Marc David Baer The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs Basic Books 2021
Marc David Baer The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs Basic Books 2021
Marc David Baer The Ottomans Khans Caesars and Caliphs Basic Books 2021
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Maps drawn by Rodney Paull.
E3-20210827-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Maps
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
List of Ottoman Rulers and Their Reigns
Notes
To Esra, Azize, and Firuze
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
To make the book accessible to the general reader, Ottoman and Turkish
names have been rendered in modern Turkish spelling, and non-English
terms have been translated into English. Those Arabic, Ottoman, and
Turkish words generally known in English, such as pasha, sheikh, and the
like, are presented in their English forms.
The Turkish letters and their pronunciation are as follows:
c as j in John
ç as ch in church
ğ is silent; it lengthens the preceding vowel
ı as i in cousin
ş as sh in ship
Istanbul or Constantinople? Despite the fact that the name
Constantinople was used by the Ottomans themselves, it is convention to
call the Byzantine city of Constantinople by that name only until the
Ottoman conquest in 1453, and thereafter to use the name Istanbul, which
derives from the Greek stin poli (to the city), the name officially given to
the city only after the fall of the empire and the birth of the Turkish
Republic in 1923. This book follows that convention.
Because the Ottomans used the term ‘Anatolia’ to refer to Southwest
Asia/Asia Minor, this is the term used in this book. Likewise, the region
often referred to as the Balkans—but which the Ottomans called Rûmeli
(land of the Romans)—is rendered as ‘Rûm’. The approximate English
translation of this is Southeastern Europe, the term most often used in this
book.
INTRODUCTION
The White Castle
HISTORIANS ARE KNOWN for their love of maps, which illuminate not only
the physical contours of their geographic subjects but also the ambitious
mindsets of their makers. Over two decades ago, I was conducting research
in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul for my first book. Off-limits to the
hordes of tourists that inundated the palace grounds six days a week, the
small library was refreshingly quiet. Located in the former prayer space of a
diminutive red-brick mosque built by Mehmed II in the fifteenth century,
the library is lined with brilliant blue tiles with intricate green and red floral
patterns. A small panel depicts the Ka’ba at Mecca, the black, cube-shaped
shrine that is Islam’s holiest place. Containing one reading table for
researchers and another facing it for staff to watch over them, the room was
freezing cold in winter, lacking heat and often electricity. To write or type
on a laptop, researchers had to wear thin leather gloves or winter gloves
with the fingers cut off. In summer it was cloyingly hot, humid, and dark,
the windows shuttered to block out the sunlight, the dust, and the noise.
The reading room offered one ray of hope, for its internal door led to
one of the richest manuscript collections in the world, a place only the
library staff were allowed to enter. But one had to come prepared. One
could not ask to see just any valuable work from the past, such as, say,
something in Armenian, Greek, or Hebrew from Mehmed II’s personal
library. Scholars were required to declare their research interests well in
advance and have them approved by the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Interior
Ministry, and Culture Ministry. One could not simply change research topic
midtrip. What I usually read were seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicles.
Some came in dark-red leather bindings, sometimes frayed or bug eaten,
written on paper with a background of marbled swirls, the script
accentuated in gold-leaf lettering. What a novelist once wrote about another
library is true of that reading room: ‘Books and silence filled the room, and
a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mould, a
strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets and dust’.1
Although I experienced an acute case of document jealousy whenever
the researchers near me were given a golden illuminated Seljuk Qur’an or a
sixteenth-century copy of Ferdowsi’s Persian Book of Kings, each
scintillating with their brilliantly painted miniatures, nothing was as
remarkable as what I saw once thanks to a Japanese television crew filming
a documentary on Asian seafaring. One day, I opened the five-hundred-
year-old intricately carved mosque door to view the surviving segment of
Piri Reis’s famous early sixteenth-century world map depicting Spain and
West Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and the South American
coastline, bathed in bright artificial light.
The white-gloved Turkish librarians unrolled it, spreading its gazelle-
skin parchment out in the small room, revealing its precious, colourful
detail inch by inch to the appreciative camera crew. At his own initiative,
Piri Reis of Gallipoli, a former corsair and future Ottoman navy admiral,
had drawn one of the earliest surviving maps of the coastline of the New
World. He based it on Christopher Columbus’s original, which is lost, and
even interviewed a crew member from Columbus’s voyages. To produce for
the sultan one of the most complete and accurate maps in the world, Piri
Reis had consulted ancient Ptolemaic, medieval Arab, and contemporary
Portuguese and Spanish maps. Imagining themselves as rulers of a universal
empire and rivalling the Portuguese in the battle for the seas from Egypt to
Indonesia, the Ottomans were interested in keeping up with the latest
Western European discoveries. Why weren’t these connections better
known in the West today? Had the Ottomans participated in what is known
as the Age of Discovery? What role did they play in European and Asian
history?
Like its language, the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1288–1922) was not simply
Turkish. Nor was it made up only of Muslims. It was not a Turkish empire.
Like the Roman Empire, it was a multiethnic, multilingual, multiracial,
multireligious empire that stretched across Europe, Africa, and Asia. It
incorporated part of the territory the Romans had ruled. As early as 1352
and as late as the dawn of the First World War, the Ottoman dynasty
controlled parts of Southeastern Europe, and at its height it governed almost
a quarter of Europe’s land area. From 1369 to 1453, the Byzantine city of
Adrianople (today Edirne, Turkey), located on the Southeastern European
territory of Thrace, functioned as the second seat of the Ottoman dynasty.
Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire—or Byzantium,
remembered as the Byzantine Empire—served as the Ottoman capital for
nearly five centuries, beginning with its conquest in 1453. It was not given
the new name of Istanbul until 1930, seven years after the establishment of
the Turkish Republic amid the ruins of the empire. If for nearly five
hundred years the Ottoman Empire had straddled East and West, Asia and
Europe, why had its dual nature been forgotten? Had accepted ideas about it
changed?
THE BEGINNING
Gazi Osman and Orhan
THE OTTOMAN STORY begins at the end of the thirteenth century, with one
group of Turkic peoples among many. Turks and Mongols had dominated
the political landscape of West Asia since the eleventh century. Osman
(reigned ca. 1288–ca. 1324), the eponymous founder of the Ottoman
dynasty, was one of the Muslim Turkic nomadic horsemen who migrated to
Christian-majority Anatolia (the Asian part of modern-day Turkey). He was
part of the wave of western migration of Turkic herdsmen with their sheep
and horses that was part of the expansion of the great Mongol Empire from
East and Central Asia. With a motley crew of mounted nomadic warriors—
armed with bows, arrows, and swords—Muslim Sufis (mystics), Christian
brothers-in-arms, and allied princes, Osman battled Christians and Turks
alike in northwest Anatolia, established a small chieftaincy, and bequeathed
it to his son Orhan, who greatly expanded it.
Turcoman, or Turkish groups of Central Asian origin, sought grazing
land on the marches, unhindered by empires, sultanates, and principalities.
The Turcoman established chieftaincies on the borderlands between the
Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire to the west and the Turkic and
Mongol empires to the east. The Muslim-Turkic Great Seljuk Empire
(1037–1118) defeated the Byzantines at Malazgirt (Manzikert) near Lake
Van in 1071, opening the eastern end of the central plateau of Anatolia to
unhindered Turcoman migration. The rout of the Byzantine army and their
emperor in an ambush in a mountain pass at Myriokephalon in 1176 by the
Great Seljuk Empire’s successor in Anatolia, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm
(1077–1307), opened the western end. Having been weakened by the
Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Byzantines could do little to stop them. The
Latin Christians captured Constantinople from their Greek Orthodox
Christian rivals during the Fourth Crusade and held it for over fifty years,
resulting in the partitioning of the Byzantine Empire. The Mongols paid
them little heed, having no interest in western Anatolia. The Mongol defeat
of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm in 1243 at Köse Dağ in northeastern
Anatolia, which made the Seljuks as well as the Armenian Kingdom of
Cilicia into tribute-paying vassals, sent larger waves of Turcoman herdsmen
and their animals westward.
The religiously tolerant and eclectic Mongol Empire, the largest
contiguous land empire in the history of the world, controlled most of
Eurasia at the time—save the westernmost part of the landmass, or Europe.
Its eastern half was the empire of the Great Khans (the Yuan dynasty of
China, 1206–1368). Its western half was divided into three realms, whose
leaders converted from shamanism or Buddhism to Islam. The Kipchak
Khanate or Golden Horde (1224–1391), north of the Caspian and Black
Seas, included Kiev and Moscow. The Chagatai Khanate (1227–1358) in
the centre in Transoxania, included Samarkand in today’s Uzbekistan. And
the Ilkhanate Khanate (1255–1353) in the south, based in Persia, contained
the cities of Bukhara, Baghdad, and Tabriz, and controlled what is today
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and most of Anatolia.
The first generation of Ilkhanids, who plundered Baghdad and ended the
storied Abbasid Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid in Iraq and Iran in 1258, were
originally heavy-drinking adherents of Tibetan Buddhism who favoured the
Chinese arts and employed Christian ambassadors and Jewish government
ministers.1 But in 1295, under the former Buddhist Ghazan Khan, they
converted to Islam. Smashing Buddhist temples in their capital of Tabriz,
the Ilkhanids became some of the greatest benefactors of Islamic art,
architecture, and literature.2 Although they continued to build towers of
severed heads as grand spectacle to dishonour their enemies and instil fear
in the survivors, they also constructed some of the most monumental and
beautiful mosques the world has ever seen, glazed in brilliant blue tile.3
An Ilkhanate vassal state, the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, based in Iconium
(Konya) in southwestern Anatolia, ruled part of eastern Anatolia. The
Greek Kingdom of Trebizond on the Black Sea was to the north, the
Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia on the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and
various Arab and Kurdish principalities were peppered throughout Anatolia.
To the far west stood the Byzantine Empire—based in Constantinople and
the seat of the Orthodox Church—which still ruled part of western
Anatolia.
In the thirteenth century, the majority of the population of Anatolia was
Christian, mainly Armenian or Greek. A sizeable minority was made up of
Muslim Turcoman, who had brought Islam to Anatolia from the east. Not
all of the Turkic migrants were Muslim, however. Some Turcoman were
Buddhist, Manichean (believing in a cosmic struggle between dark and
light), or Nestorian Christian (uniquely denying that Christ’s human and
divine natures are united in a single person). Some still followed the Central
Asian custom of exposing corpses to the open air until they were pure and
could be buried.4 A minority of Jews lived in urban centres. Most Muslims,
the other demographic minority, were new to their faith. The Turkic peoples
of the Central Asian steppe had originally been shaman, following ecstatic
religious figures who communicated with the spirits through trances. But as
they had migrated west, they had become Buddhist, Jewish, Manichean,
Nestorian Christian, Taoist, and Zoroastrian. The preaching and alleged
miracle working of Muslim spiritualists known as Sufis travelling along the
Silk Road compelled others to become Muslim.
Anatolia at the time was an unstable patchwork controlled by Mongol
forces, Armenian kingdoms, Byzantine Greek princes and governors, and
other Turcoman, Arab, and Kurdish principalities, frequently at war.
At the far southwestern tip of Asia and the western end of the Silk Road,
on the frontier between Christian Byzantium to the west and the Islamic
Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm in the east, more than a dozen Turkic Muslim
principalities emerged and disappeared between the eleventh and sixteenth
centuries. Most are forgotten today. The only principality we remember is
the one that lasted the longest, the Osmanlı, named after Osman. The drama
and tragedy of the Ottoman dynasty begins as the curtain rises on this
nomadic warrior.
NOMADISM
The use of tents reminds us that the Ottomans originated among a nomadic
people. The Ottoman Empire first took root in that region of Anatolia most
resembling the steppes of Central Asia. The great central plateau of
Anatolia, which rises to one thousand metres and has the great salt lake Tuz
Gölü at its centre, is a semiarid steppe grassland characterised by warm, dry
summers and very cold winters. It receives little rainfall, has very few
forests, provides little water or wood, and is largely unsuitable for
cultivation. Ringed by mountain ranges and surrounded on three sides by
coastlands and their ancient Byzantine and Armenian cities, ports, and
agrarian regions, the central plateau offered ideal conditions for the nomad.
Befitting his Turco-Mongol background, Osman is described in the
Ottoman chronicles as having lived a nomadic lifestyle.11 He migrated with
his herds of horses, oxen, goats, and sheep annually between summer and
winter pastures, the former in the hills, the latter in the valleys.
Nomadic men such as Osman relied on strong, independent women who
played leadership roles or provided much of the labour that sustained their
lifestyle. Arabs travelling on the steppe in Central Asia to the Kipchak
Khanate were surprised by the respect shown to women by the Turkic
peoples, their freedom and near equality to men. The women did not veil
themselves as Arab women did.12 Mongol women played an open role in
politics. Each Friday after the midday prayer, the khan—who had declared
Islam his religion upon coming to power in 1313—held a public audience
in a tent together with his four khatun (the royal wives, one of whom was a
Byzantine princess), who sat on either side of him. In full view of the
assembled public and without the use of any screen or veils, when the
senior khatun entered the tent, the khan walked to the entrance to meet her,
saluted her, took her by the hand, and sat down only after she had taken her
seat on the divan.13 While we do not learn as much about the ordinary
women in Osman’s principality, such as whether they took part in raids or
not, we do know that they milked the animals to make cheese, butter, and
cream, and that they wove their hair into the elaborate-yet-durable round
felt tents in which they lived and the carpets upon which they sat.
The presence of horses attests to the fact that Osman and his supporters
fought as nomads do. Their travelling camps included ironmongers who
made their swords, daggers, and axe heads, along with their cauldrons for
cooking stews, which were suspended by chains over fire. Osman’s first
battle recorded in contemporary sources in the region occurred in 1301 or
1302 against the Byzantines at Bapheus on the southern shore of the Sea of
Marmara close to Nicea (İznik), over eighty kilometres north of Söğüt.
Having inherited Mongol military tactics with a force of lightly armed
archers mounted on horseback, Osman and his men engaged in guerrilla
warfare. Utilising their mobility, speed, and ability to travel long distances,
their stratagems were ambushes and surprise attacks—seizing roads,
villages, and the countryside, raiding Byzantine forces at night, and
retreating to forests and mountains when pursued.14 Under Osman, they
were unable to launch lengthy sieges and take large, heavily guarded forts
and cities. Accordingly, they acquired little territory of their own.
AT THE BEGINNING of the fifteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty faced two
vastly different enemies. In 1402, a massive nomad army ravished its
domains from east to west. And in 1416, a deviant dervish set off uprisings
within Ottoman society. The two might seem to have little in common, but
both Tamerlane and Sheikh Bedreddin drew on popular discontent with the
Ottoman family’s lack of religiosity. Add to this a decade-long interregnum
that was sandwiched between the two, from 1402 to 1413, and the whole
thing spelled near disaster. Two of the same forces that had brought the
Ottoman dynasty to power—its Turco-Mongol heritage and its Sufi, or
mystical, version of Islam—threatened now to destroy it.
Bayezid I was not much of a model Muslim. Or a model ruler for that
matter. He set siege to Constantinople unsuccessfully for eight years (1394–
1402) from Anadolu Hisarı, his fort complex on the Asian side of the
Bosporus. He had defeated the Western crusaders at Nicopolis in 1396, but
he had a miserable reputation among Christians and Muslims alike. Known
as an alcoholic who did not attend mosque, Bayezid I was barred from
giving testimony at Bursa’s Islamic law court, an unusually censorious limit
to be imposed upon a sultan.1 This meant foregoing the spiritual blessings
of Muslims and the ability to use the religion to promote loyalty to the
dynasty, to unite followers and supporters, and to urge them to fight against
its enemies.
A story circulated that catalogues his main vice. When completing the
massive Great Mosque in Bursa in the final years of the fourteenth century,
Bayezid I asked the pious Sufi sheikh Emir Sultan if everything about it
was in order. Emir Sultan cleverly told him that one thing was missing: he
should add taverns to the mosque so that he and his boon companions
would have a reason to visit. Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus also
complained about Bayezid I’s drinking. Serving as his vassal and
accompanying him on military campaigns in Anatolia in 1391, the
Byzantine ruler complained that he could not keep up with his counterpart’s
daily partying, the excessive drinking, ‘the flocks of flute players, the
choruses of singers, the tribes of dancers, the clang of cymbals, and the
senseless laughter after the strong wine. Is it possible for those who suffer
all this not to have their minds dulled?’2
All that the Ottomans had constructed over the past century had been
threatened by the uprisings of Sheikh Bedreddin and his disciples. Turning
away from earlier foundational visions and the groups that propelled the
rise of the dynasty to power in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
namely the gazi ‘holy warriors’, caused tensions that increased support for
rebellions. These rebellions illustrated the clash between interpretations of
Islam and what happens when the electrifying ideas of Ibn Arabi are acted
upon. That Börklüce Mustafa was originally a Christian and Torlak Hu
Kemal a Jew demonstrates the unexpected outcomes of Islamic
conversion.27
Everything the Ottomans had built since their founding had been
shattered by the steppe cavalry archers of the nomad conqueror Timur and
betrayed by those Ottoman subjects opposed to Bayezid I who deserted the
sultan to join them. At the time, Ottoman failures seemed to suggest that the
reliance on slave soldiers and not gazis had been a fatal error. But after
Timur, sedentary gunpowder empires, including that of the reborn
Ottomans, would gradually rise to power, making a standing army vital.28
The determining factors in the continued existence of the empire were
the powerful interests that wanted it put back together. Along with the
remaining members of the dynasty itself who had been spared by Timur,
these included those who held land grants (cavalry and Christian families in
Southeastern Europe) and the servants of the sultan who had been recruited
through the Collection (Janissaries and administrators). Given their interest
in reviving the dynasty, it seemed unlikely that such leading figures would
return the revitalised empire to its mystical and warrior roots. They would
instead attempt to rein in the centrifugal force of the deviant dervishes, who
in 1416 had proven themselves too much of a threat to the survival of the
empire.
Mehmed I resurrected most of the territories of the empire prior to being
crushed by his own horse in an accident in Edirne in 1421. According to
two Ottoman chroniclers, several days after his death, his viziers came up
with a macabre ruse to calm the palace and make his Janissary commanders
believe the sultan was still alive until they were able to put a new ruler on
the throne. The sultan’s Persian physician propped up Mehmed I’s corpse
and had a page stand behind it, using the deceased’s own hand to stroke his
beard. Continuing the ploy, the physician begged the assembled to leave
and let the sultan recover his health. Convinced or not, thus chastised, they
left the (deceased) sultan in peace.29
They hid Mehmed I’s corpse for forty-one days until his nineteen-year-
old son and designated successor Murad II (reigned 1421–1444, 1446–
1451) could be enthroned in Bursa.30 He expanded the empire further, but
only after defeating two Mustafas. The first Mustafa was Mehmed I’s
brother, who had proclaimed himself sultan in Edirne. During battle
between the opposing armies of nephew and uncle near Bursa, Mustafa fled
but was captured and killed. Then Murad II had to contend with the army of
his thirteen-year-old brother, Mustafa, who besieged Bursa. After the two
sides fought outside İznik, Murad II’s forces captured his younger brother
and strangled him.
Murad II reconquered Thessalonike in 1430 after an eight-year siege.
The Ottomans sacked the city, converted churches to mosques, and
enslaved much of the population. Despite taking the Byzantines’ second
city and dominating Southeastern Europe and Northwest Asia, however,
Murad II’s territory was split in two at its centre by Byzantine
Constantinople, which controlled the Bosporus straits. He also faced
powerful enemies to the west, especially the Kingdom of Hungary, and to
the east, including the Turcoman principality of Karaman. Should the
Hungarians and Karamanids launch a simultaneous, two-pronged military
invasion while the Byzantines and their Venetian allies blockaded the
narrow waterway, hindering the sultan’s armies from crossing between
Europe and Asia, it could spell the end of the Ottoman dynasty. Such a
nightmare scenario was almost realised by the Crusade of Varna of 1444, a
Crusade not fought in the Middle East, but in Southeastern Europe. The
battle was one of the major turning points in fifteenth-century European and
Asian history.
