History of the Ottman Empire

Introduction

This book owes its origins to an event that occurred in Vienna in the

summer of 1983, when lines of schoolchildren wound their way through

the sidewalks of the Austrian capital. The attraction they were lining up for

was not a Disney movie or a theme park, but instead a museum exhibition,

one of many celebrations held that year to commemorate the 300th

anniversary of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna. In the minds of these

children, their teachers, and the Austrian (and, for that matter, the general

European) public, 1683 was a year in which they all were saved ± from

conquest by the alien Ottoman state, the ``unspeakable Turk.''

The Ottoman empire had emerged, c. 1300, in western Asia Minor,

not far from the modern city of Istanbul. In a steady process of state

building, this empire had expanded both west and east, defeating

Byzantine, Serb, and Bulgarian kingdoms as well as Turkish nomadic

principalities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Mamluk sultanate based

in Egypt. By the seventeenth century it held vast lands in west Asia,

north Africa, and southeast Europe. In 1529 and again in 1683,

Ottoman armies pressed to conquer Habsburg Vienna.

 

 

The artifacts in the Vienna museum exhibit told much about the

nature of the 1683 events. For example, the display of the captured tent

and personal effects of the Ottoman grand vizier illustrated the panicky

¯ight of the Ottoman forces from their camps that, just days before, had

encircled Vienna. The timely arrival of the central and east European

allies, notably King John ( Jan) Sobieski of Poland, had put the encir-

cling Ottoman armies to ¯ight and turned the second Ottoman effort to

seize the city into a full-blown disaster. For hundreds of years the

Ottoman forces had been pressing northward, ever deeper into the

Balkan peninsula and closer to Vienna and the German-speaking lands.

These Ottomans literally were the terror of their enemies, seemingly

invincible. Viennese mothers put their children to bed warning them to

behave lest the ``Turks'' come and gobble them up. This world changed

in 1683. Somewhat to the surprise of both sets of protagonists, the

Ottoman forces besieging Vienna were catastrophically defeated, an

event that marked the permanent reversal of power relations between

the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires.

 

 

By ``Turks,'' these frightened mothers meant a more complex reality ±

the ®ghting forces, who may or may not have been ethnically Turkish, of

the multi-ethnic, multi-religious Ottoman empire. Thus, a word here

about the terms ``Turks'' and ``Ottomans'' seems in order. West, central,

and east Europeans referred to the ``Turkish empire'' and to the ``Turks''

when discussing the state led by the Ottoman dynasty. This was as true

in the fourteenth as in the twentieth centuries. The appellation has some

basis since the Ottoman family was ethnically Turkish in its origins, as

were some of its supporters and subjects. But, as we shall see, the

dynasty immediately lost this ``Turkish'' quality through intermarriage

with many different ethnicities. As for a ``Turkish empire,'' state power

relied on a similarly heterogeneous mix of peoples. The Ottoman

empire succeeded because it incorporated the energies of the vastly

varied peoples it encountered, quickly transcending its roots in the

Turkish nomadic mig rations from central Asia into the Middle East (see

chapter 2). Whatever ethnic meaning the word ``Turk'' may have held

soon was lost and the term came to mean ``Muslim.'' To turn Turk

meant converting to Islam. Throughout this work, the term Ottoman is

preferred since it conjures up more accurate images of a multi-ethnic,

multi-religious enterprise that relied on inclusion for its success.

 

 

In hindsight, we can see that after 1683 the Ottomans never again

threatened central Europe. They did, however, stay in occupation of

southeast Europe for 200 more years, dominating the modern-day states

of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, and others. Finally, in the hardly

unbiased words of the British politician, Gladstone, they were driven

``bag and baggage'' from their possessions. In its Asian and African

provinces, the Ottoman empire persisted even longer. Most parts of

modern-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and

Saudi Arabia remained part of the empire until World War I. During the

last decades before it disappeared in 1922 the Ottoman empire existed

without the European provinces that for centuries had been its heart

and soul. In its last days, but only then, it fairly could be called an

Asiatic, Middle Eastern power. Until the 1878 Treaty of Berlin stripped

away all but fragments of its Balkan holdings, the Ottoman empire was a

European power and was seen as such by its contemporaries, being

deeply involved in European military and political affairs. Throughout

nearly all of its 600-year histor y, the Ottoman state was as much a part

Ottoman history in world history

 

