The present chapter focuses on international relations and addresses two complementary aspects of the place of the Ottoman Empire in the wider international community. Thus, it explores the empire’s relations with other states, empires, and nations, as well as its diplomatic strategies. The chapter offers a distinctive commentary on the global order through the Ottoman perspective. It first focuses on the changing place of the Ottoman empire in the international order, 1700–1922, as it declined from first- to second-rank status. It then examines the changing diplomatic tools employed in dealing with other states, particularly the shift from occasional to continuous methods of diplomacy. Another diplomatic tool, the caliphate, gave the Ottoman state a special religious instrument that it increasingly used for secular state purposes from the eighteenth century onwards. And finally, the chapter provides an overview of Ottoman relations with Europe, central Asia, India, and North Africa.
The place of the Ottoman state and any political system in the international order is a function of many factors, sometimes demographic and economic power. A large and densely settled population is not always a certain barometer of political importance: consider the vast power of eighteenth-century Prussia with its tiny population and the political weakness of nineteenth-century China, the world’s most populous country at the time. In the Ottoman case, a relative decline in the global importance of its population paralleled its fading international political importance. Between 1600 and 1800, the Ottoman population slipped from being one-sixth that of western Europe to only one-tenth and from about one-eighth to one-twelfth that of China. Its relative economic importance fell even more dramatically. Ironically, the Ottomans’ peak of political power precisely coincided with the conquest of the New World by western Europe. This event clearly placed Europe on a separate trajectory from the rest of the world and shifted the balance of power westward from the Mediterranean world to the Atlantic economies.
Globally speaking, the Ottoman state in 1500 was one of the most powerful in the world, surpassed perhaps only by China. Then the “Terror of the World,” the Ottoman Empire played a crucial role in the lives and deaths of many, quite different, states. The Ottoman Empire destroyed or outlasted the Mamluks of Egypt, the Safevids of the Iranian plateau and the Venetian Republic. It played a vital, formative role (see chapter 1) in the lifecycles of the Vienna Habsburgs and the Russian Romanovs until all three dynastic states vanished in the early twentieth century. The Ottoman state helped to define the kingship of Philip II of the Spanish Habsburgs as a crusading enterprise while exercising a less central but still key influence on the international politics of France. For the English monarchy, the distant Ottoman state was a more marginal concern.
By the eighteenth century, however, the “Terror” had become the Sick Man of Europe. Even so, as we shall see, the Ottomans remained high on the international agendas of Britain, France, Russia, Vienna, and the new states of Italy and Germany during the nineteenth century. In addition, the Ottomans were significant to the interests of many states in the Indian subcontinent, central Asia as well as North Africa. Between the Ottomans and their neighbors, from early times, there existed quite permeable frontiers with habitual diplomatic, social, cultural, and economic exchanges across them. For example, merchants with their goods moved routinely in both directions across these boundaries and the quantities exchanged became increasingly large over time (see chapter 7). European artists, architects, scientists, and soldiers of fortune frequented the Ottoman capital in search of employ in the court of the sultan and ranking notables. To give a fifteenth-century example of these cultural exchanges, recall the fine portrait of Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror by the Renaissance Venetian painter, Gentile Bellini. Three centuries later, Mozart captured this fluidity well in his opera, Escape from the Seraglio. His hero, Belmonte, disguised himself as a Spanish architect in order to enter the sultan’s palace and find his lost beloved. To the composer’s Vienna audiences, west Europeans in Istanbul were a familiar image. Istanbul, Vienna, Rome, and Paris all were attractive destinations for those seeking work and favor in the courts of the great.
Diplomatic activity is another measure of frequent exchanges across frontiers. Emissaries, on missions of greater and briefer durations and importance, commonly crossed the Ottoman frontiers in both directions. During the sixteenth century, for example, representatives of the sultans and of the French and Hapsburg rulers visited one another’s courts to seek advantage, redress grievances and negotiate possibilities of peace and war. Two centuries later, we can count the number of diplomatic exchanges as an indicator of the tempo and pace of the cross-frontier contacts in the centuries preceding continuous, “modern” diplomacy. Thus, between 1703 and 1774, the Ottomans signed sixty-eight recorded treaties or agreements with other sovereign entities, each requiring at least a single diplomatic mission in one direction or the other. Hence, during the reign of Sultan Ahmet III (1703–1730), twenty-nine treaties or agreements were signed, including three with the Nogai Tatars and one with Iran, while Sultan Mahmut I (1730–1754) signed thirty agreements, including four with Iran and two with the Dey of Algiers (a nominal vassal of the sultan). Thus, taking the eighteenth century as our example, there clearly were frequent diplomatic contacts between the Ottoman Empire and the wider world prior to the emergence of modern diplomacy.
