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.
What angered Mustafa Ali was what he perceived as the total abandonment of racialised class distinctions. Wealthy Kurds and Turks were being awarded government positions, he claimed, despite the fact they ‘do not have the capability and qualifications enough’ to be given power and authority, and will ‘never be fit’ to govern ‘and to distinguish right from wrong’. Giving them arms, horses, and military kit was enough for them. Going beyond this was incomprehensible, something he termed dangerous and evil. He disparaged their native trustworthiness, loyalty, and fitness to rule themselves. If only, he argued, sultans would study what history teaches, then they would see the errors of the present.16 But he was wrong to place his hopes in the sultanate.
After Suleiman I’s passing in 1566, the Ottomans entered a new phase in the politics of reproduction. A sedentary as opposed to warrior sultanate arose, alongside the rise to influence of the women of the harem. Seniority became the new law of succession rather than military victory and fratricide. It made succession an automatic procedure. Facilitated by the fact that the successor also resided in the palace, enthronements became quick and easy. But they did not end subsequent political crises or violence. From the end of the sixteenth century, we witness an era once referred to derogatorily as the ‘sultanate of women’, in which the mother of the sultan (valide sultan), a post-sexual woman, was more influential than the sultan. She controlled the imperial household, transmitted political values, and protected and preserved the dynasty.
Correlated with the rise of the valide sultan was a decreased emphasis upon the sultan being a gazi and waging jihad, or war against the Christian powers.17 Martial abilities had been of great importance to Ottoman sultans from the 1280s to 1453, especially the leading of troops in gaza, a prerequisite for maintaining their power, according to the Ottoman history writers. But, after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire was no longer a frontier-oriented realm whose motivating drive was warfare and territorial expansion. Instead, it became a bureaucratic, sedentary empire. Ever since Mehmed II had refused to stand at the sound of martial music, the primary component of a sultan’s identity was less gazi and more emperor.18
The abolishing of this custom symbolised how the imperatives of rule had changed during the transition of the sultan from the head warrior of a frontier principality to the ruler of an empire that spanned continents yet marginalised warriors. The lives of sultans had been marked by mobility, the childhood of sultans by a princely governate. Living in small towns in Anatolia, future sultans were taught the arts of war and governance. Once a sultan died, his sons raced to the capital to be enthroned, battling and ultimately killing their brothers in the process.
Murad III’s oldest son and successor, Mehmed III, was the last prince sent out to train in the provinces. He was also the last to enforce the law of fratricide at his accession, having all nineteen of his brothers, including infants, strangled with a silken bowstring when he became sultan.19 This extreme act of fratricide alarmed the sultan’s subjects outside the palace walls: according to an Ottoman chronicler, ‘the sound of wailing for the fate of these innocent people rose to Heaven’.20 Mehmed III’s father, Murad III, had such an unsatiable sexual appetite that he bedded virgins and widows without discrimination, and produced over one hundred children during his reign.21 He allegedly had been so driven by lust that he did not heed secular law, which would have prevented his having so many male children, who were, in the words of an Ottoman intellectual, ‘cruelly and wastefully’ killed at a young age when he died.22 His twenty-seven daughters, seven pregnant concubines, and numerous other concubines were sent with their eunuchs and servants to the Old Palace, as Mehmed III’s mother, concubines, and children took their place in the harem at Topkapı Palace.23
Mehmed III’s rise to power left a deep scar on the palace. Thereafter the throne would pass from prince to prince, brother to brother, in descending order of age. Upon Mehmed III’s death in the palace, his thirteen-year-old son Ahmed I (reigned 1603–1617) was immediately enthroned, and he became the first sultan to be circumcised after becoming the ruler.24 Contrary to his predecessors, he was young and lacked military or administrative experience. To acquire legitimacy in the eyes of his army commanders, he was the first to ritually gird a sword—likely that of Osman I—as part of the accession ceremonies.25 He also spared the life of his younger brother, Mustafa. He was confined in a part of the palace harem near the apartments of the valide sultan. Sealed from the outside world, the princely suite was dubbed ‘the cage’ in later centuries. In 1617, when Ahmed I passed away at the age of twenty-seven, he became the first sultan to be succeeded by his brother; twenty-six-year-old Mustafa became Mustafa I (reigned 1617–1618, 1622–1623).26 Seniority had by then replaced fratricide as the Ottoman method of succession. Ahmed I’s eldest son, the thirteen-year-old Osman, was allowed to live.