 

The Ottoman empire was one of the greatest, most extensive, and

longest-lasting empires in history. It included most of the territories of

the eastern Roman empire and held por tions of the northern Balkans

and north Black Sea coast, areas that Byzantium had never ruled. Nor

were these holdings ephemeral ± the Ottoman empire was born before

1300 and endured until after World War I. Thus, it began in the same

century the powerful Sung state in China ended, in the era when

Genghis Khan swept across the Euro-Asiatic world and built an empire

from China to Poland while, in Europe, France and England were about

to embark on their Hundred Years' War. In west Africa the great Benin

state was emerging while, in the Americas, the Aztec state in the valley

of Mexico was being born, both events being nearly contemporaneous

with the Ottomans' emergence in Asia Minor. Born in medieval times,

this empire of the Ottomans disappeared only very recently, within the

memory of many people still living today. My own father was nine years

old and my mother ®ve years old when the Ottoman empire ®nally

disappeared from the face of the earth. Large numbers of persons living

today in the Ottoman successor states ± such as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon,

and Iraq ± bear Ottoman personal names given to them by their parents

and were educated and grew up in an Ottoman world. Thus, for many,

this empire is a living legacy.

 

 

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman empire shared the world stage

with a cluster of other powerful and wealthy states. To their far west lay

distant Elizabethan England, Habsburg Spain, and the Holy Roman

empire as well as Valois France and the Dutch Republic. More closely at

hand and of greater signi®cance to the Ottomans in the short run, the

city states of Venice and Genoa exerted enormous political and eco-

nomic power, thanks to their far-¯ung ¯eets and commercial networks

linking India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and west European

worlds. To the east were two great empires, then at their peak of power

and wealth: the Safevid state based in Iran and the Moghul empire in

the Indian subcontinent. The Ottoman, Safevid, and Moghul empires

reached from Vienna in the west to the borders of China in the east and,

in the sixteenth century, all prospered under careful administrators,

enriched by the trade between Asia and Europe. The three (but for

China) held the balance of economic and political power, at the very

moment when Spain and Portugal were conquering the New World and

its treasure. China, in the midst of Ming rule, certainly was the most

powerful and wealthy state in the world at the time.

 

 

The Ottomans, in 1453, had destroyed the second Rome, Byzantium,

that had endured for one thousand years, from the fourth through the

®fteenth centuries. As destroyer, the Ottoman empire in some ways

also was the inheritor of the Roman heritage in its eastern Byzantine

form. Indeed, Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople,

explicitly laid down the claim that he was a caesar, a latter-day emperor,

while his sixteenth-centur y successor, SuÈ leyman the Magni®cent,

sought Rome as the capstone of his career. Moreover, the Ottoman

rulers, having conquered the second Rome, for the next four hundred-

plus years honored its Roman founder in the name of the capital city.

Until the end of the empire, the city's name ± the city of Constantine ±

Konstantiniyye/Constantinople ± remained in the Ottomans' of®cial

correspondence, their coins, and on their postage stamps, after these

came into use in the nineteenth century. In some respects, moreover,

the Ottomans followed certain Byzantine administrative models. Like

the Byzantines, the Ottomans practiced a kind of caesaro-papism, the

system in which the state controlled the clergy. In the Ottoman judiciary

the courts were run by judges, members of the relig ious class, the

ulema. The Ottoman sultans appointed these judges and thus, like their

Byzantine imperial predecessors, exercised a direct control over

members of the religious establishment. In addition, to give another

example of Byzantine±Ottoman continuities, Byzantine forms of land

tenure carried over into the Ottoman era. While the Ottomans forged

their own unique synthesis and were no mere imitators of their prede-

cessors, their debt to the Byzantines was real.

