decline of the Ottoman Empire
decline of the Ottoman Empire, period of Ottoman history that followed the empire’s zenith in the 16th century until its dissolution in the 20th century.
The Ottoman Empire saw a remarkable expansion in the 14th and 15th centuries. It reached its peak after the momentous capture of Constantinople—a prize sought by Muslim empires since the 7th-century Umayyads. The defeat of the Byzantine Empire allowed the Ottomans to settle in, consolidate their power, and inaugurate a golden age in the rule of Süleyman I the Magnificent (ruled 1520−66). In the 16th century the empire had one of the most advanced and powerful militaries in the world.
But the grandeur of the Ottoman Empire did not last, and Süleyman’s rule was followed by a slow and arduous decline that spanned nearly four centuries. The defeat at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) was a historic setback for the Ottomans, and a century later the failed siege of Vienna (1683) marked a key turning point in their expansion and military prowess. Meanwhile, a weakened central authority and corruption made it difficult for the empire to address economic difficulties and social unrest. By the 18th century local notables ruled with significant autonomy, but their isolation and regional self-interest left little incentive for the ruling class to engage in reform or invest in technological advancement. Attempts to modernize began with the nizam-ı cedid (“new order”) reforms of Selim III (ruled 1789–1807) and the Tanzimat (“Reorganization”) begun under Abdülmecid I (ruled 1839–61). But the “sick man of Europe”—as Western pundits called the empire in its waning days—was never able to recover its former glory, and it was ultimately unable to survive the throes imposed by World War I (1914–18).
Empire after Süleyman I the Magnificent
Internal problems
The reign of Süleyman I the Magnificent marked the peak of Ottoman grandeur, but signs of weakness signaled the beginning of a slow but steady decline. An important factor in the decline was the increasing lack of ability and power of the sultans themselves. Süleyman tired of the campaigns and arduous duties of administration and withdrew more and more from public affairs to devote himself to leisure. To take his place, the office of grand vizier was built up to become second only to the sultan in authority and revenue; the grand vizier’s authority included the right to demand and obtain absolute obedience. But, while the grand vizier was able to stand in for the sultan in official functions, he could not take his place as the focus of loyalty for all the different classes and groups in the empire. The resulting separation of political loyalty and central authority led to a decline in the government’s ability to impose its will.
The triumph of the devşirme
The mid-16th century also saw the triumph of the devşirme (a class of personnel recruited from among Christian youths) over the Turkish nobility, which lost almost all its power and position in the capital and returned to its old centres of power in southeastern Europe and Anatolia. In consequence, many of the timars formerly assigned to the notables to support the sipahi cavalry were seized by the devşirme and transformed into great estates—becoming, for all practical purposes, private property—thus depriving the state of their services as well as the revenue they could have produced if they had been transformed into tax farms. While the sipahis did not entirely disappear as a military force, the Janissaries and the associated artillery corps became the most important segments of the Ottoman army.
Corruption and nepotism
Because the sultans no longer could control the devşirme by setting it against the Turkish notables, the devşirme gained control of the sultans and used the government for its own benefit rather than for the benefit of a sultan or his empire. In consequence, corruption and nepotism took hold at all levels of administration. In addition, with the challenge of the notables gone, the devşirme class itself broke into countless factions and parties, each working for its own advantage by supporting the candidacy of a particular imperial prince and forming close alliances with corresponding palace factions led by the mothers, sisters, and wives of each prince. After Süleyman, therefore, accession and appointments to positions came less as the result of ability than as a consequence of the political maneuverings of the devşirme-harem political parties. Those in power found it more convenient to control the princes by keeping them uneducated and inexperienced, and the old tradition by which young princes were educated in the field was replaced by a system in which all the princes were isolated in the private apartments of the harem and limited to such education as its permanent inhabitants could provide. In consequence, few of the sultans after Süleyman had the ability to exercise real power, even when circumstances might have given them the opportunity. But the lack of ability did not affect the sultans’ desire for power; lacking the means developed by their predecessors to achieve that end, they developed new ones. Selim II (ruled 1566–74; known as “the Sot” or “the Blonde”) and Murad III (ruled 1574–95) both gained power by playing off the different factions and by weakening the office of grand vizier, the main administrative vehicle for factional and party influence in the declining Ottoman state. As the grand viziers lost their dominant position following the downfall of Mehmed Sokollu (served 1565–79), power fell first into the hands of the women of the harem, during the “Sultanate of the Women” (1570–78), and then into the grasp of the chief Janissary officers, the agas, who dominated from 1578 to 1625. No matter who controlled the apparatus of government during that time, however, the results were the same—a growing paralysis of administration throughout the empire, increasing anarchy and misrule, and the fracture of society into discrete and increasingly hostile communities.
