitality was a conviction within the ruling élite and the ulema that the Ottoman Empire was Islam. The prestige of the Caliphate, whether held legitimately or by appropriation, enhanced the secular power of a Sultan after he was girded with the Sword of Othman at Eyüp, however feeble his personality might be. ‘May it be known to His Imperial Majesty that the origins of good order in kingship and community and the guarantee of a stable foundation for the faith and the dynasty lie in a firm grasp on the strong cord of the law of Muhammad,’ the Ottoman counsellor Mustafa Koçi Bey wrote in 1630 in a famous treatise which he presented to Murad IV; and later memoranda to several of Murad’s successors similarly stressed the wisdom of basing public and private life on Holy Islamic Law (the şeriat).1 But there remained in the structure of the Ottoman state an innate conservatism which was always restorative and reformist in character rather than narrowly obscurantist, as some members of the ulema wished. This is a thin distinction, but an important one: provided outward forms looked familiar, the military and naval techniques of Western Europe might be adopted and changes of practice introduced into the day-to-day business of government. Already, under the Köprülüs, the Grand Vizier had acquired an official residence, in a road skirting the outer wall of the Topkapi Sarayi, and from 1654 he retained there an administrative staff in the residence which because of its lofty gate became known as the Sublime Porte (Bab-i Ali) and remained the recognized seat of government until the fall of the Empire. There were several periods in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries when a Sultan or a Grand Vizier cautiously experimented with westernization, seeking to introduce a European style to the well-worn fabric of Ottoman rule.

  The earliest and most original innovator was Ibrahim Pasha Kulliyesi, who became Ahmed III’s Grand Vizier in 1718, after two years as kaimakan (deputy Grand Vizier).2 Foreign observers portray Ibrahim as a sybaritic impresario, with an aesthete’s eye for the beauties of landscape, and great intellectual curiosity. But he was also a shrewd diplomat and a skilled manipulator of palace politics, able to remain Grand Vizier for twelve years, at a time when fourteen months had become the norm. He survived by playing off his enemies against each other, by close marriage links with the dynasty, and by constantly keeping the Sultan amused, entertained and free from all cares of state.

  Ibrahim married the Sultan’s eldest daughter; and he is generally called Damat (‘son-in-law’) Ibrahim to distinguish him from the many namesakes whose ambition never carried them so high. Like his imperial master, he was greedy for wealth and personally extravagant. Yet, despite his many failings, Damat Ibrahim cut an impressive figure, showing broader vision than any of his predecessors. He was the first Ottoman minister to send envoys to the greater European capitals: in 1719 to Vienna; in 1720–1 to Paris; and in 1722–3 to Moscow. As well as negotiating trade agreements, they were to serve as observers, reporting back to the Grand Vizier on aspects of life and culture which might be ‘applicable’ to conditions in the Ottoman Empire. The instructions to Celebi Mehmed, the envoy to France, have survived. He was to visit ‘fortresses, factories, and see generally the products of French civilization’. This task he performed diligently. Reports were sent to the Grand Vizier describing the French court, Parisian street scenes, hospitals, military training grounds and schools. Above all, Celebi lavished praise on the spread of books in libraries and the wonders of printing—a skill to which the envoy’s son, Mehmed Said, gave particular attention.3

  The two visitors to France were cultural missionaries. They helped dispel the legendary suspicion of the ‘cruel Turk’ and stimulated a fashionable interest in turquerie, even to the extent of introducing kebabs to Western Europe. But their main influence was on court life in Constantinople. Although the Blue Mosque was completed in 1616 and the Yeni Cami ‘new mosque’ in 1663, the classical period of Ottoman-sponsored architecture had long since ended. During their half-century of campaigning in Europe the Sultans had favoured Edirne, a pleasantly relaxed city which was also a week’s journey nearer to the battle fronts. But with the return of peace Ahmed III was prepared to burnish the fading glories of his imperial capital, if only Ibrahim could provide him with the funds.

  Ibrahim did just that—and more. A property tax was invented and, at least in the centre of the empire, successfully levied. Emergency ‘campaign assistance taxes’ were raised regularly, even if there was peace along every frontier. On the Anatolian waterfront Ibrahim built a new villa, prompted by the first detailed reports from Celebi in Paris; and there he entertained his father-in-law throughout May 1721, looking out across the Bosphorus. Ahmed III’s aesthetic sense was highly developed; he was interested in poetry, in painting and calligraphy, and particularly in horticulture. He was delighted with his Grand Vizier’s villa and its gardens. The Venetian envoy reports that Ibrahim promptly presented it to him.4