No matter that each side formulated this as a ‘holy war’ against
‘infidels’, the Crusade or gaza was not simply a battle between Muslims
and Christians. The crusaders had Muslim allies and the Ottomans had
Christian support. The main crusader protagonists were Pope Eugenius IV,
the Byzantine emperor John VIII, and the king of Hungary Vladislav I (who
was also Władysław III of Poland), along with others such as the
Burgundian Knights aiming to retaliate for the debacle at Nicopolis half a
century earlier. Venice’s rival, the Genoese, based in their enclave in Pera—
the walled, hilly district marked by the well-known stone tower built in the
mid-fourteenth century, facing Constantinople across the Golden Horn—
and assisted the Ottomans, who faced formidable enemies.
Murad II’s opponents had a military advantage. The Kingdom of
Hungary, led in the field by King Vladislav and the ruler of Transylvania,
John Hunyadi, were able to deploy more troops than the Ottomans. More
significant was their technological edge. The Hungarians employed the
wagenburg tactic, a ‘mobile fortification, with cannon mounted on carts’,
and utilised armour that Ottoman weapons could not penetrate.31 In one
skirmish, Ottoman infantry shot John Hunyadi’s horse out from under him,
and he ‘crashed to the ground with his horse and weapons, like a dog falling
off the roof of a bazaar’.32 But because he was ‘clad in pure iron’, the
Ottomans could not kill him, and he was able to escape. In many battles,
whether the Ottomans used arrows or arquebuses, the Hungarians were able
to retreat to their wagenburgs, firing cannons and arquebuses in return. The
Ottomans succeeded in stopping the Hungarians at Zlatitsa Pass in Bulgaria,
but could not defeat them.
Murad II realised peace was necessary.33 With the assistance of his
Serbian wife, Mara, the daughter of his vassal George Branković, Murad II
concluded a ten-year truce with Hungary in summer 1444.
John VIII, the Byzantine emperor, did not give up hope to save his
kingdom from the Ottomans, however. Promising a simultaneous
Hungarian attack from the west (despite the truce), and a blockade of the
Bosporus straits, which would hinder the sultan’s advance from Europe, the
emperor spurred the Karamanids to attack from the east that same year.34
Although the Karamanids launched an offensive, their leader capitulated
without battling Murad II’s forces.35
Believing that the Ottoman Empire was secure in the west and east, with
a European truce and Asian peace restored, the forty-one-year-old sultan
surprised his court by abdicating the throne, the first Ottoman leader to do
so.36 To this day, we are not sure why he made this decision. Twenty-three
years earlier, he had chosen to have his accession ceremony in the Grand
Mosque of Bursa, where he girded the sword of, or was invested with the
cloak of, a Sufi sheikh, as if becoming initiated as his disciple.37 Perhaps,
tiring of the trappings of power in this world, he wished to retire to
contemplate the afterlife in a dervish lodge. Murad II also had a reputation
for being a heavy wine drinker. The oldest extant line written in Turkish by
an Ottoman ruler—‘Cupbearer bring, bring here again [what is left over
from] yesterday’s wine’—reads like the pleading of an alcoholic.38 As he
went off to spend his days in mystical retreat, or in his cups, Ottoman rule
passed to his twelve-year-old son, Mehmed II (reigned 1444–1446, 1451–
1481), who was enthroned in Edirne.
But the peace was short-lived. Due to pressure from Polish knights and
the papal legate, who absolved him of having to honour his commitment,
the Hungarian king quickly abjured his agreement with the sultan and
resumed the war.39
Viziers implored Murad II, who was in Anatolia at the time, to return to
the throne in Edirne to perform his duty as gazi. He grudgingly agreed.40
Fearing imminent Hungarian occupation, the Ottomans felled large trees to
block the probable path of the Hungarian army and dug a moat around
Edirne, evacuating the countryside and ordering civilians to take refuge in
the citadel.41 Such scenes of impending doom spurred the appearance of an
apocalyptic Muslim scholar in the city preaching faith in Jesus. To quell this
internal upheaval, Ottoman authorities executed him and tortured his many
followers.42
To participate in the campaign against the Hungarian army with the
Anatolian army, Murad II had to cross the straits. But by October 1444, the
Venetians and others had blockaded the Bosporus. The only way to
overcome this was to place Ottoman artillery on both shores, ‘so that
cannon on either side should be able to kiss each other’, providing cover for
the sultan and his army to cross safely to the European side.43 Part of his
army managed to cross further south of Constantinople at Gallipoli and set
up the battlements on the European shore. The sultan used Genoese
cannoneers to set up artillery on the Asian bank. The Byzantines launched
two giant ships loaded with arquebuses into the Bosporus, but Ottoman
cannon balls burst into one of the ships, turning its hull to matchsticks and
sinking it, and tore a huge hole in the other.44 Crossing on Genoese boats
procured for the occasion, the sultan and his troops landed safely in Europe.
Prince Mehmed, although ‘still a fresh rose’, impudently demanded to
lead the campaign against the Hungarians while his father defended Edirne,
the seat of the sultan.45 Murad II admonished him to do as he told him, and
to defend Edirne and say his prayers.46
As tens of thousands of Hungarian soldiers swept across Southeastern
Europe, the Ottoman defenders, male and female, were praised for their
manliness—firing their cannons, arquebuses, lances, and arrows from their
castles—but because the Hungarians wore armour of steel, Ottoman
swords, axes, clubs, and maces were useless.47 As Hungarian forces burned
Ottoman citadels, some defenders threw themselves to their deaths. At one
castle, the victorious Hungarians threw the Ottoman defenders from the
castle into the moat, and any that survived were cut down by arrows before
they could stand.48 The Hungarians moved ever closer to their goal of
seizing Edirne.
On 10 November 1444, the two sides met in battle at Varna on the coast
of the Black Sea. The Hungarians took to the field blaring trumpets, as the
Ottomans went into battle accompanied by thundering kettledrums.49
Murad II and his Janissaries and infantry soldiers took up a position at the
centre rear, stationed on a mountain, his Southeastern European cavalry to
his left and his Anatolian cavalry to his right.50
The battle began with a loud clamour. One ‘could hear stabbing, and,
above all, blows ringing out from both the armies’, as ‘arrows began to fly
like grasshoppers from out of the grass’.51 The Hungarians decimated the
Anatolian wing of the cavalry and killed their commander. Because the
Hungarians were ‘clad from head to toe in iron’, Ottoman swords could not
make a dent in them, so those on the Southeastern European wing used their
axes, maces, and clubs to bash their opponents, but after fighting for a
while, they fled the battlefield.52 Without cavalry, Murad II and his
Janissaries were left alone at the centre to fight. Battling with few men,
including his palace pages, it was a bloodbath, where ‘heads and legs,
fingers and fingernails, axes and hammers, arrows and lances, shields and
weapons poured on the battlefield like a carpenter’s chippings’.53
According to a Greek chronicler, Hungarian king Vladislav was killed
‘as a result of his stupidity’.54 Ignoring the ruler of Transylvania Hunyadi’s
advice to wait for reinforcements, the king waded into battle, where a
Janissary knocked him off his horse with a mace and other Janissaries
hacked him to pieces with their axes.55 They ‘cut off his head and hoisted it
on a lance’.56 Hungarian knights fell all around him ‘like autumn leaves’.57
The Southeastern European Ottoman cavalry then returned to rout the
Christian knights. Thousands of crusaders were annihilated. The
anonymous Ottoman author of the account of the battle proclaimed:
A RENAISSANCE PRINCE
Mehmed II
the monarch of the lands, the exalter of the empire, the Khan of the
seven climes at this auspicious conjunction and the fortunate lord of
the four corners of the earth, the emperor of the regions of Rûm
[Southeastern Europe] and Persia and Hungary, of the lands of the
Tatars and Wallachians and Russians, of the Turks and Arabs and
Moldavia, of the dominions of Karamania and Abyssinia and the
Kipchak steppes, of the eastern climes and of Cawazir [Iraq] and
Shirvan, of the western climes and of Algeria and Kairouan
[Tunisia], the padishah bearing the crown of the lands of Hind and
Sind and Baghdad, of the Franks and Croatians and Belgrade,
possessor of the crown of his [eleven] predecessors, Sultan son of
Sultan… the Shadow of God, the protector of faith and state, Khan
Murad.39
A GLOBAL RENAISSANCE
Contrary to the inherited view, the Renaissance was not a strictly Christian
European affair, for it was undergirded by economic, diplomatic,
intellectual, and cultural interaction with Muslim-majority societies. When
we add the Ottomans to the Renaissance as it is traditionally understood, we
see it as the global phenomenon that it was. The revival of ancient
knowledge was a process that occurred not sui generis in fifteenth-century
Florence, but connected to an older and ongoing phenomenon, a diffusion
of knowledge travelling from East to West, from eighth-century Baghdad,
to twelfth-century Cordoba, to fifteenth-century Florence and
Constantinople.45 How indeed did Filippo Brunelleschi, a goldsmith with
no formal architectural training, manage to create the most sublime
monument of the Renaissance?46 Perhaps because the Ilkhanid khan
Öljeitü’s turquoise-blue, double-shell, domed mausoleum, built at the
beginning of the fourteenth century at Sultaniye in Iran, anticipated
Brunelleschi’s double-shell, domed cathedral in Florence by a century. It
may in fact have been its inspiration.
So, too, can we accept that Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was as much a
Renaissance prince as were François I of France (reigned 1515–1547) and
Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. The curators at Henry VIII’s
Hampton Court Palace outside London choose to display portraits of these
two men as the English king’s contemporary rivals. What is missing is the
portrait of the Ottoman sultan that the Tudor elite owned.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, too, the Ottomans did not play a
negative role in the Renaissance, blocking cultural, diplomatic, and
economic exchange across the Mediterranean. Instead, sultans were
Renaissance princes, employing the same artists to paint their portraits,
sharing the same history and heritage, and engaging in cross-confessional
military and political alliances. Admired and envied, the Ottomans
stimulated classic European political thought, including promulgation of an
imagined division between East and West that continues to this day.
For the Ottomans, however, no matter Sultan Mehmed II’s cultural
relations or references, the exchange with Renaissance Italy was to be brief.
An effigy of Mehmed II was reportedly borne atop his coffin during his
funeral procession from Topkapı Palace to his mosque in 1481. If so, it was
an allusion to the funeral march of Constantine the Great, founder of
Constantinople. It meant that Mehmed II saw himself as the heir of the
Romans.47 But Mehmed II’s pious successor, Bayezid II (reigned 1481–
1512), was opposed to human depictions in art. He sold the Christian relics
his father had collected—as well as the palace frescoes and paintings he had
commissioned, including Bellini’s portrait—in the bazaars of the city.48 The
latter eventually found its way to London.
Bayezid II may have turned away from being a patron of Renaissance
art, but he found himself in the thick of European politics due to his family
troubles. Bayezid II’s fight for the throne with his own brother and his fear
of this and other threats compelled the dynasty to record its history for the
first time, nearly two centuries after its establishment.
6
Into the possession of the gazis, the guides of the gaza, the army of
mail-clad warriors, came gratuitously beautiful, graceful and
rosebud-mouthed creatures, and elegantly-walking, cypress-statured,
rose-scented idols. Many jasmine-complexioned girls were taken,
girls who imparted gladness and whose beauty was a delight. [They
were] fairy-faced and houri-featured [virgins of paradise], with
curling locks and with ambergris-fragrant ringlets. The inside of the
camp became full of [these] fairies, like a sky full of moons, suns and
Jupiters.28
MAGNIFICENCE
From Selim I to the First Ottoman Caliph, Suleiman I
AN ISLAMIC REFORMATION?
In addition to the ubiquitous use of millenarian claims in both East and
West, the sixteenth century was characterised by a challenge to the right to
call oneself a true believer. Following the Reformation, Christianity in
Western and Central Europe split into the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist
churches. As religious rivals pursuing common strategies and goals, each
church promoted piety and individual spirituality, the internalisation of
church teachings, the drawing of dichotomies between faiths, and the quest
for uniform orthodoxy. They utilised violence to ensure religious
homogeneity in the territories they ruled. Book burnings, inquisitions,
heresy trials, the persecution of dissenters, and the burning of ‘witches’
were frequent and vicious. Most of the latter victims were women, usually
old, poor, and widowed or single—women not considered to be controlled
by a man and thus not conforming to male standards of female behaviour.
Just as the church in the West split into three denominations during the
Reformation, so, too, did the chasm between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims
deepen in the same era. Selim I’s attacks on Shah Ismail I are similar to the
aspersions Martin Luther cast on the Catholic Church. As Selim I
condemned Shi’i ‘temporary marriage’ as adultery and fornication, Luther
excoriated monks and clergy in Rome for their mistresses and prostitutes.
The Sunni-Shi’i split was rooted in Islamic history in the seventh century
following Muhammad’s death. They debated who had the right to rule the
community: men chosen by consensus or members of Muhammad’s family,
the latter calling themselves the shi’at Ali (partisans of Ali). That sectarian
split became more pronounced in the sixteenth century, catalysed by the
Safavid threat and attracting the support of Turcoman in Ottoman Anatolia,
with the Ottomans affirming their Sunnism in unprecedented ways.
Suleiman I ordered a mosque to be built in every Muslim village in the
empire, which was meant to centralise as well as Islamise and stamp out
pro-Safavid or deviant-dervish alternative interpretations of Islam. Such
alternative interpretations were demonstrated partly through the forcible
sorting out of the two denominations through conversion, deportation, war,
banishment, and massacre. Ottoman historians boasted about how Selim I
massacred tens of thousands of Shi’ites, a bloodbath that was similar to the
Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, in which Catholics in France
slaughtered thousands of Protestants (called Huguenots) and mutilated their
corpses.77
For their part, the Safavids butchered large numbers of Sunnis while
compelling the wholescale conversion of Iran’s Muslim population from
Sunnism to Shi’ism under Shah Ismail I and his successors in the sixteenth
century. To effect this change, the Safavids also brought in Shi’i scholars
from Ottoman territories such as Lebanon, who were conversant in both
interpretations of the faith, to help define and police the boundaries of Shi’i
belief. Soon the Shi’i call to prayer, which includes the line, ‘I testify Ali is
the friend of God, I testify Ali is proof of God’, rang out from minarets
three times a day across the Safavid Empire.
Yet in the same century, the Janissaries repeatedly marched off into
battle against the Shi’i Safavids while extolling Shi’i propaganda. Their
standards were emblazoned with the phrases ‘saint’ or ‘friend of God’,
‘Hajji Bektaş is the manifestation of the divine light of Ali’, and ‘There is
no one as valiant as Ali, there is no sword of God other than Ali’s sword’.
They vowed to avenge the seventh-century killing of their ‘shah’, Ali’s son
Hussein, at Karbala in Iraq. The same banners declared, ‘Long live my
Sultan, may he reign for a 1000 years’. What mattered, once again, was
loyalty, not ideological purity, as in Reformation Christian Europe. The
Janissaries were never made into normative Sunni Muslims, yet the explicit
expression of the rival faith was permitted at the centre of empire. Whereas
in Reformation Europe the religion of the ruler became the religion of the
subjects, in the Ottoman Empire authorities tolerated a significant
community of Shi’is in Lebanon.
But to understand this age of confessionalisation and how the great
empires of Europe and Asia participated in it, it is worth bearing in mind
that the Islamic institution of the caliphate was not the same as the Christian
institution of the papacy. Because they were more concerned with public
behaviour than private belief, Muslims lacked institutions with which to
pronounce and repress ‘heresy’, such as the Inquisition, or to discipline
authority and institutions of ‘orthodoxy’.
The Ottoman imperial council did hear cases of subjects uttering
abominable statements about Islam. Yet, it was no Inquisitional authority, as
most trials were concerned with treason and social upheaval. The
authorities could pardon the offending party if he pledged political
allegiance. It would therefore be a mistake to use the terms ‘orthodox’,
‘heterodox’, and ‘heresy’ in the absence of institutions with authority to
pronounce true religion and punish those who did not follow it. Although
the distinction between Sunni and Shi’i sharpened during this period, what
mattered was not confessional divide—as in the split between Calvinist,
Catholic, and Lutheran in Christian Europe—but allegiance to a dynasty.
As for loyalty to the ideal that the Ottoman sultan was the messiah, one
group surpassed all others in the fervency and tenacity of this belief. Jews
who had migrated to the Ottoman Empire from Spain and Portugal
following their forced conversion to Catholicism or expulsion perceived
Ottoman sultans as carrying out God’s plan for them. The ingathering of
European Jews in the sultan’s domains would lead Jews East and West to
place the Ottoman sultan at the centre of their apocalyptic drama.
In the first seven chapters, the reader has encountered a narrative of the
Ottoman dynasty from its origins at the turn of the fourteenth century
through to the middle of the sixteenth century. At this point, we will break
the narrative flow in order to devote the next five chapters to exploring
several major themes that emerged, before returning to the story of the
changes faced by the dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century. The
themes are the ingathering of Jews, Jewish utopian views of the empire, and
ecstatic, messianic depictions of the sultan; the development of the
Ottomans as a maritime power and their participation in the Age of
Discovery; the unique Ottoman way as expressed in class structure, law,
culture, and ideology; the role of women and eunuchs in the palace and
dynastic politics; and the culture of same-sex desire.
8
SULTANIC SAVIOURS
MUSLIMS WERE NOT the only Ottoman subjects who viewed sultans as
God-sent messiahs. So, too, did Jews.1 Massacred, forcibly converted, and
expelled from every medieval kingdom in Christian Europe, including
England, Jews found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Following their forced
departure from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, as many as one
hundred thousand Spanish and Portuguese Jews, as well as a large number
of conversos (Iberian Jews compelled to convert to Catholicism) migrated
to the Ottoman Empire. There, conversos found that they were able to
return to Judaism, which was a crime punishable by death in Western
Europe. Jews were amazed to discover that they were relatively free to
openly practice Judaism in the Ottoman Empire, unlike almost anywhere
else in contemporary Europe. Thanks in part to the Ottomans, for much of
history Jews have had a positive image of Muslims. Equally astounding was
the fact that individual Jews rose to important positions at the Ottoman
court.
Between 1453 and 1600, Jews served the dynasty as privy physicians,
diplomats, translators, advisors, spies, and ladies-in-waiting to the harem
and were given licence to conduct trade as international bankers. Prominent
Jews included the illustrious physicians and diplomatic agents Joseph (born
in 1450 in Granada) and Moses Hamon. The Portuguese converso and
international merchant Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi headed one of the
greatest family businesses in Western Europe. Forcibly converted to
Catholicism and then persecuted for being secret Jews, she and members of
her family, including her nephew, João Miguez, migrated to the Ottoman
Empire in order to return to their ancestral Judaism, bringing their wealth
and connections with them. Miguez, who would become the duke of Naxos,
also served the Ottoman court as a diplomatic agent. A relative of Gracia
Mendes and Miguez, the Portuguese Jew Don Alvaro Mendes (Salomon ibn
Yaesh), would serve as counsellor to Murad III and helped establish close
relations between England and the Ottoman Empire, both eager to counter
Phillip II of Spain. Physician, advisor, diplomatic agent, and international
merchant Salomon ben Natan Eskenazi would become the trusted advisor
of Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and official envoy of the sultan to
Venice and the Habsburgs.2
The prominence of such Jews at court and the fact that after 1517 the
Ottomans controlled the Holy Land meant that Jews could make pilgrimage
to or settle in Jerusalem. This raised Jews’ messianic expectations. Used to
brutal treatment at the hands of Christians, Jews across the Mediterranean
were grateful for this reception and wrote ecstatic accounts of the
Ottomans.