Economic difficulties
Under such conditions it was inevitable that the Ottoman government could not meet the increasingly difficult problems that plagued the empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. Economic difficulties began in the late 16th century, when the Dutch and British completely closed the old international trade routes through the Middle East. As a result, the prosperity of the Middle Eastern provinces declined. The Ottoman economy was disrupted by inflation, caused by the influx of precious metals into Europe from the Americas and by an increasing imbalance of trade between East and West. As the treasury lost more of its revenues to the depredations of the devşirme, it began to meet its obligations by debasing the coinage, sharply increasing taxes, and resorting to confiscations, all of which only worsened the situation. All those depending on salaries found themselves underpaid, resulting in further theft, overtaxation, and corruption. Holders of the timars and tax farms started using them as sources of revenue to be exploited as rapidly as possible, rather than as long-term holdings whose prosperity had to be maintained to provide for the future. Political influence and corruption also enabled them to transform those holdings into private property, either as life holdings (malikâne) or religious endowments (vakif), without any further obligations to the state.
Social unrest
Those conditions were exacerbated by large population growth during the 16th and 17th centuries, part of the general population rise that occurred in much of Europe at that time. The amount of subsistence available not only failed to expand to meet the needs of the rising population but in fact fell as the result of the anarchic political and economic conditions. Social distress increased, and disorder resulted. Landless and jobless peasants fled off the land, as did cultivators subjected to confiscatory taxation at the hands of timariots and tax farmers, thus reducing food supplies even more. Many peasants fled to the cities, exacerbating the food shortage, and reacted against their troubles by rising against the established order. Many more remained in the countryside and joined rebel bands, known as levends and Jelālīs (Celâlis)—the latter fomenting what became known as the Jelālī Revolts—which took what they could from those who remained to cultivate and trade.
The central government became weaker, and as more peasants joined rebel bands they were able to take over large parts of the empire, keeping all the remaining tax revenues for themselves and often cutting off the regular food supplies to the cities and the Ottoman armies still guarding the frontiers. Under such conditions the armies broke up, with most of the salaried positions in the Janissary and other corps becoming no more than new sources of revenue, without their holders performing any military services in return. Thus, the Ottoman armies came to be composed primarily of fighting contingents supplied by the vassals of the sultan, particularly the Crimean Tatar khans, together with whatever rabble could be dragged from the streets of the cities whenever required by campaigns. The Ottoman army still remained strong enough to curb the most pressing provincial revolts, but the revolts proliferated through the centuries of decline, making effective administration almost impossible outside the major cities still under the government’s control. In many ways the substratum of Ottoman society—formed by the millets and various economic, social, and religious guilds and buttressed by the organization of the Ottoman ʿulamāʾ—cushioned the mass of the people and the ruling class itself from the worst effects of that multisided disintegration and enabled the empire to survive much longer than otherwise would have been possible.
