Download PDF | Shadow Of The Sultan's Realm The Destruction Of The Ottoman Empire And The Creation Of The Modern Middle East, By Daniel Allen Butler, Potomac Books, 2011.
261 Pages
INTRODUCTION
It was the cataclysm that nobody knew had occurred.
Just as the world had kept its attention riveted to the four-year-long carnage of the Western Front during the Great War, so, also, it focused on the drama unfolding in the palace of Versailles as the victorious Allies dictated terms of peace to the defeated Germans. And so hardly anyone noticed that along with the Houses of Romanov, Hapsburg, and Hohenzollern, another imperial throne had vanished in the dust and rubble that were postwar Europe. It was a realm far older than any of the others, one with a history as rich, colorful, tumultuous, and bloody as any of them—an empire that, at the height of its glory, had stretched from the eastern shore of the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules: the House of Osman and the Ottoman Empire.
And yet, in its passing, the Ottoman Empire determined much of how the next century would unfold, not only in the Middle East, but for the larger part of the civilized world as well. It was both the fortune and the curse of the Ottoman Empire and the sultans who ruled it to have been at the center of world events for most of its fourteen hundred—year history. Geography had placed the Ottoman Turks at what would become a crossroads between the Occident and the Orient at a time when those terms were still valid; history dictated that their empire would still have a place in the political and military calculus of the Great Powers even after the Ottomans’ power had irrecoverably waned.
Nor did the influence of the Sultan’s realm end with its collapse. The destruction of the Ottoman Empire would lead to the creation of one of the greatest super-powers of the twentieth century—the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, and with it, a half-century of international tension that became known as the Cold War. At the same time, as the Allies dismembered the empire and created the patchwork of nation-states that became the modern Middle East, they sowed the wind that would be the whirlwind of terror and warfare reaped in the opening decade of the twenty-first century.
And because they were looking elsewhere, fascinated first by the negotiations in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, then turning their attention inward as they began to confront their own grief over the sacrifices of blood and treasure that had been made during the Great War, nobody really knew it had happened.
The Ottoman Empire would be destroyed through a combination of battles, blunders, bureaucrats, and buffoons. Campaigns such as Gallipoli, battles with names like Kut and Beersheba. Monarchs such as Sultan Abdul-Hamid and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and ambitious politicians like Ismail Enver, Mehmed Talaat, David Lloyd George, and Arthur Balfour. Diplomatic ciphers like Sir Mark Sykes and Frangois Georges-Picot. The empire would be brought down by men such as Gen. Sir Frederick Maude, Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby, and Lt. Col. T. E. Lawrence. And as it finally fell, the empire would introduce to the world the towering figure of Middle Eastern history in the twentieth century, Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk.
While much of the narrative that follows is, of necessity, military in content, this is not a military history in the conventional sense of being a “battle narrative.” It is an accounting of who, how, and why, not a recapitulation of carnage and combat; it is an examination of how the Ottoman Empire essentially destroyed itself. For the Ottoman Turks did not passively stand aside while greedy and ambitious politicians in London and Paris plotted and schemed over how they would dismember the corpse of what had been called “the Sick Man of Europe.” That Sick Man showed a remarkable vigor in what were supposed to be his final days and, for a few brief astonishing moments, actually stood on the threshold of triumphing over the combined naval and military power of France and the British Empire. That the Turks failed in so doing was not the result of the brilliant and ruthless execution of policies by the Allies or any glorious feat of Allied arms; the Turks failed because of their own acts of commission and omission, which combined to bring down the edifice of the Ottoman Empire. In the end, it was brought down so low that all what remained, when the dust had finally settled in the Middle East, was just the shadow of the Sultan’s realm.
CHAPTER ONE THE SULTAN’S REALM
Embedded in one of the walls of the nave of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna is a Turkish cannonball. A relic from the Siege of 1683, it marks the flood tide of the last great surge of the Ottoman Empire into Europe, the farthest point of the Turkish assault on Christendom. The Austrian-Polish Army, led by the Polish warrior-king Jan Sobieski, reached Vienna, with only days to spare before the beleaguered city fell, and immediately attacked the Turks. From September 11 to September 13 the two armies fought, a struggle marked by merciless ferocity and astonishing courage on both sides, before the Turks, already nearly exhausted by the siege, withdrew from Vienna, never to return. Although more than three centuries would pass before the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist, the retreat of the Ottoman Army from the walls of Vienna signaled the beginning of the empire’s irreversible decline and eventual collapse. Lost in the shadows of the Great War, it was a fall to which much of the world paid scant attention, yet as it died, the Ottoman Empire would give shape to the next century.
The origins of the Ottoman Turks can be traced back to the Turkic peoples who had migrated from the steppes of Central Asia to the central and eastern parts of the old Roman province of Anatolia, what is today modern Turkey, sometime between 300 and 400 A.D. In the eighth century these seminomadic tribes had given up their somewhat amorphous animistic religion in exchange for the new dynamic creed of Islam, which was then surging out of the Arabian Peninsula, its faithful bringing conversion on the edge of their swords. Called Beyliks, as early as the sixth century A.D., these settlements became small emirates nominally subject to the authority of the Seljuk Turks of Mesopotamia, their responsibility being the protection of the border that the Seljuk realm shared with the Byzantine Empire.
The first turning point in the Ottoman Turks’ history came in 1071, when the Seljuk Sultanate of ROm won a decisive victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert. No sooner had the Seljuk Empire defeated the Byzantines than it became embroiled in a struggle for dominance of the Moslem world with the Arab Fatimids in Egypt and southern Syria. Taking advantage of the Seljuks’ distraction, the Beyliks were able to permanently establish themselves, asserting their independence from the Seljuks as they carved out a homeland for themselves in western and central Anatolia, in what had once been the heart of the Byzantine Empire.
The first collision between Christian Byzantium and Islam had come in 636 A.D., when Arab Moslems surged out of Arabia and ran headlong into the Byzantine Empire. The last remnant of the ancient Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople (originally known as “Byzantium” and still often called that centuries later, the city gave the empire its name), it had been a separate entity since 395 A.D. When Christianity and Islam first clashed, the Byzantine Empire covered much of present-day Turkey, Armenia, Jordan, Syria, Israel, and Egypt. When they first met the Moslems, the Byzantines had just concluded a long and costly war with the Persians, who themselves were exhausted and would soon fall to advancing Islamic armies. The Byzantine Empire, however, would prove more difficult for the Arab Moslems to overwhelm—even in her weakened state Byzantium was very strong. Only a combination of unrelenting pressure from without, coupled with disorder and discord within the empire, would finally topple the Byzantines, a process that would take almost four hundred years.