By then, the male head of the Ottoman dynasty was more sedentary than mobile, more often engaged in ceremony than battle. And when on the rare occasion they were compelled to head the imperial army, sedentary sultans with weak constitutions did not last long. Ahmed I built a stunning, six-minaret mosque, popularly referred to as the Blue Mosque due to its exquisite interior blue tilework, on the Hippodrome to celebrate the final suppression of rebellion in Anatolia. But he was no martial leader. As a Venetian contemporary noted, he had been happier in his garden in Topkapı than where wolves prowled.27
Beginning at the turn of the seventeenth century, rather than fighting for or actively claiming the throne, sultans were more often than not placed passively on it, sometimes even against their will. Primogeniture—the right of the firstborn son to inheritance—ensured that princes, compelled now to live deep in the palace in the harem, spent their entire childhood surrounded by eunuchs, boys, and women, gaining knowledge neither of how to lead troops in battle nor of the proper forms of statecraft.
Without a childhood spent training in male virtues and the cultivation of manliness, they had little chance to develop into ‘virtuous men’, as understood in that era. While mercifully left alive, Ottoman princes were politically neutralised in the palace, hermetically sealed off from the world, confined and condemned to a life of isolation. They waited for death or a chance to rule without having been prepared for the position. For some sultans, the only sword they would ever unsheathe was the ceremonial one that accompanied their accession. This was reflected in art, as it became conventional for miniaturists to depict the sultan on the throne and not on horseback leading a military campaign.28 In the seventeenth century, it was expected that the sultan would be a pacific figure.29
The sultan had been removed from the operations of government. The executive had shifted from the harem and palace to the grand vizier. Because he no longer administered the empire nor led gaza, the sultan withdrew from subjects and servants and from public view. Since ordinary speech was considered undignified for sultans to use, they communicated by sign language. Unable even to speak in public, the sultan became out of touch with ordinary people as well as administrators and the military, and he was visible only on rare, carefully staged processions through the capital. The sultan had become a showpiece and, like an icon, sat silently immobile on his throne wearing a three-foot turban. He appeared to be aloof, secluded, and as sublime as a Byzantine or Persian emperor. He had been reduced to a legitimating figure with merely symbolic, ceremonial functions.
Residing in the palace, sultans spent the dynasty’s wealth but not the empire’s. The two treasuries had been separated. Under these circumstances in which the dynasty and the empire became distinct yet connected entities, loyalty was owed to the dynasty and not to individual sultans, who became far less significant figures than they had been in the past. Although the empire still earned its legitimacy from its affiliation with the dynasty, the royal household was separated from the empire’s administration. Sultans reigned, but others ruled. New centres of power arose, in part due to a revolution in socioeconomic relations.
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.
Following decades of peace, renewed, decades-long wars against the Habsburgs and Safavids between 1578 and 1618, combined with changes in the key administrative institutions including the sultanate, led to a perception of decline among members of those same ruling institutions. This in turn led to a growth in political analysis and calls for reform in how the empire was governed and by whom. Searching for remedies to cure the body politic, many argued for turning the clock back to a romanticised ‘golden age’ with a strong sultan as unopposed military leader, along the lines of a caesar.
Beginning in the late sixteenth century, in order to ‘save’ the empire, Ottoman intellectuals began to analyse the birth of Ottoman decline, what had caused it, and how it could be reversed. In an inscription on a citadel in Moldova, Suleiman I had once boasted of his own sultanship: ‘I am God’s slave and Sultan of this world. By the grace of God I am head of Muhammad’s community. God’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions. I am Suleiman, in whose name the Friday sermon is read in Mecca and Medina. In Baghdad I am the Shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt, the Sultan; who sends his fleets to the seas of Europe, North Africa, and India. I am the Sultan who took the crown and throne of Hungary and granted them to a humble slave’.43 It was against this template—conquest, wealth, Islamic piety—that all future sultans would be judged.
Despite Suleiman I’s claims, the Ottomans did not destroy the Habsburgs or Safavids. Nor did they take the capitals of Vienna or Tabriz (more than temporarily) or Isfahan, let alone Venice or the seat of the pope in Rome. After Suleiman I, the Ottomans waged long, costly, and ultimately fruitless campaigns. The Ottomans fought the Safavids in the Caucasus under Murad III from 1578 to 1590, and during the entire reign of Ahmed I from 1603 to 1618. Murad III, Mehmed III, and Ahmed I waged continuous campaigns against the Habsburgs in Central Europe from 1593 to 1606. The Ottomans lost their former military superiority, not least in gunpowder technology.
