Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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christoph k. neumann

In 1621 Osman II, energetic and ambitious, had personally led an unsuc-

cessful campaign against the stronghold of Hotin on the Dniestr. Conﬂict

between the Ottomans and the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth concerned

suzerainty over Moldavia and Cossack marauding on Ottoman territory. With

this war the Ottomans had opened a new frontier in the north.

Osman’s apparent hostility against the janissaries and his military zeal were

instrumental in his downfall. He attempted to win over the ulema, marrying

the daughter of the s¸eyh

ulislam, and planned to combine a campaign against

Ma‘no

glu with performance of the pilgrimage. But he lost ﬁrst his throne, then

his life, in a janissary rebellion.

A coalition between janissaries and prominent

palace circles headed by K

osem Sultan, the most senior member of the harem,

was to dominate Ottoman politics for some time. K

osem had been Ahmed’s I

(r. 1603–17) favourite (haseki), and as neither Osman nor Mustafa I had a sur-

viving mother, K

osem ﬁlled this important position under several rulers.

The period between the death of S

uleyman the Magniﬁcent in 1566 and the

ascendancy of the K

opr

u household in 1656 has been characterised as the ‘Age

of the Queen Mother’.

The sultans’ mothers enjoyed high inﬂuence and great

prestige; for beginning with Sultan S

uleyman, the ruler’s position had become

ever more exalted, and as a corollary this implied his growing seclusion in the

palace and an increasing inﬂuence on the part of palace circles. The sultan’s

mother was comparable to the kul (non-ulema members of the elite) by her

slave origin, but unquestionably legitimated through her relationship to the

ruler. Inevitably she was well connected with the leading members of the

sultan’s household. The queen mother’s inﬂuence was even more important

when rulers were mentally disabled, such as Mustafa I (r. 1617–18 and 1622–3)

Ibrahim (r. 1640–8) or else still children: coming to the throne in their early

teens, Ahmed I and Osman II ‘the Young’ were relatively old when compared

to Murad IV (r. 1623–40) or Mehmed IV (r. 1648–87).

From Murad IV’s personal rule to

political strife, 1632–56

Only very energetic rulers could attempt to sideline the vested interests of their

military and ulema supporters. Where Osman II had failed, his step-brother

Murad IV succeeded. In 1632, after a number of crises connected with Abaza

16 Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play (Berkeley, 2003),

pp. 9–29.

17 Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New

York and Oxford, 1993), pp. 91–112.

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Political and diplomatic developments

Mehmed Pas¸a’srebellionand the situationon the Safavidfrontier, Muradshook

off the domination of the janissaries who periodically had come to dictate

the political course of the empire. Like Osman II, Murad IV participated in

campaigns, but unlike his predecessor he had the luck to become a conqueror:

in 1635 he entered Erivan, a short-lived gain, and in 1638 it was the turn of

Baghdad. In the latter city, the Sunni monuments demolished by the Safavids

were restored to their old splendour, and two pavilions in the Topkapı Palace

were erected to commemorate Murad’s martial accomplishments.

Murad IV tried to control the social forces that formed the basis of his

political power by imposing strict control. In doing so, he cooperated even

with the relatively obscurantist ultra-orthodox movement of the so-called

Kadızadeliler who aimed at the ‘restoration’ of the Sunna as it purportedly

had been in the Prophet Muhammad’s time. Their pressure allowed him to

persecute the consumers of coffee and tobacco, to close the taverns (then

ofﬁcially open only to non-Muslims) and to insist on distinguishing dress codes.

Moreover, Murad was known for arbitrary executions of frequently scandalous

character. It is characteristic of the political thought of the time that he has

nevertheless come to be remembered as a ruler who reinvigorated the state

rather than as an oppressive tyrant.

Murad’s positive image is also linked to the fact that the most inﬂuential

Ottoman chronicles dealing with this period were written in the second half

of the seventeenth century, when the K

opr

u household wielded enormous

inﬂuence. Praising the oppressive rule of Murad thus served an ideological

purpose: his reign could be described as a legitimate forerunner of the regime

established by the K

opr

u ‘dynasty’, whose members were certainly not

averse to the shedding of blood in internal conﬂicts.