Because the Ottoman Turks would eventually bring down the Byzantine Empire—and the Byzantines would exert such a powerful influence on the Ottomans—it is worth taking note of the edifice they would supplant. In 330 A.D. Emperor Constantine, concluding that the Roman Empire had grown too large to be effectively ruled from Rome alone, divided the empire into eastern and western halves, establishing the capital of the eastern empire in the Greek port of Byzantium—a city strategically situated on the European side of the Bosporus at its entrance to the Sea of Marmara, where the Black Sea flows into the Mediterranean. For almost twelve hundred years this city, which Constantine had modestly renamed Constantinople, would rule the Byzantine Empire, the last bastion of Roman glory and a formidable power unto itself.
The language and the culture of the Byzantine Empire were Greek, while its laws and governance were Roman; this gave the empire a distinctly cosmopolitan attitude toward the rest of the world. For most of its history the Byzantine Empire was remarkably tolerant of non-Christian religious beliefs— such as the cults and mystery religions from Egypt and Persia—although Christianity was the “official” state religion. Emulating the glory days of Rome, the Byzantine emperors aggressively expanded their realm during the fifth and sixth centuries until the empire included not only Greece and Anatolia, but Syria, Egypt, Sicily, most of Italy, and the Balkans, with outposts across North Africa as far as Morocco.
Anatolia (modern-day Turkey and northwest Iraq) was the heart of the empire, and when Syria fell to the Moslems in the seventh century, it became the
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Euphrates and made considerable inroads north into Bulgaria. Yet conquest was achieved at the cost of overextending the empire’s economy, and as a consequence decline soon set in. By the end of the eleventh century, Byzantine power in Mesopotamia would be broken, the defenses of Anatolia breached by the rising tide of the Islamic Empire.
Of course, the “Islamic Empire” was not an empire in the traditional sense—a vast collection of lands ruled by a central authority. It was a far different creature, for there was no single seat of supreme authority from which all power flowed and which ruled over the territories conquered by the Moslem armies. Rather, it was a confederation of principalities along with their conquered territories, loosely bound together, driven in equal part by a desire to conquer and by the missionary imperative in Islam to spread the True Faith—by force if necessary.
Among those principalities was a tribe of Turks called the Ségiit, after the village where they lived. Having for the most part avoided any involvement in the Crusades during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they were gathered together under a chieftain by the name of Ertugrul and had settled in the valley of the Sakarya River. When Ertugrul died in 1281, he was succeeded by his son Osman (or Othman, as the name is sometimes spelled), who was intelligent, ambitious, carefully aggressive, and a conscientious ruler as he expanded his realm. As other Beyliks busied themselves with intertribal bickering, Osman, once he was certain his base of power was secure, began moving against these smaller, weaker Turkish princelings. By the end of the thirteenth century, Osman had absorbed, through either conquest or political maneuver, all of the petty Turkish states in Anatolia. He now ruled a territory that encompassed more than 10,000 square miles (16,000 square kilometers). It was Osman who would give a name to this new Turkish state: “Osman,” distorted by Europeans who could never master the Turkish pronunciation, became “Ottoman,” and his people became the “Ottoman” Turks.
Osman also bequeathed his successors a remarkably well-organized government system that would endure for nearly four centuries. Unlike most of its contemporaries, including the Arab states, the Ottoman bureaucracy was not a strictly military form of government. The viability of the Ottoman state was not dependent on a continuous policy of aggression. Undeniably expansionist, the empire was nonetheless never predisposed to wars of unbridled rapine and plunder—conquest for its own sake—which had been the method of the Mongols. Instead, the military campaigns of the Turks were carefully thoughtout preludes to Ottoman settlement in the areas that had been attacked.
In 1299 Osman declared himself a sultan, Osman I; originally, “sultan” was an abstract Arabic noun that meant “sovereign authority,” but before long it had evolved into a title that was soon being bestowed upon—or assumed by—ruling nobles, princes, and magistrates. Osman’s assumption of the rank of sultan marked the beginning of the Ottoman Dynasty. He also set a remarkable precedent for his heirs: the twenty-five years of his reign were marked by such ability and wisdom that it became a proverb among the Turks on the accession of a new sultan to say, “May he rule as well as Osman.”
Following Osman’s death in 1324, his son Orhan I continued his policy of expansion. As clever a military leader as his father, Orhan also played the political game with a high degree of skill. His marriage to Theodora, the daughter of John Cantacuzenus, a Byzantine prince who had designs on the imperial throne in Constantinople, was a carefully calculated dynastic alliance. When Cantacuzenus revolted against the Emperor John V Palaeologus in 1346, Orhan openly supported him. His reward, once Cantacuzenus was safely ensconced as co-emperor, was to be allowed the privilege of raiding the Gallipoli Peninsula at the southern end of the Dardanelles, thus giving the Ottomans their first stronghold in Europe. It would serve as a springboard for Ottoman invasion and colonization throughout Thrace and parts of Bulgaria and give the Turks strategic control over the land routes that connected Byzantium with the rest of Europe, or Christendom, as it was called then.
Orhan also set about refining the structure of the Turkish bureaucracy. Osman himself had created its basic organization, and it was a work of genius, for it was able to function with an admirable degree of efficiency for nearly five hundred years. Only when the world around the Ottoman Empire changed economically, socially, and scientifically beyond anything that Osman would have recognized did the system of government administration he created finally begin to break down.
That administration was known as the “millet system.” It divided the empire into a collection of semiautonomous principalities, also known as “millets” or muqata’ah, with their boundaries being drawn along either ethnic or religious lines, whichever was more effective and efficient. Each muqata’ah was ruled by its own religious or secular leader, usually known as the hidiv (a Turkish word meaning “governor,” taken from the Persian khidew), or pasha (sometimes rendered bashaw, meaning “lord”), and was allowed to retain its own laws and customs in exchange for a pledge of ultimate fealty to the Sultan. The hidiv, granted viceroylike authority, almost always answered directly to the Sultan, only rarely to an intermediary or a representative, and was charged with maintaining order within his muqata’ah by collecting taxes and levying troops in time of war. In return, the hidiv was allowed to keep a specified portion of the revenues collected, which would be his to spend as he saw fit. Some lower-level administrators or minor governors were given similar privileges in place of salaries. Although it was a system that seemed tailor-made for graft and corruption, on balance the majority of the hidiv were reasonably honest; even in the cases where they were more avaricious than usual, the system ensured a regular collection of revenues and eliminated the need for large numbers of bureaucrats.