Messianic desires and an emotional state of gratefulness compelled Jews
in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries to be exceptionally
loyal to the Ottoman sultans, who at that time ruled one of the only
kingdoms in the world that permitted them to be Jews. This shaped a
utopian image of the Ottomans and their sultan. Jews saw the Ottoman
sultan as a personification of the empire, depicting him in messianic terms
as God’s rod, the one who fulfils God’s plan in the world by smiting the
Jews’ Christian oppressors. They also credited him for gathering the Jewish
diaspora from across the Mediterranean, conquering Jerusalem, and
enabling Jews to settle in the Holy Land. In their view, these all served as
signs and wonders, omens for the beginning of the messianic age and the
redemption of the Jews.
Rabbi Elijah ben Elkanah Capsali of Candia (Iráklion, on Venetian
Crete), wrote ecstatically of Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman
I. He saw them as redeemers of the Jews, players in the cosmic drama
between the forces of good and evil that preceded the advent of the
messiah.3 While Greeks lamented how ‘all things turned to evil. What and
how and why? Because of our sins!’, non-Greek Jews had the opposite
reaction to the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire.4 The
sultans were ‘messengers of God’ who punished ‘wicked’ nations and
gathered the exiled Jews.5 Capsali claimed that God had promised Osman,
the founder of the Ottoman Empire, ‘a kingdom as hard as iron’. This is a
reference to the fourth kingdom of the vision of Daniel in the Bible, the last
before the redemption to attack the Jews’ oppressors.6 That is why God
brought the Turks from a faraway land, blessed them, and made the
Ottomans great and powerful.7 The Turk ‘is the rod’ of God’s wrath with
which ‘God punishes the different nations’.8 Having punished Byzantine
Constantinople, God made Ottoman Istanbul flourish as a reward to the
sultan, who had carried out God’s will.9 Jews looked to Suleiman I with
hope, for he was the tenth Ottoman sultan, and, as the Torah predicts, ‘every
tenth one shall be holy to God’ and ‘in his days Judah shall be delivered and
Israel shall dwell secure’ and ‘a redeemer shall come to Zion’.10
Imbued with such millenarian expectations, Solomon Molho—the
former Diego Pires, a Portuguese converso who had returned to Judaism in
the Ottoman Empire, where he studied Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism)—
proclaimed himself as the messiah around 1525. In Regensburg, Bavaria, he
had an audience with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The meeting did not
go well, and Molho was turned over to the Inquisition. He was burned at the
stake in 1532.
As messianic views continued to be kindled, subsequent Jewish writers
expressed ecstatic gratefulness to the sultans. One of them was Portuguese
converso Samuel Usque. Usque, an ardent follower of Solomon Molho,
believed his group’s suffering marked the end of history. The great comfort
was that all these travails were foretold by the prophets, and that as the
prophecies of evil were verified, so should Jews trust that the prophecies of
good would also be fulfilled. Writing to fellow exiles, he argued that
conversos suffered because the millennium was at hand, after which a new
age would dawn and their misfortunes would end.11 Like the nations around
them, Jews, he argued, had sinned and become idolatrous. For this they had
been punished by God. If they repented, God would forgive them. If they
returned to Judaism and God, their misfortunes would end. Usque
interpreted the expulsions from Christian Europe as fulfilments of biblical
prophecies, which meant that once all the conversos returned to Judaism,
redemption of the Jews would be at hand.12
Usque argued that the Ottoman Empire was the greatest consolation for
the persecution of Jewry.13 He compared the Ottoman Empire to the Red
Sea, across which the Israelites had fled to safety from the pharaohs of
Egypt. According to him, the Ottoman Empire ‘is like a broad and
expansive sea which our Lord has opened with the rod of His mercy, as
Moses did for you in the Exodus from Egypt, so that the swells of your
present misfortunes, which relentlessly pursue you in all the kingdoms of
Europe like the infinite multitude of Egyptians, might cease and be
consumed by it’. In the Ottoman Empire ‘the gates of liberty are always
wide open for you that you may fully practice your Judaism’.14 Jews were
allowed to embrace their former faith and abandon the rites they had been
forced to adopt.
Other writers continued the inter-Jewish dialogue, praising the Ottomans
in emotional, messianic terms. Joseph ben Joshua ha-Kohen was born in
France, the son of expelled Castilian Spanish Jews. His family was
subsequently expelled from Provence, and he spent most of his life in
Genoa, where he also faced expulsion decrees. He aimed to prove that
Christians were being punished by the Ottomans for the calamities to which
they subjected Jews and that redemption was at hand.15 He described
Mehmed II as ‘a scourge and breaker of the uncircumcised’ [the
Christians].16 In describing Suleiman I’s reign, ha-Kohen argued that the
messianic age was approaching and that the Ottoman and Habsburg
dynasties represented the forces of good and evil. The world war between
these empires meant that the prophecy of Ezekiel—in which the enemies of
the Jews would be defeated and the Temple restored—was being realised.
For ha-Kohen, God had awakened the sultan’s soul to rebuild the walls
of Jerusalem, predicting the messiah would come in his lifetime. Suleiman I
rebuilt the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. The walls include Jaffa and
Damascus Gates, as well as the sealed Golden Gate, or Gate of Mercy,
located on the eastern side of the Temple Mount. According to Jews, this
was the door through which the messiah would come. According to
Christians, the messiah had already come through this door in the person of
Jesus.
Along with these Mediterranean Jews, Ottoman Jews such as Samuel de
Medina—chief rabbi of Salonica, Macedonia, and scion of a Castilian
family—also believed God caused Mehmed II to besiege Istanbul and
allowed him to capture it.
In messianic expectation, Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi settled former
conversos returned to Judaism in the Holy Land. She paid for the
construction of public works, housing, and a synagogue in Tiberias. She had
mulberry trees planted to jump-start the silk industry and imported merino
sheep to be raised for their high-quality wool. Gracia Mendes planned to
move to Tiberias, close to the main Kabbalist centre of Safed, due to
feverish expectations about the onset of the messianic era, but she passed
away in 1569 before doing so.17
Her nephew João Miguez played a more significant role in the Ottoman
Empire. Having worked as Gracia Mendes’s agent and representative in
Western Europe, Miguez migrated to Istanbul and returned to Judaism,
becoming known as Don Joseph Nasi.18 Unlike his aunt, Joseph Nasi was
able to enter royal circles, specifically that of Prince Selim, who became
Selim II upon Suleiman I’s death in 1566.
During Selim II’s reign (1566–1574), Joseph Nasi, whose commercial
agents in Western Europe proved useful for gathering intelligence for the
Ottomans, quickly rose at court as an advisor and diplomat. Throughout the
1560s, he negotiated treaties with Poland, the Habsburgs, and France, and
promoted rebellions by Protestants in the Netherlands and by Moriscos—
Spanish Muslims converted to Catholicism—in Spain. He allegedly
convinced the sultan to launch the successful conquest of Venetian Cyprus
in 1571. In return, he was named duke of Naxos and the rest of the
Cyclades, a group of recently annexed former Venetian islands in the south
Aegean Sea. His wife, Gracia Jr., was named the duchess of Naxos.19 He
was granted extensive tax farms, as well as the monopoly on the regional
wine trade. Contemporary Western European accounts of this Jewish man’s
alleged desire to be ‘king of Cyprus’ made him the scapegoat for Ottoman
failures during the Age of Discovery. But the fact that other Europeans
considered the Ottomans a decisive sea power during the era is significant.
For the Age of Discovery was also a time of critical successes for the
Ottoman Empire.
9
BOTH THE OTTOMAN conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the defeat and
conquest of the territories of the Mamluk Empire in 1516–1517, including
the Middle East, by Selim I made the Ottomans into a naval power with a
worldwide vision. Selim I’s conquests doubled the size of the empire and
set it on the path for having a Muslim majority in the following centuries.
Selim I’s successor, Suleiman I, proclaimed himself the caliph, the universal
protector of the entire Muslim-ruled world, the defender of Sunni Muslims
from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Advances in military and
naval technology—firearms, artillery, and ocean-sailing vessels—allowed
the Ottomans to project their power and control oceangoing trade to
Southeast Asia. All of this led to a cultural florescence, a rediscovery of
overlooked ancient knowledge, the launching of curious Ottoman travellers,
the translations of Western works, and the production of new Ottoman
maps, atlases, and geographical treatises. If such developments are the
major determinants of whether an empire partook in the Age of Discovery,
then there was an Ottoman Age of Discovery.1
The Ottomans did not possess a land empire only. From the fifteenth
century, theirs was also a seaborne empire. Thanks in part to the influx after
1492 of refugee European Jews and their knowledge of geography,
technology, military developments, and politics, and because of the
continued use of converts in key positions, the Ottoman maritime empire
emerged in the same century as that of the Portuguese.2 Beginning with the
reign of Mehmed II, sultans referred to themselves as ‘Lord of the two seas
and two continents’. The sultans were the rulers of the Mediterranean and
Black Seas, Europe and Asia. From Egypt to Indonesia, the Ottomans
rivalled the Portuguese in the battle for the seas and played a major role in
international trade. Why, then, are the Ottomans not included as major
participants in the European Age of Discovery?3 Ottoman writers of the
time confute such an exclusion.
Sea captain (or reis) Seydi Ali—the author of The Mirror of Countries
(1560), which was based on his travels through India, Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, and Iran—explains how in 1552 he was appointed Ottoman
admiral of the Egyptian fleet. He had ‘always been very fond of the sea, had
taken part in the expedition against Rhodes under Sultan Suleiman I, and
had since had a share in almost all engagements, both by land and by sea’.
He had ‘fought under Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, Sinan Pasha, and other
captains, and had cruised about on the Western [Mediterranean] sea’ such
that he ‘knew every nook and corner of it’. Seydi Ali ‘had written several
books on astronomy, nautical science, and other matters bearing upon
navigation’. His ‘father and grandfather, since the conquest of
Constantinople, had had charge of the arsenal at Galata; they had both been
eminent in their profession, and their skill had come down to me as an
heirloom’.4 Seydi Ali was a typical explorer of that era.
The Age of Discovery is conventionally understood as the sixteenth-
century European maritime exploration and mastery of the sea that served
as the basis for the expansion of global European influence.5 In the
accepted story, Muslim powers such as the Ottomans are depicted as
obstacles to Western European domination, obstacles to the Europeans’
‘natural path of expansion’ into Africa and the Middle East.6 When we
think of what immediately preceded the Age of Discovery, we imagine the
Portuguese and Spanish—and later the Dutch, English, and French—not as
being engaged in world trade, but as existing first in a period of relative
geographic and intellectual isolation limited to the North Atlantic and the
Mediterranean. Incongruously, they possessed a decisively bold political
and religious legitimating ideology that allowed them to imagine
conquering the world. This boldness was manifested in the Treaty of
Tordesillas of 1494, in which the Spanish and Portuguese divided up the
extra-European world between them, despite not even controlling one part
of it. As they launched their voyages of discovery, there followed rapid and
significant technological advances—particularly in firearms and
oceangoing vessels, which were combined into formidable warships as they
put cannons onboard carracks. Curiosity gave rise to cultural and
intellectual transformation, the blossoming of scholarly and artistic
achievements—especially in cartography, geography, and classical studies
—and an interest in the outside world and their ability to control it.7
One might be tempted to imagine the brief period of Ottoman control
over Morocco and the entire North African littoral during the reign of
Murad III as comparable to the European Age of Discovery. Had the
Ottomans remained in power there, they might well have expanded down
the west coast of Africa. This was uncharted territory for the Ottomans, in
some ways as foreign to them as the New World was to the Western
European powers. A better comparison, however, lies with the Ottomans’
economic and naval expansion into the Indian Ocean basin.8 Given their
lack of development of oceangoing vessels and the Europeans’ comparative
advantage, it is easy to disparage the idea that the Ottomans experienced
maritime expansion in this age. But the Ottomans actively participated in
the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century.
IN JUST TWO and a half centuries, from the turn of the fourteenth century to
the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman dynasty had progressed
from nomadic chieftains to settled princes to rulers of a globe-girdling
empire that stretched from Algeria in the western Mediterranean through
the Middle East, and even had influence on the Indian Ocean basin to
Sumatra. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans had asserted
their own vision of empire. One artefact from that century conveys what the
dynasty had become.
The British Museum in London owns an outstanding example of the
‘caliph of the world’ Suleiman I’s calligraphic seal, the tughra. The
imperial monogram reads, ‘Suleiman Shah, son of Selim Shah, the ever-
victorious Khan’.1 The rest of the document is missing, but the fact that the
cipher itself has a height of 45.5 cm and a width of 61.5 cm means that it
was part of a very large scroll. Written in interlocking Arabic letters in
cobalt blue and gold ink, forming a three-dimensional, glittering whole, it is
a stunning work of art and expression of power.
Like gold-tipped Ottoman battle standards, the seal has three blue lines
rising on the right, ending in loops filled in with gold. They are held up by a
base made of the name ‘Suleiman’. Wrapped with curling lines forming an
aigrette, the three vertical lines in turn form the base for a giant, battle-
helmet-shaped blue loop, racing off to the left. A short, curved dagger leads
out to the right. Bold, energetic, swirling, whirling circles and cords of gold
and blue flowers fill in the loops and lines. Split palmettes, carnations,
lotuses, pomegranates, tulips, roses, and hyacinths dance across the interior
of the tughra, forming a spiralling, golden nautilus shell.
The nautilus is the symbol of expansion. Nautilus shell, flowers, dagger,
battle helmet, aigrette, battle standard, and gold, the cipher is the concise,
beautiful expression of a confident military power and sophisticated culture.
It resembles musical notes written in priceless, golden letters. The sultan,
represented by the letters of his name, encircles myriad flowers representing
the diverse parts and peoples of his kingdom, all under his control, the
conductor of a grand orchestra.
The cipher is the symbol of what it meant to be an Ottoman in the
sixteenth century, the special characteristics that defined the ruling class,
why their armies were so successful, and what their sources of manpower
were. Converting enemies into cogs in their military machine, the Ottoman
rulers expanded their territory fast, conquering much of the former Roman
Empire, their success enabled by their unique political organisation. Central
to their distinctive imperial vision and way of life was their use of
conversion-based meritocracy as a way to absorb and integrate enemies, an
imperial feature esteemed by European observers.
This ‘Ottoman Way’, first described by a diplomat from the Holy
Roman Empire, was articulated in class structure, language, law, culture,
and ideology. Society was divided into the askeri (the military and the
sultan’s salaried servants or holders of fiefs), reaya (commoners and tax-
paying subjects), and slave classes. A centrepiece of the system was the
timar, a land grant allowing the holder to keep the revenue on the goods
produced on that land in exchange for the responsibility of raising a
mounted military force to serve the sultan when called to battle. The empire
was also based on a gendered religious hierarchy of long-standing Islamic
precedent, wherein Muslims were favoured over Christians and Jews, men
were advantaged over women, and the free were privileged over slaves.
Westerners (Rûmis or Romans) were preferred to easterners. Yet the social
order was flexible. Christians and Jews could become Muslim; slaves could
be freed. Women could rise in station, especially through dynastic marriage
or becoming childbearing concubines to the sultan. The Ottomans created a
new language, a composite of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish grammar and
vocabulary, written in modified Persian script. This was the language of
administration and culture, especially poetry. The Ottoman Way was also
expressed in law, as chancellor Celalzade Mustafa and head of the religious
establishment Sheikhulislam Ebussuud Efendi harmonised secular law
(kanun), based on custom and sultanic decree, and religious law (Sharia) so
as to fit the empire’s aims. It was another example of how the Ottomans had
long subordinated religious authority to imperial authority and had made
secular law equivalent in force to religious law. Ottoman culture was
expressed in textile and ceramic art and mosque architecture by Collection
recruits in court workshops, including the great architect Sinan, famous for
his mosques built for Suleiman I and Selim II.
Ottoman ideology in that age rested on several pillars. One was a
meritocracy that balanced and properly utilised the diverse human resources
at the empire’s disposal. That in turn reflected how the Ottomans created an
‘empire of difference’ that tolerated, rather than sought to erase, diversity—
as realised, for example, by granting Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and
Muslims their own law courts, judges, and the ability to adjudicate
marriage, divorce, inheritance, and so on according to their own religion.2
A third pillar was projecting Ottoman power and might both in Muslim-
majority Eurasia and in Christian Europe, best articulated by Suleiman I’s
mosque built on the highest hill in Istanbul. The magnificent structure
expresses Ottoman wealth, power, piety, and harmony.
Mehmed II was not alone in his affections. His writing reflects that of
the Sufi Rûmi, recorded two centuries earlier. Rûmi was spiritually
transformed by his passionate relationship with his elder Şams al-Tabrizi,
another Sufi from the east. Rûmi called Şams ‘heart-stealer’ and ‘soul’s
beloved’ for whom his heart burst with ecstasy.3 He praised his ‘beauteous
face’, ‘bewitching narcissi [eyes]’, ‘brow of hyacinth’, and his lips, which
were as ‘rubies sweet to taste’. After Şams left him, an anguished Rûmi
referred to him as a ‘gorgeous heartbreaker’, a ‘heartthrob’, and ‘luscious
bough of rosebuds’. He lamented how bitter it was to be separated ‘from
such sugary lips’.
A chaste reading interprets such verses as symbolising humans held
captive by worldly illusions. The lover is spellbound, contemplating the
beauty of God. Rûmi’s love for and devotion to Şams is seen as a model of
his love of God.4 The Sufi practice of gazing at young boys is interpreted as
a window onto human contemplation of God’s beauty. Rûmi’s biographers
go out of their way to deny that the writers of homoerotic verse engaged in
physical love. Perhaps. Just as verses written about earthly profane love
may be seen as metaphors for the human love for God, so, too, may poems
articulating human love for God be seen as metaphors for earthly profane
love. In a world before sexual preferences constituted an identity, where
men who desired other males were not considered members of a
biologically determined, distinctive subculture with a fixed nature, the
verses written by Rûmi dedicated to Şams al-Tabrizi were erotic love
poetry, the ecstatic expression of one younger man’s love for an older one.
The socially acceptable practice of men drinking wine and adoring and
having sexual relations with beardless youths, who were the inspiration for
lyric love poetry, was common practice in England, Italy, and the Ottoman
Empire, as well as in contemporary Iran. A character in Richard Barnfield’s
The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) declares, ‘If it be sin to love a sweet-
faced boy, / Whose amber locks trust up in golden trammels / Dangle
adown his lovely cheeks with joy, / When pearl and flowers his fair hair
enamels; / If it be sin to love a lovely lad, / Oh then sin I, for whom my soul
is sad’.5 In the Ottoman Empire, Sufis and the male urban elite saw
beautiful boys as objects of desire.
Regarding sexuality in Renaissance Europe and the contemporary
Muslim-majority world, what mattered was age and stage of life, not
gender. What was important was one’s place in the social order, not one’s
social identity. Distinctions were drawn between adult men who loved boys
(which was acceptable), the boys themselves (who once they matured could
love only boys, not other men), and adult men (between whom sexual
relations were not socially acceptable). Once one’s beard grew, one could
no longer be an object of anyone’s same-sex affection.
Of consequence was life stage. A young man would be considered
desirable, a passive object of affection and sexual penetration
indistinguishable from a woman, and expected to attract male admirers.