By contrast, the years between Murad’s early death and K

opr

u Mehmed’s

appointment as grand vizier are described as a time of chaotic instability and

state decline. The setting that Ottoman chroniclers prepare for the emergence

of the K

opr

u household includes two sultans, one of them mad (

Ibrahim,

r. 1640–8) and the other a child (Mehmed IV, r. 1648–87); strife between two

queen mothers (terminated by K

osem’s murder in 1651); frantic sequences

of appointments and depositions in high state ofﬁces; venality; nepotism;

favouritism that allowed redoubtable ﬁgures such as the exorcist Cinci Hoca

to gain substantial inﬂuence; ﬁnancial difﬁculties; and, ﬁnally, a less than suc-

cessful war against Venice. A grim picture indeed, and more than just a histo-

riographical ﬁction.

Even so, there was no real political or military breakdown throughout

these years that, as a ‘dark period’, have so far attracted little research interest.

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christoph k. neumann

Evidence derived from tax rates

or consumer prices

does not indicate that –

wartime stringency apart – political conﬂict led to severe economic crisis. With

regard to the volatile political situation and the occasionally quite eccentric

court life, it might be meaningful to ask whether these features were not also

typical of the political culture of seventeenth-century European monarchies.

To what degree was this kind of court life part of the world shared by the

Ottoman elite with its French, Italian, Habsburg and other counterparts?

The K

opr

u period

An undeniably acute military crisis precipitated the appointment of K

opr

Mehmed Pas¸a as grand vizier. The Venetian ﬂeet had blocked the Dardanelles

and occupied Lemnos, Samothrace and Tenedos (Bozcaada). In this situation,

Mehmed Pas¸a was able to negotiate terms of ofﬁce. The sultan agreed not

even to listen to proposals in conﬂict with his grand vizier’s policy. Military

fortune did help: the Venetians had to lift the blockade of Istanbul after a lucky

hit into the powder magazine of their admiral’s vessel, and after that the war

with Venice became a drawn-out and costly but still controllable affair.

Mehmed K

opr

u succeeded in establishing a veritable dynasty of grand

viziers: from his death in 1661 until 1703, members of other families held this

ofﬁceforonly afewyears,whileMehmed Pas¸a’stwosons,twoof hissons-in-law

and a nephew headed the government;furtherdescendants played a prominent

role in politics throughout much of the eighteenth century. Mehmed Pas¸a

himself and his ﬁrst son, Fazıl Ahmed, used their power and military prestige

to rather ruthlessly curb political rivals, thus putting an end to the dominance

of the janissaries in Ottoman politics.

The K

opr

us, however, were only one of several ‘political households’,

albeit the most important one.

Organised around a high dignitary with his

extended family, such households included clients and servants of all kinds.

Increasingly, afﬁliation to a household became more important than being

a military slave (kul), although the two statuses were not incompatible.

for the transition from the more or less single-centred patrimonial adminis-

trative structure of the sixteenth century to a set-up dominated by numerous

18 Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: TaxCollection and Finance Administration

in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1 660 (Leiden, 1996), pp. 110–14.

19 S¸evket Pamuk (ed.),

Istanbul ve di

ger kentlerde 500 yıllık ﬁyatlar ve

ucretler, 1469–1 998

(Ankara, 2000), p. 13.

20 Rifa‘at ‘Ali Abou-El-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (Istanbul

and Leiden, 1984), pp. 31, 88–93.

21 See Carter Findley’s contribution to this volume (chapter 4).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Political and diplomatic developments

households all mirroring that of the sultan, it entailed a fair amount of political

crisis.

‘Political households’ were successful because their heads were militarily

effective. The Ottomans not only terminated the long war against Venice with

the conquest of Crete (1669),

they also performed well on the northern and

western borders. In 1657–8, George R

oczi, the duke of Transylvania, aspired

to full sovereignty and the Polish crown. Despite a simultaneous large-scale

rebellion in Anatolia against K

opr

u Mehmed Pas¸a’s harsh policy (its leader,

Abaza Hasan Pas¸a, was executed in 1659), the Ottomans reduced Transylvania

to a dependent tributary, and in 1660 annexed the region around Oradea.