By allowing nominally subject peoples to retain the larger measure of their ethnic and religious identities while at the same time ruling with a relatively light hand, the Ottomans eliminated most potential sources of discontent and rebellion. There were also institutions that united the peoples ruled by the Ottoman Turks. Foremost among these were the artisans’ guilds, which usually took no note of religion or ethnicity but simply recognized skilled artistry. Another unifying influence was trade, both within the empire and without: at this point in time, all of the trade routes from Europe to the Far East—India and China—passed through Ottoman lands. Tolls and taxes were exacted for these passages, while supplying the traders with animals, fodder, and provisions became one of the foundations of the Ottoman economy.
Together Osman and Orhan set the precedents for ability by which all subsequent sultans would be judged. When Orhan died in 1360, he bequeathed an empire to his heirs that was militarily strong, financially stable, and well organized. For the next two hundred years their successors lived up to those standards with admirable competence, culminating in the reign of the aptly named Suleiman the Magnificent. Eight generations of sultans would oversee the ongoing expansion of the Ottoman Empire by whatever means was available to them.
It was not a steady expansion, nor was it uninterrupted. The Turks lost as many battles as they won, as Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, Greeks, Venetians, Walachians, Hungarians, and Poles, in diverse combinations at various times, fought bitterly to oppose Turkish expansion into the Balkans or throw them out of lands they had already conquered. In 1400 a Mongol horde led by Tamerlane (or Timur Leng) appeared in eastern Anatolia, and the Mongols quickly subjugated the Ottoman Turks for almost a decade, a period known in Ottoman history as the Interregnum. A bitter, bloody civil war followed: for ten years Sultan Bezayid I’s four surviving sons fought one another for the throne (Bezayid himself died in captivity at the hands of the Mongols). Nevertheless, by
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fortune, the Ottoman Turks gradually regained their cohesion and their realm. The Turkish position in the Balkans was finally secure, and the Sultan, by then Mehmed II, turned his attention to the most glittering prize of all— Constantinople.
In the fifteenth century, the magic conjured up by the name “Constantinople” was immense, powerful, heady stuff indeed—and totally devoid of reality. The blunt truth was that by 1451, the city was a mere shadow of its former self—a feeble, desiccated, old dowager clinging fitfully to its faded glory and the scraps of its once-sprawling power. The Byzantine Empire had been reduced to little more than the city of Constantinople itself, along with a few small patches of land on either side of the Straits of Bosporus. The city had been viciously sacked by a Crusader Army in 1204, the culmination of a conspiracy by the Venetians who sought to break the economic power of their chief rival for the lucrative merchant trade from India and China. Byzantium never fully recovered from the disaster, and after two centuries of poverty large sections of the city had fallen into disrepair while its population had steadily dwindled.
Yet Constantinople retained a mystique that it would never lose. Heir to ancient Rome’s mantle of glory, the city was imbued with a sentimental nimbus of the unity and direction lost a millennium earlier when Rome fell to the Visigoths; it was a moral touchstone for the nations of Europe that were only beginning to shape their own national identities. The strength of the city’s defenses and the skill and courage of the Byzantine cataphractarii (heavy cavalry) were legendary. Despite the schism between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, Constantinople was recognized by all of Christendom as one of Christianity’s two epicenters (Rome being the other) of spiritual authority, learning, and instruction. Finally, despite the truth of the poverty into which Constantinople had fallen, in the minds of nearly everyone in Europe the legends and the myths of Byzantium’s fabulous wealth persisted. All in all, the sway exerted by Byzantium—Constantinople—was so powerful that although the city’s importance had become more symbolic than substantive, having it fall into the hands of the “infidel” Turks would shake the morale of Christendom to its foundations.
Mehmed II spent two years in meticulous preparation for the siege. He ordered the construction of a fleet of galleys powerful enough to cut off the Byzantine capital from any chance of support or reinforcement from the maritime cities of Italy. The Rumeli Fortress was built on the Bosporus to serve as a base of operations for the siege, as well as a training ground for the army that would assault the city. An enormous siege train of very heavy cannons was procured trom Hungarian gunsmiths. Finally, Mehmed gauged his moment carefully, choosing to begin the siege in April 1453, as springtime was when most of the Christian powers of Europe would be preoccupied with their own political and dynastic squabbles.
The Siege of Constantinople became the stuff of legends. The city had no realistic chance of successfully resisting the Turks—an eventuality that assumed the Italian city-states could cease their bickering and unite in the effort to raise the siege. Yet Constantinople’s defenders, led by the emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, and Giovanni Giustiniani, a Venetian mercenary general, fought with a determination that bordered on the fanatical. In the end, however, the once-impregnable walls of the city were breached after a relentless bombardment, and on May 29, 1453, after fifty-three days of fighting before the walls of Constantinople, the Turks stormed the city.
Mehmed renamed the city “Istanbul,” although for most of the rest of the world—and many of the Ottoman Turks as well—it continued to be known as “Constantinople.” It became the imperial capital in 1462 when the Topkapi Palace was completed. Mehmed fell victim to the city’s imperial mystique when he began to style himself “Kaiser-i-Rum,” or “Roman Caesar,” and attempted to restructure his bureaucracy along the lines of the old Byzantine state. His little fantasies and pretensions did nothing to dilute his energies or vision, however. Emissaries were sent to the four comers of the empire with orders to attract as many emigrants to the new capital as possible, particularly skilled artisans, craftsmen, and traders, in an effort to repopulate the city and protect its commerce. Among the enticements were choice bits of property within the city, as well as guarantees to Jews and Christians that they would be allowed to practice their own religions without fear of repression or reprisal. Within a generation of its fall to the Turks, Constantinople was growing and thriving— multiethnic and multicultural, it quickly became the economic, cultural, and political heart of the Sultan’s realm.
Mehmed II, who also began to style himself “the Conqueror,” devoted considerable energy to codifying Ottoman law and establishing several outstanding centers of learning, but he would continue to fight wars of expansion and consolidation for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life. In this he became the exemplar for the next several generations, who found themselves obliged to quell rebellions among the empire’s Slavic vassals in the Balkans, as well as intermittent incursions of varying severity by foreign powers to the east and west. In a little more than a century and a half, the Ottomans had evolved from being just one more petty state among the remnants of the Great Seljuk Empire to the overlords of what had been the last and perhaps grandest legatee of the Roman Empire. Weakness and a frequent lack of unity on the part of their foes had played no small part in their spectacular rise, but it was the Turks’ distinctive combination of a remarkable talent for war coupled with a gift for administration that allowed them not only to create their empire but to maintain their hold on it. It is a military maxim that conquest is easy; keeping that which was conquered is difficult. The Ottomans’ superior military and civil organization gave them the ability to do both.