External relations
Despite those difficulties, the internal Ottoman weakness was evident to only the most discerning Ottoman and foreign observers during much of the 17th century. Most Europeans continued to fear the Ottoman army as they had two centuries earlier, and, although its ability was reduced, it remained strong enough to prevent the provincial rebels from assuming complete control and even to make a few more significant conquests in both East and West. The empire suffered defeats for the first time, but it retained reserve strength sufficient for it to recoup when needed and to prevent the loss of any integral parts of the empire. Although the Ottoman navy was destroyed by the fleet of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), it was able to rebuild and regain naval mastery in the eastern Mediterranean through the rest of the 16th and most of the 17th century, taking Tunis from the Spanish Habsburgs (1574), Fez (now Fès, Morocco) from the Portuguese (1578), and Crete from Venice (1669). In consequence, as long as Europe continued to fear the Ottomans, no one tried to upset the precarious peace treaties concluded in Süleyman’s later years, and the Ottomans were shielded from their own weakness for quite some time. Despite the upsets then disturbing the body politic, the Ottomans occasionally undertook new campaigns. When the rising principality of Moscow conquered the last Mongol states in Central Asia and reached the Caspian Sea, thus posing a threat to the Ottoman positions north of the Black Sea and in the Caucasus range, Murad III conquered the northern sections of the Caucasus and, taking advantage of the anarchy in Iran that followed the death of Shah Ṭahmāsp I in 1576, seized long-coveted Azerbaijan. He thus brought the empire to the peak of its territorial extent and added wealthy new provinces whose revenues, for a half century at least, rescued the Ottoman treasury from the worst of its financial troubles and gave the empire a respite during which it could attempt to remedy its worst problems.
Reform efforts
The Ottoman reforms introduced during the 17th century were undertaken by Sultans Osman II (ruled 1618–22) and Murad IV (ruled 1623–40) and by the famous dynasty of Köprülü grand viziers who served under Mehmed IV (ruled 1648–87)—Köprülü Mehmed Paşa (served 1656–61) and Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Paşa (served 1661–76). Each of those early reformers rose as the result of crises and military defeats that threatened the very existence of the empire. Each was given the power needed to introduce reforms because of the fears of the ruling class that the empire, on which the privileges of the ruling class depended, was in mortal danger. In a war between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs that began in 1593, the Austrians were able to take much of central Hungary and Romania, and only an accidental Ottoman triumph in 1596 enabled the sultan to recoup. The Habsburgs then agreed to the Treaty of Zsitvatorok (1606), by which Ottoman rule of Hungary and Romania was restored. The treaty itself, however, like the events that led up to it, for the first time demonstrated to Europe the extent of Ottoman weakness and thus exposed the Ottomans to new dangers in subsequent years.
In the East, anarchy in Iran was brought to an end by Shah ʿAbbās I, who not only restored Iranian power but also conquered Iraq (1624) and threatened to take the entire Ottoman Empire. Though Murad IV was able to retake Iraq (1638), Iran remained a major threat. A long war with Venice (1645–69), occasioned by Ottoman efforts to capture Crete, exposed Istanbul to a major Venetian naval attack. Although the Venetians finally were pushed back in a naval campaign culminating in the Ottoman conquest of Crete (1669), they still posed a major threat that, like those which had occurred earlier in the century, stimulated the ruling class to accept needed reforms. The reforms introduced during the 17th century were too limited in nature and scope, however, to permanently arrest the Ottoman decline. The reforms essentially were no more than efforts to restore the inherited system of government and society that had operated successfully in the past. Efforts were made to restore the timar and tax farm systems as the basis of the administration and army and to limit taxes to the limits imposed by law. Provincial revolts were suppressed, peasants were forced back to the land, and cultivation was increased. Debased coins were replaced by coins of full value. Industry and trade were encouraged, corrupt officials executed, and insubordination driven out.
Such reforms were sufficient to end the immediate difficulties. But they were successful only temporarily because the reformers were allowed to act against only the results of the decay and not its cause, the continued monopoly of the self-interested ruling class. As soon as the worst consequences of decay had been alleviated, the old groups resumed power and their old ways. Moreover, the reformers did not understand that the Europe now faced by the Ottomans was far more powerful than the entity that the great sultans of the past had defeated; even if the reforms had been more permanently successful, they could not have corrected the increasing Ottoman weakness relative to the powerful nation-states then rising in Europe. Such an understanding was to come to the Ottoman reformers only in the 19th century.