A major, worldwide shift took place in the conduct of diplomacy, beginning in the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance period. While in many respects the Ottoman state participated in the changes in diplomacy from an early date, the turning point probably did not occur until the nineteenth century, when patterns and trends that had been evolving slowly came together. In sum, Ottoman diplomacy became continuous only at a relatively late date.
In the more distant past, diplomacy fairly could be characterized as ad hoc, intermittent, non-continuous, and personally highly dangerous. Seeking to conduct negotiations for a specific purpose, a ruler (in this case the sultan) assembled a specially formed mission, usually consisting of trusted government servants. Gathering the individuals together, the ruler issued directives and letters of introduction as well as the missives to be delivered. The emissaries went on their journey, arrived at the foreign court, negotiated, and returned with the results. When the group left the foreign court, the diplomatic contact between the two states ended. Thus diplomacy between states functioned only sporadically, during the weeks and months of these embassies. To personalize this pattern, consider the career of Ahmet Resmi Efendi (1700–1783). He began state service as a clerk and, after twenty-five years, was sent on a four-month mission to Vienna, on the occasion of the accession of Sultan Mustafa III. His visit ended in 1758, and he returned to Istanbul where he entered the financial offices of the state. He is somewhat unusual in that he went on more than one mission for his ruler. Thus, in 1764–1765, he traveled to Berlin, unsuccessfully offering Frederick the Great an alliance with the Ottoman state. This type of diplomacy personally was highly risky and could result in imprisonment and even execution (but not for Ahmet Resmi). While such methods of diplomacy in general provided no principles of protection for emissaries, those to the Ottoman court received some because the Prophet Muhammad’s behavior allegedly provided the precedent for the protection of persons sent on diplomatic missions. Still, diplomats sent to Istanbul were held responsible for their sovereign’s behavior and many ended up in the Seven Towers prison (until Selim III, 1789–1807, halted the practice).
During the period of so-called “pre-modern” international relations, the Ottoman state generally employed unilateral diplomacy, that is, at the will of the sultan. There are many examples regarding Venice, the Hapsburg Empire, and Poland in which the sultan unilaterally granted peace or trade concessions at his own discretion. Such unilateral actions were standard practices in “pre-modern” diplomacy; they also can be understood to reflect the Ottoman Empire’s power at the time. And yet, Ottoman diplomacy sometimes possessed a certain bilateral quality. Back in the sixteenth century, for example, Süleyman the Magnificent treated King Francis I of France as an equal, addressing him with the title of “padishah.” Also, the Ottomans granted certain reciprocal rights in peace settlements that lent them a bilateral character, dependent on the continuing consent of both the Ottoman ruler and the other party, whether it be the Habsburg emperor or the Venetian Senate.
In “pre-modern” diplomacy, a condition of war between nations was assumed to prevail unless specifically stated otherwise. There was no recognized condition of peace, only halts in the fighting. Sultans therefore felt at liberty to resume fighting at will and without warning. In the Ottoman world, this notion of permanent war found its theoretical justification in the Islamic division of the world between the House of War and the House of Islam. It needs to be stressed that the same notion of permanent war prevailed elsewhere, for example, in China and Europe, where it received different legal justifications. Until 1711, agreements to end fighting with European states were limited to one, two, five, seven, eight, twenty, or twenty-five years of peace. Eternal peace first appeared in the 1711 Treaty of Pruth, but the 1739 Peace of Belgrade with Vienna relapsed to the earlier system and limited the peace to twenty-seven moon years.
