doremon
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The walled city of Vienna (less than 150,000 population). Ottoman armies surrounded the city for two months in the summer of 1683. Christian armies arrived, and with the Battle of Vienna the Ottomans withdrew, their expansion in Europe at its end.
Lost Trade, Oppression and a Weak Middle Class
World trade shifted from the Mediterranean Sea and from overland routes between the West and East. Piratical violence on the Mediterranean Sea was rampant and hurting economies connected to trade across that sea. The Muslims had been world traders, but the bulk of world trade was bypassing the Middle East and transit across Muslim lands. The British and Dutch were sailing the Atlantic and Indian oceans and taking over trade between northern and southern Europe. Spices from Asia were being shipped by sea directly to Europe, leaving Muslims without a percentage of the profits.
The Ottoman Empire -- the greatest of empires in the 1500s – was ruled by a sultan who was commander-in-chief of the military and looked upon his male subjects as soldiers of Islam. The Ottoman Empire was a theocracy, with the sultans dedicated to the advance of Islam – the Sunni branch of Islam – through military means. A primary source of wealth for the sultan had been loot from conquests. The sultans were less interested in the study of economics for the purpose of advancing their societies economically, or advancing agriculture scientifically. European merchants were scurrying across the globe looking for raw materials, markets and profits, while the middle class in the Ottoman Empire were looked upon by the sultans as a threat to their authority. The middle class in the Ottoman Empire was more interested in commerce than the sultan and more materialistic than the mullahs, and middle class interests received little support from either. The sultans succeeded in inhibiting the growth of their empire's middle class while Europe's middleclass was growing in wealth and influence.
Ottoman society continued with its traditions. Law for Muslims was a matter of interpreting the Koran. Government officials appointed judges and jurists, and jurists with the title of mufti had the right to issue fatwas (opinions within religious law). Legal decisions were based somewhat on a consensus among the Islamic scholars – with various schools of thought in various geographical areas. According to a Harvard Law School scholar, Noah Feldman:
By tradition and logic, the shari'a was an uncodified body of legal doctrines, principles, values, and opinions. It was the province of the scholarly class to use interpretation and discern the requirements of the law. The fact that the law could not be looked up and ascertained by just anybody was precisely what made the scholars into the keepers of the law and its embodiment. (Click here for more.)
Restricting the Development of Printing
Printing on paper with movable type was part of a new age in Europe from the 1500s. Printing helped create a new variety among Christians in the form of Protestantism. Printed books on all sorts of subjects, technical and non-technical, was part of a growing commerce, rise in literacy and education. Egypt had block printing from the ninth century, mostly for prayers, but the productivity of advanced printing was slow in coming to Islamic societies. In Islam, memorization was bigger than it was among Christians. A good child memorized the Koran. He did not have a printed Koran at hand for reference. Printing the Koran began in Christendom, in Venice in the year 1530 – in Arabic.
For Muslims, Arabic was the language of God and the original language, given to Adam. Proper Arabic grammar was as it was in the Koran. Classical Arabic was the only literary language of the Arab world. Creativity with the language was frowned upon. Translations of the Koran were forbidden.
In the early 1700s a Transylvanian-born slave, intellectual and diplomat who had converted to Islam, Ibrahim Muteferrika (1670-1745), received permission to print non-religious books. Caligraphers protested. His presses publicized news of the inventions of the telescope and microscope to the Muslim community. But the use of advanced printing methods ended with his death in 1745. Decades would pass before books would again be printed.
In 1873 permission would be granted to print the Koran, in Arabic of course.
Muslim scholars remained conservative. They were convinced of the superiority of their Islamic civilization and of doing things as described in the Koran. And the Ottoman religious establishment was being infiltrated by those with a Sufi point of view, which increased
an other-worldliness attitude rather than favor of modernization.
In the 1500s, Ottoman society had substantial population growth. Poor peasants had been moving into the towns, creating large-scale unemployment, and the unemployed sought relief by joining religious organizations, which brought them little other than spiritual relief. Instances of improvement in agriculture were helping some peasants in the empire – in Romania, Bulgaria, Thrace and Macedonia – where farmers had begun growing crops from the Americas and feeding their animals maze. They were able to export more wheat and cattle. But in the empire as a whole agriculture was not developing commercially as it had been among the Dutch and British.
Taxes and a Discouraged Middle Class
War and military expansion had been a primary source of wealth for Islamic society, and when that stopped in the 1500s rulers demanded more in taxes and seized the properties of merchants and entrepreneurs. As a consequence, less wealth was invested in the economy. Some manufacturing continued, such as cotton weaving and the production of raw silk, but in the Ottoman Empire money to invest in the growth of manufacturing was diminished.
The sultan's government had been selling the job of tax collecting, and the buyer of this position collected enough in taxes to satisfy the income wants of the authorities and himself. The tax collector decided how much to tax. The poor who scratched a living from the soil had little to tax, but anyone who could afford to invest in a new enterprise became an obvious target for tax collection and bribery by officials.