After the reign of Safavid shah Tahmasp ended when he was poisoned in 1576 during a dispute with the Red Heads over who would inherit his throne, the Ottoman rival entered a decade of political chaos. The Red Heads, not the dynasty, were in charge. To reign in these ecstatic warriors, Shah Tahmasp had begun to recruit Christian slaves from the Caucasus to be trained as a central army. After his death, Tahmasp’s younger son Ismail II acceded to the throne, but he was murdered a year later by the Red Heads and replaced by Tahmasp’s only other son by a Turkish concubine, Muhammad Khudabanda. Stability returned only with the ascension of Shah Abbas I (reigned 1588–1629). Abbas I—who was brought to power in a Red Head coup—aimed to end the Red Heads’ political and military domination. The Safavids turned fully away, like the Ottomans, from a primary reliance on nomadic warriors and put their trust in a loyal standing army made up of converted Christian military slaves from Georgia and Circassia supplied with artillery and paid salaries by a central treasury. The Safavids became again a formidable enemy of the Ottomans as they expanded to their greatest territorial extent and prosperity during Abbas I’s reign. They constructed the majestic and massive Royal Square complex—with its bazaar, gardens, palace decorated with colourful frescoes depicting battles against Ottomans, and stunning blue-tiled mosques—in the new capital of Isfahan. Their textile, carpet, and silk industries flourished. These were all symbols of the Safavid resurgence.
In 1603, Shah Abbas I retook Tabriz (held temporarily by the Ottomans); Yerevan, Armenia, after a nine-month siege; and Kars and Van in eastern Anatolia. In 1605, he pushed the Ottomans out of much of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan, including Tbilisi, Georgia. By 1606, the Ottomans had lost all gains in the east made in the wars against the Safavids between 1578 and 1590. In 1624, Abbas I seized Baghdad, held by the Ottomans for nearly a century. Only after Shah Abbas I died were the Ottomans able to retake the revered Arab city on the Tigris.
Such military defeats were seen as a symptom of systemic problems. Ottoman intellectuals railed against favouritism in political appointments, what they perceived as moral decline and financial corruption, the breakdown of class hierarchies, the withdrawal of the sultan from day-to-day decision-making and his reduction to a ceremonial figurehead, and, especially, the rise in power and influence of the women of the harem, including the awarding of the revenues of provincial landholdings to royal ladies.44
By the end of the sixteenth century there existed an elite of religious scholars, the military, and the bureaucracy that was the product of Suleiman I’s reign.45 This intellectual elite was self-conscious of its identity, its privileged place, and its history. Members saw themselves as bearers and articulators of the meritocratic Ottoman Way.46 Addressing political tracts to the sultan, the authors of critical works painted an ideal image of the empire at work, partly based on their own grievances. Writing polemical works in defence of the interests of their class and to express frustration about their own failure to acquire the power and privilege they believed they deserved, these authors analysed the causes of the imperial system’s transformation and prescribed remedies. They aimed to restore the idealised practices of the past, the age of Mehmed II, Selim I, or Suleiman I, and focused on what they perceived to be institutional failure, injustice, and social disruptions. Intellectuals saw canon law (kanun, secular law)—on par with Islamic law (Sharia, religious law)—as a symbol embodying the Ottoman commitment to justice, the very basis of its political legitimacy.47 Promoting secular (canon) and sacred (Islamic law) justice, they equated injustice with imperial failure. These authors complained of secular law not being followed, custom being violated, the erosion of elite orders, corruption, and military inefficiency borne of the military class having been ‘infiltrated’ by commoners and ‘foreigners’.48
From the end of the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, Mustafa Ali was joined by a number of other elitist, griping, misogynist, prejudiced, prudish, xenophobic Ottoman intellectuals who waxed nostalgic for Suleiman I’s reign.49 Writers of his type sought in vain to control social mobility, especially entry into the privileged, ruling elite. They perceived social disruption and administrative disorder everywhere, blaming this state of affairs on royal women having power over men and the fact that princesses, eunuchs, and ‘foreigners’ rather than cavalrymen were being given large land grants. They raged against ‘accursed’, ‘traitorous’ Jews holding positions at court while Sunni Muslims were supposedly viewed with scorn.50 They blamed the sultan: ‘“The fish stinks from the head” they say; the head of all this woe is known’.51 They perceived an imperial household overrun by ‘Turks, Gypsies, Jews, people without religion or faith, cutpurses and city riff-raff’. The Janissaries had become crowded with ‘townsmen, Turks, Gypsies, Tats [an Iranian group], Lazes [a Black Sea people], muleteers, camel-drivers, porters’, and highway robbers.52
These intellectuals longed for a powerful, resolute man of the sword to lead a political elite built on meritocracy. They idealised a time when cavalry fought for God and not pleasure, when society was ruled by Islamic law and not greed, as in the new monetised economy, which expanded the membership of the elite and witnessed the rise of new social groups. To rectify these problems, they advocated that the sultan become again a real man of the sword, not a ceremonial figure withdrawn from battle and decision-making.53 One tragic figure would take their advice but pay the consequences.