The so-called capitulations played a vital role in Ottoman international relations, governing the treatment of foreigners who happened to be residing, for however long, within the sultanic domains. The concept of capitulations, based on the idea that each state possessed its own laws too exalted for others to enjoy, was not uniquely Ottoman, and prevailed elsewhere in the world, for example in China. Hence, only Ottoman subjects normally could benefit from Ottoman law. The ruler granted capitulations to foreigners in a unilateral, non-reciprocal, manner. Although Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent usually is credited with initiating the practice, recent scholarship suggests that negotiations during his reign were not completed and it was his son Selim II who likely granted the first capitulations, to France, in 1569. In a unilateral act of generosity, friendship, and favor, and because the sultan wanted or needed certain commodities, he allowed the French king’s subjects to travel in the Ottoman lands under the king’s own laws, outside of the sultan’s legal and fiscal jurisdiction. This act, intended to benefit the Ottoman state, lapsed on the death of the sultan granting it. (Their limited character faded in 1740 when, in gratitude for diplomatic aid, capitulations to the French were made permanent.) A capitulation meant that all subjects of a foreign monarch and citizens of republics such as Venice remained under the laws of their own king or republic once the capitulatory favor had been granted. Otherwise, foreigners inside the empire had no legal protection. Persons with capitulatory status also enjoyed full exemption from Ottoman taxes and customs duties. Not surprisingly, capitulations proved popular and were requested by other Western states, especially England and Holland. Harmless enough in the sixteenth-century era of Ottoman power, they came to dangerously undermine its sovereignty later on.
As the Ottoman Empire weakened, European states twisted the capitulations into something they had never been intended to be. In the sixteenth century, only small numbers of merchants obtained these legal and tax immunities. By the eighteenth century, however, large numbers of foreigners within the empire advantageously did business thanks to these tax exempting privileges. Still worse, many Ottoman non-Muslim subjects obtained certificates (berats), granting them the tax privileges and benefits of Europeans who had capitulatory status, including exemption from the jurisdiction of the Ottoman courts. Again and again, Ottoman policy-makers sought to eliminate the capitulatory regime and its abuses, but failed to do so because of European opposition. Finally, during World War I, and over the protests of its German ally, the Young Turk leaders unilaterally suspended the capitulations. These finally were abolished in the Turkish Republic in 1923 but continued in Egypt until the late 1930s.
“Modern diplomacy,” a different form of regulating relations among states and of conducting international relations, had emerged during the late Renaissance as a way of dealing with the incessant warfare of the many principalities in the Italian peninsula. From there, modern diplomacy spread to west and central Europe by the time of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and thereafter to the rest of the world. This mode of inter-state relations and diplomacy is continuous and reciprocal and rests on notions of reciprocity, extraterritoriality, and equality of sovereignty: no matter how weak or strong, each state is equal to the next when they meet on matters of international relations. The emergence of modern diplomacy coincided, more or less, with the decline in Ottoman military power and, in the later centuries, became an important tool in the Ottoman arsenal of survival.
During the negotiations for the Karlowitz treaty in 1699 and again in 1730, the Ottomans accepted French mediation on their behalf. By the late eighteenth century, Ottoman policy-makers not only accepted but actively sought mediation as well as defensive treaties of alliance. Examples include the 1798 Russian, British, and Ottoman alliance against Bonaparte, as well the 1799 tripartite defensive alliance with Britain and France. Until the nineteenth century, however, permanent diplomacy remained unidirectional as west, central, and east European states, but not the Ottoman, sent resident legations. The Istanbul government accepted European diplomats (whose reports back home are a marvelous source of Ottoman history) virtually from the time that resident missions were first developed in Europe. This refusal to send permanent emissaries may have reflected the older attitude, pre-dating permanent embassies, that only weaker princes should send a standing representative, not rulers of more powerful states. In any event, for a long time the Ottomans did not feel they needed permanent representation abroad. As seen above, reciprocity long had been present in Ottoman diplomacy and often existed on an ad hoc basis. For example, when an Ottoman subject was poorly treated in a state to which capitulatory privileges had been granted, there may have been consequences. More specifically, following the signature of the 1774 Küçük Kaynarca treaty, emissaries from the two sides traveled to their adversaries’ capital conveying letters ratifying the treaty.