Although the Ottoman army was routed in the battle of Szentgotth

ard, a

war against the Habsburgs was concluded in 1664 with – minor – territorial

gains. Finally, in 1672 the Ottomans conquered Podolia in today’s western

Ukraine and attempted to establish a Cossack buffer state against Poland and

Muscovy. A few years later, a short war against the Muscovites ended with a

stalemate.

All these gains, however, were more than reversed after the second Ottoman

siege of Vienna (1683), an event that has long been regarded as a turning-point

in European history. Led by grand vizier Kara Mustafa Pas¸a, the campaign had

been motivated by long-standing conﬂict about Hungary, where the Ottomans

supported an uprising of Protestant magnates led by Emre Th

oly. From the

Ottoman perspective, it was a major military catastrophe that a relief army of

Habsburg allies under the command of the Polish king Jan Sobieski defeated

the Ottoman army close to Vienna at the battle of Kahlenberg, just a few days

before an assault that probably would have succeeded. Even graver were the

consequences: in a kind of roll-back, a Holy League formed by the Habsburgs,

the Pope, Venice and Poland captured Buda and most of central Hungary

(1686). One year later, Russia joined the alliance. In 1688 Belgrade fell; the

Peloponnese had been lost to the Venetians even earlier. Grand vizier Fazıl

Mustafa, K

opr

u Mehmed Pas¸a’s second son, fell in the battle of Slanka-

men (1691). After the Habsburg victory at Zenta, the Ottoman defeat was

ﬁnal.

On the domestic level, the failure at Vienna cost Kara Mustafa Pas¸a his

life and Mehmed IV his throne (1687). The ﬁnancial burden of the long and

unsuccessful war sparked a political crisis. While during the peace talks at

Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans still acted as a self-conﬁdent great power,

22 Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Mulims in the Early Modern Mediterranean

(Princeton, 2000), pp. 13–44.

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christoph k. neumann

they had to cede Hungary to the Habsburgs, the Peloponnese to the Venetians,

Podolia to the Poles and a year later Asow on the Black Sea to Russia. However,

they managed to avoid a dictated peace.

The 1703 ‘Edirne Incident’ and Ottoman

political thought

The loss of territory to non-Muslim rulers was a severe blow to the govern-

ment’s prestige. Sultan Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703) apparently tried to proﬁt from

the situation by curbing the inﬂuence of the established political households.

To this end, he allowed his s¸eyh

ulislam, Feyzullah Efendi, from a renowned

ulema family of the eastern Anatolian town of Erzurum, to build a new power

base. In an attempt to protect itself from the inhabitants of Istanbul, among

whom the janissary corps remained inﬂuential, the court mostly resided in

Edirne.

Feyzullah Efendi’s attempt to establish a political household that would

allow him and his offspring to surpass even the grand viziers proved a fatal

mistake. In an uprising that spread from Istanbul to Edirne the s¸eyh

ulislam and

his son were lynched and their corpses desecrated. In the wake of this ‘Edirne

Incident’ Mustafa II was dethroned and, after a period of unrest, the political

order based on grandee households was re-established.

This outcome indicates that Ottoman critical political thought, which

had ﬂourished throughout the seventeenth century, had by 1700 lost much

of the inﬂuence it had possessed in the earlier 1600s. This thinking was

expressed in numerous ‘mirrors for princes’ treatises (nasihatn

ame) whose

authors addressed not only the sultan and leading politicians but often a wider

readership as well. In the seventeenth century the perspective of Ottoman

political literature was overwhelmingly domestic, and Ottoman statehood

was discussed entirely in its own terms, not in connection with its linkages

to the outside world. The legitimacy of Ottoman rule was never questioned;

indeed, for these authors no alternative was even remotely imaginable.