The power, splendor, and size of the Ottoman Empire reached their peak in the sixteenth century, under a sultan who has been known throughout Western history by the justly deserved title “Suleiman the Magnificent.” Ruling for fortysix years, from 1520 to 1566, the Turks know him as Suleiman the Law-Giver. No matter what name he is called, his reign would become the embodiment of the popular conception of the Ottoman Empire. Born in 1494, Suleiman was the tenth Ottoman sultan—a contemporary to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor; Francis I of France; and England’s Henry VIII. It is no overstatement to say that his accomplishments far outshine those of any of them.
Suleiman was a fighting monarch, a warrior as well as a ruler, and he personally led Ottoman armies in some of their most stunning conquests. Suleiman defeated the Mamelukes of Egypt and Syria and took Cairo in 1517. He defeated Algiers in 1518, and Ottoman fleets dominated the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf; most of the Greek islands that had been held by the Venetians fell to the Turks. The Hungarians were defeated at Mohacs in 1526, which left the fortress of Buda vulnerable—it would fall in 1541, along with most of the rest of Hungary. Transylvania, Walachia, and Moldavia all became tributaries of Constantinople —even Vienna was briefly besieged in 1529. When the last Abbasid caliph in Damascus abdicated in 1534, Suleiman annexed all of Mesopotamia and Persia to the empire and at the same time reduced Baghdad, hitherto the secular center of Islam, to little more than a provincial city. He imposed Ottoman rule over most of the Levant and what is today Saudi Arabia and annexed vast stretches of Arab territory in North Africa as far west as Morocco.
This tremendous expansion would ultimately carry deeper and more lasting consequences for the conquerors than for the conquered. For the most part, the newly subject Arabs continued to simply maintain allegiance to a tribal chieftain or caliph, who in turn pledged fealty to an imperial governor and the Sultan; for the Ottomans, however, it opened an entirely unexpected chapter in their history. With an empire that stretched from India to Europe, holding absolute sway over the trade routes to the Far East, as well as a dominant position in the
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It was a task to which Suleiman was equal. In 1535 he initiated what would become a long-standing friendship with France, one built on their mutual interest in containing the growing power of Hapsburg Austria and Spain. Wisely, Suleiman declined to formalize the relationship as an alliance, allowing the empire to avoid becoming entangled in the factionalism of Europe’s religious wars that followed the Reformation.
Suleiman’s chief legacy to his subjects was his recognition of the need for genuine justice—the rule of law—and his intolerance of corruption. He was fascinated by law, and, working with some of the finest legal minds, he oversaw a complete reconstruction of the Turkish legal system, bringing uniformity and rationalism to what had been an often-contradictory muddle of tradition and Moslem doctrine. While the Sultan’s power was absolute in theory, in practice his prerogatives were limited by the spirit of Moslem canonical law, and he usually shared his authority with the leading clerical authority, as well as with his Grand Vizier, an office much akin to a European prime minister. Suleiman’s genius was in codifying these relationships so that the laws could be consistently applied throughout the empire, an accomplishment that earned his legacy among Moslems as “The Lawgiver.”
Suleiman was also a keen patron of science and the arts, filling his court with poets, architects, artists, and philosophers; he is justifiably remembered as one of Islam’s great poets and was noted for his talent as a goldsmith. Science—it was called “natural philosophy” in those days—reached a pinnacle within the empire under Suleiman was well. Patronage of scholars had actually begun a century earlier, under Muhammed IJ, owing in no small part to his personal interest in science and education, which led to his establishment of several schools of higher learning in Constantinople after its capture. Muhammed had taken an interest in European culture long before he became sultan and was taught Roman and European history while still a prince by a group of Italian scholars led by the humanist Ciriaco d’ Ancona. Showing the same cosmopolitan outlook that characterized Ottoman attitudes toward religion and culture, Muhammed became the sponsor of numerous Islamic, Greek, and Italian scholars, philosophers, astronomers, mathematicians, and mapmakers. During Suleiman’s reign, scientific, philosophical, and religious debate took place in his court without fear of censure or retribution; this was at a time when scientific inquiry was, in most of Europe, still being regarded as borderline heresy, if not outright blasphemy.
The grand tradition of Ottoman architecture also peaked in the sixteenth
century under Suleiman. As befitting the imperial capital, Constantinople was the most glittering jewel in the Ottoman crown of cities. A visitor sailing up the Sea of Marmara and into the narrows of the Bosporus would be struck by the bustle of the city’s waterfront. Here, ships from every corner of the Mediterranean world, from the Black Sea, and from as far as India, emptied their cargoes of rice, sugar, pepper, spices, saffron, salt, silk, cotton, coffee, tea, and a thousand other sundries. These cargoes would make their way to Constantinople’s bazaars and markets, where the centuries-old ritual of haggling would continue from sunrise to sunset. Next the visitor would notice how green was the city: cypresses and fruit trees grew everywhere, every dwelling had its garden. The impression created was that of a vast pleasure garden.
Rising through the canopy of foliage would be the towers, domes, and spires of the city’s mosques, libraries, and palaces. Ottoman architecture achieved its grandest expression in the series of mosques that still dominate the horizon of modern Istanbul—the Fatih, built between 1463 and 1470; the Bayazid Mosque, completed in 1491; the Selim Mosque, finished in 1522; and the Sehzade and Suleiman ktilliyes, built in the 1540s. These masterpieces of Ottoman style were the ultimate fusion of two aesthetic traditions, Byzantine and Islamic. The style also extended to public baths, caravansaries, and in particular the elaborate pavilions, halls, and fountains of the huge palace complex of the Topkapi, which still sits in unrivaled splendor over the skyline of modern Istanbul.
The Topkapi perches on a rocky promontory that in part forms the Golden Horn, the strait that separates the Sea of Marmara from the Bosporus. Here, in the Sultan’s seraglio, the ultimate seat of Ottoman power reposed. More than five thousand men and woman lived and worked here solely to fulfill the Sultan’s every need and wish. Virtually a city within a city, the seraglio was home to an etiquette and a protocol even more formal, stylized, and ritualistic than that which Louis XIV would inflict upon the court of Versailles a century later. There were whole companies of servants assigned to the imperial wardrobe, the imperial laundry, and the imperial bath. There were servants responsible for lighting the imperial pipe, others for serving the needs of the imperial toilet, still others for opening and closing specific doors. One servant was charged solely with the duty of properly folding the Sultan’s turban; another was responsible for the placement and adjustment of the imperial napkin at mealtimes. He would carry out his duties in between the ministrations of the Pickle Server, the Fruit Server, the Water Server, or one of a platoon of Tray Servers. The whole of the Sultan’s court was organized to ensure that the Sultan did not have to exert himself in even a single effort he did not wish to make.