During the eighteenth century, as in the past, the Ottoman court treated foreign ambassadors as guests, paying their expenses and assigning them escort officers. This behavior has been interpreted as a refusal to recognize some aspects of the new state system, saying these guests were present by invitation and on sufferance but not by right. If so, the early eighteenth-century French government also was guilty of the same reluctance since the French court in 1720 paid for the transportation and the entire six-month stay of the Ottoman emissary to Paris, one Yirmisekiz Çelebi.
Sultan Selim III is credited for initiating reciprocal and continuous relations. Beginning in 1793, he established a permanent embassy in London and counterparts in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin within a few years. He also appointed consuls to look after commercial interests (such consulates apparently already had existed in different places after 1725). For a variety of reasons, Sultan Selim’s efforts failed and diplomatic service at the ambassadorial (but perhaps not the consular) level was suspended in the 1820s.
The “modern” Ottoman diplomatic service began taking its definitive shape in 1821. In their dealings with foreigners, the Ottoman rulers had been dependent on translators, the so-called dragomans. These dragomans mainly were recruited from the Ottoman Greek community, which possessed considerable multilingual skills because substantial Greek trading communities did business in the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean worlds. To a lesser extent, other diaspora communities with international commercial links, notably the Armenian, possessed similar language capabilities and supplied dragomans. With the Greek war of independence, the loyalty of Ottoman Greeks generally became suspect. The Greek Patriarch of Constantinople was hung and the Greek dragomans, who had been in positions of power and sensitivity, were seen as potentially disloyal. And so, in 1821, the Ottoman government established the Translation Bureau (Tercüme Odası) to develop a new source for the recruitment of translators and end its dependence on the dragomans. This Translation Bureau, which remained very small until 1833, assumed responsibility for translations from European languages. A seemingly minor office, it quickly became the major site of political prestige and mobility within the Ottoman bureaucracy. Personnel of the Translation Bureau rose to become among the most important bureaucrats of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, as it increasingly integrated into the international state system of continuous diplomacy. Knowledge of European languages, especially French, became a key qualification for advancement in Ottoman state service and the best place to learn was in the Translation Bureau. For many, but not all elites, proficiency in French served not merely as a symbol of cultural modernity but became virtually its content. In the eyes of such individuals, modernity meant knowledge of European languages and the lack of such tools of knowledge (incorrectly) spelled backwardness and reaction.
Sultan Mahmut II (1808–1839) formally created the Foreign Ministry and, in 1834, set up the diplomatic apparatus to allow for permanent missions abroad. The timing seems crucial for the capital city had just escaped occupation by the Russians in 1829 and by the forces of Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1833. In this crisis, the armies had failed and only diplomacy remained to save the state. Thus, the group of full-time, salaried persons – dedicated solely to conducting diplomacy on behalf of the Ottoman state in foreign lands – owed its emergence to both long-term evolutionary patterns and the immediate crisis of the early 1830s.
By the early 1870s, there were Ottoman embassies in Paris, London, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, legations in Berlin, Washington, and Florence/Rome and consulates in a number of states in North and South America, Africa, and Asia. In 1914, the central offices of the Foreign Ministry in Istanbul held about 150 officials. By then, there were eight embassies – in Berlin, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Tehran, London, Washington, and Vienna. In addition, lower ranking diplomats served in eight legations – in Athens, Stockholm, Brussels, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Madrid, and The Hague – while more than 100 staffed the Ottoman consular service, not including commercial agents.
Most Ottoman diplomats derived from elite backgrounds. A school named Galatasaray Lycée (Mekteb-i Sultani), established in 1868, became the most important single source of Foreign Ministry officials. Instructors offered lessons, mostly in French, from a curriculum based on that of a French lycée. Students came from wealthy families, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and their attendance at the school served as a key vehicle for entry into Ottoman elite life.