Military defeats and the emergence of the Eastern Question, 1683–1792
The traditionalist 17th-century reforms did, however, produce at least a semblance of revival. By 1681 the Ottoman army seemed so strong that the grand vizier, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Paşa (served 1676–83), brother-in-law of Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, was emboldened to move again into central Europe and besiege Vienna (July–September 1683). His effort quickly overextended the fragile bases of the Ottoman revival. The aroused defenders, led by the Polish king Jan Sobieski (ruled 1674–96), not only held out but also built a major European coalition that was to bring destruction to the Ottoman Empire during the 18th century. The Habsburgs set out to reconquer Hungary, Serbia, and the Balkans, while Venice hoped to regain its naval bases along the Adriatic coast and in the Morea and to resume its naval and commercial power in the Levant, and Russia worked to extend its reach through the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles to the Aegean. Only the European enemies of the coalition, led by France and Sweden, tried to support Ottoman integrity. They were backed in that stance by neutral Britain and the Netherlands, who sought to guard the commercial privileges that they had secured from the sultan through the Capitulations treaty of 1536 by preventing any country from gaining control of the entire Ottoman Empire and thereby becoming dominant in Europe. Russia and Austria fought the Ottomans not only by direct military attack but also by fomenting dissatisfaction and revolt on the part of the non-Muslim subjects of the sultan. Against such subversion, the Ottomans could only try to conciliate their subjects where possible and repress them when conciliation was rejected, taking advantage at every opportunity of each rivalry that arose between the Habsburgs and Russians for predominance in the Balkan provinces of the empire.
In consequence, the Ottoman Empire fought intermittent wars with its European enemies during the period between the second siege of Vienna (1683) and the Treaty of Jassy (1792). From 1683 to 1699 it fought the armies of the Holy League in a disastrous war that culminated in the Treaty of Carlowitz (1699). In 1710–11 it fought Russia again, and at the Treaty of the Pruth (1711) it regained some territories previously lost. The war of 1714–18 with Venice and Austria was concluded by the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718); and three wars with Russia and Austria, in 1735–39, 1768–74, and 1787–92, culminated in the treaties of Belgrade (1739), Küçük Kaynarca (1774), and Jassy (1792). As a result of those wars, the Ottomans lost Hungary, the Banat of Temesvár region, Transylvania, and Bukovina, establishing their European boundary on the Danube River, where it had been early in the 16th century. By 1812 the Ottomans had lost all of their possessions on the northern coast of the Black Sea, from the Romanian principalities to the Caucasus, including Bessarabia, southern Ukraine, and the Crimean Peninsula (the soldiers of which had provided the strongest element in the Ottoman army during the 17th century). In addition, the Ottomans were compelled to allow the Russians and Austrians to intervene legally on behalf of the sultan’s Christian subjects, increasing European influence in internal Ottoman affairs.
Imperial decline in the 18th−19th century
Most manifestations of the empire’s decline were only continuations and elaborations of earlier conditions. In the later Ottoman period, however, a new factor of decline was added: the weakness of the central government resulted in the loss of control of most of the provinces to the local ruling notables, called ayans or derebeyis (“lords of the valley”) in Anatolia and klephts or hayduks in Europe. Those individuals took more or less permanent control of large areas, creating a situation that in many ways resembled European feudalism much more than the traditional Ottoman timar system ever did. The notables were able to build up their power and maintain control not only because the sultan’s government lacked the military resources to suppress them but also because the local populations preferred the notables’ rule to that of the corrupt and incompetent Ottoman officials. In the Balkans and Anatolia local rulers solidified their positions by taking advantage of currents of local nationalism that were arising among the Balkan Christians. The notables formed private armies of mercenaries and enslaved persons, which they sometimes used to provide important contributions to the Ottoman armies in return for recognition of their autonomy by the sultans. Those rulers were able to exercise almost complete authority, collecting taxes for themselves and sending only nominal payments to the Ottoman treasury, thus further increasing its problems. The central government maintained its position when it could by playing off the local rebels against each other, using the leverage of Ottoman support to its own advantage and securing considerable payments of cash and military contributions when needed. The treasury, therefore, did not suffer as much from those provincial revolts as might be imagined, but the revolts did disrupt the established food supplies of the empire and caused large-scale famines to starve the major cities on a regular basis. In response, the urban populace became a restless, misruled, and anarchic mass that broke loose at the slightest provocation, responding to unemployment, famine, and plague with riots and summary executions of the officials considered responsible. The violence brought attention to Ottoman difficulties but did not remedy them and in fact made things worse. The potential for reform lay only in the hands of the ruling class, but its reaction was quite different.