  But a new villa was not enough to satisfy Ahmed’s cultural acquisitiveness. Celebi Mehmed’s descriptions of Fontainebleau and, even more, of King Louis’ compact château at Marly, fascinated him. In imitation of what he assumed to be French royal fashions—and with active encouragement from Damat Ibrahim—Ahmed III created Sa’adabad (‘The Place of Happiness’), an exquisite summer palace above the ‘Sweet Waters of Europe’, beyond Eyüp, some four miles up the Golden Horn from the Topkapi Sarayi. The palace was built in 1722, with astonishing speed. The two streams which constituted the Sweet Waters, the Alibey Suyu and the Kagithane Suyu, were canalized, so as to give Sa’adabad a long, ornamental lake and feed fountains and cascades set in the grounds of the palace. Other members of the Divan sought to emulate their sovereign’s example. A new waterfront palace went up for Damat Ibrahim at Kandilli, some five miles up the Bosphorus, where he sumptuously entertained the Sultan in 1724 and again in 1728, on both occasions for a fortnight. Foreign architects were invited to Constantinople; small waterfront villas, often of timber or moulded plaster rather than the more expensive marble and stone, went up along the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus as well as at the head of the Golden Horn.

  The pleasure of going in a barge to Chelsea is not comparable to that of rowing upon the canal of the sea here, where, for 20 miles together, down the Bosphorus the most beautiful variety of prospects present themselves. The Asian side is covered with fruit trees, villages and the most delightful landscapes in nature; on the European stands Constantinople, situated on seven hills, . . . showing an agreeable mixture of gardens, pines and cypress trees, palaces, mosques and public buildings, raised one above another, with as much beauty and appearance of symmetry as you ever saw in a cabinet adorned by the most skilful hands.

  So the twenty-nine-year-old Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote home to Lady Bristol in April 1718, describing the city where her husband was in residence as King George I’s ambassador.5 But she was writing before the Sa’adabad craze swept the Court. Had she returned to the Bosphorus five or six years later, she would have seen her symmetrical ‘cabinet’ embellished with Rococo extravagance. The French envoy, Louis Sauveur de Villeneuve, commented particularly on two aspects of court life—the Imperial Progresses from palace to palace, and the liking of the Sultan and his ruling class for festive illumination in the night sky.

  Soon after his arrival in Constantinople, Louis de Villeneuve wrote back to Paris:

  Sometimes the court appears floating on the waters of the Bosphorus or the Golden Horn, in elegant caiques, covered with silken tents; sometimes it moves forward in a long cavalcade towards one of the pleasure palaces . . . These processions are made especially attractive by the beauty of the horses and the luxury of their caparisons; they progress, with golden or silver harnesses and plumed foreheads, their coverings resplendent with precious stones.6

  And one night, looking
across to Stamboul from the hill of Pera (now Beyoğlu), Villeneuve was fascinated by ‘the domes of its mosques, rising from within crowns of fire, while an invisible apparatus strung between the minarets made it possible for verses from the Koran to be inscribed in the sky by letters of fire.’7

  The Venetian envoy (bailo), less surprised by processions of boats or by carnival chains of slow-burning resin lamps, commented as early as February 1723 on the wealth of decoration brought by the Sultan’s leading officials to the pavilions or kiosks they had erected in the tree-festooned parkland of Sa’adabad.8 Every visitor seems to have been impressed by some particular novelty in these socially giddy years: a halvah fête, perhaps, with dishes of sesame seed and honey available to all comers; or the painting of portraits, in defiance of the Islamic inhibition against the representation in art of the human figure; jugglers and wrestlers and midgets; parrots and exotic caged singing-birds; confectionery made to look like palm trees or, at the wedding feast of three of the Sultan’s daughters, a sugar and candy garden seventeen square metres in area. To many foreign envoys it seemed a toy world of frivolous inconsequence, fascinating in itself but in startling contrast to the realities so often exposed along the lower waterfront of the Golden Horn, where non-Muslims suffered the bastinado or gasped for death after they had been impaled, or left to hang with a meat hook inserted under the chin.

  ‘Let us laugh, let us play, let us enjoy the delights of the world to the full,’ proclaimed the principal court poet, Ahmed Nedim, boon companion to the Sultan in his later years.9 This was a happy philosophy for an empire allegedly in decline. But it was not an utterly hedonistic way of life. New Muslim schools were founded and old ones, fallen into neglect by misappropriation of their endowments, received support either from individual viziers or from the Sultan and his chief minister. Books had been printed in non-Turkish languages by Jews and Christians in Constantinople ever since the closing years of the fifteenth century, and on Mehmed Said’s return from Paris, Damat Ibrahim encouraged him to set up the first Turkish language printing press, with technical assistance from Ibrahim Muteferrika, a Hungarian-born convert to Islam. Despite complaints from the ulema that the printing of the Koran and other Islamic sacred works was blasphemous, and strong hostility from scribes and calligraphers fearing for their jobs, Muteferrika brought out the first Turkish printed book in 1729, a treatise on historical geography. Twenty-three more volumes were printed over the following thirteen years; among them, in 1732, Muteferrika published his own study of magnetism, Fuyuzot-i minatisiye.10