Other powerful in¯uences shaped the Ottoman polity besides the

Byzantine. As we shall see, the Ottoman empire emerged out of the

anarchy surrounding the Turkish nomadic movements into the Middle

East after 1000

 

 

causes in their central Asiatic homelands. It was the last great Turco-

Islamic state, following those of the Seljuks and of Tamerlane, born of

the migration of the Turkish peoples out of central Asia westward into

the Middle East and the Balkans (see chapter 2). The shamanist beliefs

of those nomads remained deeply embedded in the spiritual practices

and world view of the Ottoman dynasty. Similarly, pre-Islamic Turkish

usages remained important in Ottoman administrative circles, despite

the later in¯ux of administrative and legal practices from the Islamic

world of Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately, the Ottoman

system should be seen as a highly effective blend of in¯uences deriving

from Byzantium, the Turkish nomads, and the Balkan states, as well as

the Islamic world.

 

 

Shaped by others, the Ottomans in their turn affected the evolution

and formation of many central, east, and west European states and the

shaping of their popular imagination. If there is such a thing as the

paranoid style in twentieth-century Soviet Russian politics, we have the

Ottomans to thank, in large measure. For the Czarist Russian state

based in Moscow the presence of a powerful Ottoman state long

blocked the way to Black Sea and Mediterranean warm water ports. For

centuries, the Ottomans were the single most important foreign enemies

of the Russian state; czars and sultans fought against each other in a

seemingly endless series of wars between the seventeenth and twentieth

centuries, until both disappeared. These wars had a powerful impact on

the evolution and shaping of the emerging Russian power: the Musco-

vite state's deep fears of powerful enemies on its southern (and western)

¯anks permanently marked its polity with a need to seek safety in

expansion and domination. The Habsburg state on the Danube, for its

part, came into existence amid profound regional confusion in order to

check further Ottoman expansion northwards. The Vienna-based state

became a center of resistance and, over time, acquired the role and

identity as the ®rst line of defense for central Europe because the various

kingdoms further south in the Balkan peninsula all had failed to check

the Ottomans. Without question, the Ottomans played a decisive role in

the formation and subsequent evolution of the Habsburg state, de®ning

its very nature.

 

 

Its geopolitical position, at the crossroads of the Asian, European, and

African continents, thus gave the Ottoman state an important role to

play in world history. This importance did not vanish after the military

catastrophe of 1683 and the failing ability of the Ottomans to defend

their territorial integrity. Indeed, Ottoman weakness prompted inter-

national instability among expanding neighbors jealous to lop off

Ottoman lands or, at the least, prevent them from falling into the hands

of rivals. This ``Eastern Question'' ± who would inherit which territories

once the Ottoman state vanished ± provoked strife among the Great

Powers of the age and became a leading issue of international diplomacy

in the nineteenth century. In 1914, the failure to resolve the Eastern

Question helped bring on the ®rst great catastrophe of the contemporary

age, World War I.

 

 

A far more positive reason to study the Ottoman empire and assign it

an important place in world history concerns the tolerant model of

administration that it offered during most of its existence. For a

contemporary world in which transportation and communication tech-

nologies and the mig rations of peoples have brought about an unpar-

alleled confrontation with difference, the Ottoman case warrants careful

study. For centuries the Ottoman hand rested lightly on its subject

populations. The Ottoman political system required its administrators

and military of®cers to protect subjects in the exercise of their religion,

whether it were Islam, Judaism, or Christianity in whatever variation ±

e.g. Sunni, Shii, Greek or Armenian or Syriac Orthodox or Catholic.

This requirement was based on the Islamic principle of toleration of the

``People of the Book,'' meaning Jews and Christians. These ``people''

had received God's revelation, even if in an incomplete and imperfect

way; therefore, the Ottoman Islamic state had the responsibility to

protect them in the exercise of their religions. Without question,

Christian and Jewish subjects sometimes were persecuted or killed for

their faith. But these were violations of the bedrock principle of tolera-

tion ± a high standard to which the state expected and required

adherence. Such principles governed inter-communal relations in the

Ottoman empire for centuries but, in the ®nal years, there was mounting

disharmony (see chapter 9). For most of its history, however, the

Ottoman empire offered an effective model of a multi-religious political

system to the rest of the world.