Resistance to change
Most Ottomans saw little need for the empire to change, because they benefited financially from the anarchy and the sultan’s lack of control. In addition, the ruling class was completely isolated from developments outside its own sphere; it assumed that the remedies to Ottoman decline lay entirely within Ottoman practice and experience. That resulted from the basic belief of Ottoman society in its own superiority over anything outsiders could possibly produce, a belief that had far more justification in the 16th century, when it arose, than in the 18th century. All of the advances in industrial and commercial life, science and technology, and particularly political and military organization and techniques that had occurred in Europe since the Reformation were simply unknown to the Ottomans. Direct contact between Ottomans and Europeans was mostly limited to the battlefield, where most Ottomans still assumed that their military reverses were caused not by the superiority of Western armies but rather by Ottoman failure to apply fully the techniques that had worked so well in the past. Thus, the 18th-century reforms largely paralleled those of the traditional Ottoman reformers of the 17th century, with only occasional efforts to add new military organizations and to make use of specific European weapons and techniques of undeniable superiority.
Contacts with the West
For some Ottomans, that isolation was at least partially broken down when some channels of contact opened with the West during the 18th century. A few Ottoman ambassadors went to Europe to participate in negotiations and sign treaties; more and more European merchants, travelers, and consuls came into the Ottoman Empire; a handful of Ottoman men of science and philosophy began to correspond with their Western counterparts; and members of the Ottoman minorities entered into correspondence with their community networks in the West. But such contacts had limited consequences, partly due to differing patterns of thought in intellectual circles. The Ottomans who were enthusiastic about European ideas were voices in the wilderness, and their efforts to apply and disseminate the new knowledge had little overall effect. Such contacts led to nothing more than changes in the modes of living of a few upper-class Ottomans and to some military innovations.
Beginning in the so-called Tulip Period (1718–30), some Ottomans under the influence of the grand vizier İbrahim Paşa began to dress like Europeans, and the palace began to imitate European court life and pleasures. Sultan Ahmed III (ruled 1703–30) built several lavish summer residences on the Bosporus and the Golden Horn (an inlet that forms part of the harbour of Istanbul), and members of his immediate entourage built similarly lavish houses, holding frequent garden parties in imitation of the pleasures of Versailles in France. The sultan and his ministers were no longer confined behind the walls of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The new era was celebrated by Nedim, the court poet, whose poetry demonstrates a considerable awareness of his environment and an appreciation of nature. Growing tulips became an obsession with rich and poor alike, signifying Westernization, and the flower gave its name to the period. In 1727 Turkish-language books were printed for the first time in the empire, by a Hungarian convert who took the name İbrahim Müteferrika, and, though the press was closed at times—because of resentment on the part of the scribes, who feared being made obsolete—during the remainder of the century it provided a number of books on history and geography that further opened the minds of the literate.
Military reforms
As a result of contact with European armies and the influence of European renegades in Ottoman service, a few attempts were made during the 18th century to adopt Western-style uniforms, weapons, and tactics. Because the members of the established military corps could not and would not surrender their old ways, entirely new corps were formed to handle the new weapons under the direction of European instructors. The new corps had no effect at all on the Janissaries and the other older corps that continued to form the bulk of the army, however; the older corps accurately perceived that the new ways threatened their privileges and security. The new corps thus were essentially special mercenary bodies built up under the direction of individual Ottomans, lasting only so long as their patrons remained in power.
The most successful and lasting Ottoman military reform during that time came in the navy, which was modernized by the grand admiral Gazi Hasan Paşa (served 1770–89) with the support and encouragement of the sultan Abdülhamid I (ruled 1774–89); that success came largely because the Ottoman naval establishment was devastated in 1770 at the Battle of Çeşme by a Russian fleet that had sailed from the Baltic Sea, and there was none of the inbred resistance that stifled significant reforms elsewhere. Important reforms introduced into the army under the grand vizier Halil Hamid Paşa (served 1782–85), with the help of Western technicians, were limited to new corps specially created for the purpose. The bulk of the Ottoman army remained unchanged and therefore was more equipped to suppress reform at home than to challenge modern Western armies.