Thanks to their privileged backgrounds and training, more than two-thirds of all Foreign Ministry officials commanded two or more foreign languages. As the century wore on, their knowledge of French became more important and that of Persian less so, while Arabic language skills remained stable. Thus, the content of elite education changed considerably and exposure to west European culture eroded mastery of Islamic Arabo-Persian culture.1
Service in the Foreign Ministry was a prestigious and much sought after career, a reflection of the importance of diplomacy in the life of the empire. The best and the brightest of those who entered state service chose the Foreign Ministry. Not coincidentally, the three leading Tanzimat Grand Viziers – Mustafa Reşit, Fuat, and Ali Pashas – who dominated the era had all been foreign ministers. And, within the foreign service, the west European posts – particularly Paris and London – were most prestigious, higher ranking than those in Iran, the Black Sea littoral, the Balkans, or central Asia. This hierarchy says a great deal about the values of the time and where cultural as well as political power resided.
Despite the dragoman crisis surrounding the Greek Revolution, Ottoman Greeks and Armenians remained important within the Foreign Ministry. The same factors that had propelled them into the dragoman corps – the heavy engagement of the Armenian and Greek diaspora communities in commerce in Iran, the Mediterranean and Black Sea worlds, Europe, and South and North America – continued in force. Hence, they constituted a significant minority, some 29 percent, of all Foreign Ministry officials, a participation rate that is somewhat larger than the non-Muslims’ share of the total Ottoman population during the later nineteenth century. Slightly over-represented in the Foreign Ministry as a whole, these Ottoman Christians nonetheless did poorly, in proportion to their numbers, in terms of holding the better positions. While some did head major embassies, they mainly ended up in the minor consular posts despite the fact that they were the best-educated group. In sum, they readily entered the Foreign Ministry but did not have equal access to promotion opportunities.
The Ottomans possessed an unusual tool – the caliphate – in conducting diplomacy. The position of caliph originated in the seventh century CE, when the title was bestowed on political leaders – at first elective and then hereditary – of the new Islamic states after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. By 1000 CE, the caliphs had lost their political power but the position continued. During the 1000–1258 period, the caliphs served in a highly prestigious but mainly symbolic role that bound the Muslim community together, regardless of who actually held real political power in the various areas of the Islamic world. In the eyes of most Muslim jurists, the caliphate had ended in 1258 when the Mongols sacked Baghdad and murdered the last caliph. In the Ottoman era, sultans occasionally used the title of caliph but the title had ceased to carry any real significance.
In the eighteenth century, however, a different kind of caliphal position came to occupy a minor place in the Ottoman diplomatic arsenal. The latter-day caliphate began to emerge during the negotiations over the Küçük Kaynarca treaty of 1774. At that time, Russia recognized the Ottoman sultan as caliph of the Crimean Tatars. This token gesture, implying a vague kind of Ottoman religious suzerainty, was meant to camouflage the actual severing of the centuries-old tie between the sultans and the Crimean khans. That is, the Ottoman–Crimean connection was broken but not totally since the caliphal title remained, however ambiguous it may have been. The Russians in return received recognition of their own form of religious claim, the right to build and protect an Orthodox church in Istanbul, a bridgehead they later used to massively interfere in Ottoman domestic affairs (see chapter 3). Other forces were working that promoted Ottoman usage of the new caliphal tool. On a general level, the Ottomans’ military and political power abruptly and visibly collapsed in the 1768–1774 war, one of the worst defeats in their history. Equally dangerously, the growing Wahhabi state in Arabia offered a spiritual as well as military threat that jeopardized Ottoman administration of these distant provinces. Both the spiritual claims of the Wahhabi reformers as the heirs of true Islam and their early nineteenth-century seizure of Mecca and Medina seemed to undermine Ottoman legitimacy. Thus, the treaty of 1774, the continuing decline of Ottoman military power, and the Wahhabi threat all worked to fashion the caliphal position into a negotiating tool and means of bolstering the sultans’ prestige. Essentially, the Ottoman rulers were able to make this claim to the caliphate because of their military prowess in past centuries, their longevity as a dynasty, their possession of the Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, and because they remained the most powerful Islamic state to survive in the age of European imperialism. By the nineteenth century, large numbers of Muslims had fallen under British, Russian, and French domination in India, central Asia, and North Africa. The sultan began appealing to them and to his own subjects as caliph, as a rallying point for resistance and for loyalty. The caliphal idea – with all of its historic prestige and honor and evocation of earlier, better, Islamic times – indeed was most popular among central Asian and Indian Muslims, communities under attack by both Britain and Russia. Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876) already had adopted a pan-Islamic approach in his relations with other Muslim countries, appealing to a shared Islam as the basis for concerted action under his own caliphal leadership. But it was Sultan Abdülhamit II, ruling an empire that had become more Muslim than Christian in population since 1878, who most emphasized the caliphate.