These tirades were the manifestation of a public sphere where the elite debated the course of the empire, pronouncing harsh criticisms after a sultan passed away and offering detailed policy proposals for change.54 But this discourse should not be exaggerated. There was no free speech in that era, and words considered treasonous or blasphemous caused many an execution. Nor did these intellectuals form an organised opposition. Not many were bold enough to go so far as to question the right of the Ottoman dynasty to rule or the legitimacy of its form of government. Most desired to save the empire on its own terms.
But the grumbling intellectuals were on to something. The empire was changing, if not in ways they liked. If we acknowledge their biased view and personal stake as the losers in the transformation, we can still use their laments and prescriptions for change to decipher how a new state of government was coming into being.
We should not call this ‘decline’. If there was political decline in the empire, it came much later than with the death of Suleiman I. The empire lasted 356 years beyond his death, representing a very long decline. So long, in fact, that it lasted over half the empire’s lifetime. The term ‘transformation’ or the phrase ‘crisis and change’ might be preferable to ‘decline’ and ‘stagnation’. The former terms have none of the negative, moralistic baggage of the latter. But that is just wordplay.
In 1618, Mustafa I became the second sultan in the dynasty’s history to be deposed (Bayezid II was the first). He was also the first to be unseated by machinations at court rather than by the Janissaries. The architect of his downfall after only three months in power was the chief harem eunuch, Mustafa Agha—another sign of the weakened sultanate.55 Mustafa I was declared mentally unfit to rule and sequestered in the princely apartments in the harem. According to an Ottoman chronicler, the ‘weak-mindedness and deranged nature’ of the sultan was obvious, and his strange deeds had become the subject of gossip. In public he repeatedly gesticulated as if he were throwing gold pieces at fish in the sea, suggesting that he reenacted the enthronement ceremonies, including scattering coins to the Janissaries, which must have traumatised him.56
He was replaced by his fourteen-year-old nephew, Osman II (reigned 1618–1622), the first firstborn Ottoman prince since 1453 to be born in Istanbul.57 All previous firstborns had been born in provincial capitals where their fathers served as governors and trained for the sultanate. Those days were over. The only aspect of provincial training reflected in Osman II’s early life was his love of horses, horse riding, and hunting. He buried his favourite horse in the grounds of one of the palaces and erected a tombstone for it.58
Osman II aimed to return power to the sultanate. And he was in a hurry. At only the age of sixteen he led a military campaign in person on the northernmost march ever undertaken by the Ottoman army.59 Before he left Istanbul, he had his eldest brother, Mehmed, strangled, lest he launch a coup in his absence.60 The 1621 campaign against the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania at the crucial citadel of Khotin, Ukraine—on the banks of the Dniester river, at the border between the Ottoman vassal Moldova and the opposing Polish-Lithuanian empire—ended in a draw, however. A draw was a failure for the sultan, who had hoped for a quick, spectacular victory.61 Returning to the Ottoman capital at the beginning of the next year, Osman II sought to retake the reins from jurists and soldiers who had not performed well and recentralise political power in his hands. He aimed to abolish the Janissary corps and replace it with a new army equipped with muskets recruited from Arab, Druze, and Kurdish Muslim mercenaries, as well as peasants and nomads from Anatolia and Syria. He appointed as grand vizier a provincial governor who had raised his own mercenary army, another example of the concurrent monetisation of the economy and rise of new regional political forces.62 Osman II wanted to relocate the Ottoman capital to Damascus, Syria, so as to make the empire more Middle Eastern than European, more Eastern than Western. He even planned to take the hajj to Mecca, which no sultan had ever done. Jurists and soldiers alike opposed his eastward journey and the threat of a new army that would replace the old. A new stage in the development of the dynasty had been reached.
