DECLINE
OF ISLAM AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
World trade shifted from the
Mediterranean Sea and from overland routes between the West and East. Piratical
violence on the Mediterranean Sea was rampant and hurting economies connected to
trade across that sea. The Muslims had been world traders, but the bulk of world
trade was bypassing the Middle East and transit across Muslim lands. The British
and Dutch were sailing the Atlantic and Indian oceans and taking over trade
between northern and southern Europe. Spices from Asia were being shipped by sea
directly to Europe, leaving Muslims without a percentage of the profits.
The Ottoman
Empire -- the greatest empire in the world in the 1500s -- was ruled by
sultans, and a sultan was commander-in-chief of the military and a member of the
Janissaries. The sultans looked upon their male subjects as soldiers of Islam.
The Ottoman Empire was a theocracy, with the sultans dedicated to the advance of
Islam -- the Sunni branch of Islam -- through military means. A primary
source of wealth for the sultan had been loot from conquests. The sultans were
less interested in the study of economics for the purpose of advancing their
societies economically, or advancing agriculture scientifically. European
merchants were scurrying across the globe looking for raw materials, markets and
profits, while the middle class in the Ottoman Empire were looked upon by
the sultans as a threat to their authority. The middle class in the Ottoman
Empire was more interested in commerce than the sultan and more materialistic
than the mullahs, and middle class interests received little support from
either. The sultans succeeded in inhibiting the growth of their empire's middle
class while Europe's middleclass was growing in wealth and influence.
Ottoman society continued with
its traditions. Muslim scholars remained conservative. They were convinced
of the superiority of their Islamic civilization and of doing things as
described in the Quran (Koran). And the Ottoman religious establishment was
being infiltrated by those with a Sufi point of view, which increased an
other-worldliness attitude rather than favor of modernization.
In the 1500s, Ottoman society
had substantial population growth. Poor peasants had been moving into the towns,
creating large-scale unemployment, and the unemployed sought relief by joining
religious organizations, which brought them little other than spiritual relief. Instances
of improvement in agriculture were helping some peasants in the empire -- in
Romania, Bulgaria, Thrace and Macedonia,. where farmers had begun growing crops
from the Americas and feeding their animals maze. They were abled to export more
wheat and cattle. But in the empire as a whole agriculture was not developing
commercially as it had been among the Dutch and British.
The sultan's government sold
the job of tax collecting, and the buyer of this position collected enough in
taxes to satisfy the income wants of the authorities and himself. The tax
collector decided how much to tax. The poor who scratched a living from the soil
had little to tax, but anyone who could afford to invest in a new enterprise
became an obvious target for tax collection and bribery by officials. War and
military expansion had been a primary source of wealth for Islamic society, and
when they stopped in the 1500s rulers demanded more in taxes and seized the
properties of merchants and entrepreneurs. As a consequence, less wealth was
invested in the economy. Some manufacturing continued, such as cotton weaving
and the production of raw silk, but in the Ottoman Empire money to invest in the
growth of manufacturing was diminished.
The government raised money
also by the sale of offices to the highest bidder, in part so the sultan and an
elite could continue to live in the luxury to which they were accustomed. Rather
than people being selected for administrative offices based on merit --
training, competence and talent -- government offices were going to people who
had money. And promotion by merit had been replaced by nepotism and favoritism.
Corruption had spread to the provinces where an official would buy his office
and then squeeze more taxes from the populace to reimburse himself. And
corruption reached judicial officials, whose decisions were at times for sale. In
the 1600s the Ottoman historian, Haji Khalifa (1608-1657), saw Ottoman society
resting on four pillars: the mullahs (Islamic clerics) the army, the merchants
and the farmers, and he saw Ottoman society as sick because of corruption, high
taxation and oppression of the masses. There were rebellions by the oppressed,
but the rebellions were always crushed.