The writers of these treatises often came from those sections of the Ottoman

elite that had dominated the sixteenth century: they were ulema, kul or had a

background in the provincial cavalry. This fact, and the generally conservative

make-up of Ottoman culture, meant that much of the nasihatn

ame literature

took the shape of complaints: things were not as good as they used to be

23 Rifa‘at Ali Abou-El-Haj, ‘Ottoman Diplomacy at Karlowitz’, Journal of the American

Oriental Society 87, 4 (1967), 498–512, esp. pp. 511–12.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Political and diplomatic developments

in the Golden Age of Ottoman history, which most writers located in the

time of S

uleyman the Magniﬁcent. Typically these authors insisted on the

re-establishment of old rules, old privileges and the old intra-elite distribution

of labour.

However, Ottoman political authors such as the historian Naima (d. 1716)

began to discuss their society differently, namely in terms of change. Naima

was an apologist of K

opr

u politics and wrote partly in order to justify the

role of the political households.

This position implied a silent shedding of

established ideological features such as the ideal of the sultan as a warrior

for the faith taking the ﬁeld in person (gazi) – this claim already had proved

counterproductive in Osman II’s case but had been successfully put forward

by Murad IV. After 1700 the prestige of rulers no longer had anything to do

with their ability as military commanders.

The Ottoman Empire at the margins

of Europe, 1703–68

New elements in the Ottoman elite

It is now knownthat the careerpaths of the military, the palace, the bureaucracy

and the specialists in religious learning were not as clearly demarcated as had

been assumed during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century.

Men with a palace

background could become military commanders, others switched from the

ranks of the ilmiye (religious scholars; experts in Islamic law) to the central

bureaucracy. Such changeovers had always been part of Ottoman life, but after

1700 we observe an increasingly marked tendency towards aristocratisation.

We still lack comparative studies between these new-style Ottoman elites,

both within and outside the court, and their European counterparts.

In the provinces local notables, the so-called ayan, formed a social layer

mediating between the interests of the inhabitants and those of the provincial

government. Among the ulema the development of an ‘aristocracy’

of great

24 Lewis V. Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. Norman Itzkowitz (New York, 1972); Piterberg,

An Ottoman Tragedy,pp.176–83.

25 Norman Itzkowitz, ‘Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Realities’, Studia Islamica 16 (1962),

73–94.

26 T

ulay Artan, ‘From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule: Gender Problems of

Legalism and Political Legitimation in the Ottoman Empire’, in Histoire

economique et

sociale de l’Empire ottoman et de la Turquie (1326–1960): Actes du Congr

es international tenu

a Aix-en-Provence du ler au 4 juillet 1992, ed. Daniel Panzac (Louvain, 1995), pp. 569–80.

27 Madeline C. Zilﬁ, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–

1800) (Minneapolis, 1988), passim. See also the same author’s contribution to this volume

(chapter 10).

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christoph k. neumann

families can be observed from the seventeenth century. By 1730 a limited

number of families had come to dominate the upper echelons of the ilmiye

hierarchy.

Finally, an Orthodox state elite evolved. Most important were the Pha-

nariotes, so called after their usual place of residence, the Fener/Phanarion

quarter in intra muros Istanbul. These families claimed Byzantine origins and

by the seventeenth century some of their members were employed as trans-

lators in state ofﬁces, most conspicuously in the bureaucracy of the imperial

divan. After 1711 the governors (hospodars) of Wallachia and Moldavia were also

chosen from among these dignitaries.

Despite aristocratisation the meritocratic principle was far from dead, for

at the same time the bureaucrats, a relatively modest sector of the state

apparatus, gained considerable inﬂuence. The eighteenth century was also

an age of the ‘men of the pen’ (kalemiye). As early as the 1600s the transfor-

mation of both the tax system and military organisation had required tighter

surveillance and a greater amount of paperwork: to a degree, accounting

took the place of the control exercised by the earlier personalised dependence

of the ofﬁce-holder upon the ruler. The bureaus attached to the imperial

divan, headed by the reis

ulk

uttab, acquired new functions. Beginning with

Rami Mehmed, the Ottoman negotiator at Karlowitz, the position of the

reis

ulk

uttab became a stepping-stone for high ofﬁce. Throughout the eigh-

teenth century, of the forty-three incumbents six were to become grand

viziers, while another seven attained vizieral rank.