Sultans had become symbolic shadows of power whose deposition and killing was licit according to legal scholars. The spring day Osman II was to set off to raise his new mercenary army, en route to the pilgrimage and moving the imperial capital, became his last in power. On 18 May 1622, rumours that the sultan was also taking the imperial treasury to pay the new troops and planning to abolish the established military elites’ salaries and landholdings motivated the Janissaries and cavalry to riot jointly in Istanbul.63 After gaining support from the sheikhulislam, they demanded the execution of the chief harem eunuch Suleiman Agha (successor of Mustafa Agha), whom they blamed for these plans. The sultan dismissed his grand vizier instead, and the next day a greater crowd consisting of Janissaries, cavalrymen, and jurists gathered at the Hippodrome. They presented a petition to the sheikhulislam demanding even more heads. According to the contemporary account of a Jewish palace physician, several thousand rebels ‘crashed suddenly on the palace like ocean waves’.64 The sultan was unresponsive to the demands to turn over the chief harem eunuch. At that point, the crowd made its decision to depose him.
Several Janissaries scaled the roof of the palace and, using axes, broke through the lead-covered dome of the room in the harem where the deposed Mustafa I, who had preceded Osman II on the throne, was hidden. They descended on improvised ropes made of curtains. Killing several harem eunuchs who fired arrows at them, they entered the sultan’s bedroom and looted his treasury. After finding Suleiman Agha, they took him outside and ‘with over three hundred sword blows riddled his corpse with holes’.65 They found Mustafa I in a small, padlocked room with two servants, emaciated as no one had remembered to provide food or water during the past days of tumult.66 He requested a sip of water from his saviours. The grand vizier was found hiding elsewhere in the city and killed.
The rebels located Sultan Osman II taking refuge in the home of the Janissary commander, whom they murdered. As a sign of his humiliation, Osman II was not permitted to wear a turban. Treating him worse than an ordinary person, the soldiers marched him to the mosque of the Janissary barracks near the mosque of Mehmed II in the centre of the peninsula. From the palace they also brought Mustafa I and the mother of the sultan, who spoke to the throng assembled in the mosque with her face veiled. Unfortunately, her name was not recorded for posterity. The bareheaded sultan wanted a turban and to speak to the crowd too, but neither was he given a head covering nor did anyone want to hear from him. He promised the crowd gold and silver and valuable cloaks but they paid no heed, as the rebels had decided to kill him. Twice the rebel leader Davud Pasha, who was selected to be the new grand vizier by Mustafa I’s mother, had the chief armourer try to put a noose around Osman II’s neck to strangle him, but the sultan pushed him away. The mob shouted insults at him and spat in his face. He became petrified seeing the reaction of the angry crowd.67
While the mother of the sultan and Mustafa I returned in the imperial carriage to Topkapı Palace so the latter could be enthroned for a second time, the deposed Sultan Osman II was dumped unceremoniously outside the mosque in a market wagon. According to the Jewish palace physician, the sultan ‘who previously slept on a feather bed was made to sit on a stack of hay’.68 Acting on the order of Grand Vizier Davud Pasha, Janissaries and cavalrymen escorted Osman II to the royal dungeon in the Seven Towers fortress.69 An immense crowd followed the common wagon all the way to Seven Towers, jeering at the former sultan and reaching into the vehicle to assault him. Imprisonment at that dungeon, located on the Sea of Marmara at the southwesternmost corner of Istanbul, was a death sentence.