When he matured and married, he would in turn become the lover of young
male beaus. Over the course of their lives, men would be both the lover and
beloved of another man. Sexuality was conceived as a power relation, not
an identity. The penetrator was considered strong and dominant. Anyone
who could be dominated and penetrated, be it a girl, boy, or woman, could
be the object of sexual desire and was accordingly considered weak and
inferior.6
Mature men desired beardless youths or women, both of whom they
described in verse, although most poetry concerned boys. Poets who were
attracted to women rather than boys were described as peculiar. Androgyny
was a feature of Ottoman literature. As the sixteenth-century poet Azizi
writes in a couplet, ‘Those who concentrate on pleasure / Grant male and
female equal measure’.7 Yet poems were mostly addressed by men to
youths. According to a Qajar Iranian, the beloved is inevitably described as
‘rose-faced, silver-bodied, cypress-statured, narcissus-eyed, coquettish, with
sugar lips, wine bearers with tulip cheeks, moon-faced, Venus-shaped, with
crescent eyebrows, magic eyes, black-scented hair, and crystalline chin
folds, and full of games and coquettishness’.8 Female and male beloveds
had the same characteristics. The ideal beautiful woman’s ‘body is a
swaying cypress, her hair a hyacinth, her moles are like peppercorns, her
cheek a rose, her lip like wine’ and her face ‘a shining moon’.9 At the same
time, a beautiful boy ‘has a cypress body, a tulip cheek, a rosebud lip, an
apple chin, a moon face and a crescent brow’, and his moles ‘are like
peppercorns, his hair like the hyacinth’.
From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ottoman poets
authored collections of poetry dedicated to beloved shop boys. These ‘city
thrillers’ were works dedicated to the beautiful boys of a particular city,
including Belgrade, Bursa, Edirne, Istanbul, and Rize in the eastern Black
Sea region. A book dedicated to the beautiful boys of Edirne was composed
in honour of the visit of Bayezid II. Along with the apprentices working in
the bazaar, the boys included theology students, sons of callers to prayer,
sons of Qur’an reciters, and young Janissaries. Of the nearly fifty extant
collections devoted to the beauties of a city, only one describes women.
Sixteenth-century Ottoman writers found that work to be the anomaly and
considered it strange because it did not describe beloved boys.10 Of the
poet, an author wrote disparagingly, ‘He was a lover of women, but then
only God is without fault’.
Galata, the former Genoese colony across the Golden Horn from
Istanbul—a district known for its Christian, Jewish, and Italian inhabitants
and taverns—was described as a place of pleasure, where Muslim men went
to enjoy wine and Christian boy beloveds: ‘For wine and beloved [boys] it
is without peer’. But ‘Adviser, don’t bar the reveller from wine saying it’s
forbidden / The fatwa [legal opinion] in hand says the law of Jesus makes it
licit’.11 Fatwas were posed in the sixteenth century asking whether it was
permissible for a beautiful boy to pray in the front row of a mosque, or
whether he should be forbidden, for his prostrations would excite the men
standing behind him. A poet urged libertines to ‘take your glass in the
direction of Galata / He who wishes to see Europe in Ottoman lands / Let
him ever cross to see that city of two beauties / Pious one, should you see
those Frankish [Western European] boys but once / You would never cast an
eye on the houris [the maidens promised to believers] in paradise’.12
Ottoman taverns were similar to English molly houses. In both places, elite
men drank and cavorted with lower-class boy lovers.
Before the nineteenth century, the view of the medical sciences in the
Ottoman Empire and in Safavid and Qajar Iran (founded in 1785) was not
based on the two-sex model, but instead viewed women as biologically
imperfect men.13 Because men and women were not understood as
opposites, same-sex relations were not considered to go against nature.
Moreover, it was believed that both men and women produced semen,
although women’s was assumed to be inferior. Both thus possessed
analogous powers of procreation and needed to discharge it, causing men
and women to desire sexual intercourse equally. Moreover, female orgasm
was understood to be critical to conception.14 Physicians wrote manuals
instructing men how to pleasure women sexually, on efficacious
aphrodisiacs, and on the various types of contraception. Men believed
women had an insatiable sexual appetite that they were unable to control.
Based on a saying of Muhammad, men envisioned every part of a woman
as being a private sexual part. They used this view to legitimise men’s
control over women, keeping them covered, veiled, and away from
unrelated men. According to this view, if men did not segregate women,
they would want to have sex with any man they ran across, whether the man
was willing or not.
Although inconceivable to most Ottoman men, there were women who
loved women and pleasured them. Poet Crazy Brother (Deli Birader) Gazali
was an Islamic scholar, law professor, Sufi, bathhouse owner, and
pornographer. He aimed to entertain his readers when he wrote about the
‘famous dildo women’ in large Ottoman cities who dressed as men, rode
horses like cavalrymen, and ‘strap[ped] dildos about their hips, oil[ed] them
with almond oil, and set about the business in the usual manner, working
away dildoing the cunt’ of elite women.15
Sex manuals were written or translated for Ottoman princes and sultans.
On the orders of Selim I in 1519, Restoration of the Old Man to Youth
Through the Power of Libido/Intercourse, for example, was translated from
the Arabic and expanded. The same work was translated by the disaffected
Ottoman bureaucrat Mustafa Ali as The Carnal Souls’ Comfort (1569) for
Prince Mehmed, two years old at the time, who became Mehmed III a
quarter of a century later.16
Sexuality was openly visible in the sexually charged plays of the
Ottoman shadow theatre.17 The shadow theatre was most likely an export
from Egypt brought back to Istanbul by Selim I after his defeat of the
Mamluks in the sixteenth century. Commonly called Karagöz, after the
main character, the shadow plays were performed in the palace, in
coffeehouses, and to large crowds during festivities such as circumcision
feasts, marriages, and the nightly fast breaking during the month of
Ramadan. Cartoonish puppets made out of coloured, translucent camel
leather were held by long sticks by a puppeteer, who projected their images
onto a screen by means of lit candles or lanterns and played the roles of all
characters, male and female. These comic and carnivalesque shows
mocked, parodied, and critiqued society and its morals, showing a world
full of lusty lawlessness and freedom. Men and women were sexually
libidinous and promiscuous, always looking to ensnare others for pleasure.
Men chased after boy dancers dressed as women. Women also chased after
women. No one attempted to maintain their virtue, save their soul, or fight
off Satan’s temptations, and women were not inferior to men. The main
female character in all plays was an unabashed flirt on the lookout for sex,
literally turning tricks. Women were bare breasted. The main character,
Karagöz, was depicted with an enormous, moveable phallus.
Collections of sexually explicit poems, jokes, and stories were common
in the sixteenth century. Crazy Brother (Deli Birader) Gazali composed The
Expeller of Sorrows and Remover of Worries (ca. 1483–1511). It contains a
hilarious imagined debate fought between virile ‘pederasts’ and weak
‘fornicators’. The work includes odes to the anus and to the vagina.18 The
‘boy lovers’ win and convert the ‘women lovers’ to their view: ‘When he
was done, the boy stood up and farted several times on the sheikh’s
exhausted head. He said, “Oh what pleasure you gave me!” and left. Then
the leader of the pederasts came forward. Putting his arm around the former
sheikh of fornicators’ neck, he said, “Now you are one of us and on our
team”’.
This text, copied in manuscript and circulated until the nineteenth
century, was written for a potential heir to the throne, Prince Korkud (died
1513), son of Bayezid II, when the prince was governor of Manisa. Gazali,
professor at an Islamic college in Bursa, wrote the text at the request of one
of Korkud’s courtiers. It was meant to be both morally instructive and
humorous. The chapters concern the sexual objects of mature men: ‘The
Benefits of Marriage and Sexual Intercourse’ (mostly revealing the
drawbacks to marriage); ‘War Between the Pederasts and the Fornicators’;
‘How to Enjoy the Company of Boys’; ‘How to Enjoy the Company of
Girls’; ‘Masturbation, Nocturnal Emissions, and Bestiality’; ‘The Passive
Homosexuals’; ‘The Pimps’.19 The chapter ‘How to Enjoy the Company of
Boys’, which is the only chapter to contain a discussion of sexual positions,
is longer than ‘How to Enjoy the Company of Girls’ or the chapter
concerning sexual intercourse with one’s wife. In fact, the chapter on loving
boys is by far the longest of the text.
The author depicted women as having more passion than men, and thus
their insatiable sexual yearning posed a threat. Young boys and young girls,
on the other hand, posed no danger. They were easily taken for a small gift,
easily satisfied because they had the lowest expectations—having sex for a
few coins, with money for a bath after—and gave the most pleasure. They
were ‘fresh’, and their orifices were ‘tight’.20 Married women with children
were the worst possible sexual partners for obvious reasons according to
this type of classification.
The disgruntled sixteenth-century Ottoman historian and bureaucrat
Mustafa Ali, who expressed his love for wine and beautiful boys in his
youth and old age, wrote in a similar vein in his work Etiquette of Salons.21
A chapter is entitled, ‘Describing the Smooth-Cheeked Boys Ready for
Pleasure’. He wrote that in his era, ‘the popularity of beardless youth,
smooth-cheeked boys, and well-behaved lads, whose sweet beauty is
apparent’, exceeded the popularity of beautiful women.22 The reason was
that while a female beloved had to be concealed for fear of malicious
gossip, keeping company with a young man was connected to acceptable
sociability. A relationship between males could be enjoyed either secretly or
openly. Beardless youths were available to their middle-aged masters as
friends and lovers, whether on military campaign or at home. Their relation
could be enjoyed in public, unlike that between a man and a woman, who
could not be companions.23 Inherent to this patriarchal vision was a
disparaging view of women, seen neither as friends nor companions, but as
intellectual inferiors. Women could offer only physical satisfaction, which
was denigrated as worldly but necessary for procreation. Same-sex
relations, by contrast, with an intellectually equal but socially inferior male
friend and beloved, were supposedly heavenly, satisfying metaphysical and
spiritual needs.
Mustafa Ali also provided a sexual ethnography of boys from different
nations. Looking down on easterners (Arabs and Turks), the Bosnian-origin
writer praised the ‘large, thick-lipped slave boys of Bosnia [who] are
always amenable to service’. Beardless Kurds were ‘faultless and
constrained to be amiable and abundantly obedient in whatever is proposed
to them’ and they dyed themselves ‘below the waist with henna’. Those
who desired ‘the famously fair of face and wish fervently to be serviced by
silver-bodied cypresses, tall of stature and elegantly moving’ turned to the
boy dancers of Southeastern Europe, or the Circassians, or the ‘musky,
delectable Croats from among the Janissaries’. Albanians stole the heart of
their lovers, but they were ‘impertinent and obstinate’. Georgians and
Russians were also available ‘for erotic pleasures’. Mustafa Ali quoted a
poem from The Expeller of Sorrows and Remover of Worries, which he
commented upon favourably: ‘The following is famous for its originality, so
much so that reading it compares with orgasm: “It opens like a smiling rose,
O anus, / And closes a rosebud-lip in wonder, O anus! / The vagina is a
house built in a narrow place like the crotch, / But, it is in a plaza to play
boccia ball, O anus!”’24
The sexual encounters between men and youths—whether bathhouse
attendants, waiters in taverns and coffeeshops, apprentices to tradesmen,
Sufi novices, or servants to soldiers on campaign—were always meant to be
based on an unequal power and status relationship. The relationship was
predicated on dominance and submission. It was entered into in exchange
for money, wine, and favours. The boys were not supposed to take any
sexual pleasure in the encounter. Violence and force were also often used—
described in Ottoman legal discussions of rape of boys and women and
literary accounts of older men taking advantage of boys when they passed
out from drinking too much wine. In one story in Gazali’s pornographic
work meant to entertain, a beautiful boy drinks too much wine, passes out,
and is raped by numerous men while unconscious. When he awakes, he
states, ‘The wine would be just dandy—if only it weren’t such a pain in the
butt’.25 His gang rape was supposed to be funny.
Mustafa Ali saw sexual danger lurking at the heart of empire, like
worms devouring an apple from within. In the first chapter in his book
Etiquette of Salons, entitled ‘About the Situation in the Palaces of the
Sultans and About the Boy Servants in the Harem’, Mustafa Ali imagined
that in the past only boys with good morals, as observable from their
physiognomy, were recruited to serve in the palace. Yet in his day, those
who served the sultan were allegedly ‘impudent converts who rush about
madly in the service of shameless lowlife types’, people who had ‘mingled
with hooligans of the city-boy class’, and ‘those notorious for going to
taverns and being sold [for sex]’.26 Such sexual adventurers, he argued,
were a danger to the royal family and should not be servants of the sultan.
He perceived the rewarding of positions to such people as a main cause of
what he thought was Ottoman decline.
The topic of decline occupied many of the best Ottoman minds of this
era, minds fearful that the Ottoman Way that had made the empire great was
being abandoned. Mustafa Ali was one of the keenest observers of the
transformations that rocked the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century empire. To understand them, we must turn to Ali’s life and analysis
of the source of Ottoman greatness and how he saw that greatness
threatened.
It is at this point that we can return to a chronological account of the
dynasty and its empire from the late sixteenth century. The next four
chapters examine transformations in the succession to the sultanate and the
role of the sultan; the rise of royal women in politics; changes to military,
administrative, and palace recruitment; the breakdown of class distinctions;
the Ottoman military losing its edge over other imperial armies; and the
impact of these developments on Ottoman ideology. Intellectuals were
compelled to critique the changes they saw occurring. Sultans mounted
tragic attempts to take back power.
13
AT THE END of the sixteenth century, Murad III (reigned 1574–1595) sat on
the Ottoman throne. The oldest son of his father Selim II, Murad was the
only son sent to a provincial governate. The others were kept in the palace.
Thus prepared to rule, Murad was called to reign in Istanbul when his father
passed away in December 1574. At the insistence of the sultan’s widow, the
favourite Nurbanu Sultan, Selim II’s corpse was kept on ice in the palace
until his son could arrive from Manisa in western Anatolia for his
enthronement.1 Only then could the father be publicly buried. Murad’s
journey to Istanbul was not auspicious. He boarded a small galley meant for
transporting grain waiting for him at the port of Mudanya. The sea was so
rough that the future sultan became violently sick.2 After an exhausted
Murad arrived at the palace, his accession was free of conflict, although
following the law he ordered the palace mutes—court servants whose
disability ensured their trustworthiness—to execute all five of his younger
brothers.
His dynasty appeared to rule the most expansive, most influential,
strongest, wealthiest, most strategic, and most politically powerful empire
in Europe, indeed, anywhere in the world, save China.3 Its realm extended
from Algiers in the west to Budapest in the north to Yemen in the south to
Basra on the Persian Gulf in the east. These territories contained some of
the largest, most important commercial cities on the planet, including
Aleppo, Bursa, Cairo, Damascus, and Dubrovnik, and some of the most
venerable, such as Baghdad, Jerusalem, and Salonica. Curiosity, vitality,
and creativity characterised Ottoman culture. In Istanbul some of the
greatest minds of the day worked at the new observatory. In Edirne in 1575,
master architect Sinan completed Murad III’s predecessor Selim II’s
mosque, his most sublime work. An Ottoman-Habsburg truce was signed in
1580. What was there to be worried about?
Mustafa Ali saw plenty that bothered him. Ali was born in 1541 to a
father who was (most likely) a freed slave and Bosnian Christian who had
converted to Islam and a mother who came from a family of conservative,
regime-supporting Nakşibendi Sufi sheikhs.4 Reflecting his own
background, Ali boasted that the ideal Ottoman emerged from the mingling
of the three pillars of Ottoman inheritance: Byzantine-Roman, Turco-
Mongol, and Islamic. He argued that the Rûmis (those from Southeastern
Europe and northwestern Anatolia), who traced their descent to Turks and
Mongols, were notable for their Muslim piety and faith. He also praised the
fact that most Rûmis were of mixed ethnic origins and descended from
converts to Islam. In his words, their genealogy was ‘traced to a filthy
infidel’.5 Despite using such a pejorative adjective, he described the union
of Christians and Muslims as the grafting of different fruit trees. The fruit of
their union offered the best qualities of their ancestors, ‘either in physical
beauty, or in spiritual wisdom’. He argued that the Ottoman dynasty had
created a new governing class that had acquired optimal physical,
intellectual, and moral qualities through a process of deracination,
conversion, education, and Ottomanisation.6 The ‘true Ottomans’ were
these converts who knew that the Ottoman Way rested on a multiracial and
multiethnic foundation.7
His vision was of a synthesis of East and West, Muslim and Christian.
Yet his was not the multiculturalism we know of today. He preferred
westerners (Rûmis) to easterners (mainly referring to Iranians, Iran
beginning in Kurdish Diyar Bakir).8 Ali, like other Ottomans, differentiated
between the ‘homeland’ of Rûm on the one hand, and Iran and the lands of
the Arabs on the other. He argued that certain ethnicities were not suited for
administrative positions. Given too much power and wealth, they turned
uppity, fomenting rebellion.9 He singled out for opprobrium ‘obstinate’ and
‘perfidious’ Kurds and ‘malicious’ and ‘mischievous’ Turcoman nomads.
After training for a career as a religious scholar in Istanbul, in 1560 Ali
became a chancery secretary to Suleiman I’s son, prince Selim, who would
become Selim II, in Konya. Failing to win the favour of Suleiman I, he also
did not gain the patronage of Selim II or his successor Murad III. Over the
course of a forty-year career, other than a two-year stint as secretary of the
Janissary corps and registrar of the imperial council in Istanbul, Ali
bounced around in provincial postings as chancery secretary, registrar of
land grants, and finance director in Syria, Iraq, and Anatolia. He was often
dismissed from his posts and suffered unemployment, at one point having to
sell all his possessions to avoid starving. In 1597 he begged Murad III’s
successor, Mehmed III, for the chancellorship or a governor-generalship,
which was denied. Instead, in 1599 he was appointed to a position in Jidda,
the port of Mecca, where he passed away the next year.10
What this précis of his life shows is that Mustafa Ali was often stuck in
provincial postings and repeatedly passed over for promotion, never
obtaining his career goal. Those around him to whom he felt superior were
promoted because they had the right connections. These ignoramuses
became rich, while he sank further into debt. He had to take out loans to
augment his unfulfilling job. He noted sarcastically that wealthy merchants
with business in India sat up all night counting their money.11 He
contemplated migrating to India, where he felt that learned men such as
himself, now unable to attain high-level administrative positions at the
empire’s centre, would be valued.12
The frustrated man felt he deserved a high position in the administration
in the capital, but none was forthcoming. Foreigners from the east had
infiltrated the country. They entered the system undeservedly and advanced,
while he—a true son of the land—was ignored. Women and Afro-Ottoman
eunuchs at the centre of power made administrative decisions. He did not
see their rise to importance as the consequence of developments within the
dynasty’s culture and administrative practices, which had led to power
being concentrated in the harem. He saw it as a symbol of Ottoman
‘corruption’ and a turn away from meritocracy.
According to Mustafa Ali, the sultan preferred Iranians—a broad term
meaning easterners, which included Arabs, Iranians, Kurds, and Turcoman
—to novice palace recruits from Southeastern Europe and northwestern
Anatolia or the scions of local educated families such as himself. He
complained that this meant that, as foreign commoners were appointed to
important positions, deserving locals such as himself were ignored.13 For
three centuries, the empire had recruited military slaves from Rûm to serve
as its elite class of administrators and fighting forces. Freeborn Muslims
from Rûm, Romans, dominated its religious class. Mustafa Ali argued that
such human material made the most loyal, exemplary servants. Maintaining
this system of recruitment and the class system separating the ruling,
military class from commoners made the Ottomans admirable. He claimed
that the Ottoman Way was predicated on ‘Rûminess’ (being Roman) and
palace recruitment and education, as established by Ottoman secular law
and custom.14
Angry, disappointed, resentful, and fearful, Ali penned Counsel for
Sultans in 1581 when he was forty-one and the Ottoman Empire was about
to enter its fourth century. Ali’s book set in motion an idea about imperial
decline that would persist for centuries. The meritocratic Ottoman Way—
predicated on conversion, palace education, and secular law—had produced
what was most excellent about Ottomanness: its Romanness. In creating a
new governing class of deracinated, mixed-ethnic, convert-origin recruits,
the Ottoman dynasty had taken the best people available and combined
them into the progenitors of a powerful empire. Now, as losers in the
seismic socioeconomic transformations that were changing the social
contract between ruler and ruled, the empire’s critics searched for an
explanation of what they perceived to be decline. Counsel for Sultans was
thus a declaration of a crisis, real and imagined. It focused on the imbalance
among the component groups of the empire, the ascent of a new social class
identified by wealth rather than merit, and the distrust of new criteria for
high office.15 Ottoman decline became such a powerful explanatory lens
that even the nearly concurrent Ottoman and English regicides of the
seventeenth century—a first for both regimes, representing a shift in the
balance of power—would be interpreted very differently by modern
historians.
