98
For the Turks merchandise with this king, who, every year, sends him many loaded vessels to Mecca …
The Jesuit Priest, Peres, writing of his fear of an Ottoman supported attack on Portuguese Malacca by the Sultanate of Aceh, 1566.
In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and by 1510 the Portuguese were threatening Ottoman Indian Ocean trade. The seeds for this revolution had been set by the Italian maritime republics of the Crusades period with their employment of portolan charts, their dedication to all-year sailing and their rapid shipbuilding technologies.
In Europe Suleiman I, the Magnificent, seemed to be having it all his own way. After the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 Hungary effectively ceased to exist, and whilst the first Ottoman siege of Vienna failed due to overextended supply lines, the writing seemed to be on the wall for the Habsburgs.
The problem for the Ottomans was that the Habsburgs were fast acquiring a global empire. The divine mission of foot soldiers and knights to Crusade and conquer in the name of Christ was being taken up by conquistadores and buccaneers. The penultimate Mamluk sultan, Al-Ghawri, fortified Jeddah with a regiment of arquebusiers and sent a rapidly-built fleet into the Indian Ocean, but after some initial success he had to seek assistance from his enemy the Ottomans as the Portuguese effected an economic war on both sultanates’ trade revenues.
With Sultan Selim I’s conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517 the Ottomans inherited the war with the Portuguese, which now extended into the Persian Gulf. The Ottoman admiral, Piri Reis, tried to draw his master’s attention to the risk to the entire empire from the Europeans sailing in the Indian Ocean and he produced an analysis of Portuguese activity in a prologue to his Kitab-i-Barhriyye, a seafaring manual. Suleiman initially showed some interest, but the opportunity to stop the Europeans at this early juncture was lost when the arms and ships built up for a campaign in the Indian Ocean were used instead in the Mediterranean in 1531.
More ‘provincial’ naval affairs were seen in the failure of the Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565 and the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. These were morale-boosting successes for the Europeans, but the ‘Battle of the Three Kings’ in 1578, which probably has the right to be called the last true Crusade, led by King Sebastian of Portugal, ended in disaster in Morocco, and events beyond the Mediterranean were to have far more impact than any of these campaigns.
The Spanish had been drawn to America for gold but also found silver. In 1540 Peru’s Silver Mountain produced 148kg a year, by 1590 it was producing 3,000,000kg a year. Nothing on this scale economically had ever occurred before, or since. The resulting massive devaluation in the value of silver across Europe had a disastrous effect on the Ottoman economy, as it was based on silver coin. There were Janissary mutinies and Anatolian revolts as hyperinflation and depreciation of the currency took hold.
The Mongols also re-enter our story at this point as the Yuan Dynasty’s collapse, and the Ming Dynasty’s wish to isolate China from the world despite inheriting a vast navy from their predecessors, formed a vacuum in the South China Seas which allowed the Portuguese, Dutch and English to create a new world trade system. The new Crusaders were going global.