 

 

The Ottoman empire in European culture

 

 

Let us begin with a word of caution about the signi®cance of the

following pages, that outline the place of the Ottoman empire in the

history, imag ination, and culture of western Europe. This discussion is

not intended to imply that the Ottomans are important only to the

extent they contributed to west European development. Instead, the

discussion has this focus because the intended primary audience is those

from the west European cultural tradition. The goal is to demonstrate

for those readers the manner in which the Ottoman empire affected the

course of their own histor y and culture.

 

 

Because the Ottomans, by chance, were physically the most proximate

to the west European states that came to dominate the globe in the

modern era, they long bore the brunt of Europe's military, political, and

ideological expansion. This proximity had a profound impact on the

formation of identity, both of the Ottomans and of the Europeans. On

each side proximity structured a complex identity formation process of

repulsion and attraction. After all, a people comes to perceive of itself as

distinct and separate, with particular and unique characteristics, often

through using the ``other'' as a means of de®ning what it is and, equally,

what it is not. Confronting the Byzantine, Balkan, east, and west Euro-

pean states, the Ottomans sometimes emphasized (perhaps like the

Moghuls facing a Hindu enemy) their identity as Muslim warriors for

the faith. This did not prevent the Ottoman rulers from simultaneously

admiring and employing Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serb, west European,

and other Christians as soldiers, artists, and technicians. For Europeans,

including their descendants in the United States and elsewhere, the

Ottomans were a vital means by which European culture de®ned itself

as such. Sometimes the Ottoman served as a model for qualities the

Europeans wished to possess. Thus Machiavelli and later European

political thinkers such as Bodin and Montesquieu praised the Ottoman

military and administrators' incorruptibility, discipline, and obedience

in order to chastise Europeans. All of them, different political thinkers

in different eras, wrote about the need for effective administrators and

an effective state. In an age when direct criticism of a king might be

dangerous, they used the example of the Ottomans to inspire European

monarchs and their soldiers and statesmen to better behavior. These are

the qualities, such writers were saying, which we in the West should

possess. Further, as Europeans sought to de®ne themselves, they did so

in part by describing what they were not. Europeans made the Ottomans

the repository of evil; Europeans identi®ed the characteristics which

they wished to have by attributing the opposite to their enemy. Thus,

cruelty vs humaneness, barbarism vs civilization, in®dels vs true be-

lievers. You could know who you were by de®ning who and what you

were not. (In the places that we now know as England, France, and

Germany, the inhabitants had assigned this role of ``other'' to the

Muslims of Arab lands during the earliest days of Islam, back in the

seventh century).

In the imagination of these inhabitants whose

identity as Europeans was still in the making , the Ottomans (them) were

described as possessing qualities which civilized persons (we) did/could

not possess. In the world of the European mind, the Ottomans alter-

nately were terrible, savage, and ``unspeakable'' and at the same time

sex-crazed, harem-driven, and debauched. Even in the nineteenth

century, European imag inings marked the Ottoman East as the degen-

erate site of pleasures supposedly absent or forbidden in the civilized

and vigorous West, where Europeans by contrast allegedly were re-

strained, sober, just, sexually controlled, moderate, and rational.

In a truly intimate way the Ottomans became part and parcel of

everyday European life, usually in ways that today are overlooked or

forgotten. For example, most west Europeans or Americans surely

would fail to acknowledge their debt to the Ottomans for the coffee and

tulips they enjoy or the smallpox inoculations that protect their lives.

But indeed, these are Ottoman contributions, arriving in western

Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. From early

times the Ottoman empire has been intertwined in the daily lives,

religion, and politics of what became Europe. Usually, as a rule of

thumb, the extent of the intertwining is in inverse correlation to the

distance. Hence, probably, the Ottoman legacy is g reater in present day

Austria than in Denmark. And yet, everywhere, including the United

States where so many western European values have been maintained,

the Ottoman presence is felt.

 

 

The Ottoman empire played an important role in the European wars

of religion, serving a didactic function. During the Reformation era, for

many of the contesting parties the Ottomans were the veritable scourge

of God on earth. Some radical reformers, called Anabaptists, held that

the Ottomans were God's sign, about to conquer the world. The Anti-

Christ then would come; the Elect would destroy the godless and bring

about the Second Coming of Christ. Martin Luther, for his part,

similarly wrote that the Ottomans were God's punishment for a corrupt

papacy, an instrument of God's anger. Catholics, from their side,

considered these ``Turks'' divine punishment for allowing Luther and his

followers to flourish.