A CLIMATE OF REBELLION
From the mid-sixteenth century, the central administration attempted to
limit the power of the military elite. But rather than reduce the role of the
cavalry or reorganise the Janissary infantry—particularly to reduce the
expense of maintaining the latter—the administration began to hire
additional salaried troops in the provinces from among commoners. These
foot soldiers armed with muskets were used by commanders in imperial
campaigns against the Habsburgs and the Safavids. The armies of Christian
Europe especially had seen benefit in equipping their infantry with the latest
types of firearms.30 The diffusion of firearms had lasting societal effects in
the Ottoman Empire. Whether they deserted or returned from a usually
unsuccessful military campaign, provincial foot soldiers kept their weapons.
Armed young men with no future and raised expectations spelled trouble.
At the same time, provincial governors in Anatolia and the Arabic-
speaking regions enlisted musketeers as mercenaries for their private
armies. These men terrorised the countryside as bands of outlaws.31
Anatolia and Syria were rent by rebellion and brigandry for decades.
International commerce and money changing caused cash to flow into
the empire, which allowed rebel leaders who engaged in these new sources
of wealth, like imperial army commanders and regional governors, to hire
mercenaries equipped with firearms.32 These rebels had made great fortunes
and were able to use their wealth to buy their way into political power,
bribing their way into office.33 They were more like rogue clients who
wanted their piece of the pie. Some demanded to join the professional army
of the Janissaries and enter the military class, which meant becoming
Ottomans. Their desire was to be in and not out, to be included as part of
the system with a secure and privileged place in the Ottoman order.34 They
were met with a mix of reward and punishment. Competing for local power,
other rebels were awarded governorships by the administration in
Istanbul.35
This upheaval was fed by climate change, as it coincided with the
extreme cold of the Little Ice Age. Huge snowstorms closed roads for
months at a time and caused roofs to collapse, while the Golden Horn froze
over.36 The unprecedented weather conditions caused severe drought and
crop failure that led to food shortages, famine, disease, and massive
population movement.37 Facing terrible conditions, peasants fled the
countryside for urban areas, causing the depopulation of rural areas and
increasing pressure on the remaining commoners to produce foodstuffs and
pay taxes. Provincial rebellion by peasants and local military leaders led to
the increased stationing of provincial Janissary garrisons, which became
new power centres. The number of firearm-bearing Janissaries tripled,
whereas that of cavalrymen halved. The Janissaries were paid a salary by
the central treasury, but the cavalry earned their income from provincial
landholdings, which were far less productive due to the crop failure and
population flight. The cavalrymen were no longer the largest component of
the Ottoman army; they were overtaken by the Janissaries just as the
Collection, the system of recruiting and converting children, fell into
abeyance along with its system of rigorous training. Although the
Collection ceased in the mid-seventeenth century, large numbers of new
converts to Islam in such places as Crete and the Trabzon region joined the
military and immediately fought against their former coreligionists.38
Religious change still provided Christians an avenue of integration and
social mobility in the empire.
New power centres also emerged in the capital, where there was the rise
of grand vizier households such as that of the Köprülü family. The Köprülüs
produced influential statesmen from the mid-seventeenth century through
the beginning of the eighteenth century. The growth in political power of
vizier households, like the appearance of powerful provincial rebel leaders
and governors, coincided with a turn away from the military land-grant
system that financed the cavalrymen and towards the monetisation of
landholding. This included the expansion of tax farming, which was
previously limited to imperial enterprises such as mines. Tax farming in its
agricultural form turned out to be harmful both to the central treasury and to
the subjects of the sultan. Required to provide an agreed amount of revenue
to the imperial treasury each year, tax farmers—whether Christian, Muslim,
or Jewish, and appointed by the administration in Istanbul—exploited the
peasants to maximise their revenues, demanding a much greater yearly
amount than obliged and pocketing the difference. To carve out their own
power centre in the provinces with these extra funds, the tax farmers raised
armies of mercenaries that challenged central authority.
With Istanbul losing its monopoly over the ability to collect revenues
and control those assigned to extract them—it could no longer simply
remove land-grant holders from office as before, as they were protected by
their patrons, the vizier households—peasants resorted to resistance,
including flight and rebellion. They could not easily transition from tax in-
kind to cash payment. Tax farmers and new mini-dynasties in the provinces
were difficult to dislodge. As land grants were converted by their holders
into private property and placed out of reach of Istanbul, the regime
increasingly had to rely on tax farmers who provided the material basis for
the new power holders and the nouveau riche. The nouveau riche included
Christian and Muslim provincial notables (ayan) whose wealth was based
on ‘land-holding, trade, money-lending and tax farming’.39 Oriented
towards the market, tax farmers, merchants, and provincial governors sold
their goods illegally abroad rather than earning income for the imperial
treasury.40
The dynasty lost not only revenue but also its ability to enforce a major
economic policy—the provisioning of Istanbul. The seat of the dynasty was
a vast, hungry mouth, fed by the goods produced in the far-flung empire.
Yet at the turn of the seventeenth century, İzmir (Smyrna) on the Aegean
coast rapidly expanded.41 It became a cog in the machine of world
commerce, especially fulfilling Western European (Dutch and English)
demand for cotton by sidestepping Ottoman restrictions on exports of all
goods. Rather than send their surplus to Istanbul for fixed prices, local
Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Muslim merchants realised large profits by
diverting regional agricultural products to İzmir and selling them abroad
instead. What this meant was that the regime could no longer control
domestic prices, markets, or social stability. Price controls and interference
in the market had been essential components of Ottoman policy, crucial to
maintaining social hierarchies. With prices no longer set by central
authority, others benefited, including commoners and merchants. To hinder
the distribution of surplus outside its control, the regime wanted the
economy to be subsumed under the traditional, centrally controlled political
power structure, where all decisions were made in Istanbul, not the
provinces. But Istanbul could no longer direct foreign or domestic trade.
Nor could it hinder the rise of a merchant class and the emergence of new
paths to social mobility.42
In the idealised economic and class system, capital was to be
accumulated by the elite for the consumption of luxury goods and the
establishment of their own patronage networks. These networks of relations
were modelled on the sultanic household, where the sultan was the patron.
Goods flowed at fair prices yet were controlled by the central government
so there were no shortages. Social status was guaranteed—each class was
kept in its place—and the commoners flourished. Yet by 1600, as capital
flowed outside the rigidly policed social boundaries, a nouveau riche class
including Christians, Jews, and Muslims emerged, along with increased use
of cash in the economy. Pay overtook patronage. This became especially
clear for the landholdings granted by the central government. Social
contracts changed as the cavalry funded by land grants passed away. Other
changing social contracts were between the sultan and the commoners, and
between the sultan and the military class—the designated mediators of the
sultan’s authority. Istanbul trained a military elite and sent it out to the
provinces to control the empire. But with the rise of a monetised economy
and new powers, including tax farmers and merchants, this ruling military
and political elite lost its formerly secure place. What was required was for
the dynasty to acknowledge the claims of the ruling elite to be the sole
holders of power and wealth. But the regime decided to circumvent this by
hiring commoners as soldiers, allowing peasants a share of the privileges of
the elite, precipitating a clash. The military class, including the
administration, resisted having to share its financial and ruling privileges
with commoners.
By the seventeenth century, it was easy for Christian commoners to join
the military class through conversion to Islam. This avenue had not been as
open in earlier centuries when the government had relied more on restricted
members of professional troops, Collection Janissaries in particular, and
less on volunteers and irregular troops. Consequently, in this era, facing
decreased distinction of membership, the first major Janissary revolts
occurred. Their rebelliousness was accompanied by an excessive growth in
their numbers caused by an opening of their ranks beyond Collection
recruits. There were so many of them that the sultan could not confine the
Janissaries to their barracks as bachelors, so they lived in urban areas,
married, and joined guilds. Rather than remaining an elite, on-call force,
these new Janissaries compelled actual guild masters to make them
partners, sharing in their profits, opening shops where they wished, and
selling goods at the prices they desired. In general, these Janissaries flouted
guild regulations. Beholden to their families and businesses, their loyalty
was less to the sultan and more to their own financial status. Yet they still
expected regular payment of their salaries from the treasury. When their
payments were delayed, or when they were paid in debased coinage such as
in 1589, they rebelled, joined by the merchants with whom they had
become entangled.
Justice was embodied in dynastic secular law that was harmonised with
Islamic law. Justice legitimised Ottoman rule. Considering the ideas of Ibn
Khaldun and Kınalızade, the practical-minded Naima advocated remedies
for regenerating the empire. They included the balancing of expenses and
income, ending the practice of delaying payments to salaried officials,
making all military corps full strength, giving military security to peasants,
and making the land prosperous. The final recommendation was that the
sultan should be cheerful, which would create affection, causing all to be
loyal to him. The greatest good, Naima argued, was having a strong sultan.
We have heard this before. Again and again, intellectuals had argued that
all that was needed to right the wrongs they perceived was the rise to power
of a decisive, manly, gazi sultan. But Osman II tried to be this, and he was
deposed and killed. Would the return of a warrior-sultan be enough? Was it
too late to reverse the socioeconomic changes the intellectuals such as
Mustafa Ali so despised? Who would dare aim to make the sultanate once
more the centre of Ottoman power? Osman II would not be the last such
attempt at imperial relevance by a sultan gazi.
14
AT THE HEIGHT of his power, having survived the Jewish upheaval at home
that reminded him of a deviant dervish uprising, Mehmed IV and his armies
would conquer much territory in Europe. After the conquest of Crete in
1669, the Ottomans launched numerous successful campaigns on the
mainland. Mehmed IV participated in person in the first of these campaigns,
that against the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1672, conquering
the fabled ‘white castle’ in Kameniçe (unlike in the novel of the same
name, in which the Ottoman siege is unsuccessful), the key to Poland and
Ukraine. A second campaign against the same kingdom was launched the
following year, as well as a successful campaign against the Russian
Empire in 1678. Through these campaigns, the Ottoman Empire was
propelled to its greatest northernmost expansion. In 1681, the Ottomans
signed their first treaty with Russia, which brought two decades of peace.
Yet it sowed the seeds of future crises, with Russia claiming to be protector
of Orthodox Christians in the empire.
In Central Europe, the Ottomans supported a Calvinist noble and
military leader named Imre Thököly, who was as opposed to the Habsburgs
as he was to their Catholicism. In 1682 the Ottomans made him their vassal,
the king of central Hungary. With such an ally, Mehmed IV was confident
he could launch a campaign to conquer Vienna, located 1,500 kilometres to
the northwest. The Habsburg capital was deemed the mythical ‘golden
apple’. So confident was he of his impending triumphal horseback ride
through the city that Mehmed IV summoned his fortysomething-year-old
younger brother Suleiman from the harem at Topkapı Palace in April 1683,
when he and his army set out from Edirne. He took his sons Ahmed and
Mustafa as well as their mother, his favourite concubine Rabia Gülnüş,
along on the journey as far as Belgrade, more than halfway to Vienna, to
show them to his Ottoman subjects. Mehmed IV broke with prevailing
tradition and gave his future successors a belated lesson in being a gazi.
Mehmed IV could have learned from the mistakes made by Suleiman I
over a century and a half earlier. A major campaign that far from Istanbul
was a harsh test of Ottoman capabilities.1 The commander confronted the
serious problems of provisioning his troops and transporting them along
roads and across streams and mighty rivers to the battlefield. Most war
matériel had to be carried overland on animals. Winter weather typically
arrived early in Southeastern Europe.
As a legitimating call to holy war, in Belgrade Mehmed IV handed the
black wool banner of Muhammad the Prophet to his grand vizier, Kara
Mustafa Pasha, to carry during the campaign.2 Mehmed IV and his sons
remained behind in the Serbian city, as the grand vizier and the sultan’s
preacher, Vani Mehmed, set off with the Ottoman army and their allies—the
Crimean khan and Thököly’s Hungarian army—to besiege the Habsburg
capital over six hundred kilometres to the northwest. On 13 July, with an
insufficient number of troops, lacking proper fodder, and with underfed
horses incapable of mounting an attack, the Ottomans reached the place
where Suleiman I had pitched his tent in 1529. A day later, they appeared
before the well-fortified citadel of Vienna.
The fortress city was ringed by numerous palisades, bastions, and high
walls, and a twenty-metre-wide ditch, defended by hundreds of pieces of
heavy artillery. Even though the army lacked the requisite large cannons
and enough firepower to take the citadel, Kara Mustafa Pasha offered the
Viennese the choice between surrendering and converting to Islam, which
would give them eternal salvation; surrendering without a fight and
submitting to Islamic rule without conversion, which would guarantee them
peace and prosperity; or fighting, in which case the victorious Ottomans
would annihilate them and enslave their children, making them Muslims.3
Vienna’s defenders—‘the herd of rabid pigs destined to burn in the eternal
flames of Hell’, as the Ottomans called them—chose to fight the ‘gazis of
Islam’ rather than surrender or convert.4
No matter the high mindedness of the grand vizier, the two-month siege
was a disaster for the Ottomans. Ottoman soldiers were lambasted by
contemporary chroniclers for drinking wine and not giving up fornicating
and pederasty, despite the fact that the siege occurred during the holy
months of Rajab, Shaban, and Ramadan.5 Bad omens abounded. Kara
Mustafa Pasha’s Istanbul palace burned to the ground in his absence.
Mehmed IV’s mother Hatice Turhan passed away. The Qur’anic verses that
decorate her tomb warn of the horrible consequences for unbelievers in the
afterlife and promise reward for those who heed the warning of the blazing
fires of hell.6 An encircled Vienna was supposed to be suffering such a fiery
fate. Despite Ottoman sappers tunnelling below ground to explode mines to
bring down its thick walls, the city would not fall, although its small
number of defenders were starving, suffering from disease, and desperate
for relief.
Sixty-thousand Christian relief forces arrived at Kahlenberg hill in the
Vienna woods northwest of the city to save it, eventually outnumbering the
deprived Ottoman forces at least two-to-one. On the sixtieth day of the
siege, 12 September 1683, Kara Mustafa Pasha launched an attack on the
relief army at the foot of the hill. In the Ottoman view, the Christian
soldiers seemed to ‘flow down upon them like black tar’, covering
everything in the Muslim army’s path. The enemy was like ‘an immense
herd of furious boars that trampled and demolished them’.7 Using
misogynist language, chronicle writers thought the Ottomans were betrayed
by their ally, the ‘bitch’ known as the Crimean khan, ‘who had less courage
than a woman’ and withdrew instead of covering the Ottoman troops, which
were routed.8 Under the leadership of the king of the Commonwealth of
Poland-Lithuania, Jan Sobieski III, winged Hussar cavalry—thus named
due to the metre-high ‘wings’ made of feathers attached to the back of their
armour—attacked the grand vizier’s position. Knowing that he would be
executed for the defeat, the grand vizier intended to die on the battlefield.
But the cavalry commander and Vani Mehmed begged him to withdraw, so
they fled with Muhammad’s banner while Ottoman troops were abandoned
and cut to pieces.9 The grand vizier’s sumptuous tent and precious cloaks,
jewel-encrusted daggers, and swords were seized by the victors.
At the forefront of military advances for centuries, the Ottomans had
lost their onetime technological firepower advantage in Central Europe,
whose empires had now surpassed them. For two decades, writers in
Mehmed IV’s service had boasted of his silencing of church bells and his
replacement of them with the Islamic call to prayer. But after the failed
siege attempt of the Habsburg imperial seat, captured Ottoman cannons
would be remade into the bell of Vienna’s Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.
Mehmed IV had the man who delivered the bad news executed for
bearing evil tidings. He ordered Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa’s execution in
Belgrade as well. On Christmas Day 1683, the grand vizier was stripped of
the symbols of his office and as leader of holy war: his imperial seal, the
banner of Muhammad, and keys to the Ka’ba in Mecca. Alerted to his fate
while performing his afternoon prayers in the citadel, Kara Mustafa
dismissed his retainers and admonished them to remember him in their
prayers. He took off his turban. The executioner entered the room. He
raised Kara Mustafa’s beard and passed the noose around his neck, the
doomed man telling him to tie it well. After two or three tugs, the former
grand vizier took in his final breath. His body was taken out to an old tent
and prepared for burial, then his head was cut off. The body was buried in
the courtyard of a mosque in Belgrade opposite the citadel, but his head was
saved, packed in straw, and sent to Edirne, to be set upon a gate at the
entrance to the sultan’s palace.10
REVOLT
Mehmed IV’s long reign, which ended in disgrace, was followed by the
brief, undistinguished reigns of his brothers, Suleiman II and Ahmed II
(reigned 1691–1695), and his son, Mustafa II (reigned 1695–1703). These
rulers added religious meaning to their enthronements, utilising the symbols
of the Sunni caliphate. Suleiman II was the first to wear the turban ascribed
to the biblical Joseph and have descendants of Muhammad play a visible
role at his accession. Ahmed II was the first to pray before the mantle of the
Prophet as part of his accession rituals. Mustafa II was the first sultan to
gird the sword of Muhammad, and not that of an illustrious Ottoman
ancestor, at the mosque of Ayyub al-Ansari in Eyüp.24 But these years were
memorable more for Janissary rebellion and the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz
between the Ottomans and Habsburgs than anything else.
The failed siege of Vienna effectively ended the reign of Mehmed IV,
the career of his preacher, Vani Mehmed, and the power of the puritanical
Kadızadeli movement. Yet Vani Mehmed’s son-in-law Feyzullah—son of
Vani Mehmed’s patron in provincial Erzurum and preacher to Mustafa II—
was soon blamed for having inordinate influence over the administration
and palace. Feyzullah was condemned for violating protocol, precedent, and
the expectations of deserved appointments. He engaged in nepotism,
appointing his sons to positions for which they were not qualified. He made
his son sheikhulislam designate. He was seemingly too powerful,
determining government appointments and domestic and foreign policy
decisions. But as conventional notions of the time held, sheikhulislams
were meant to be apolitical and act as spiritual and moral checks to
temporal power, not wield it. Janissaries demanded that Feyzullah’s power
be limited.
Feyzullah Efendi did not offend only the Janissaries. He managed to
unite almost the entire Muslim population against himself and the sultan in
spring and summer of 1702. He accomplished this feat by attempting to
impose Kadızadeli Islam, which emphasised ‘enjoining the good and
forbidding wrong’, on the diverse Muslims of the entire realm. He should
have realised such austere piety had been discredited since the fall of its
main promoter, the preacher Vani Mehmed, and his patron Sultan Mehmed
IV after the failed siege of Vienna. Nevertheless, Feyzullah took the
Kadızadeli aim of creating a brotherhood of all believers a great step further
by promoting standardised beliefs taught to and confirmed by every
Muslim.