Abdülhamit II first used the caliphal instrument during the Ottoman– Russian war of 1877–1878. The Russians earlier had crushed the central Asian Muslim states of Bukhara, Khiva, and Khokand, leaving the Afghans as a buffer between them and the British. After the Ottoman– Russian war began, the sultan sent a high level mission to Afghanistan to obtain help against their common Russian enemy. The emissary also visited British India where, in Bombay, Muslims gave him an enthusiastic welcome. For the rest of his reign, Sultan Abdülhamit II sent agents to work within these communities and strengthen his own position in this arena of Great Power politics.
Many Muslim heads of state, including the Uzbek khans, the Crimean khans, and the sultans of Sumatra in the East Indies acknowledged the Ottoman ruler as caliph. And they sometimes also recognized the Ottomans as their temporal leaders. For example, the ruler of Kashgar in central Asia is said to have issued coins bearing the Ottoman sultan’s name during the nineteenth century, while the Afghan emirs, acknowledging the sultan as successor of the true caliphs, agreed to read his name at the Friday prayer.
Although we cannot know how effectively the caliphate cemented the sultan’s hold on his own subjects, it is clear that the caliphal appeal ultimately did not have a major impact on the loyalties of Muslims under the domination of Britain, France, and Russia. In 1914, the Ottoman caliph/sultan issued a call for a holy war (jihad) against his French, British, and Russian enemies, appealing to their Muslim subjects to revolt. In the end they did not, despite three decades of propaganda. Indeed many served, if sometimes unwillingly, in the armies of the caliph’s enemies.
The Ottoman relationship with Europe changed considerably over time. It certainly was one characterized by war: between c. 1463 and 1918, the Ottomans fought at least forty-three wars and thirty-one of them were with the various European states. And yet, during this time of warfare, other, co-operative relationships existed, often hidden by the ideological divisions of the age. In the sixteenth century, the Pope and other Christian theologians still thought of the broader European world as being divided into the lands of Islam under the Ottomans and the Christian world, the respublica Christiana. The latter term meant that all Latin Christian states, but not including those of Orthodox Christianity, were part of a single, theoretically unified community, despite the fact they spoke different languages and were under the rule of different monarchs. This respublica Christiana notion was dying in the sixteenth century, alive only in the minds of theologians and a few others, being replaced by the concept of nation states, loyalty to which became more important than vague sentiments of Christian unity. For example, in the sixteenth century, the French king pursued policies to enhance the power of his state, at the expense of the rest of the Christian world. And so Francis I synchronized his foreign policy with that of the Ottomans, but very carefully avoided entering into an official alliance. One season, when it was battling with the Habsburgs who were also his enemy, Francis allowed the Ottoman fleet to winter on his south coast, the present day Riviera. For that he was roundly but ineffectually vilified. (Recall that during Süleyman the Magnificent’s reign occurred the first negotiations for granting a capitulation to the King of France.) Compare Francis’ caution in dealing with his de facto Ottoman ally and events that occurred a century and a half later. In 1688, another French king, Louis XIV, felt able to attack a fellow European Christian state, the Habsburg, at the very moment it was fighting the Ottomans. Louis received some mild rebukes but generally his actions were seen as the normal business of state. His decision marks a turning point in the evolution of the inter-state system, in Ottoman– west European relations, and the final collapse of the respublica Christiana ideal. Louis had shifted his policies abruptly. Just a few years before, he had sent troops to help the Habsburgs against the Ottoman forces at the battle at St. Gotthard (1664) and similarly had aided Venice in its fight against the Ottomans on Crete. So, 1688 clearly marks the presence of raison d’état, the principle that any behavior to protect a state was justified, as well as the more visible role of the Ottomans in the European balance of power, and the disappearance of the respublica Christiana.