 

 

The Ottomans similarly are embedded in European popular culture.

In the seventeenth century, French imaginative literature frequently

focused on the sultans, for example in the story of Sultan Bayezit I

(1389± 1402) in his cage and his captor, Timur (Tamerlane), which was

published in 1648. Most stories, however, related the cruelty of the

Turks, such as that of Sultan SuÈ leyman the Magni®cent towards his

favorite, the Grand Vizier Ibrahim. Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror, who

actually was a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, multilingual Renaissance

prince, became a cruel and brutal tyrant in a 1612 French play that

portrayed his mother drinking the blood of a victim. Other, equally

bizarre, stories depicted Ottoman soldiers making sacri®ces to the

Roman god of war, Mars. The receding of the Ottoman threat after

the 1683 failure before Vienna, however, modi®ed the image of the

Ottomans.

And so, in the eighteenth century, west, central, and east Europeans

felt safe enough to begin borrowing overtly, actively, from their Ottoman

neighbor. During this period the Ottomans made important contri-

butions in the realm of European classical music, adding to it the

percussion sections of the modern orchestra. From the 1720s until the

1850s, so called ``Turkish music'' ± a term once used for the percussion

instruments in the orchestra ± became the rage in Europe. European

courts vied with one another to produce the Ottoman percussion sounds

± cymbals, the single kettle drum, the side drum, and the bass drum,

plus triangles, tambourines, and the ``Jingling Johnny,'' a pavilion-

shaped instrument of bells. This music had originated with the Janissary

band that marched with the Ottoman armies to inspire the troops and

strike terror into enemies' hearts. King Augustus II of Poland

so admired Janissary music that a sultan gifted him with a

band of twelve to ®fteen players. The king's neighbor, Empress Anne of

Russia, determined she needed one as well, and in 1725 sent to Istanbul

for a similar group. By 1741, the Vienna Habsburgs had their own and,

somewhat later, so did the Prussian king in Berlin. In each of these, the

band members were Ottomans, whose careers abroad in these strange

lands certainly deserve telling. In 1782, London received its own band

but, in this instance, Africans were employed on the drums, cymbals,

and tambourines, probably to further promote the sense of the exotic.

One survival of this Janissary band craze is the mace throwing by drum

majors. Over time, the mace became ceremonial, carried by the head of

the Janissary band to keep time. This ®nally evolved into the baton of the

drum majorettes, thrown into the air in parades and at football games

everywhere in the United States.

 

 

The popularity of the Janissary sound spilled over from the orchestra

and entered the mainstream of what we now call Western classical

music. There is a wonderful passage in the ®nal movement of Beetho-

ven's Ninth Symphony, ®rst published in 1824, that conjures up images

of marching Janissaries. ``Turkish music'' can also be heard in the

Fourth Symphony of Brahms and in Haydn's Military Symphony as well

as in Rossini's William Tell overture and in the march of Wagner's

TannhaÈ user. Mozar t's A major piano sonata K. 331 contains a marvel-

lous rondo alla turca, a theme that carried over into American jazz and

the repertories of musicians such as Dave Brubeck and Ahmad Jamal. In

opera, not only Ottoman music but Ottoman settings became popular,

the ®rst being a three-act opera in 1686 produced in Hamburg, on the

fate of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha after the siege of Vienna.

Handel's opera Tamerlane (1724) portrayed the defeat, capture, and

imprisonment of Sultan Bayezit I (1389± 1402) by the central Asian

world conqueror. The Escape from the Seraglio by Mozar t in 1782 was

preceded by several operas with similar plot lines and characters.

Rossini's The Turk in Italy and to some extent The Italian Girl in Algiers

carried on this tradition of Ottoman operatic themes.

 

 

As European music borrowed Ottoman musical themes and settings,

``Turkish'' fashions became the rage of late eighteenth-century Europe.