He had the grand vizier issue an imperial decree in the sultan’s name
imposing religious tests on all Sunni Muslims and the sending of agents to
instruct and ensure right practice. The decree ordered testing imams and
preachers for their knowledge of Islam and adherence to Sunnism. College
and primary school teachers were commanded to not deviate from teaching
the Sunni curriculum. Those religious functionaries who did not obey were
to be dismissed. As leader of the religious hierarchy, the sheikhulislam was
in control of the hiring and firing of such officials. But he overstretched by
targeting all Muslims from Bosnia to Basra, Belgrade to Beirut, Rûmeli,
Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq. Urban dwellers, villagers, and even nomads
—‘those who live in woolen tents’—were to be instructed in the basic
duties of the faith (praying, fasting, alms giving, pilgrimage), and
compelled to attend communal Friday prayers and to instruct their children
in right Sunni Muslim practice as well. College students were to be
assigned to make sure people fulfilled their Muslim religious obligations.
Magistrates were to admonish the people to discharge their moral duties.25
Sweeping in its intentions, and violating the still-prevailing laissez-faire
attitude towards Muslim religious diversity, such an order was guaranteed
to be met with resistance not only from deviant dervishes but from most
Muslims.
In 1703, with wide popular backing, soldiers demanding overdue pay
and merchants and Janissaries insisting the court move back to Istanbul
fomented rebellion against the sultan’s preacher, Feyzullah. The revolt was
a backlash against the attempts to impose religious conformity and to
resituate the sultan and his palace school at the centre of power.26 By then,
client-patron relationships, blood relationships, and ethnic ties had become
the deciding factors by which elite men married to royal women established
and maintained their circles of power—known as households rivalling the
sultan’s household—and had pushed aside sultanic power.27 Many of those
who rebelled in 1703 sided with the grand vizier and pasha households
against the sultan and his sheikhulislam. After this rebellion, their situation
was confirmed.
The rebellion illustrated the struggle between a decaying Collection
system, which had become much less important and ultimately fell into
abeyance and then obsolescence as the empire reached the limits of its
expansion under Mehmed IV, and an interest group that supported the grand
vizier and pasha households. With the end of territorial enlargement, the
empire needed men with specialised experience. By the end of the
seventeenth century, half of all key administrative posts were staffed by
men trained in or attached to these households, rather than the palace.
Mehmed IV had been deposed following a conflict with these same interest
groups. The 1703 rebellion was caused by Mustafa II’s attempt to neutralise
that competing power structure.
During the 1703 uprising, a Janissary rebel named ‘Deranged’ or
‘Pockmarked’ Ahmed demanded the overthrow of the dynasty and its
replacement by a ‘popular assembly’, a Janissary oligarchy.28 Rebel
soldiers deposed Mustafa II. In 1703, the Janissaries replaced him with
Mehmed IV’s younger son, thirty-year-old Ahmed III (reigned 1703–1730),
and arrested, tortured, and executed Feyzullah by beheading him. To make
the public spectacle of his humiliation complete, they dismembered the
corpse and forced Armenians and Greeks to parade his body through the
streets of Edirne as they sang dirges and burned incense, as though the
Muslim scholar and former sheikhulislam had been a Christian. The
corpse’s feet were tied to the head, the head impaled on a pole and paraded
around. The corpse and head were then thrown in the Tunca river.
Feyzullah’s eldest son and Vani Mehmed’s two sons were also executed.29
REVOLT AGAIN
For the first fifteen years of his reign, Ahmed III had been served by a
dozen grand viziers. But in 1718, nepotism became the determining factor
for the awarding of high positions of government. In 1717, Ahmed III
married Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha to his daughter Fatma Sultan and the
following year appointed him grand vizier. He became known as Damad
(Son-in-Law) Ibrahim Pasha. Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s son from his first
marriage was married to Ahmed III’s daughter Atike Sultan. The navy
admiral Kaymak (Cream) Mustafa Pasha married Fatma Hanım, one of
Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s daughters from his first marriage.50 The chief
assistant to the grand vizier, Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha, who also came from
Nevşehir, in central Anatolia, was married to Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s other
daughter from his first marriage, Hibetullah Hanım. Two of Damad Ibrahim
Pasha’s nephews were also married to daughters of Ahmed III. Two of his
great-grandchildren (the offspring of Kaymak Mustafa Pasha’s daughter and
Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha’s son) married each other.51
Between 1718 and 1730, the husbands of six of Ahmed III’s daughters
were viziers. So, too, were the husbands of four daughters of the sultan’s
predecessor, Mustafa II. Ahmed III’s sister Hatice Sultan was married first
to a boon companion of the sultan, then to a grand vizier, and finally, at the
age of eighty, thirty years after her second husband had passed away, to
another grand vizier. Jurists also tried to enter the elite through marriage ties
with the dynasty and statesmen.52
What these intricate ties of nepotism illustrate is how power was held
collectively. The dynasty allied with high officials connected through the
sultan’s daughters and sisters. Rather than the sultan alone, or even his
family, it was as if nonroyal dignitaries ensured the continuity of the
dynasty and empire. And to do so, these men displayed their wealth and
generosity, as if they were members of the Ottoman house. Royal women
had a share in this, as they built lovely waterside mansions on the Bosporus
or Golden Horn where they and their husbands, who were viziers or other
high administration officials, hosted lavish banquets, ostentatious displays
of consumption. At the two-week princely circumcision and princess
wedding festival in 1720, there was a significant change in protocol, as
Ahmed III’s imperial tent was set up alongside those of Damad Ibrahim
Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha, as if they
together shared power. All four tents offered visitors pomp and
circumstance, feasts, and gifts.53
Damad Ibrahim Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, and Kethüdha Mehmed
Pasha exhibited their blood affinity to the royal family, pretensions to being
as wealthy as the dynasty, and generosity by conspicuously displaying their
large collections of bejewelled, golden weapons; precious furs and fabrics;
jewellery; thousands of pieces of silver, crystal, and Chinese porcelain and
greenware (celadon) serving sets; enough bedding to furnish several
palaces; and libraries’ worth of precious Islamic manuscripts at their many
waterside pavilions and mansions on the Bosporus and Golden Horn.
Damad Ibrahim Pasha named three of the rooms in one of his waterside
mansions after Mehmed II, Bayezid II, and Suleiman I. He possessed a gold
sword inscribed ‘Sultan Suleiman son of Sultan Selim Khan’ and other
priceless weapons bedecked in dozens of diamonds and hundreds of rubies
and emeralds. He also obtained dynastic genealogies containing miniature
portraits of sultans owned by previous sultans, gifted to him by Ahmed
III.54 Opposition to the dynasty sharing power, the concentration of power
and wealth in the hands of this small group of relatives, and the policies
they imposed led to revolt.
In the Ottoman domains the new wealth and ostentatious display of
luxury grew alongside an expansion of the underclass. For every partying
prince and smiling princess there were thousands of down-and-out
commoners who did not receive taxpayer money with which to live a
luxurious lifestyle and who resented those who did. As Ottoman military
losses and shrinking borders in Southeastern Europe propelled people to
travel to the imperial capital in search of homes and work, Istanbul was
flooded with immigrants from former Ottoman territories. What they found
were slums and poverty in an economically polarised city.55 The regime
was unable to control their movements. When the Janissaries revolted in
1726, they were joined by members of this underclass, who even stoned
Ahmed III’s palace in Beşiktaş on the European shore of the Bosporus.56
Worse was to come for the dynasty in 1730—and from a not unexpected
quarter.
Janissary-connected, beardless Albanian youth who worked in public
baths as shampooers and prostitutes pleasuring mature men bedevilled
Ottoman authorities throughout the eighteenth century.57 As the Collection
fell into disuse, Janissary applicants as young as eight years old but most on
the verge of puberty were permitted to live in the Janissary barracks and
serve Janissaries until they grew facial hair. In private, they attended to their
master’s needs. In public, the young boys wore veils over their faces so that
other men could not gaze upon their beardless faces and desire them.58
Because they were not paid a salary, some of these Janissary interns worked
in the public baths as shampooers and prostitutes in order to earn a living.59
One such man led a revolt that toppled a sultan.
Patrona Halil was originally a beardless youth of Albanian origin who
had worked as a shampooer in the Bayezid Bath in Istanbul.60 In September
1730 when the city’s elites were away planting tulip bulbs in a garden on
the Dardanelles, Patrona Halil led a rebellion joined by artisans, the petty
bourgeoisie, small-scale merchants, religious students, and scholars.61 They
blamed the Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha,
and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha for the situation they detested. They united
around their distaste for the public picnicking and frolicking of Christians
and Jews, and especially the newfound public presence of elite women.
Women dared to wear their hair loose, show cleavage, and don light,
transparent clothing—to the joy and ire of men. In the words of Ignatius
Mouradgea d’Ohsson, an Istanbul Armenian and French Catholic historian
who served as translator at the Swedish diplomatic mission and late in life
settled in Paris, ‘No woman covers her breast, especially in the summer,
except with a blouse that is usually made of thin gauze’.62 The rebels aimed
to ‘stop the regime that robbed them of their daily living’ through
extraordinary war taxes to finance campaigns in Iran after the Safavid
dynasty had collapsed in 1722.63 In contrast to the conspicuous
consumption of the nouveaux riches, Patrona Halil wore simple clothes and
went about barefoot like a radical Sufi, a deviant dervish. Perhaps he was a
Bektaşi Sufi.
The second day of the rebellion was a Friday, the day when Muslim men
gather for communal prayer.64 It was the day when it was the norm to
complain to the sultan about injustices after the communal prayer, either
through petition or protest. Because of this timing, rebel ranks grew larger
and began to include Janissaries, a menacing sign for the dynasty. The
demonstrators refused to break up, instead demanding to speak to high
officials, including Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, whom they blamed
for their troubles. On the third day of rebellion, as the insurgents first
blockaded and then attacked Topkapı Palace, the sultan decided to sacrifice
his grand vizier as a scapegoat to end the dangerous uprising. The grand
vizier was executed on the sultan’s orders and his corpse given to the angry
mob to desecrate. They claimed he was not a Muslim, but an Armenian or
Greek, as proven by his allegedly being uncircumcised and having a
tonsure.65 After parading the corpse around the city, the rebels ripped it into
pieces and dumped them in Ahmed III’s babbling fountain outside Topkapı
Palace. But even this did not curb the rising demands of the crowds who
wanted the sultan’s neck too. Realising he had to abdicate to protect the
peace and save his own life, Ahmed III declared thirty-five-year-old
Mahmud, son of his brother Mustafa II, his successor rather than either of
his own eldest sons and gave up his throne.
The new sultan, Mahmud I (reigned 1730–1754), agreed to have the
palace and gardens at Sa’dabad and those of his ministers burned to the
ground.66 Palace librarian, first printing-press editor, and Greek speaker
Esad Efendi and Ottoman-speaking Greek patriarch Chrysanthos Notaras
soon passed away, and the Müteferrika printing press ceased its operations.
The Ottoman enlightenment proved short-lived (although the Greek
enlightenment flourished again later in the century). Mahmud I also
cancelled some of the grievous taxes established by the executed grand
vizier and allowed thousands of rebels to register as the sultan’s salaried
troops. Their demands met, the popular rebels, who had even established a
shadow cabinet and demanded the right to make administrative
appointments, did not last long in power. A little over a week after he was
enthroned, the sultan decided to wipe them out. He waited until he had the
support of the Janissaries, who had had a falling out with these armed
commoners after they murdered one of their own. The sultan arranged for
Patrona Halil and his men to be called into the palace on the pretence of
honouring them with government positions. Instead, they were murdered
inside the Yerevan pleasure pavilion, built by Murad IV to celebrate his
conquest of the fortress in Armenia from the Safavids in 1635.67 After this
massacre, Janissaries killed the rebels’ supporters who tried to flee.
Coffeehouses and public baths favoured by Albanians were shut.
Albanians were banished from the city. It became illegal to employ
Albanian men as shampooers in the bathhouses.68 But even these measures
did not prevent another revolt in Istanbul the following year, fomented by
rebels who had escaped the dragnet and returned to attack the Janissaries. It
was quickly suppressed and accompanied by more measures to restrict
migration to the imperial capital. Restrictions were also reimposed on male
prostitutes. To uphold the gendered religious hierarchy of society, gender
segregation was reinstated in public spaces. Because the norms delineating
the clothing permitted to be worn by Muslim women and by all Christians
and Jews had been openly flaunted by the nouveaux riches during Ahmed
III’s reign, sumptuary laws were also reintroduced.69
REFORM
Breaking the Cycle of Rebellion from Selim III to Abdülaziz I
AT THE END of the Crimean War in 1856, the concert of European states
recognised the Ottoman Empire as an equal member. But by that point they
were anything but equal. At the end of the eighteenth century the Ottoman
elite realised that the dynasty and empire had fallen behind the military and
economic levels of elsewhere in Europe and of Russia, whose armies
encroached on their territory from without. Within the empire, subject
peoples imbued with nationalism began to demand autonomy or
independence. In response, eighteenth and nineteenth century sultans and
elites launched reforms to strengthen the empire against occupation and
colonisation from abroad and chaos within. In their view, they needed to
modernise the empire, striking the right balance between adapting European
innovations and strengthening their own traditions. Reforming sultans went
so far as to wipe out the Janissaries, suppress the Bektaşi Sufi order with
which the army was affiliated, and ostensibly abolish the hierarchical social
order based on religious and class difference. Conversion to Islam was no
longer a path to assimilation. But instead of saving the empire, these
changes deepened the chasm between Ottoman Christians and Muslims.
One of the reasons for this was that in this era, elite Muslims—while
promoting the newly granted religious freedom, constitution, and
parliamentary form of government—did not relinquish the idea of the
superiority of Islam or the primacy of Islamic law. They exalted Ottoman
Muslims and, for the first time, Turks, including the sultan caliph who was
the head of government.
SELIM III: A BREAK WITH THE PAST
For the Ottoman Empire, the nineteenth century was a long one, for it began
in 1789, the year that witnessed the French Revolution. Accompanied by
massive bloodshed, French revolutionaries would abolish the monarchy,
execute the king, disestablish the church, nationalise its revenue and
property, and close churches and monasteries. They established a de-
Christianised republic based on the principle of the equality of all citizens
no matter their religion (but not their gender). The French established a
system of rule based on the will of the people and freedom of speech. They
unleashed nationalism and made devotion to the fatherland a guiding
principle. They abolished the slave trade.
The French Revolution had been preceded by the American Revolution
(1775–1783), during which thirteen British colonies in North America
fought for and gained their political independence. The founding principles
of the United States of America as articulated in the Constitution (1787)
and Bill of Rights (1791) include the separation of powers and the
prohibition of religious tests for officeholders. They also include individual
liberty manifested in freedom of speech, religion, and the press, the right to
assembly, to petition, to hold property (including African American slaves),
and to impartial justice. The Ottoman dynasty closely monitored these
developments with trepidation. In the early nineteenth century, some of the
component elements of the empire, such as the Greeks and Serbs, would be
inspired by these ideas, including nationalist revolution. In the second half
of the nineteenth century, influential Ottoman Muslim intellectuals and
statesmen would also promote patriotism, liberty, and separation of powers.
Less revolutionary but nonetheless dramatic transformations ensued in
the Ottoman Empire with the rise of Selim III (reigned 1789–1807), the son
of Mustafa III, who acceded to the throne at the age of twenty-eight upon
the death of his uncle, Abdülhamid I. Selim III was a sultan willing to
change the administration and the military root and branch, revising
relations between ruler and subjects and among subjects. The dynasty also
renegotiated its relation to various groups in society and to the new imperial
powers.
Acceding to the throne in the year of the French Revolution, which
would spark feelings of nationalism within the empire and contribute to its
shrinkage and then collapse, Selim III sought to strengthen his realm.
Coming to power in the midst of a losing campaign against Russia—and
keeping one eye on this nemesis, with an ultimate goal to retake the Crimea
—he incorporated into his army the latest French, Prussian, and Russian
advances in the military sciences. Open to reforms yet hesitant to
completely revolutionise society, Selim III favoured Europe and European
advisors; when still a prince, he had corresponded with France’s Louis XVI
(reigned 1774–1792). At the same time, Selim III was keen to maintain the
gendered religious hierarchy of Ottoman society. As he launched his new
order, Selim III enforced clothing restrictions on women, Christians, and
Jews, marking them as distinct. The centrepiece of his reform was a new
army and navy corps made up of Muslim recruits. The sultan revised the
aims of Osman II, who had been deposed and murdered for his reforms
nearly two centuries earlier. The new army was trained by French military
advisors at new academies and medical schools. The Ottoman elite began to
learn French. Selim III established the first permanent Ottoman embassies
in Berlin, London, Paris, and Vienna, dispatching portraits of himself to
such figures as Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (reigned 1804–1814, 1815),
who began his military and political career during the French Revolution.
Despite good relations with France, like the rest of the European
continent including Russia, the Ottoman Empire suffered from Napoleon’s
militant expansion. During the Napoleonic Wars—which lasted from 1792
to 1815 and which partly played out on Ottoman territory—France invaded
and occupied Egypt, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the
early sixteenth century. The 1798 occupation was a reminder of the role that
the Ottomans played in European history. Napoleon’s aim in targeting
Egypt was Britain, for he sought to control the route to India.
The arrival of the French demonstrated the weakened Ottoman condition
in the face of the expanding military might of other European powers in the
nineteenth century. In 1799, Napoleon and his army marched from Egypt to
Syria, but returned to Egypt after failing to capture the coastal fortress of
Acre, Palestine. It was defended by the semiautonomous governor of Sidon
and Damascus—the Bosnian Cezzar (the Butcher) Ahmed Pasha—and a
British fleet. To seize power in Paris, Napoleon returned to France that
same year. It was only in 1801 that the Ottomans, relying on the British
navy, forced the French army to quit Cairo and Alexandria. Nevertheless,
the Ottomans again allied with France and went to war against Britain and
Russia in 1806 as the Napoleonic Wars continued. In late 1806, the British
fleet bombarded Istanbul.
While breaking new ground within the empire, the reformist sultan
Selim III faced opposition from entrenched interests, especially the
Janissaries, who were unhappy with the creation of a new corps. He was
also opposed by the jurists, who were nervous about the French culture on
display and were concerned about a revitalised sultanate that they had
thought they had under their control. Tax farmers were outraged when their
holdings were confiscated to pay for the new army. He also alienated
provincial notables. In summer 1806, they blocked the new army from
being set up in Thrace. The new order had been stopped.
In spring 1807, Janissaries in Istanbul rioted. They were joined by
underclass militiamen led by a Turk named Mustafa, whose Albanian
supporters demanded the abolition of the new corps. Thanks to a legal
opinion issued by his own sheikhulislam, Selim III was deposed. The
reason given was that he had introduced innovations allegedly contrary to
Islamic law. He was murdered a year later while under house arrest. He
suffered the same fate as Osman II, killed in 1622 in part for attempting to
create a new army.
Conventional wisdom has long depicted a clash in late Ottoman society
between those labelled as Westernisers, modernisers, reformers, and
secularists versus Islamists, traditionalists, conservatives, and religious
reactionaries.1 But the categories were not exclusive. Modernising Islamist
reformers initiated secularising processes, as in Selim III’s reforms. But the
Janissaries and jurists did their best to limit the power of the sultan. High
points of radical change and reform would occur under Selim III’s
successors.
The patriotic sentiment of this play, along with the outspoken criticism
of the regime by the Young Ottomans, increased the government’s fear of a
coup. It closed the Young Ottoman newspaper İbret and again exiled these
ideologues and put them under house arrest that same year.79
Inspired by ideals of fatherland and liberty, and facing uprisings in
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bulgaria—where nationalism was stimulated
by the Ottoman establishment in 1870 of a Bulgarian Orthodox church, the
exarchate, separate from the Greek Orthodox patriarchate—and the threat
of war with Russia, leading statesmen decided to act.80 Midhat Pasha, a
constitutionalist who had long been praised by the Young Ottomans as an
ideal statesman, Minister of War Hüseyin Avni Pasha, and Sheikhulislam
Hayrullah Efendi launched a coup and deposed Sultan Abdülaziz I on 30
May 1876.81 They replaced him with his nephew Murad, a longtime
supporter of the Young Ottomans and advocate of a constitution and
parliament, who became Murad V. His first private secretary was one of the
leading Young Ottomans, Ziya Pasha. Within two weeks of his accession,
the former sultan Abdülaziz I committed suicide and an army captain killed
Hüseyin Avni Pasha and other ministers at a cabinet meeting. The ministers
decided to act quickly and have the sultan declare a constitution, but
physicians determined that Murad V, suffering from alcoholism and a
nervous breakdown, was unfit to rule. His response to suddenly being
enthroned was like that of many princes since the seventeenth century:
taken from the harem to be made sultan at a mature age, they believed they
were being led to their execution. His younger brother Hamid refused to be
appointed regent. He demanded to be sultan. He received the oath of
allegiance as Abdülhamid II on 1 September 1876.82
A committee to draft a constitution began to meet in October 1876.