Thus, in the Karlowitz negotiations of 1699 and those for the 1730 Peace of Belgrade, the French actively mediated on behalf of the Ottomans to prevent the Habsburgs from becoming too successful and upsetting the European balance of power. As the eighteenth century proceeded, west European–Ottoman relations evolved still further. The Ottomans signed formal alliances and actively fought in Egypt with one west European state, Britain, against another, France. By the mid nineteenth century, active military co-operation no longer seemed strange and during the Crimean war of 1853–1856 the Ottomans, British, and French all fought together against Russia. In 1856, the Ottoman Empire entered the “Concert of Nations,” a formal recognition of their transformation from antagonist to participant in the European state system.
One final word: while in a true sense the Ottoman state operated as one among many, using diplomacy and war in the European political arena, it nonetheless remained unique. As other states on the continent came to define themselves, they increasingly considered the Ottoman Empire to be an alien body, an “encampment on European soil.” But at the very same moment, some of them were allied with the Ottomans in a war. The legacy survives to the present; in part for this reason, I believe, the European Union continues to struggle with the application of Turkey, an important Ottoman successor state, for full membership (see chapter 10).
West, central and east Europe, although certainly an important and intense site of Ottoman diplomacy, were not the only regions in which Ottoman diplomats conducted their business. Active diplomacy persisted for centuries with states in central Asia, Iran, India and, to the west, North Africa. For example, between 1700 and 1774, Iranian monarchs sent embassies to the Ottoman state on eighteen separate occasions. Despite their frequency and their importance, these relationships largely have been overlooked in scholarly publications on Ottoman history.
As in earlier times, the Ottoman sultans during the eighteenth century intermittently established diplomatic ties with the rulers at Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh, and Khiva in the borderlands between Iran and central Asia. Often, the one or the other sent emissaries on the occasion of an accession to the throne or to discuss attacks on common enemies, first the Iranians but in later centuries, the Russians. Very often, the emissaries of Muslim states to the Ottoman court included pilgrimage to the Holy Cities in their itinerary. For example, an Uzbek khan sent an ambassador to Sultan Mustafa II who in the meantime had been dethroned. So the emissary presented his credentials and gifts to Sultan Ahmet III in 1703, went on the pilgrimage and in 1706 returned home. Another emissary quickly followed, sent by the succeeding khan to announce his own accession and congratulate Ahmet III. This person also made the pilgrimage before returning. During the early 1720s there were two additional Uzbek embassies but then none until 1777. Diplomatic contacts with the Khiva Uzbek khans of the Aral Sea area dated from the second half of the sixteenth century. The 1683 debacle at Vienna prompted an embassy to discuss the possibility of aid, while there were other embassies in 1732, 1736, and 1738. The catastrophe of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 also sparked a flurry of diplomacy between the Ottoman and central Asian rulers, who all feared continued Russian expansion. The Uzbek khan at Bukhara sent two emissaries in 1780; one died in Konya after making the pilgrimage but the other returned safely. Sultan Abdülhamit I sent valuable gifts along with his credentials (in Persian) to the Bukhara ruler. This mission and several to the Kazakh khans and to the Kirgiz were part of his grand diplomatic offensive to gain support for the retaking of the Crimea. One of the sultan’s emissaries to Bukhara, in 1787, then traveled to Afghanistan and, in 1790, re-established relations between the Ottoman and Afghan rulers.
Rulers from various states in the Indian subcontinent regularly dispatched emissaries to Istanbul during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, often on the occasion of their accession. There is a famous, perhaps apocryphal, story of a letter from the great Moghul Emperor Humayun to Süleyman the Magnificent in 1548. Many states in India, including the Moghul, sent emissaries during the eighteenth century, for example, in 1716, 1722, and 1747, often to obtain Ottoman aid in wars against Iran. A ruler on the Malabar coast ordered an emissary to Istanbul in 1777, seeking help against local Zoroastrian enemies. He sent two elephants as a gift, via Suez. One died en route but the other was presented to the sultan and lived out its days in the Ottoman capital. In 1780, the sister of a south Indian ruler arrived, asking for Ottoman help against the Portuguese and the English. Sultans Abdülhamit I and Selim III both concluded frequent political and commercial agreements with the Mysore sultanate in southern India, then enmeshed in the middle of the French–British struggle for the subcontinent. On one occasion, the Mysore ruler, Tipu Sultan, requested Ottoman intercession since, temporarily, they were allies of the British against Bonaparte in Egypt. Thus, at a moment at the end of the eighteenth century, Ottoman–British diplomacy was working both in the eastern Mediterranean and in the Indian subcontinent.