Within the realm of the seraglio was yet another realm, one that was never seen by the outside world and whose occupants were barely aware that there was a world outside the walls confining them: the harem. The word comes from the Arabic harim, which means “forbidden,” and it was perfectly descriptive—only the Sultan, his privileged guests, and the women who lived in the harem, along with their eunuch guards, were ever allowed to be inside the harem. The women inside were never permitted to leave.
The popular concept of the Ottoman harem is that of a world of limitless luxury, sex, and intrigue, yet what is startling about this perception is its overall accuracy. The harem’s origins lay in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. His wife, Roxelana, was an intelligent, strong-willed Russian woman possessed of fiery red hair and a temperament to match, who continually sought to interfere in the affairs of the Ottoman government. Doing so, she created so many problems for Suleiman’s ministers that after his death, it became the custom for sultans never to formally marry but merely to take concubines for the dual purposes of producing heirs and obtaining sensual satisfaction.
Inevitably, this resulted in life becoming rigidly stratified among the women confined within the harem. The only way a woman could gain influence or power in the court at Constantinople was through a male, beginning with the Sultan himself and then, in descending order of importance, through the potential heirs to the throne, from eldest to youngest. In practice this meant that the mother of the reigning sultan essentially ruled the harem, with the mothers of the other potential heirs vying and scrambling for position below her.
When Osman founded the empire, no rule of primogeniture—the right of the firstborn to inherit the throne—existed under Ottoman custom or Islamic sharia law. If a sultan died without a son or, as usually happened, he left several sons without designating an heir to the throne, the question of succession was usually settled by violence—poison, strangulation, or the assassin’s dagger were the order of the day within the harem. It quickly became the custom, once a successor had been crowned, to eliminate potential rivals by executing all of his male relatives—a custom formalized in 1413 by Mehmed I after a power struggle of the Interregnum and the civil war that followed in the wake of the Mongol invasion by Tamerlane in 1400. This ruthless policy was adhered to for nearly three hundred years before being repealed in the early seventeenth century and replaced with the rule of primogeniture. In the meantime, the knowledge that failure to succeed to the throne was tantamount to a death sentence led to endless scheming among the head wives and the concubines, each striving to gain preference for their sons, while the princes themselves
became proficient in the art of lethal palace intrigues—hardly the proper training for sultans-to-be—which did nothing to make them fit to rule.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the sultans grew weaker, cocooned as they were in a life of luxury and with the distractions of the harem continually at hand, and the Office of Grand Vizier accrued more and more real power unto itself. The power of the Sultan flowed through the Grand Vizier, who served as a sort of prime minister, confidant, and imperial majordomo. The actual administration of the imperial bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the army was his responsibility; consequently, it is easy to see how the authority of the office grew. Such authority was not without its perils: until well into the nineteenth century, most Grand Viziers died in office, strangled by an imperial executioner who, acting on the Sultan’s instructions, was exacting payment for some failure in the performance of their duties. Nevertheless, the power inherent in the office was an almost-irresistible allure to men of talent and ambition, and there was rarely a scarcity of candidates for the office.
The open, or public, court of the Sultan, which was overseen by the Grand Vizier, was known as the Sublime Porte. The original “porte” was the gate, the Babi Ali, or “Lofty Gate,” which led to the Office of Grand Vizier in the Topkapi Palace. According to an ancient Persian tradition that the Ottomans freely borrowed, the gates of cities and royal palaces were places of meeting and assembly. So it was at this gate where the Sultan traditionally greeted and met with foreign ambassadors. “Sublime Porte” is a French translation of “Lofty Gate,” and given France’s unique (at that time) relationship with the Ottoman Empire, the choice of language was hardly surprising. Nor was it startling that the name was widely viewed as an acknowledgment of the empire’s position as the gateway between Europe and Asia.
Yet with Suleiman’s death in 1566, the first faint cracks began to appear in the grand facade of the empire, although more than two hundred years would pass before they became visible to the rest of the world. The empire had suffered its first serious setback in 1571 off the western coast of Greece in the Gulf of Lepanto, where a Turkish galley fleet was attempting to expand Ottoman dominance along the Adriatic coast. Met by a combined Spanish and Venetian fleet led by Don John of Austria, the Turks were defeated at the Battle of Lepanto, and their advance up the Adriatic, which would have threatened the whole of northern Italy, as well as the heart of Hapsburg Austria, was stopped cold. It was a significant reverse, for Turkish naval power had long played a vital part in Ottoman expansion. When Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the nineteenthcentury American naval historian and theorist, defined sea power as the ability to
use the oceans and the seas to move men, materiel, and goods at will, where and when they were needed, while denying an enemy the opportunity to do the same, he was articulating a concept that the Ottomans had instinctively understood as early as the thirteenth century.
Unlike the Romans and the Byzantines, who usually viewed the sea as a vast barrier and an obstacle to be overcome, the Turks emulated the Greeks and the Phoenicians, who had seen the sea as an opportunity and who had used it as an unobstructed pathway to prosperity. Turkish naval policy was never one of simple raiding for plunder and loot, like that of the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean or the Scythians of the Black Sea. Instead, it played a vital role in the empire’s expansion, coastal raids and landing parties serving as the vanguard for permanent Turkish settlements along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas. Turkish power would then spread inland from these settlements, whose lines of communication were secure and protected by the Turkish galleys. Turkish sea power would be the decisive factor in containing Russia’s southward expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, turning back Peter the Great as he tried to wrest control of the Crimea and the northern coast of the Black Sea from the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman Turks would always remain conscious of the importance of sea power, and the empire would continue to be the dominant naval power in the Middle East until the nineteenth century. Eventually, the Turks’ desire to reassert their maritime authority in the Aegean and Black Seas would have decisive consequences for the fate of the empire.
Although it temporarily eclipsed Turkish sea power, the defeat at Lepanto was regarded as merely a temporary setback, although by this time the Ottomans were facing enemies along every frontier. Venice, Austria, Poland, Russia, and Persia were all making war on the Turks, often in combination with one another. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Sultan Murad IV restored a large measure of Turkish military prestige when he defeated a resurgent Persia in 1638, and wrested Crete from the Venetians. In 1683 a huge Turkish army under Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa lunged westward out of Hungary into Austria and surrounded the Hapsburg capital of Vienna. The city would have been taken if not for the last-minute arrival of a relieving army led by King Jan Sobieski of Poland. Then a series of campaigns by the Polish king, along with those led by Charles V of Lorraine, Louis of Baden, and the great Prince Eugene of Savoy, drove the Turks back deep into their own territory, a retreat that ended only when the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed in 1699.
The treaty cost the Ottomans dearly—they surrendered the whole of Hungary
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Balkan territories. Karlowitz was the real, tangible beginning of the empire’s decline, as the next two hundred years would be marked by constant compromise, conciliation, and concession, with Ottoman power and authority steadily diminishing.