Headed by the reformer and vizier Midhat Pasha, among its members were
several Young Ottomans including Namık Kemal and Ziya Pasha.83
Another member was Krikor Odyan, one of the architects of the 1860
Armenian constitution and close friend and advisor of Midhat Pasha.84
Within three months, the Ottomans promulgated their first constitution
for all subjects of the empire. The Ottoman government system put forth in
1876 was based on the Belgian constitution of 1831 and the Prussian
constitution of 1850. Belgium was established as a parliamentary monarchy
with a separation between the legislative (a parliament made up of a house
of representatives and senate), judicial (the courts), and executive powers
(the king and his ministers). Prussia also established a bicameral legislature
in 1850 along with a government based on separation of powers. However,
the kaiser retained more power than the king in Belgium. In Prussia, the
kaiser granted some of his subjects the right to a share in governance yet
retained full authority. The Ottoman constitutional system more resembled
that of Prussia than of Belgium. One could also add a local source of
inspiration: the constitution granted to the Armenians a little more than a
dozen years earlier. Elections were held for parliamentary representatives in
December and January 1877. The Ottoman parliament first met in Istanbul
in March 1877.
The Young Ottomans were successful. Thanks in part to the spread of
their modern ideas, by 1877 the Ottomans boasted their own parliament and
constitution and had enshrined the principles of equality and universal
subjecthood. The constitution declared that while Islam was the religion of
the Ottoman Empire, ‘the practice of all recognised religions in Ottoman
dominions is free on the condition that they do not disturb public order and
general propriety. The rights granted to various creeds are all under the
guarantee of the state’.85 The question was how long those newfound rights
would be maintained.
18
REPRESSION
A Modern Caliph, Abdülhamid II
LOOKING WITHIN
The Ottoman Orient
FOR CENTURIES, THE Ottomans had been open to receiving every type of
person as a Muslim, no matter his or her language or background, whether a
slave, commoner, or member of the elite. When faced with losing power to
the ascendant Western European empires and brand-new Southeastern
European nations, the Ottomans began to turn away from the Ottoman Way
of incorporating diversity of Islam and conversion to it. In an effort to
restore the empire to its once dominant position, certain activists among the
Ottoman elites sought to remake it into a ‘civilised’ Ottoman Muslim
nation-empire on par with the West. No longer an empire of conversion, it
was to be made into an empire of Muslim Turks. The Ottoman elites’
Orientalist view of their own society and the peoples they governed was
channelled into new forms of ethno- and ethno-religious nationalism. When
compounded by coups, revolutions, counterrevolutions, and war, the
consequence was that tolerance was replaced by ethnic cleansing and
genocide, leading ultimately to the dynasty’s demise.
From the 1880s to 1913, the Young Turks would promote revolution and
two wars but face counterrevolution and resistance. Working together with
Sufis, Freemasons, and other esoteric groups in Ottoman Salonica—the port
city in Macedonia that is today Thessaloniki, Greece—these Muslim
officers and bureaucrats of varied backgrounds spearheaded opposition to
Abdülhamid II. At first they demanded only restoration of the constitution
and parliament, but their demands soon evolved to overthrow the sultan. In
a short period of time, the ideology of these elitist, militarist, anti-Christian
imperialists evolved from Ottoman Muslim nationalism to Turkish
nationalism.
OPPOSITION TO ABDÜLHAMID II
Salonica was a site of great political agitation. It was the birthplace of the
Young Turk revolutionary movement as well as assorted socialist
organisations.7 It had the highest concentration of factory labour in the
empire, particularly in the tobacco industry. Headed by Bulgarian Jew
Avram Benaroya, the city’s Workers’ Solidarity Federation was considered
by the Second International—the global federation of socialist parties and
trade unions—to be the spark of the proletarian struggle in the East.
Salonica was also a centre of Masonic activity and the main domicile of the
Dönme. Salonica was one of the Ottoman cities best supplied with schools,
including a law faculty, and army headquarters, both of which were open to
new currents of thought. Professionals and civil servants who shared a
progressive outlook—especially employees of the Post and Telegraph
Department such as Mehmed Talat (later promoted to pasha) and members
of the Third Army such as Enver Bey (later promoted to pasha)—made up
the majority of the revolutionaries. The heart of the struggle was Salonica.
Abdülhamid II had his supporters, as all dictators do. They included the
top military brass and the members of the religious class that supported his
Islamisation campaign. But more legion were his enemies, who opposed his
closing of the parliament, suspension of the constitution, and authoritarian
reign.
Opposition to Abdülhamid II was launched by the Committee of Union
and Progress (İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti, CUP), first initiated as a secret
society (with a slightly different name, the Committee of Progress and
Union) in 1889 by students at the Royal Military Medical Academy in
Istanbul. They were heavily influenced by biological materialist ideology.
Biological materialism promoted science in place of religion to cure all of
society’s ills. The CUP supporters later spread to Paris, Geneva, and Cairo,
and then to cities throughout the Ottoman Empire, including Salonica.
Following a failed coup attempt in 1896, opponents of Abdülhamid II’s
autocratic rule who had operated underground in the empire in the 1890s
were forced to move overseas. The constitutionalists operated mainly
abroad for a decade. In 1907, they reemerged in strength in the empire as a
political organisation. By that time, the CUP was a merger of the decades-
old, Paris-based Committee of Progress and Union and the new Salonica-
based Ottoman Freedom Society. The guiding figures of the Committee of
Progress and Union included Dr. Bahaettin Şakir and Dr. Nazım, the
director of the modern municipal hospital in Salonica.8 He would become
one of the two leading Young Turk ideologues. The Ottoman Freedom
Society had been founded in 1906. One founder was Mehmed Talat, born in
the Hasköy district of today’s Bulgaria, who knew Ottoman Turkish, Greek,
and French and had been exiled to Salonica, where he ran the Telegraph and
Post Office.9 The other was Enver Bey.10
These men, who in wishing to save the empire paved the way for its end,
shared common characteristics. They were part of a new generation of elite,
highly educated, young, urban Muslim men. Most were Rûmis, as they
came from Southeastern Europe, northwestern Anatolia including Istanbul,
and the Aegean. They received higher education in the new medical and
military colleges. Despite calling themselves Young Turks, the four students
who founded the organisation at the Royal Military Medical Academy that
would later become the CUP were not Turks. They were Ibrahim Temo (an
Albanian), Abdullah Cevdet (a Kurd), Mehmed Reşid (a Circassian), and
İshak Sükûti (a Kurd).11
Sufi brotherhoods and Freemasons also played a role in opposition
politics in the Hamidian era, supporting the CUP and favouring the
assassination or overthrow of Abdülhamid II. Although that sultan had been
close to a sheikh from the Nakşibendi order named Gümüşhanevi, the
Bektaşi and Mevlevi Sufi orders opposed him.12 Ruthlessly suppressed in
1826 because of their affiliation with the Janissaries, the Bektaşis had made
a comeback by the beginning of Abdülhamid II’s reign in 1876 and were
the strongest Sufi order opposing the regime.13 The Young Turks were
sympathetic to the Bektaşis because they considered the Sufi order to be
liberal, and a number of Young Turks were Bektaşi. The radical tendencies
of the Bektaşis matched the progressive ideas of the Young Turks, and
Bektaşis were affiliated with Freemasons, who let the CUP use their lodges
after 1906.
The CUP also had a relationship with Rûmi’s Mevlevi order. Mevlevi
lodges distributed CUP propaganda, and Mevlevi sheikhs hosted CUP
meetings in their homes. Other sheikhs were exiled together with Young
Turks for their political activism. Sultan Abdülmecid I had supported the
Mevlevis, and his successor, Sultan Abdülaziz I, had been a member of the
Mevlevi order, as was Sultan Abdülhamid II’s brother Mehmed Reşad in
Galata.14 But during Abdülhamid II’s reign, the Mevlevi order had
abandoned its traditional quietism, and the CUP tried to install Mehmed
Reşad as sultan in a failed coup in 1896. In the last decade of Abdülhamid
II’s rule, the Mevlevi sheikhs in Istanbul, İzmir, and Konya aligned with the
CUP, and some were arrested and exiled. The grand çelebi even asked the
British for asylum.15
The Sufi role in revolutionary politics was significant, but until 1895 it
was the Freemasons who were more important in opposition politics. The
Freemason Murad V, envisioned as an enlightened sultan who would unite
Turks and Greeks, had come to power in a coup d’état aided by Freemasons
in 1876. The nucleus of the Young Turks emerged from the members of a
Masonic lodge established by those who had brought that sultan to the
throne.
Until 1902, because they were forbidden in the empire, Ottoman
Freemasons had organised their own political organisations under other
names and distributed political tracts on liberty and freedom across Europe.
Thereafter they supported the Paris-based Committee of Progress and
Union (which with the Ottoman Freedom Society became the CUP in
1907), whose leader, Ahmed Rıza, included in his inner circle many
prominent Freemason leaders. All the founding members but one of the
Ottoman Freedom Society in Salonica were Freemasons or became
Freemasons. They were members of either the Italian Obedience of
Macedonia Risorta or the French Obedience of Véritas (Truth). After the
merger of the Committee of Progress and Union and the Ottoman Freedom
Society as the CUP, the CUP was based in Salonican Masonic lodges.16 In a
society not ready to abandon hierarchies of religion, and in which
sectarianism had become a problem—leading to massacres of Armenians in
Anatolia and Maronite Christians in Syria—Christians, Jews, and Muslims
could meet in Masonic lodges as equals, united in secrecy. Freemasons
benefited from social egalitarianism, which allowed them to accommodate
their religious differences and promote societal change. At Masonic lodges,
strangers were transformed into brothers seeking the same political goal.
Murad V’s successor, Abdülhamid II, recognised the threat and suppressed
the Freemasons. His government labelled them a constant source of treason.
There were close links between secret societies of Freemasons and the
diverse members of the CUP, a secret society imitating Masonic practices
and meeting in Masonic lodges. In a dictatorship, secrecy afforded political
organisation. The Jewish attorney Emmanuel Carasso, one of the leaders of
the CUP in Salonica and in the hierarchy of the entire organisation, received
medals of honour from the very sultan he worked to overthrow. He also
headed the Italian rite Macedonia Risorta, whose lodge was the site of
secret CUP meetings and the place where CUP archives and records were
kept. The Masonic order counted among its members the majority of the
leaders of the Salonican branch of the CUP. Freemasonry was important for
the CUP. Masonic lodges were crucial channels through which oppositional
politics could germinate.
Many prominent Dönme were Freemasons as well as Sufis, which
facilitated their entry into the CUP. Dönme were among the founders of the
French Obedience of Véritas, established in 1904, and sat on its supreme
council. That order counted two future grand viziers, Ali Rıza Pasha and
Hussein Hilmi Pasha. Jews and Dönme were prominent in the clubs of
Freemasons where the CUP met in Salonica.17 Mason and dervish lodges
where many Dönme participated in Sufi rituals sided with the CUP against
the sultan, in part because Freemasons and some Sufi sects promoted
equality and brotherhood. Conveniently, given Salonica’s secret CUP cells,
Masonic membership, and revolutionary cells in the Third Army, ancient
underground storage spaces located in the main Dönme neighbourhoods
allowed passage undetected from house to house and even from
neighbourhood to neighbourhood. When police raided homes, people on the
run and the secret documents they carried could easily disappear in these
spaces.
Dönme played an important founding and supporting role in the
revolutionary movement.18 The banker, textile merchant, director of one of
the largest banking and commercial houses in the city, and head of the
chamber of commerce Mehmed Kapancı used his wealth to fund the CUP.
Wealthy merchants such as Kapancı supported the revolution because they
were Freemasons who believed that the sultan was stifling society. These
were men who supported progressive schools that promoted critical
thinking, especially the Dönme schools the Feyziye (Excellence) and
Terakki (Progress), considered centres of revolution.
Some Dönme became so committed to the political ideas discussed in
secret CUP meetings at the city’s Masonic lodges that they were considered
the revolutionary vanguard. Dönme intellectuals and civil servants played a
crucial revolutionary role. Their history and religion had caused them to
evolve more and more into an association of freethinkers, separate from
Muslims and Jews yet placed in a position to be a progressive factor in the
city.
Dönme, Freemasons, Bektaşi and Mevlevi Sufis, students at the new
medical and military colleges, young army officers, wealthy capitalists,
liberal professionals, and bureaucrats all conspired to compel Abdülhamid
II to reinstate the constitution and parliament.
REVOLUTION
Determined to save the empire from itself and its ever more dictatorial ruler,
the CUP, led by Muslim men of diverse background (Albanian, Caucasian,
Circassian, Dönme, Kurdish, and Turkish) launched the events of June and
July 1908 known as the constitutional revolution. What transpired was
actually not very impressive, but it achieved the CUP’s aim. The
revolutionaries considered their event on par with the other significant
events that occurred in July, the French Revolution and the American
Declaration of Independence.19 But there was no storming of the Bastille as
in France, and the sultan was left formally in power. More like an armed
revolt, it did not seem to be a revolution at all. The CUP forced
Abdülhamid II to reinstate the abrogated 1876 constitution and reconvene
the parliament. This was no mass uprising. Nor was it a toppling of the
political and social system.
The revolution of 1908 was triggered by the secret CUP central
committee in Salonica when it decided to reveal itself by publicly rejecting
British and Russian efforts to make Ottoman Macedonia an autonomous
region under foreign oversight.20 Macedonia was claimed by Greek,
Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian nationalists. As the Ottomans had
steadfastly refused to offer autonomy, the diverse Southeastern European
Christian nationalists had proselytised national consciousness among their
people through their churches and schools, used violence against Ottoman
authorities (who responded in kind), and appealed for foreign intervention
to achieve their political aims.21
The self-outing of the CUP caused the Ottoman government to
investigate it. The CUP shot the man charged with this task, Nazım Bey,
brother-in-law of Major Enver Bey of the Ottoman Third Army. The CUP
ordered its branches throughout Macedonia to start an insurgency and to
form guerrilla bands on the model of those of the Bulgarians, Greeks,
Macedonians, and Serbs already operating in the region to fight both the
Christian guerrillas and Ottoman forces that opposed them. Enver Bey,
leader of the CUP branch in Monastir, western Macedonia, headed to the
hills. He established a band of guerrillas outside Salonica. Battalion
commander Adjutant Major Niyazi Bey, an Albanian, formed a guerrilla
band in Macedonia.
Other CUP branches in other Ottoman cities and their leaders sent
telegrams to the sultan demanding the restoration of the constitution and
parliament. Şemsi Pasha, the Ottoman general sent after them, was
murdered by the CUP. Enver and Niyazi traversed the Macedonian
countryside with their bands. They rallied Muslims behind them by playing
on their fears of attacks by Christian guerrillas supported by the Russian
army. They made little use of the soldiers under their command, who they
assumed were loyal to the sultan. They appealed instead to Muslims—
Albanians, self-sacrificing volunteers, brigands and outlaws, and CUP men
—rather than Christian villagers. They planned to march on Istanbul. When
they captured Monastir and its significant garrison, they declared that the
constitution was back in force. Abdülhamid II agreed to reconvene the
prorogued parliament of 1878. Urban-based junior officers educated in the
new military academies had gone to the mountains of Macedonia with
irregular forces and had compelled the sultan to act. The constitutional
revolution was over.
In their proclamation to the public, read out in city squares across the
empire to jubilant crowds, the constitutional revolutionaries declared that
‘the basis for the constitution will be respect for the predominance of the
national will’.22 The will of the people, and not the whims of the sultan,
was to be the governing force of empire. They offered universal suffrage to
men, permitted political parties, freed the press, gave more rights to women,
and confirmed that ‘every citizen will enjoy complete liberty and equality,
regardless of nationality or religion’. All Ottomans were ‘equal before the
law as regards rights and duties relative to the state’ and were ‘eligible for
government posts, according to their individual capacity and their
education’. They confirmed that Christians and Jews were liable for
military service. In fact, between 1908 and 1914, to an extent not seen even
after the reform decrees of 1839 and 1856—which promised legal equality
to all subjects of the sultan—Armenians, Greeks, and Jews entered political
office and military service.
When the revolution was announced, speeches were made on the
balcony of the Dönme-owned Olympos Hotel on Plateia Eleftherias
(formerly Olympos Square) in Salonica. Among the speakers was Moiz
Kohen (who later adopted the Turkish name Tekinalp), a Turkish nationalist
of Jewish background. He shouted, ‘We want brotherhood between all
peoples. We are all one without regard to religion or sect. Long live the
fatherland! Long live freedom! There are no Greeks, Jews, or Bulgarians,
there are only Ottomans’.23 Postcards printed to mark the event travelled
the globe, depicting the diverse Ottoman peoples uniting behind ‘freedom,
equality, brotherhood, and justice’, the words translated into Armenian,
Greek, Ottoman Turkish, French, and Judeo-Spanish.
Dönme journalists played a decisive role in the events of July 1908.
Journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman, a Dönme member of the Véritas lodge and
leading CUP activist and publicist, was put in charge of organising the
movement’s propaganda in Salonica. He penned patriotic poems and
articles welcoming the new freedoms and propagating the movement’s
excitement about the beginning of a new era. He held street demonstrations
and organised writers and a press association. In 1914, Yalman would
become the news editor of the CUP’s main publication, Echo. Yalman’s
alma mater, the Dönme school Terakki—whose name, ‘Progress’, was the
same as that used in the title of the CUP—boasted that it raised freedom-
loving, constitution-supporting youths, and that those who announced the
second constitutional government were Terakki graduates.24 The Dönme
Feyziye school was proud of its former administrator, the new finance
minister Mehmed Cavid, and praised the revolution.
The revolution ushered in a renaissance for the Bektaşi Sufi order and
Masonic lodges favoured or founded by the CUP. Revolutionary officers
visited Bektaşi lodges to pay tribute, and Bektaşi publications were again
permitted. Newspapers attacking the Bektaşis were closed. New Bektaşi
lodges were opened.25 Freemasons declared themselves ‘the main force’
behind the 1908 revolution, supported the CUP in power, and thrived. The
CUP established its own exclusive Masonic lodge in 1909, Le Grand Orient
Ottoman, to reduce the power of foreign-affiliated lodges.26 Its first grand
master was none other than Young Turk leader Mehmed Talat.
Elections were held in October and November. CUP-backed candidates
won 287 of the 288 seats in parliament. The lone opposition
parliamentarian was a member of the Liberal Party. The bicameral
legislature opened in December.27
The CUP held sway in parliament and in the provinces with its local
party bosses. Yet the real centre of CUP power was not its parliamentarians,
but its secretive central committee in Salonica, which numbered fewer than
two dozen members. Members included Mehmed Talat, Enver Bey, Dr.
Bahaettin Şakir, and Dr. Nazım. The central committee was the real power
holder in the empire. The members of the central committee we know about
averaged around thirty-five years of age, all had college educations, and
nearly half originated in Southeastern Europe, with most of the rest coming
from Istanbul and the Aegean region.28 These demographics displayed the
continued relevance of Rûminess, of being Roman.