On Friday, 20 May, they murdered him. According to a contemporary Ottoman historian, the chief armourer put the oiled noose used for executions around his neck. Because the eighteen-year-old Osman II courageously resisted, attacking his guards with a wild fury, a cavalry commander named Kalender ‘squeezed his testicles and exhausted him until he gave up his soul’.70 The chief armourer then cut off Osman II’s ear and brought it to the mother of the sultan as proof of the death of her son’s rival. Treating Osman II as a criminal, perhaps they cut off his nose as well. As the historian concludes, no ruler of the Ottoman dynasty had ever been treated with such contempt. Princes had been killed for centuries according to the law of fratricide—though not in this humiliating manner—but never a sultan.71
Davud Pasha’s grand vizierate only lasted a few weeks. In little over half a year, the three men responsible for the killing of Osman II—Davud Pasha, the chief armourer, and the cavalry commander Kalender (whose name, perhaps not coincidentally, is the same term used for a type of deviant dervish)—were arrested and killed by strangling or having their throats slit. Kalender’s corpse was not buried, but thrown in the Bosporus, ‘like that of a dead dog’.72 A year later, Mustafa I was deposed again, as his already poor mental health, manifested in his strange speech and gestures, had worsened. Yet the mother of the sultan intervened to ensure he was not executed.
What these episodes demonstrate is that by this moment in Ottoman history, the dynasty had entered a new phase. From the time of Osman I, power and fortune (devlet) and the sultanate had inhered in the sultan. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, as made concrete with the enthronement and deposition of Mustafa I, as well as the deposition and murder of Osman II, devlet meant the dynasty, the whole Ottoman family. Allegiance and loyalty were due to the dynasty and the sultanate, no matter the qualities of the individual sultan.
Previously the sultanate and the man holding that position were seen as one. The sultan was a mere mortal but one who embodied the dynasty. The death of the sultan was a real crisis. His death seemed to mean the dynasty had temporarily ended. But by this point in time the sultan had two natures. The sultan’s body, unlike in the rest of Europe, was not considered sacred, and once deposed could be treated worse than any other. Killing the sultan did not mean ending the dynasty. It was the man, not the sultanate, whose time on earth had ended. Another man could be chosen to rule in his stead, guaranteeing dynastic continuity.73 The Ottoman dynasty had become a different kind of regime. For this reason, the following chapters will focus more on the family dynasty and the royal women than on the sultan.
The first regicide in Ottoman history—carried out in horrible fashion and sandwiched between the two dethronements of Mustafa I—forever altered the bonds between the sultan and his subjects. Thereafter his power was limited, constrained by the law as interpreted by jurists, who, though appointed by the sultan to rule in his name, acted independently to limit his power. They curbed the sultan’s power when they legitimated the actions of the Janissary corps, who, once a crucial cog in the centralised administration, now served as a check on the authority of the central government. The sultan’s subjects were no longer his servants and slaves. He was theirs. In the two centuries following Osman II’s dethronement and murder, seven of fourteen sultans were deposed. Rather than being outsiders ill-deserving of a share in power or a say in who was fit to rule, the Janissaries and jurists who deposed these sultans were expressing the will of—if not all, then a larger segment of—the people than when only the royal family decided who should rule.
What the authors and actors of this time were in fact witnessing was a new polity, a limited government centred on the Janissaries, who represented a sector of the common people or at least the urban Muslim population.74 We do not know if the Janissaries of this time were a sort of a political party representing the will of the people, because we do not know whether they had a group consciousness or mentality. One wonders how popular they were among the guilds when they forced merchants to pay ‘tribute’. It is debatable whether the Janissaries ‘spoke for’ the Christians and Jews of urban areas or for the majority of Ottoman subjects, the peasantry. Nevertheless, they and the jurists were one of the two groups compelling a new polity. In contrast to previous centuries when slaves rose in the social hierarchy to dominate the administration and military, in the new polity any free Muslim male could join the ruling elite and rise in the government hierarchy.75
Introduced by the rebellions of military men and the legal reasoning of jurists, limited government may have sowed the seeds for democracy, even if they were never fully reaped. The Janissaries were neither political reactionaries nor economic conservatives. Due to their often primary role as merchants rather than soldiers, the Janissaries supported the transition to a market economy. Sometimes they acted as a collective representing the interests of Muslim merchants and artisans. At other times, merchants revolted in Istanbul with the jurists on their side. Islamic law did not hinder a monetary economy and limited government. Earlier jurists had already legitimised the use of cash to endow public foundations such as mosques and the ability to profit from interest. Jurists allied with the merchant class defended tax farming and cash endowments, interpreting the law in opposition to absolutist government. The same jurists backed rebellious Janissaries by legitimising the deposition and enthronement of sultans. They brought the sultanate under legal supervision, using Islamic law to counter secular canon law. The reins of power were no longer in the hands of the sultans. They were held by the Janissaries and jurists.