The economy of the Ottoman
Empire was hurt also by an unfavorable balance of trade. Wealthy Muslims were
purchasing goods from Christendom, but little was being exported and the supply
of gold was diminishing. As manufactured goods flowed into the Ottoman
Empire, local handicraft industries suffered. Manufacturing remained largely a
peasant operation -- home industry. Foot-operated treadle reels, hand-operated
looms and silk-twisting machines were to be used in the Ottoman Empire into the
1800s. And, for the Ottoman Empire, economic weakness produced military
weakness.
A Weakened Military and Diminished Empire
The Ottoman Turks had been
watching the retreat of Islam to their north, Kazan,
where the Russians were pushing against the Tatars. Into the 1600s the Ottomans
still held territory just short of Vienna, and to maintain their strength they
had been equipping their armies with European firearms. This required more money
for waging war, paid for by farmers.
Militarily the Ottoman Empire
was changing. The Janissaries had been the heart of the Ottoman army and the
world's most effective military unit, but they had acquired more influence and
had been rewarded with more privileges. They had been allowed to marry, causing
them to shift their first loyalty from the military to their families. By the
1600s Janissaries had become involved in trade. The Janissaries in the Ottoman
armies were being replaced by recruits drawn from the unemployed. And the old
fief system, with the reward of land to the warriors on horseback, was being
abandoned -- a benefit militarily, a feudalistic military machine having become
inappropriate for combat against European powers.
Nevertheless, the Ottomans did
weaken militarily vis-à-vis the Europeans. Those who decided who would lead
armies believed that an army could be led adequately by an unschooled amateur.
The Ottomans were not keeping up with the study of military changes, while faith
in God continued to be held as of paramount military consequence. The
muskets that had been acquired by the army were not to be used so much as
organized fire power laid down by a team as it was to be used individually, with
the same individual courage involved in fighting with a sword.
A part of the decline in
military power was the weakness in political leadership. The education of
sultans had declined. The sultans after Suleiman I (who ruled from 1520 to 1566)
tended to be men of little ability, training or experience. Some were mentally
defective. They were reared and influenced by eunuchs and women with no
education. The harem was the center of their life. Similar to the rest of the
world, power passing to the eldest male of the royal family did not always put
top leadership among the Ottomans with the most able.
The Ottomans managed to drive
the Cossacks back from Azov
in 1641. Then, rather than considering that the world had changed, they tried to
resume the conquests of centuries before. The Ottomans decided to try another
assault on Vienna. The
assault was led by the grand vizar, an incompetent court favorite, Kara Mustafa.
For two months, beginning in mid-July, 1683, Mustafa and his army surrounded
Vienna. He bombarded the city. On September 2 his army penetrated the outer
fortifications of the city. He knew of but ignored the approach of an army of
70,000 Habsburg and Polish troops coming to rescue Vienna. The Christian forces
routed the Turks and pursued them, and by 1687 the Austrians had pushed the
Ottomans out of Hungary and the city of Budapest.
And the commercial and military power that was Venice
took advantage of what they saw as Ottoman weakness and drove the Ottomans out
of much of Greece.
The defeats upset people
around the sultan, Mehmed IV, and in 1687 they deposed him, replacing him with
his brother, Suleiman II, who had spent much of his forty-five years in the
royal harem. Suleiman II appointed Mustafa's younger brother as military
commander, but the military losses continued. In 1688 the Austrians drove the
Ottomans out of Belgrade.
In 1690, the Ottomans retook Belgrade, but in 1697 the Russians drove the
Ottomans out of Azov, and that year the Ottomans were defeated at the battle of
Zenta -- about one hundred miles southwest of Budapest. Under diplomatic
pressure from the Dutch, the British and the Venetians, the war that had begun
in 1683 was ended in 1699, the Ottomans feeling obliged to sign a treaty with
Austria, Poland and Venice. This was Treaty of Karlowitz, a dictated treaty with
most European nations represented. The Ottomans gave up some European territory:
Hungary and Transylvania
were ceded to Austria; Podolia, occupied by the Ottomans in 1672, was returned
to Poland; Venice acquired Morea
(the Peloponnesian Peninsula) and most of Dalmatia.
The Ottomans were expanding their control on the island of Crete,
but the glorious days of Islamic conquest were over, never to be replicated.
.
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