The government also raised money by the sale offices to the highest bidder, in part so the sultan and an elite could continue to live in the luxury to which they were accustomed. Rather than people being selected for administrative offices based on merit – training, competence and talent – government offices were going to people who had money. And promotion by merit had been replaced by nepotism and favoritism. Corruption had spread to the provinces where an official would buy his office and then squeeze more taxes from the populace to reimburse himself. And corruption reached judicial officials, whose decisions were at times for sale. In the 1600s the Ottoman historian, Haji Khalifa (1608-1657), saw Ottoman society resting on four pillars: the mullahs (Islamic clerics), the army, the merchants and the farmers, and he saw Ottoman society as sick because of corruption, high taxation and oppression of the masses. There were rebellions by the oppressed, but the rebellions were always crushed.
The economy of the Ottoman Empire was hurt also by an unfavorable balance of trade. Wealthy Muslims were purchasing goods from Christendom, but little was being exported and the supply of gold was diminishing. As manufactured goods flowed into the Ottoman Empire, local handicraft industries suffered. Manufacturing remained largely a peasant operation – home industry. Foot-operated treadle reels, hand-operated looms and silk-twisting machines were to be used in the Ottoman Empire into the 1800s. And, for the Ottoman Empire, economic weakness produced military weakness.
A Weakened Military and Diminished Empire
The Ottoman Turks had been watching the retreat of Islam to their north, Kazan, where the Russians were pushing against the Tatars. Into the 1600s the Ottomans still held territory just short of Vienna, and to maintain their strength they had been equipping their armies with European firearms. This required more money for waging war, paid for by farmers.
Militarily the Ottoman Empire was changing. The Janissaries had been the heart of the Ottoman army and the world's most effective military unit, but they had acquired more influence and had been rewarded with more privileges. They had been allowed to marry, causing them to shift their first loyalty from the military to their families. By the 1600s Janissaries had become involved in trade. The Janissaries in the Ottoman armies were being replaced by recruits drawn from the unemployed. And the old fief system, with the reward of land to the warriors on horseback, was being abandoned – a benefit militarily, a feudalistic military machine having become inappropriate for combat against European powers.
Nevertheless, the Ottomans did weaken militarily vis-à-vis the Europeans. Ottoman rulers believed that an army could be led adequately by an unschooled amateur. The Ottomans were not keeping up with the study of military changes, while faith in God continued to be held as of paramount military consequence. The muskets that the Ottomans had acquired from the West were not to be used in the most effective manner, as organized fire power laid down by a team. The muskets were to be used individually, with the same individual courage involved in fighting with a sword.
A part of the decline in military power was the weakness in political leadership. The education of sultans had declined. The able sultan Suleiman I (Sulayman) ruled from 1520 to 1566, and those after him tended to be men of little ability, training or experience. Some were mentally defective. They were reared and influenced by eunuchs and women with no education. The harem was the center of their life. Similar to the rest of the world, power passing to the eldest male of the royal family did not always put top leadership among the Ottomans with the most able.
The Ottomans managed to drive the Cossacks back from Azov in 1641. Then, rather than considering that the world had changed, they tried to resume the conquests of centuries before. The Ottomans decided to try another assault on Vienna. The assault was led by the Grand Vizar, an incompetent court favorite: Kara Mustafa. For two months, beginning in mid-July, 1683, Mustafa and his army surrounded Vienna. He bombarded the city. On September 2 his army penetrated the outer fortifications of the city. He knew of but ignored the approach of an army of 70,000 Habsburg and Polish troops coming to rescue Vienna. The Christian forces routed the Turks and pursued them, and by 1687 the Austrians had pushed the Ottomans out of Hungary and the city of Budapest.
The defeats upset people around the sultan, Mehmed IV, and in 1687 they deposed him, replacing him with his brother, Suleiman II, who had spent much of his forty-five years in the royal harem. Suleiman II appointed Mustafa's younger brother as military commander, but the military losses continued. In 1688 the Austrians drove the Ottomans out of Belgrade. In 1690, the Ottomans retook Belgrade, but in 1697 the Russians drove the Ottomans out of Azov, and that year the Ottomans were defeated at the battle of Zenta -- about one hundred miles southwest of Budapest. Under diplomatic pressure from the Dutch, the British and the Venetians, the war that had begun in 1683 was ended in 1699, the Ottomans feeling obliged to sign a treaty with Austria, Poland and Venice. This was the Treaty of Karlowitz, a dictated treaty with most European nations represented. The Ottomans gave up some European territory: Hungary and Transylvania were ceded to Austria; Podolia, occupied by the Ottomans in 1672, was returned to Poland; Morea (the Peloponnesian Peninsula), taken from Venice in 1460, was returned to Venice, as was most of Dalmatia. The Ottomans were expanding their control on the island of Crete, but the glorious days of Islamic conquest were over, never to be replicated.
Ottoman power had declined vis-à-vis Christendom not because its soldiers were not courageous or genetically inferior. What had hurt the Ottomans was social organization and inept political leadership. And the West had become more economically advanced, more economically productive, its navies and armies better fed and better equipped.