A form of stagnation began to take hold of Ottoman affairs and institutions. Rather than growing and evolving to keep pace with the rest of the Mediterranean world, the Ottoman Empire froze in time, held in the thrall of Suleiman’s greatness. As happens all too often when a monarch of the stature of Suleiman passes, those who succeed him are seen by comparison as being lesser men, which, inevitably, they are. Seventeen sultans would ascend to the Ottoman throne in the years between Suleiman’s death in 1566 and 1789, and for the most part—there were few exceptions—they were an admittedly indifferent lot: men of limited ability, with little or no education or training in the responsibilities and duties of rule. When Muhammed III died in 1605, his two minor sons were the only direct male heirs. The elder, Ahmet I, spared his brother Mustafa’s life but locked him away in a secluded apartment in the harem of Topkapi Palace. Ahmet’s decision, though unusually merciful, marked the beginning of the pernicious influence the harem would exert on the affairs of the empire. It was also a mistake, for Mustafa in turn would lead a palace revolt in 1617 in which he would overthrow his brother and take his place on the throne, in turn banishing Ahmet to the harem for the remainder of his life.
At the same time, other gradual but profound shifts in power began. In the Topkapi Palace, as the sultans spent less and less time in the actual exercising of their authority in ruling the empire, the Grand Viziers began to fill the power void. In the provinces, the long-standing Turkish tradition of promotion by merit began to give way to bribery, corruption, and nepotism. The millet system began to fail as ambitious officials exploited it shamelessly, buying their offices, then imposing ever-harsher taxes on the people in order to pay for them.
The history of the Ottoman Empire in the years between 1566 and 1789 has sometimes been described as “The Decline of Faith and State,” but to Western ears the phrase can be misleading, for the cultural meaning of the terminology was different. In the parlance of the Ottoman world, “decline” did not necessarily imply “decay”; rather, it meant “change”—that the traditional order had in some way been disrupted or displaced. Reforms enacted to halt or reverse the decline, then, were not efforts at producing workable solutions within the context of the problems, but rather attempts to restore the old order that had produced the Golden Age of Suleiman. Consequently, the term “reform” became increasingly reactionary. While the rest of the world (particularly Europe) was
slowly—or sometimes rapidly—evolving, the Sultan and his court continually sought to drag the Ottoman Empire back into a time and a place that, with each passing decade, were less and less attuned to the reality of the world developing outside its borders. It was a situation guaranteed to institutionalize imperial stagnation.
The causes of the Ottoman “decline” can be summed up in fairly swift order. Europe entered the Age of Exploration in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and by opening direct seagoing trade routes to the Far East, the nations of Western Europe no longer needed the overland routes that had passed through the Levant for more than a millennia. As the overland trade declined, with it went the revenues that maintaining and servicing those routes had provided, hamstringing the economy of the empire just at the time when Europe’s economy began to grow at an unprecedented rate. Gold that had been flowing into Ottoman purses was now filling European treasuries.
The explosion of scientific and artistic genius that marked the Renaissance in Italy was paralleled by a quieter but more profound flowering of practical science in much of the rest of Europe. In particular, European farmers were discovering the beginnings of scientific agriculture, which led to larger crop yields and in turn produced larger populations, bigger labor forces, and increased demands for skilled trades and services. Reform, meanwhile, stifled what had once been the world’s outstanding scientific and academic community, all in the name of preserving Suleiman’s Golden Age. Just as Europe’s scientists, engineers, and philosophers were stepping across the threshold of one of the greatest sustained periods of creativity and innovation in the history of the world, the scholars of the Ottoman Empire fell into the embrace of conservative thinking, resisting new ideas and denouncing unorthodox thinking as heretical. Taking for granted the superiority of Moslem and Ottoman civilization, the empire’s intellectual community refused to study or even acknowledge the advances being made by the “infidels.” Ottoman scholars—and the Moslem clerics who increasingly made up the majority of the Ottomans’ intellectual “elite’—would recognize the superiority of a particular “infidel” innovation or practice only when compelled to do so by circumstances. Even then, such recognition would be made only for specific applications of such innovations, because the reactionary Moslem clergy refused to exploit them or the thinking that created them, denouncing such practices as “blasphemous” and “heretical.”
Hand in hand with the atrophy of learning and scholarship within the Ottoman Empire came the erosion of imperial authority. With the Sultan often reduced to little more than a figurehead, corrupt and incompetent governors, no longer fearing imperial retribution should they fail to administer their provinces
efficiently, turned increasingly to maintaining and enhancing their own personal power, position, and prestige at the expense of the regions for which they were responsible. This occurred at a time when the monarchs of Europe were consolidating their own positions and emplacing strong centralized government structures and bureaucracies of their own to administer the rising power of their nations.
An unexpected by-product of those governments and bureaucracies was the rise of a mercantile class that had no equivalent in the Ottoman Empire. With stable governments came stable societies in which businesses and industries could grow and flourish. The emerging middle classes of the European nations, though small, quickly became national bulwarks at the same time that they were leading their countries into entirely new directions of growth. None of this was happening in the Ottoman Empire, where the mercantile classes resisted change and growth as departures from the idea of the Golden Age. By the end of the eighteenth century, the “traditional” ways of doing business and conducting the affairs of the empire had become so well entrenched that it would take an extraordinary individual to effect any change at all. Yet changes had to come if the empire was to survive.
The extraordinary individual appeared in the person of Sultan Mahmud I, who rose to the throne of the Sublime Porte in 1808. He was determined to carry through the plans for genuine reform and innovation that had been implemented by Sultan Selim III as far back as 1789. Called the New Order, or Nizam-i Cedid, Selim’s plans had emphasized military and fiscal reform aimed at modernizing the Turkish Army and bringing to account the nobles and the governors who barely acknowledged the authority of the Sultan. On his orders, new military and naval schools were opened, and the Turkish Army was completely reorganized, trained, and equipped along European lines. The traditionally superb Ottoman cavalry forces were retained, but for the first time “infantry” units, as understood by the European powers, were introduced. Selim found new ways of increasing imperial revenues by instituting taxes on liquor, tobacco, and coffee, and Levantine and Greek merchants, who enjoyed enormous prosperity and influence but had paid little in the way of taxes, were stripped of many of their privileges. Ottoman embassies were opened in the major European capitals to provide for direct contact with the West.