Pseudo-Ottoman sultans and sultanas appeared everywhere, a fad

started by Madame de Pompadour in the court of King Louis XV.

During the Sarmation movement in Poland, for example, nobles wore

Ottoman costumes and rode ``Arab'' horses. Ottoman-style coffee

houses across Europe became populated with Europeans wearing bright

silks, billowing trousers, and upturned ``Turkish slippers,'' smoking

``Turkish'' pipes and eating ``Turkish'' sweets.

 

 

In the nineteenth century this ``Turkomania'' faded, to be replaced by

yet other expressions of the Ottoman presence in European popular

culture. The common motifs of cruelty, intrigue, jealousy and savagery

continued, hence the ready reception accorded to the powerful British

politician Gladstone's rantings against the ``Bulgarian horrors.'' Along-

side this old, ruthless image emerged that of the amorous or the buffoon

Turk. The silly Turk already had become a stock ®gure, as we see in

Molie

Áre's The Bourgeois Gentleman (1670), where a major character

babbled gibberish which the audience was meant to understand as

Ottoman Turkish. Now, in the nineteenth century, lustful Turks with

enormous sex organs became an important feature of Victorian porno-

graphic literature. Further, many Europeans, from Lord Byron to the

novelist Pierre Loti to Lawrence of Arabia, came to consider the

Ottoman empire as the land of dreams where sexual or other fantasies

could be realized. These three individuals and thousands of others

sought escape from the tedium and monotony of modern industrial life

in the imagined East ± whether or not they traveled to the Ottoman

realms. The paintings of Delacroix, Ge

Âroà me, and others abound in

images of the exotic and erotic, the primitive, the savage, and the noble.

Thanks to the Ottoman ar tifacts displayed at the various world's fairs

of the nineteenth centur y, including the 1876 American Centennial

Exposition, a ``Turkish corner'' became commonplace in European and

American homes. In the parlors of the wealthier classes overstuffed

armchairs with deep fringes and tassels appeared, often set off with a

copper tray and always ``Oriental'' carpets. In 1900 Paris, for example,

the designer Poiret was famed for his ``Oriental'' fantasies. In the homes

of the less-well-off, a single piece of overstuffed furniture ± a sofa,

ottoman, or divan ± often conjured up the exotic East. The great

German novelist Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924) depicts a

``Turkish corner,'' and also a ®gure who used a ``Turkish'' coffee mill

and ``Turkish'' coffee for socializing. The grandfather of one of the main

characters had ``a funny little Turk in ¯owing silk robes, under which

was a hard body with a mechanism inside. Once, when you wound him

up, he had been able to leap about all over the table, but he was long

since out of repair.'' In the United States, for example, in New York

City, Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, architects built scores of motion

picture theaters that borrowed ver y heavily from Islamic and Ottoman

architectural details (as well as from other cultures, including the

ancient Near East).

 

 

In sum, as is clear from the above examples, the Ottomans supplied

much grist for the imaginative mill of the Europeans. The Anti-Christ

and enemy of the Reformation and of the French imag inative literature

of the seventeenth centur y had given way to more innocent images in

the age of Ottoman militar y contraction. Hence we ®nd the Janissary

music and Turkomania fads of the eighteenth century, and then the

exoticism and eroticism of the nineteenth century accompanied by the

omnipresent Oriental rug and the movie theater. Even today, in the

cultural world of Europe and its extensions, the Ottoman empire is

gone, but its legacies remain (see chapter 10).

 

 

In its last days, the Ottoman empire persevered in the heyday of west

European imperialism, when the empires of Britain and France physi-

cally dominated and occupied much of the globe. Everywhere peoples

had fallen under the control of these and other west European states. In

the late nineteenth-centur y world there were only a handful of indepen-

dent states outside the European continent. The Ottomans, together

with imperial China and Japan, were the most important of such states

which survived with any strength. As independent states, they became

models and sources of hope to the colonized peoples of the world in

their struggles against European imperialism. Thus, peoples as diverse

as Indian Muslims, the Turkic speakers of central Asia and the North

Africans of the Maghreb all looked to the Ottoman empire in their

struggles against British, Russian, and French colonialism.

 

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