The actions of Janissaries and jurists in turn led to the creation of a form of polity more civil than military. The social uprisings that they led began to curtail the unlimited authority of the sultan in the old order. They helped build the foundation for a state apparatus differentiated from the person of the ruler, one of the key features of modernity. Modernity was not something Western, imposed by outsiders on the Ottoman Empire at a later time. Developments East and West are related, as the Ottoman Empire was part of Europe and Europe was part of Eurasia.
This fact was noticed by well-informed Western European writers. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli was a Bolognese intellectual who had lived in Istanbul but then served in the Habsburg military, became an Ottoman prisoner of war, was released, took part in the negotiations for the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, and led the Habsburg commission mapping the boundary between the two empires. In his treatise on the Ottoman military, he noted that the Ottoman despotism of the age of Suleiman I had long since ended, as Janissaries dethroned sultans, imprisoned or killed them, and enthroned others in their place when backed by the authority of the jurists. For in this new era, sultanic rule was dependent on ‘the consent of both Estates, the judicial one and the military one’.76 Exaggerating, he called it a ‘democracy’.77
In the world’s oldest democracy, England, Charles I was the first (and only) king to be executed. He had come to the throne in 1625 and immediately wrangled with Parliament over the limits to their respective powers. Charles I dismissed Parliament in 1629 and ruled without it until 1640. But he was forced to bring Parliament back to raise money for war against Scotland, and the legislature refused, presenting instead a long list of grievances against him. Charles I responded by attempting to arrest the leaders of Parliament. This led to eight years of civil war between the supporters of Parliament and the king, the forces of the former claiming victory. Charles I was found guilty of treason and beheaded in public before Banqueting House in the centre of London in 1649. Thereafter, for almost a dozen years, Oliver Cromwell ruled an English Republic, but in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne.
Some of the political developments in England were shared by the Ottoman Empire. The killing of Osman II is thus yet another example of the Ottomans partaking in European historical developments. In both Istanbul and London, the regicides of the seventeenth century compelled a turn away from a system of government in which rulers had unlimited authority and towards a new system of limited monarchy. The murder of Osman II was the onset of a period of limited government in which royal authority was diminished and the institution of government was made distinct from the person of the sultan.
Events East and West could occur at the same time, but it did not mean they were coterminous or that distinct societies were on the same trajectory. At the time the English had a long-standing Parliament and the Ottomans had not yet established theirs. Unlike the English, the Ottomans did not temporarily establish a republic, nor promulgate a Bill of Rights as the English did, leading to a constitutional monarchy. What was analogous was how the affairs of Ottoman government were now in the hands of the grand vizier, whose role was similar to that of a prime minister. His office was located outside the palace grounds.
While conventional European history views the 1649 execution of Charles I as ushering in the modern era, the 1622 killing of Osman II twenty-seven years earlier—the first regicide in Ottoman history—was as earthshaking a political event. What was happening in the Ottoman Empire should be compared with how similar events in England were viewed by historians.78 Thereafter in the Ottoman Empire, three generations of jurists from the same family would sanction deposing and even executing sultans.79 It was the start of a new age, a shift in the balance of power wherein the high authority of the ruler was challenged and lost.
The revolts of Janissaries and jurists may have ushered in a new political era, yet supporters of the old order promoted the return of a determined sultan as the solution to the real and imagined crises of the era. Mustafa Naima of Aleppo, son of a Janissary who served as official court ‘annalist’, suggested remedies for saving the empire.80 Naima was influenced by the Tunisian thinker Ibn Khaldun, whose ideas Ottoman intellectual circles found relevant in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.81 Ibn Khaldun argued that empires pass through five inevitable stages. Ottoman thinkers desperately tried to determine where theirs fell on the spectrum—beginning with the heroic age and passing through stages of consolidation, confidence and security, contentment or surfeit and decline, and finally disintegration—and what they could do about it. Naima believed that the Ottomans had reached the penultimate stage. He sought measures to restore the dynasty and empire to an earlier stage of historical development.
Ibn Khaldun also became popular because he employed ideas already familiar to Ottoman thinkers, as expressed by jurist Kınalızade Ali, who propagated the older Persian and Greek theory of the ‘circle of justice’:
There can be no royal authority without the military.
There can be no military without wealth.
The subjects produce the wealth.
Justice preserves the subjects’ loyalty to the sovereign.
Justice requires harmony in the world.
The world is a garden, its walls are the state.
Islamic law orders the state.
There is no support for Islamic law except through royal authority.82
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.