The reforms begun by Selim III were left incomplete as he was distracted by wars with Russia and France; the two sultans who succeeded him displayed little interest in continuing Selim’s efforts. They were taken up again by Mahmud II in 1808. For more than twenty years, in what later Turks would call the
Tanzimat, a blizzard of firmans (imperial decrees) descended from the Topkapi, abolishing corrupt administration, curbing the sometimes arbitrary authority of the hidivs and the pashas, revising the legal system to make it more evenhanded, and revising the imperial tax code to make it more difficult for governors to find opportunities for graft and corruption. At the same time Mahmud began to regularly attend the meetings of the divan, or “state council,” driving home the point that he intended to take a personal interest in the affairs of the empire.
Mahmud extended his reforms to the Ottoman Army as well, most notably in his abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826. The Janissaries had been exerting a baleful influence on the empire for more than a century: forgetting their tradition of being the Sultan’s personal bondservants, they increasingly became a law unto themselves. In the provinces, the Janissaries acted like semiautonomous local rulers, while in Constantinople they were a constant source of disruption, often acting in combination with the city’s artisans, craftsmen, and students. Echoing the role played by the Praetorian Guard in the declining years of the Roman Empire, they influenced (and sometimes openly decided) the appointment and replacement of governors and other officials and, on occasion, even determined who would succeed to the Sultanate. It was an intolerable state of affairs—clearly, the Janissaries had to go. Here, technology provided Mahmud with an unanswerable argument: the introduction of the musket and with it the disciplined, trained, professional, firepower-based armies of Europe reduced the Janissaries to a colorful anachronism. The Janissaries were summarily disbanded; in their place Mahmud brought in German advisers to restructure the Turkish Army along modern European lines. At the same time he began an ambitious modernization program—constructing roads, aqueducts, and public buildings and improving the education of his subjects—in an attempt to make the imperial bureaucracy more efficient and effective.
Encouraged by their father’s example, Mahmud’s sons continued his efforts at reform and modernization after his death in 1839. But the rot had gone far and deep: many of the “reforms” of Mahmud’s successors were thinly disguised concessions to the four Great Powers of Europe—Great Britain, France, Austria, and Russia—because by now the empire’s military strength was only a shadow of its former glory, as it no longer possessed the power of open defiance backed by force of arms. The most humiliating of these reforms by far would be the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), created in 1881 for the purpose of collecting taxes in order to pay off the empire’s debts owed to European business interests. Staffed entirely by Europeans, with more than five thousand officials posted all across the empire, the OPDA was an independent bureaucracv within the Ottoman bureaucracv. Particularlv galling for the Turks
was that in addition to its own efforts, the administration had first call on any funds collected by Ottoman tax officials. The Turks grievously resented the implication that they were working to fill foreigners’ collection boxes.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Ottoman foreign policy was increasingly one of merely reacting to the moves and maneuvers of those foreign powers. When European intervention compelled Constantinople to grant Greece her independence, it introduced what would become one of the great issues of European politics for the rest of the century, what was euphemistically termed the “Eastern Question”—that is, how should the spoils be divided when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and who would do the dividing? Although it could not reasonably be said that the empire was on its last legs, clearly it was weakening with each passing decade. No amount of palliatives could permanently stem the loss of territory and prestige through rebellion or foreign intervention.
Perhaps the best illustration of Turkish weakness was made during the Crimean War. A dispute had arisen between Russia and France over which nation was the rightful “protector” of the various sites in Palestine that were sacred to Christianity. Nominally Ottoman territory, these holy places were traditionally defended by one of Europe’s Christian powers. In 1852 France challenged Russia’s claim to guardianship and wrested a number of concessions in access and occupation of parts of Palestine and Syria from the Turks. Russia demanded equal consideration, and when it was turned down, it advanced into the province of Bulgaria and down the coast of the Black Sea in October 1853. The Ottomans promptly declared war, and in March 1854 England and France, in truth more concerned with preventing Russia from seizing the Bosporus and Constantinople than with defending Ottoman sovereignty, decided to make common cause against the tsar of Russia and declared war on Russia as well.
The British and the French determined that the Russians were particularly vulnerable to an assault against the Crimean Peninsula: the strategic focus of the campaign would be the fortified port of Sebastopol, Russia’s main naval base on the Black Sea. A naval force of British and French warships blockaded the port while a force of 26,000 British and 30,000 French troops were landed at the mouth of the Balaklava Valley. The Ottomans, whose grievances were the ostensible cause of the war, were unable to send a single warship to join the blockading force, and a paltry 5,000 Turkish troops were assembled with the landing force.
Even this pathetic effort nearly exhausted the Turks economically, and although the Ottomans were “victorious” in the Crimean War, the Congress of
Paris, which brought the war to an end in 1856, found it necessary to formally recognize the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire. It was a humiliating development for the Sublime Porte—despite its diplomatic courtesies and eloquent circumlocutions, the congress had given formal confirmation that the empire’s existence now depended on the tolerance of the European powers, rather than on its ability to assert its own sovereignty.
Events that were bringing the empire closer to dissolution now began to acquire a momentum of their own. In 1875 a rebellion in the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina triggered the Russo-Turkish War of 1877—78. Despite a surprisingly strong showing by the Turkish Army, the Russians marched almost to the gates of Constantinople, only to be halted by diplomatic pressure from Great Britain and France. The peace settlement, imposed by the Congress of Berlin, saw Romania (formerly, Walachia and Moldavia), Serbia, and Montenegro declared fully independent, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were placed under Austrian administration. Bulgaria, though still nominally an Ottoman principality, became an all-but-autonomous kingdom and asserted its position in 1885, when Bulgar troops occupied the province of Eastern Rumelia with impunity.
There was still hope for the empire: Midhat Pasha succeeded in introducing a liberal constitution in late 1876, and under it, the first Turkish parliament was seated early in the following year. The assembly was short-lived. The new sultan, Abdul-Hamid II, ordered it dissolved in fewer than two years, suspended the constitution, and began to rule as an absolute autocrat. Only by asserting such authority, he believed, could the empire avoid the upheaval that he feared would begin the process by which it would begin to break up. Dissolution was Abdul-Hamid’s worst nightmare. It appeared to be coming true in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877—78, when the Treaty of San Stefano stripped the Sultan of most of his European provinces. It was only because the British, the French, and the Austrians feared that imperial Russia would dominate the states newly formed from the former Ottoman provinces that the Congress of Berlin rewrote the treaty a few months later, softening most of its harshest terms and reducing much of the damage done to the Ottoman Empire. Yet such assistance came at a price: Cyprus was “rented” to Britain in 1878, and when the British occupied Egypt in 1882 after a revolt by the Egyptian Army, Constantinople was forced to accept Egypt’s status as a de facto British colony. In 1885 Bulgaria annexed the province of Eastern Rumelia, and the Turks were helpless to prevent it.