Some of the most impor-

tant Ottoman politicians of the age had begun their careers as scribes in the

divan.

Peace and war: relations between the Ottomans and the West

in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century

The peace of Karlowitz had not solved the conﬂicts in south-eastern Europe –

in an age when limited war was an integral part of foreign policy, it had

probably not been meant to do so. Likewise, the war had demonstrated that

the Ottomans’ military superiority was a matter of the past; but this did not

mean that they were no longer a serious military power.

However, the government of Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) did not dare to wage

another war against the Habsburgs when, in 1703, Francis II R

oczi headed

28 Recep Ahıshalı, Osmanlı devlet tes¸kilatında reis

ulk

utt

ablık, XVIII. y

uzyıl (Istanbul, 2001),

p. 38.

Political and diplomatic developments

an uprising in Hungary, and merely sheltered the refugees after their rebellion

had failed in 1711. At that time the Ottomans had already been host to another

famous ﬁgure: Charles XII of Sweden. He had taken refuge on Ottoman

territory after his misconceived campaign in the Nordic war had ended in

defeat in the battle of Poltawa.

The Ottomans brieﬂy intervened in this war, and took back the fortress

of Asow (1711). Thereafter conﬂict with Russia would be perennial, in addi-

tion to periodic confrontations with the Habsburgs and Iran. In 1736 Asow

was again lost, along with the exclusive right to trade in the Black Sea.

Until 1746 the empire was involved in wars with variable results. In 1715

the Ottomans regained the Peloponnese from the Venetians, whose role in

Mediterranean politics thus came to an end. Two years later, after a serious

defeat at Petrovaradin (Peterwardein), the Ottomans lost Belgrade in the peace

of Passarowitz (Pasarofc¸a), and regained it, along with parts of Wallachia, in

1739. Moreover, the downfall of the Safavid dynasty in Iran and the ensuing

political disorder motivated the Ottomans to intervene in the Caucasus and

even to agree with Russia on mutually recognised spheres of inﬂuence. Terri-

tories in Iran were lost and won until, in 1746, a peace settlement with Nadir

Shah restored the old borders, but frustrated the shah’s hopes for a treaty

that would have overcome the divide between the Sunnis and the Twelver

Shia.

On balance, the wars between 1710 and 1746 werenot very advantageous, but

with the signiﬁcant exception of the battle of Peterwardein, neither triumph

nor catastrophe prevailed. Eighteenth-century warfare proved, however, to be

both costly and unpopular. In 1730, Ahmed III lost his throne after bad news

from the Iranian front triggered an urban uprising in Istanbul by the long-lived

coalition of janissaries and artisans.

Throughout the 1700s various Ottoman elite groups responded to Europe in

a manner that differed considerably from that of the two preceding centuries.

European technology and court culture became, to a degree, fashionable, a

development that mirrored the predilection for turqueries among the elites

of contemporary Catholic and Protestant Europe. Elite interest formed the

channel through which in 1727 a printing-press was introduced to Istanbul:

it functioned as a monopoly enterprise licensed by the state mainly for the

dissemination of historical and geographical texts in Ottoman Turkish. Like-

wise, a fast-shooting light artillery was introduced by a European aristocrat,

Claude Alexandre Comte de Bonneval (1675–1747), who joined the Ottoman

forces after a brilliant though turbulent military career under Louis XIV and

Eug

ene de Savoie. Both Bonneval, who became Humbaracı Ahmed Pas¸a, and

christoph k. neumann

the Hungarian Unitarian who had introduced the printing-press

converted

to Islam; this was notable, as since the late ﬁfteenth century the inclusion

of converts of foreign origin into the Ottoman elite had been quite rare. On

the other hand, non-Muslim elites such as the Phanariotes in their own way

appropriated European knowledge and, more cautiously, manners as well.

Throughout the century, Greek scholars and educationists attempted a har-

monisation of modern scientiﬁc with Aristotelian worldviews.

It is still open

to debate how deeply the appropriation of Western knowledge inﬂuenced

society at large.

