19 The Ottoman empire

To an Englishman writing in 1603, the Ottoman Turks were “the greatest terror of the world.” It was a view universally shared among the Christians of Europe.

Over the previous two centuries the Ottomans had snuffed out the last vestiges of the Roman empire in the east, conquered the entire Balkan peninsula, and appeared in force at the gates of Vienna itself, threatening to bring all of central Europe under the Islamic caliphate. Their power stretched from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to Hungary and the Barbary Coast of North Africa, and they had come close to dominating the entire Mediterranean.

The Ottoman empire takes its name from its founder, Osman or Othman I, a nomad leader who at the end of the 13th century declared his small state in Anatolia independent of the Seljuk Turks, then the dominant power in the region. It was said that Osman, while staying at the house of a holy man, dreamed that a moon rose out of the holy man’s chest and settled in his own. “As soon as it did so,” the story continues, “a tree sprouted from his navel and its shade covered the whole world.” The holy man told Osman that this dream foretold the sovereignty of him and his descendants.

“Covering the whole world” Osman and his successors set about turning this dream into a reality, extinguishing the Byzantine presence in Asia Minor and expanding into the Balkans, where the Christian peasantry found they were treated better under the Ottomans than they had been under their earlier Christian masters. The Byzantines—inheritors of the eastern Roman empire—were confined to their capital, Constantinople, until this too fell in the great siege of 1453, marking the end of two millennia of Roman history and sending shockwaves across Europe. The Ottomans made Constantinople their capital, renaming it Istanbul—“the city.”

The sultan who had captured Constantinople, Mehmet II, also completed the conquest of Greece and established a foothold across the Black Sea in the Crimea. His successors, Bajezid II and Selim I, conquered Syria, the Levant, Egypt and part of Arabia, including the Muslim holy cities of Medina and Mecca.

Ottoman power reached its zenith under Selim’s son, Suleiman I (ruled 1520–66), known as “the Magnificent.” Suleiman seized Mesopotamia from the Persians, conquered Hungary and Transylvania, and in 1529 laid siege to Vienna, only withdrawing with the onset of winter. Suleiman also created an effective navy, which he used to take the island of Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, while Ottoman power was extended into the western Mediterranean via the corsairs of the Barbary Coast, who became vassals of the sultan.

To western Christendom, “the Turk” presented a threat to its very existence, and numerous stories of Ottoman atrocities were in circulation. On the whole, however, the Ottoman sultans showed tolerance toward the religious practices of their Christian and other non-Muslim subjects—in stark contrast to the religious persecutions conducted by Europe’s Christian princes before, during and after the Reformation.

Sultans and Caliphs

In the Muslim world, the title “caliph”—meaning “successor”—was given to those who followed Mohammed as leaders of the entire Islamic community, and in the centuries after Mohammed the title was held by a number of Arab dynasties. The title “sultan” was given to those who held power behind the throne of the caliph, and was adopted by the Ottomans in the 14th century. Leadership of the caliphate itself was assumed by the Ottoman sultans in the 16th century following their conquest of Egypt and the death of the last Abbasid caliph. The Ottoman caliphate was finally abolished in 1924 by the new secular Turkish republic.

“The sick man of Europe” Ottoman ambitions in the western Mediterranean were finally crushed in 1571, when the Turkish fleet was defeated by a joint Spanish and Venetian force at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. Thereafter, the Ottoman story is one of slow decline. Looking back from the perspective of the late 19th century, a Turkish historian pictured the fortunes of the Ottoman state after the time of Suleiman the Magnificent as an oscillation between “autumnal decay and distress” and “spring restoration and rejuvenation.” But the general drift was one way: towards decay. Turkey, once the scourge of Christendom, became known as “the sick man of Europe.”

“I who am the sultan of sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the shadow of God on earth … ”

Suleiman the Magnificent writes to Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, June 1547

Various reasons for this decline can be identified. The sultans themselves were partly to blame, sinking into isolated self-indulgence in their luxurious palaces, surrounded by their harems and their sycophantic courtiers. At the same time, the centralized administration established by Suleiman disintegrated as local administrators—the pashas—assumed greater power. The effectiveness of central government was also weakened by the increasing tendency to award administrative jobs on the basis of heredity rather than merit. Another factor was a growing conservatism within the Muslim world, once a hotbed of intellectual and technological innovation. Thus the Ottoman empire was largely untouched by two crucial developments that transformed Europe and America in the 18th and 19th centuries: the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

As the vigor of the Ottomans diminished, the neighboring powers began to nibble away at the edges of their empire. After another unsuccessful Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the Austrians went on the offensive and conquered Hungary, while in the later 18th century the Russians seized much of the northern coast of the Black Sea. In the 19th century, nationalist unrest increased among the Ottomans’ Christian subjects in southeastern Europe, and the Ottomans responded with increasing savagery—to the horror of popular opinion in the West. However, the Western powers were alarmed by Russian ambitions as Ottoman power declined in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean, fearing an upset to the balance of power. Britain in particular believed that Russia threatened its route to India, its most important imperial possession. A series of wars and diplomatic crises followed, as Austria and Russia vied for dominance in the disintegrating Balkans. This rivalry was to culminate in the outbreak of the First World War, in which Turkey allied itself with Austria and Germany against Russia, Britain and France. Turkey’s ultimate defeat in that war led to the final dismantling of the Ottoman empire.

The Barbary Corsairs

From the 16th century, corsairs from the Barbary Coast—modern Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—raided all round the western Mediterranean and as far as southern England and Ireland, capturing hundreds of thousands of Christians and selling them as slaves. It was only in the early 19th century that the piracy of the corsairs was suppressed by the Western powers, including the USA. European colonization of their homelands followed.

the condensed idea

The disintegration of the Ottoman empire affected the balance of power in Europe