Meanwhile, word of the first Armenian massacres reached the outside world,
and Western opinion turned sharply against the Sultan and his realm, relegating them to the status of little more than international pariahs. The slaughter of frightful numbers of Armenians living within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire is argued in some circles to be the first documented “holocaust,” and there would be a sickening recurrence in the last decades of the Sultan’s realm. It also earned Abdul-Hamid his enduring nickname of “Abdul the Damned.” At the time some two million Armenians, all nominally Christians, were subjects of the empire, living primarily in northern and eastern Anatolia. The vast majority of them held to the Armenian Apostolic Church; the rest were mostly divided between the Catholic and Protestant faiths. An unassuming, industrious people, the Armenians rarely came into conflict with their neighbors, although they quietly held to a dream of independence. Yet they also had a reputation of unbroken loyalty to their Ottoman overlords right through to the last decade of the nineteenth century, so the Armenians were regarded as millet-i sadika (a loyal nation).
Like other minorities, the Armenians were subject to laws that gave them fewer legal rights than the empire’s Moslem population; along with Greeks and Jews, they were barred from military service and were taxed twice as much as Moslems. When the Ottomans were defeated in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877— 78, imperial Russia announced that it was assuming the role of “protector” of the Christian peoples of the Ottoman Empire, an act of unnecessary bombast that had two completely unforeseen consequences. The first was that the Turks regarded it as a veiled threat, believing that the Russians would use their “protectorate” as a pretext for further incursions into Turkish territory. At the same time the Armenians believed that it was an implied declaration of Russian support, should they seek independence from the Ottomans.
The trigger for the first wave of massacres was a minor Armenian uprising in Bitlis Province in 1894. The local Turkish authorities reacted with unexpected ferocity, fearing Russian intervention should the uprising grow into an open revolt, and they ruthlessly suppressed it, beginning a cycle of brutal attacks on Armenian communities during the next three years. Reliable reports reaching Europe indicated that as many as 300,000 Armenians were killed between 1894 and 1897. Although there was no evidence that directly linked the attacks to Constantinople, perhaps more damning was that neither was there much to indicate that the Sultan had made any effort to prevent the slaughter. In the capitals of Europe the assumption was quickly reached that Abdul-Hamid, like his local magistrates fearing a widespread Armenian uprising, had given tacit permission for the massacres. Whatever the truth may have been, the perception would taint relationships between Constantinople and most of the Great Powers for the few remaining years of the empire.
There were, however, some positive accomplishments under Abdul-Hamid, most notably the construction of the Hejaz Railway and the promotion of the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, which brought the Ottoman Turks and imperial Germany into a particularly close diplomatic relationship. Construction of the Hejaz Railway was begun in 1900, part of Abdul-Hamid’s “Pan-Islamic” vision for reviving and reunifying the empire. Completed in 1908, it permitted thousands of Moslems to make the traditional Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj) in relative comfort and safety. At the same time it also helped reinforce Ottoman control over the chronically troublesome territories in western Arabia.
Yet the blunt truth was that as the nineteenth century was passing into the twentieth century, the “Sick Man of Europe” was clearly in critical condition. Civil rights as they were understood in Western Europe simply did not exist— people were arrested, detained, and oftentimes executed simply on the whim of the Sultan or one of his favored subordinates; even Russian muzhiks had more protection under the law than the typical Turkish peasant did. Corruption was rampant once more, there was little industry or technical infrastructure—in 1901 there were barely 1,600 miles (3,000 kilometers) of railroad in the whole of the empire—and what little existed was owned by foreigners, primarily Germans.
Foreigners had become a particular problem, for they were in many ways unraveling the fabric of the empire. By the time Abdul-Hamid assumed the throne, the “concessions” being made to the European powers were literally that: the Turks were conceding their rights and sovereignty to the Westerners. Perhaps the most telling example of the decline of Ottoman authority was a diplomatic convention concluded in 1887 that held Europeans living within the empire from being subject to imperial legality. Instead, when accused of a breach of the empire’s laws, the European in question would be tried in Constantinople before a court constituted of fellow Europeans, who judged the accused according to their appropriate national legal code.
Germany was particularly aggressive in seeking a favorable position within the empire, sponsoring the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, which was intended to rival France’s legendary Orient Express and Great Britain’s dream of a CapeTown-to-Cairo Railway in Africa, as well as providing the technical expertise to build the rest of the empire’s railways. Germans managed all of Constantinople’s electricity generating plants, its gasworks, its munitions factory, and its arsenal, and the Kaiser’s subjects occupied almost all of the skilled technical positions. Not surprisingly, the Ottoman Army was trained and equipped by the Germans. Increasingly, the feeling among educated Turks, who were becoming a shrinking
minority within the empire, was that the Sultan’s realm was being given away piecemeal by the very men who were charged with maintaining its integrity.
The typical Turkish peasant, meanwhile, eked out an existence from the soil of Anatolia, lived in ignorance, and was usually functionally illiterate. The oncevaunted Ottoman scholarship had been overtaken by the reactionary Moslem clergy, who were most concerned that the Ottoman peasantry faithfully adhere to the teachings of Mohammed—as interpreted by the clerics. It seemed far better to them that those peasants stoically accept their lot and blindly and unquestioningly embrace the teachings of their imams and mullahs, rather than risk overburdening their intellects with such basic skills as reading, writing, or mathematics. Among the empire’s Arab population the situation was even worse, as the vast majority of the Arabs lived as seminomads, their lives little different than those of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. All the while the presence of the all-pervasive secret police and its accompanying network of informers loomed over the population, Turk and Arab alike, and kept it in a constant state of near-terror.
It was a situation that could not last long, and in 1908 the Ottoman Empire underwent a convulsion the likes of which it had never before experienced. All of Europe—even the entire world—could see that “the Sick Man of Europe” was living on borrowed time. The empire had been in decline for nearly two centuries, for it had far to fall. Indeed, the “fall” of the Ottoman Empire lasted longer than the span of years that many other empires had existed. In 1908, however, a group of semirevolutionary idealists who called themselves the Young Turks sought to arrest that fall, leading a near-bloodless coup that stripped Abdul-Hamid of much of his power and forced the restoration of the 1876 constitution that Abdul had suspended more than thirty years earlier.
For better or worse, the Ottoman Empire was entering what would be its last chapter. In whatever form it emerged from the reforms and ambitions of the Young Turks, the empire would never be the same. At once reformist and strongly nationalist, the Young Turks were determined to drag the Ottoman Empire out of its quasi-Orientalism and somnolence and transform the nation into a modern, strong, stable European-style state. What they did not anticipate —indeed, what they could never have anticipated—was that in doing so, they would be helping to write the final chapter to the fourteen-centuries-old saga of the Ottoman Empire.
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