Some remarks on centralisation and

decentralisation

Local power-holders never had been absent from the Ottoman polity. Curbing

their inﬂuence and allowing for hereditary or quasi-hereditary status in border

areas had ﬁgured prominently on the agendas of sixteenth-century central

administrations. The 1700s seemingly saw the erosion of these principles, with

local notables (ayan) occupying an essential position in the empire’s economy

and ﬁscal regime. The ascendancy of local families controlling districts or

even whole provinces began in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century but

gained momentum later on. Political historians have conventionally regarded

this process as part of imperial decline. More recent research, however, has

demonstrated the interdependence between local power-holders and central

administrations. These close links did not however prevent, in times of conﬂict,

the administrative labelling of a given local notable as a derebe

gi (illegitimate

‘lord of a valley’) or m

utegallibe (oppressor).

More often than not, rather than destroying the empire’s political and socio-

cultural framework, localism made use of it. This was especially true in times

of external pressures. Throughout the eighteenth century, Muslim power-

holders did not pursue a policy of independence or allegiance to non-Ottoman

powers.

Conﬂicts between central administrations and provincial leaders

29 This man is known as

Ibrahim M

uteferrika: Niyazi Berkes, ‘

Ilk T

urk matbaası kurucusu-

nun din

ıveﬁkr

ı kimli

gi’, Belleten 26, 104 (1962), 75–137; Niyazi Berkes, Yazmadan basmaya:

uteferrika, m

uhendishane,

Usk

udar, ed. Turgut Kut and Fatma T

ure (Istanbul, 1996),

pp. 5–8, 21–65; Kemal Beydilli, M

uhendish

ane ve

Usk

udar matbaalarında basılan kitapların

listesi ve bir katalog (Istanbul, 1997), pp. 1–7.

30 Dimitris Dialetis, Kostas Gavroglu and Manolis Patiniotis, ‘The Sciences in the Greek-

Speaking Regions during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Sciences in

the European Periphery During the Enlightenment, ed. Kostas Gavroglu (Dordrecht, 1999),

pp. 41–71.

31 On a remarkable exception see Jane Hathaway, ‘C¸ erkes Mehmed Bey: Rebel, Traitor,

Hero?’, Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 22, 1 (1998), 108–15.

Political and diplomatic developments

concerned the ﬁnancial and military obligations of the latter. During the last

twenty years or so these issues have become clearer, as eighteenth-century

provincial politics continue to be a favourite subject for research.

Generations of crisis, 1768–1838

Until the war against Russia in 1768 the Ottoman Empire lived through a period

of relative tranquillity and prosperity. Yet it did not manage to organise a large

standing army, regularly drilled, of the kind that constituted the main military

asset of contemporary absolutist territorial states. It is fruitless to speculate

whether a less provisionist approach to the economy might have enabled the

central administration to ﬁnance such a modern army; after all, the costs

of eighteenth-century war-making contributed greatly to political crisis in

France, Russia and other states that embraced the new methods of warfare. In

the two decades prior to 1768, military improvements were certainly no motor

of Ottoman transformation.

The defeat by Russia in the 1768–74 war was a turning-point in Ottoman

history. From now on there existed an ‘Eastern Question’–arelatively weak

Ottoman Empire became the object of the political as well as territorial

aspirations of the European great powers. With the sultan no longer an

important agent at the margins of the diplomatic and military ‘balance of

power’ game played by the European states of the 1700s, his territories were

turned into bones of contention for Russian, Habsburg, English and French

ambitions.

A second consequence of this defeat was that certain power-holders or social

groups now began to contemplate leaving the Ottoman framework. Third, in

consequence of this defeat and its repercussions the Ottomans embarked on

a process of transformation that grew ever more comprehensive over time.

These three tendencies would shape the political developments of the decades

between 1774 and 1838. Both elite and non-elite Ottomans must have expe-

rienced this age as a series of extraordinarily violent military and political

crises.

Conﬂicts with the Great Powers: the initial phase of the

‘Eastern Question’, 1768–1812

The peace of K

uc¸

uk Kaynarca (1774) resulted in the loss of Ottoman suzerainty

over the Crimea. To cede a region inhabited mainly by Muslims to a

Christian power was probably of more signiﬁcance politically than heavy war