The CUP—its junior officers and civil servants—did not formally take
power. It was influential behind the scenes in the newly elected parliament
and was able to have a grand vizier appointed that was to its liking. But it
faced much opposition and responded in brutal fashion. The CUP was
blamed for the assassination of the leading Liberal opposition newspaper
editor Hasan Fehmi in 1909. His assassination galvanised massive anti-
CUP opposition, organised by the Liberal Party, Nakşibendi Sufi sheikhs,
and students of religious colleges, as well as a group calling itself the
Muslim Union. Members of the Muslim Union were especially worried by
the new societal role of women. In 1908, just as Armenian women fought
for women’s rights, self-proclaimed Muslim feminists had published half a
dozen journals and founded organisations, such as the Ottoman Association
for the Protection of the Rights of Women, demanding legal reforms
including the end to polygamy and expanded access to education and
employment outside the home.29
WOMEN’S RIGHTS
Beginning in 1908, there was a renewed clash of two cultural visions, a
central feature of which was the role of women in society. One group called
for equality between men and women and making women visible in the
public sphere. It perceived Islam as a hindrance to modernity and
civilisation. If women were veiled and not participating in political life,
then the empire would never become modern or civilised and would surely
fall. For the opposing group, such exposure of women corrupted society,
which needed to adhere to a model in which women’s roles were well-
defined and women’s bodies invisible. In this vision, if women were
unveiled and participated in societal roles formerly the preserve of men,
then the empire would come to ruin. Both groups looked at women’s bodies
and saw the future of the empire—for good or ill.
Radicals advocated for the human rights of women, arguing for the
necessity of seeing women as human beings rather than as females limited
to roles as wives and mothers.30 They argued against the practice of veiling.
Only when women were unveiled and participating fully in the life of
society would they become human beings, individuals. In this view, free
individuals were the building blocks of a modern society. Once women
were treated as individuals, Ottoman society would become civilised.
Their opponents, the Muslim Union, countered that unveiling women
and thrusting them from the private to the public sphere would cause moral
and political decline. They claimed that what the radicals advocated was not
freedom, but a turning away from religion towards anarchy and chaos,
thereby ruining the family, the true building block of society. They
proposed a correlation between the abandoning of the veil and the opening
of taverns and whorehouses.31 And they opposed the new freedoms granted
by the constitution and fomented rebellion to replace it.
The Ottoman forces and their hero Colonel Mustafa Kemal defended the
peninsula valiantly, managing to hold the high ground while suffering a
staggering casualty rate, as did the attacking Allied forces. Divided evenly
between the Allies (Australian, British, French, Indian, and New Zealander
forces) and the Ottomans, more than five hundred thousand of the eight
hundred thousand men who fought there between the Allied landing on 25
April 1915 and the Allies’ final evacuation on 9 January 1916 were killed,
taken prisoner, or wounded.33 For the Ottomans, this costly victory was
well worth the price, for they were able to prevent the conquest of Istanbul.
For the Triple Entente powers, who thought they would quickly defeat the
Ottomans and speed up the end of the war, the result was the opposite. The
Ottomans and the Germans would continue to battle the British and French
across the Middle East in Iraq and Syria.
The Ottomans went on to defeat a British-Indian expeditionary force at
Kut in Iraq in April 1916, after which they employed the prisoners of war in
forced labour, but this was the last Ottoman victory. After that battle, the
Ottoman army could barely hold its own in the Middle East. The army was
devastated by hunger and disease, including cholera, malaria, and typhus.
Its soldiers were poorly equipped and dressed in rags. It suffered a high
desertion rate—jihad or not—and lacked in transportation. Yet in 1915 it
was used to annihilate its fellow citizens.
THE END
Gazi Mustafa Kemal
AT THE END of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was devastated
and most of its territory occupied. Anatolia’s population had been
decimated and impoverished, and the countryside and many cities were in
ruins as a result of war, genocide, migration, famine, and epidemics. Eight
hundred thousand Ottoman soldiers—one out of every four enlisted men—
had been killed or died from disease; an equal number had been wounded.
As many as four million civilians had died or were killed, from a prewar
population of twenty million. Civilians in the Ottoman Empire suffered a
much higher mortality rate—calculated as proportion of the population
rather than absolute numbers—than most other belligerents.1 In some
eastern provinces, half the population had died or been killed. One quarter
had been displaced.2
As the official occupation of Istanbul began in late 1918, the League of
Nations awarded Britain a mandate—a commission to administer the
government and affairs—of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. France was
given a mandate over Syria and Lebanon. The Allied powers partitioned
Anatolia, placing the Aegean region including İzmir under Greek control
and dividing the Mediterranean region (as far inland as the city of Konya in
central Anatolia) between France and Italy. What remained independent
Ottoman territory was central Anatolia and a small section of the Black Sea
coast. To humiliate the Ottomans, the French general who was occupation
commander rode into Istanbul on a white horse, imitating Mehmed II’s
entry in the same city in 1453.3
It was in this postwar era that the last remaining subject peoples of the
sultan, especially the Kurds and Armenians, had their best chance at
obtaining autonomy or independence. Although instrumental in the carrying
out of the Armenian genocide, the Kurds had also been subject to the CUP
regime’s harsh policies of resettlement from 1913 to 1918. The regime had
intended to assimilate Kurds among Turks by forcibly resettling hundreds
of thousands of them in the west, so that they would not constitute a
majority anywhere in the empire. The First World War devastated
Kurdistan. Warfare, genocide, massacre, starvation, disease, and famine
caused staggering losses to Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds, and Turks.
The victorious Allies, especially the British and the Americans, led by
President Woodrow Wilson—whose ‘Fourteen Points’ programme outlined
what was hoped to be a long-lasting peace at the end of the First World War
—promoted creating an Armenian and a Kurdish mandate in eastern
Anatolia. These plans were never realised. Instead, defeat in war and the
Europeanising impulses begun in the nineteenth century ultimately brought
down the dynasty. The man who ensured its demise was an Ottoman First
World War hero.
Blond and blue-eyed, the Salonican-born military officer Mustafa Kemal
(1881–1938), a Young Turk, CUP member, and veteran of the 1908
revolution, the 1909 Action Army, and the First World War, was sent by the
Ottoman government to Samsun on the Black Sea coast as military
inspector of the Third Army in May 1919. He began instead to organise all
remaining Ottoman army units and guerrilla bands. Ordered to defend the
empire, the sultan, and the caliphate, he would soon turn against all but the
first. He began to lead the CUP’s regional resistance committee—the
Defence of Popular Rights societies—whose interests differed from those of
the government in Allied-occupied Istanbul.4 When the Ottoman
government ordered his arrest, the army refused, choosing to follow
Mustafa Kemal as leader. By April 1920, he had established a shadow
parliament in Ankara. Defeat in war would lead to the overthrow of the
dynasty by this Ottoman army officer.
From 1918 to 1922, the Young Turks were not guided by Ottomanism,
Islamism, or Turkism. Their leading light was again Ottoman Muslim
nationalism, as it had been a decade earlier. The CUP revamped the Special
Organisation and other irregulars as armed guerrilla groups in Anatolia. The
political organisation, the Defence of Popular Rights societies, was for the
Muslim peoples of Anatolia alone, especially Turks and Kurds. The
exclusion of Christians was made explicit at the congress of Erzurum in
1919, which gathered the resistance groups from the seven eastern
provinces. It declared that its goal was ‘to defend the historic and national
rights of the Muslim population’. Muslims ‘form one nation, consisting of
Turks and Kurds’.5 That same year, the western Anatolian Defence of
Popular Rights societies promoted Muslim nationalism and faced off
against Ottoman Christians and European powers.
The Sivas Congress, convened by Mustafa Kemal in 1919 after the
congress at Erzerum, dedicated itself to the battle to preserve ‘our state
which belongs to the Muslims’. This was Ottoman Muslim nationalism and
territorialism, explicitly excluding the Arabophone regions. Mustafa Kemal
defined the fatherland as the area of Anatolia peopled by Kurds and Turks
where the Ottoman army was in charge. This was a small area, as much of
Anatolia was occupied by European powers.
There was no room in this new polity for the remaining Christians of
Anatolia. In December 1919, Mustafa Kemal accused the Armenians of
having a ‘genocidal policy’ against Muslims.6 He praised Ottoman
tolerance and declared that what had happened to the Armenians and
Greeks during the war was the consequence of their separatist nationalism,
which ‘they pursued in a savage manner, when they allowed themselves to
be made tools of foreign intrigues and abused their privileges’. Christian
Europe, he argued, had committed far worse crimes than the massacres
committed by the Ottomans. He blamed the victims, belittled the severity of
the violence, and accused others of having committed far worse assaults.
Elections held in autumn 1919 brought a Muslim nationalist parliament
to power in winter 1920. The parliament adopted the National Pact of
January 1920, which articulated all the sentiments of the Erzurum and Sivas
congresses. The National Pact supported the right of only Muslims to the
land. It rejected the occupation and partition of the areas of Anatolia
inhabited by an Ottoman Muslim majority. It gave up any claims to Arab-
majority regions. The Ottoman Empire in this vision was to be an
Anatolian, Turkish-Kurdish polity.
The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI (reigned 1918–1922)—who could
see a flotilla of Allied warships from the windows of his residence,
Dolmabahçe Palace—and the Ottoman government in Istanbul in 1918 and
1919, however, pursued an anti-CUP, pro-British policy and complied with
the demands of the occupying Allied powers. In March 1920, when the
official occupation of the city began, the British and their thirty thousand
troops put an end to legal political activity.
The last Ottoman parliament prorogued itself in protest in April. On 23
April, parliamentarians who were able to escape arrest by the occupying
powers along with delegates elected from among the Anatolian Defence of
Popular Rights committees assembled in rebel-controlled Ankara at the first
meeting of a shadow government, the Grand National Assembly, which still
recognised the sultan caliph as supreme leader. Allied high commissioners
administered the capital, which was beset by sky-high inflation, lack of
basic food and fuel, a large refugee population, and a housing shortage.
In April, the Ottoman government charged Mustafa Kemal with treason
and sentenced him to death in absentia. The sheikhulislam gave a fatwa, a
legal opinion, that the resistance groups led by Mustafa Kemal were
traitors, whom Muslims should kill. For his part, Mustafa Kemal had the
mufti of Ankara, the leading specialist in Islamic law in the city, declare in a
legal opinion that the members of the government were traitors. He
emphasised that his struggle was for the sake of the empire, sultanate, and
caliphate. It was a Muslim (Turkish and Kurdish) resistance movement
supported by Sunni dignitaries, Alevis, and Bektaşi Sufis. Most Kurds
believed Mustafa Kemal’s rhetoric that Turks and Kurds were brothers and
supported his campaigns to save the presumably Muslim empire and
caliphate from foreigners and local Christians.
On 10 August 1920, a delegation from the sultan’s government signed
the Treaty of Sèvres with the Allied powers outside Paris. The treaty left
very little territory in the hands of Ottoman Muslims. It created an
independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia, gave Greece eastern Thrace and
İzmir, internationalised the Bosporus, presented France with a sphere of
influence in southern Anatolia, let Italy control southwestern Anatolia, and
gave the Kurds autonomy in much of northern Kurdistan, with the right to
vote for independence one year later and unite with southern Kurdistan in
today’s Iraq (which was controlled by Britain). The Grand National
Assembly in Ankara refused to accept these terms or comply with its
orders.
The Allied powers, the British in particular, gave Greece the right to
enforce the Treaty of Sèvres. Several years of warfare ensued, waged
mainly between the Anatolian Muslim resistance and foreign occupying
powers and their local Christian allies, but also between soldiers of the
Istanbul government and Mustafa Kemal’s forces. Defeating the army of the
short-lived independent Republic of Armenia—established in 1918 and led
by members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation—in autumn 1919
and signing a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union in early 1921
allowed the Anatolian fighters to focus on western and northwestern
Anatolia. Greek armies, after having been given the green light by the
British to occupy İzmir in 1919, conquered much territory in the region
throughout 1920 and 1921. The Greeks were stopped by the forces under
the command of Mustafa Kemal at the Battle of the Sakarya, only eighty
kilometres southwest of Ankara, during a nearly three-week struggle in
September 1921. Mustafa Kemal’s men had changed the situation on the
ground and had become the de facto government of the Muslim rump state,
driving foreign armies out of much of Anatolia, defeating the French in
southern Anatolia, and threatening to take southern Kurdistan (northern
Iraq) from the British.
In August and September 1922, in their last great offensive following
the Battle of the Sakarya, Mustafa Kemal’s forces, the Ottoman Muslim
nationalists, routed the Greek army south of Afyon-Karahisar, capturing its
commander in chief and driving its surviving troops and the Greek
population of western Anatolia all the way back to İzmir on the Aegean
coast. The Muslim nationalists burned the city to the ground, targeting first
the Armenian quarter and then the Greek Orthodox neighbourhoods,
sparing only the Muslim and Jewish districts.7 Thousands of desperate
Greeks fled to İzmir’s harbour and then onto waiting ships, which took
them to Greece, never to return.
Mustafa Kemal crushed or outmanoeuvred left-wing, right-wing, and
Islamist rivals, including Enver Pasha—who was based alternately in
Berlin, Baku, and Moscow and tried unsuccessfully to rally former CUP
and Special Organisation members to join his own Muslim army entering
Anatolia from the east. He served as political leader and commander in
chief of the political and military battles between 1919 and 1922, which
were reframed afterward as Turkey’s successful war for independence.8
Brooking no resistance, Mustafa Kemal’s followers assassinated or lynched
politicians and journalists who opposed them.9 The shadow-government
Grand National Assembly in Ankara promoted Mustafa Kemal to field
marshal, conferring upon him the messianic title of ‘saviour’ and the old
Ottoman title of gazi, holy warrior.
Turning his back on Ottoman Muslim nationalism, as well as on his
connection to the Ottoman past, Mustafa Kemal adopted the title of gazi,
which harkened back to what the Ottomans had argued was the crucial
factor in their rise. At the same time, he began to promote the ideology of
secular Turkish nationalism in its place. On 1 November 1922, the Grand
National Assembly separated the caliphate from the sultanate, named
Mehmed VI’s cousin Abdülmecid II, the eldest Ottoman male heir, as
caliph, and abolished the sultanate. The last Ottoman cabinet resigned. Only
the Ankara government would represent the empire. Fearing for his life, a
little over two weeks later the last sultan, Mehmed VI—escorted by the
commander in chief of Allied forces occupying the Ottoman Empire,
British general Charles Harington—left Yıldız Palace. Mehmed VI boarded
the British warship Malaya and sailed to Malta. With British backing, he
attempted to gain recognition as the caliph in Mecca. Failing in his efforts
in the first half of 1923, he retired to the Italian Riviera.10
On 29 October 1923, the Turkish Republic was declared in Ankara. The
Ottoman Empire was replaced by a constitutionalist republic that abrogated
the caliphate. In 1924 the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, and the remaining
members of the dynasty were expelled from Turkey and forbidden from
returning. Abdülmecid II took refuge in Switzerland and then France.11 The
last sultan, Mehmed VI, passed away on 16 May 1926 in San Remo. He
was buried in Damascus a month and a half later. After more than six
hundred years in power, the rule of the Ottoman family had ended.
The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne replaced the Treaty of Sèvres. It was
negotiated between Britain, France, Italy, and Greece on one side, and
Mustafa Kemal’s government in Ankara—where the Defence of Popular
Rights committees had been reestablished as a single political party, the
Republican People’s Party—on the other. The Treaty of Lausanne
recognised the establishment of the independent Turkish Republic. All
foreign troops were ordered to leave. But so were some religious minorities.
Based on the principle that nation-states should have homogenous
populations, the treaty mandated a compulsory, irreversible ‘population
exchange’ of Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey and Muslims in
Greece.12 The approximately 200,000 Greek Orthodox and 350,000
Muslims who were ‘exchanged’ were forbidden to return.13 Approximately
one million Greek Orthodox had already fled from western Anatolia to
Greece after Greek forces were routed in 1922. The Greek Orthodox in
Istanbul and two islands in the Dardanelles were exempt, as were Muslims
in western Thrace. Along with war, genocide, famine, epidemics, and
forced migration, this internationally sanctioned ethnic cleansing
contributed to Anatolia’s Christian population decreasing from one in five
inhabitants (20 percent) in 1913 to one in forty (2 percent) in 1923.14
The Treaty of Lausanne gave neither Armenians nor Kurds autonomy.
Both had been promised autonomy in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, but
neither Armenia nor Kurdistan was even mentioned in the new agreement.
The Turkish Republic ceased mentioning Kurds and Kurdistan, and Turkish
place names replaced Kurdish, Armenian, and Greek ones. Turning its back
on a decade of Ottoman Muslim nationalism—when Islam was used to
build loyalty to the leaders and especially to link Turks and Kurds in
common cause to wage war against perceived enemies—the new republic
would be one for the Turks alone.
Mustafa Kemal fashioned a new nation from the ashes of the Ottoman
Empire. To do so he chose to jettison the past, to obliterate any and all
connections with what had come before. According to a Turkish scholar, the
Turkish Republic ‘was originally based on forgetting’.15 Already in 1922,
Mustafa Kemal—who would be given the name Atatürk, the father of the
Turks, by the Grand National Assembly in 1934 and would lead the Turkish
Republic from its founding until his death in 1938—declared, ‘The new
Turkey has absolutely no relation with the old Turkey. The Ottoman state
has gone down in history. Now, a new Turkey is born’.16
CONCLUSION
The Ottoman Past Endures
Credit: Medhî, Şâh-nâme, an Ottoman Turkish translation of the Persian epic, Uppsala
University Library, Sweden, Ms. O Cels. 1, fols. 1b–2a, public domain
Miniature depicting male dancer and musicians performing
for the sultan and public at princely circumcision festival
(1582–1583)
Credit: Franz (Frans) Geffels (Künstler), Die Entsatzschlacht Wiens 1683, 1683–1694,
Sammlung Wien Museum, CC BY 3.0 AT, Foto: Birgit und Peter Kainz, Wien Museum
(https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/objekt/3)
Mehmed IV as child sultan
I never would have imagined writing this book were it not for Adam
Gauntlett, who, after realising that I was the only professor in the United
Kingdom teaching Ottoman history from beginning to end, convinced me to
write a complete history of the dynasty. I would like to thank dear friend
Theresa Truax, who saved this book at a crucial stage. I am grateful for the
wise counsel of Joe Zigmond at John Murray and Brian Distelberg at Basic
Books, who offered invaluable criticism on many book drafts. I am
indebted to Roger Labrie for asking important questions, which compelled
me to rewrite the manuscript until it was clearer. I would like to express my
gratitude to Yorgo Dedes, Ceyda Karamürsel, Chris Markiewicz, Esra
Özyürek, Christine Philliou, Elyse Semerdjian, Gagan Sood, Bedross Der
Matossian, and Taylor Sherman, who graciously commented on all or
sections of the manuscript in the midst of a plague year. I am thankful that
the International History Department at the London School of Economics
and Political Science granted sabbatical leave, which enabled me to finish
writing this book. My debt to my teachers, Carl Petry, Rudi Lindner, Fatma
Müge Göçek, Ronald Grigor Suny, Robert Dankoff, and Cornell Fleischer,
who taught me to look critically at Ottoman history from different
perspectives, will be evident to all specialist readers of this work.
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authors.
To cut down on the number of notes, I have not cited basic reference tools
every time I have used them for factual details. These include articles on
individuals and historical events in the various editions of the
Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopaedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Judaica,
and the Turkish version of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the İslam
Ansiklopedisi, and its continuation as Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam
Ansiklopedisi. I have relied on Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story
of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005) and Erik
J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 4th revised ed. (London: I.B. Tauris,
2017) for the basic outline and chronology of Ottoman history.