Political relations between Istanbul and the western North African states changed considerably over time. In the sixteenth century, the areas just east of Morocco had been provinces under direct control, but after local military commanders seized power during the seventeenth century, they became vassal states of varying sorts. Overall, Ottoman diplomacy in the region either sought to regulate the behavior of their nominal vassals or mediate in struggles among the vassals or between one of these and the neighboring sultanate of Fez, in modern Morocco. The North African states had found an important source of income in piracy and made their livings preying on shipping. The 1699 Karlowitz treaty, however, required Istanbul to more energetically protect signatories’ ships from attacks by North African corsairs. Thus forced to take action against his own vassals, Sultan Ahmet III in 1718 coerced the Dey of Algiers into halting his attacks on Austrian shipping. As mediators, the Ottomans often intervened in disputes between Fez and the Algerians, for example, in 1699. To obtain military supplies and political aid, the Moroccan sultan sent gifts to Istanbul in 1761, 1766, and 1786. In 1766, he was seeking support against French attacks but in 1783 he inquired as to what kind of aid he might offer in the Ottomans’ own struggle against the Russians. At this same moment, his Algerian rivals also were sending gifts to Sultan Abdülhamit I.
A fascinating example of Ottoman diplomacy in the western Mediterranean occurred in the late eighteenth century. Recall that in the 1768–1774 war, the Russians had sailed from the Baltic Sea, into the Mediterranean, and into the Aegean Sea, to destroy the Ottoman fleet at Çeşme. (They also burned Beirut.) When the second war with Czarina Catherine erupted, the sultan appealed to the Moroccan ruler to block Gibraltar and keep out the Russians while, in 1787–1788, an Ottoman legation negotiated with Spain to achieve the same goal.
Entries marked with a * designate recommended readings for new students of the subject.
*Aksan, Virginia. “Ottoman political writing, 1768–1808,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 25 (1993), 53–69.
Anderson, M. S. The Eastern Question (New York, 1966).
Cassels, Lavender. The struggle for the Ottoman Empire, 1717–1740 (New York, 1967).
*Deringil, Selim. The well protected dominions (London, 1998).
Farooqhi, Naimur Rahman. Mughal–Ottoman relations (Delhi, 1989).
Findley, Carter. Ottoman civil officialdom (Princeton, 1992).
Heller, Joseph. British policy towards the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1914 (London, 1983).
Hurewitz, J. C. The Middle East and North Africa, a documentary record. I: European expansion, 1535–1914, 2nd edn (New Haven and London, 1975).
Itzkowitz, Norman and Max Mote. Mübadele: An Ottoman–Russian exchange of ambassadors (Chicago, 1970).
Langer, William. The diplomacy of imperialism (New York, 2nd edn, 1951).
Marriott, J. A. R. The Eastern Question (Oxford, 1940).
*McNeill, William. Europe’s steppe frontier (Chicago, 1964).
Panaite, Viorel. The Ottoman law of war and peace. The Ottoman Empire and tribute payers (Boulder: distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 2000).
“Trade and merchants in the Ottoman-Polish ‘Ahdnames (1489–1699).” The great Ottoman–Turkish civilisation, II (Ankara, 2000), 220–229.
Parvev, Ivan. Habsburgs and Ottomans between Vienna and Belgrade (New York, 1995).
Vaughan, Dorothy M. Europe and the Turk: A pattern of alliances, 1350–1700 (Liverpool, 1951).
Wasit, S. Tanvir. “1877 Ottoman mission to Afghanistan,” Middle Eastern Studies 30, 1 (1994), 956–962.
1For a more nuanced view of the Galatasaray school, see Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial classroom. Islam, the state, and education in the late Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 2000), 99–112.