AT THE HEIGHT of his power, having survived the Jewish upheaval at home that reminded him of a deviant dervish uprising, Mehmed IV and his armies would conquer much territory in Europe. After the conquest of Crete in 1669, the Ottomans launched numerous successful campaigns on the mainland. Mehmed IV participated in person in the first of these campaigns, that against the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in 1672, conquering the fabled ‘white castle’ in Kameniçe (unlike in the novel of the same name, in which the Ottoman siege is unsuccessful), the key to Poland and Ukraine. A second campaign against the same kingdom was launched the following year, as well as a successful campaign against the Russian Empire in 1678. Through these campaigns, the Ottoman Empire was propelled to its greatest northernmost expansion. In 1681, the Ottomans signed their first treaty with Russia, which brought two decades of peace. Yet it sowed the seeds of future crises, with Russia claiming to be protector of Orthodox Christians in the empire.
In Central Europe, the Ottomans supported a Calvinist noble and military leader named Imre Thököly, who was as opposed to the Habsburgs as he was to their Catholicism. In 1682 the Ottomans made him their vassal, the king of central Hungary. With such an ally, Mehmed IV was confident he could launch a campaign to conquer Vienna, located 1,500 kilometres to the northwest. The Habsburg capital was deemed the mythical ‘golden apple’. So confident was he of his impending triumphal horseback ride through the city that Mehmed IV summoned his fortysomething-year-old younger brother Suleiman from the harem at Topkapı Palace in April 1683, when he and his army set out from Edirne. He took his sons Ahmed and Mustafa as well as their mother, his favourite concubine Rabia Gülnüş, along on the journey as far as Belgrade, more than halfway to Vienna, to show them to his Ottoman subjects. Mehmed IV broke with prevailing tradition and gave his future successors a belated lesson in being a gazi.
Mehmed IV could have learned from the mistakes made by Suleiman I over a century and a half earlier. A major campaign that far from Istanbul was a harsh test of Ottoman capabilities.1 The commander confronted the serious problems of provisioning his troops and transporting them along roads and across streams and mighty rivers to the battlefield. Most war matériel had to be carried overland on animals. Winter weather typically arrived early in Southeastern Europe.
As a legitimating call to holy war, in Belgrade Mehmed IV handed the black wool banner of Muhammad the Prophet to his grand vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, to carry during the campaign.2 Mehmed IV and his sons remained behind in the Serbian city, as the grand vizier and the sultan’s preacher, Vani Mehmed, set off with the Ottoman army and their allies—the Crimean khan and Thököly’s Hungarian army—to besiege the Habsburg capital over six hundred kilometres to the northwest. On 13 July, with an insufficient number of troops, lacking proper fodder, and with underfed horses incapable of mounting an attack, the Ottomans reached the place where Suleiman I had pitched his tent in 1529. A day later, they appeared before the well-fortified citadel of Vienna.
The fortress city was ringed by numerous palisades, bastions, and high walls, and a twenty-metre-wide ditch, defended by hundreds of pieces of heavy artillery. Even though the army lacked the requisite large cannons and enough firepower to take the citadel, Kara Mustafa Pasha offered the Viennese the choice between surrendering and converting to Islam, which would give them eternal salvation; surrendering without a fight and submitting to Islamic rule without conversion, which would guarantee them peace and prosperity; or fighting, in which case the victorious Ottomans would annihilate them and enslave their children, making them Muslims.3 Vienna’s defenders—‘the herd of rabid pigs destined to burn in the eternal flames of Hell’, as the Ottomans called them—chose to fight the ‘gazis of Islam’ rather than surrender or convert.4
No matter the high mindedness of the grand vizier, the two-month siege was a disaster for the Ottomans. Ottoman soldiers were lambasted by contemporary chroniclers for drinking wine and not giving up fornicating and pederasty, despite the fact that the siege occurred during the holy months of Rajab, Shaban, and Ramadan.5 Bad omens abounded. Kara Mustafa Pasha’s Istanbul palace burned to the ground in his absence. Mehmed IV’s mother Hatice Turhan passed away. The Qur’anic verses that decorate her tomb warn of the horrible consequences for unbelievers in the afterlife and promise reward for those who heed the warning of the blazing fires of hell.6 An encircled Vienna was supposed to be suffering such a fiery fate. Despite Ottoman sappers tunnelling below ground to explode mines to bring down its thick walls, the city would not fall, although its small number of defenders were starving, suffering from disease, and desperate for relief.
Sixty-thousand Christian relief forces arrived at Kahlenberg hill in the Vienna woods northwest of the city to save it, eventually outnumbering the deprived Ottoman forces at least two-to-one. On the sixtieth day of the siege, 12 September 1683, Kara Mustafa Pasha launched an attack on the relief army at the foot of the hill. In the Ottoman view, the Christian soldiers seemed to ‘flow down upon them like black tar’, covering everything in the Muslim army’s path. The enemy was like ‘an immense herd of furious boars that trampled and demolished them’.7 Using misogynist language, chronicle writers thought the Ottomans were betrayed by their ally, the ‘bitch’ known as the Crimean khan, ‘who had less courage than a woman’ and withdrew instead of covering the Ottoman troops, which were routed.8 Under the leadership of the king of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, Jan Sobieski III, winged Hussar cavalry—thus named due to the metre-high ‘wings’ made of feathers attached to the back of their armour—attacked the grand vizier’s position. Knowing that he would be executed for the defeat, the grand vizier intended to die on the battlefield. But the cavalry commander and Vani Mehmed begged him to withdraw, so they fled with Muhammad’s banner while Ottoman troops were abandoned and cut to pieces.9 The grand vizier’s sumptuous tent and precious cloaks, jewel-encrusted daggers, and swords were seized by the victors.
At the forefront of military advances for centuries, the Ottomans had lost their onetime technological firepower advantage in Central Europe, whose empires had now surpassed them. For two decades, writers in Mehmed IV’s service had boasted of his silencing of church bells and his replacement of them with the Islamic call to prayer. But after the failed siege attempt of the Habsburg imperial seat, captured Ottoman cannons would be remade into the bell of Vienna’s Saint Stephen’s Cathedral.
Mehmed IV had the man who delivered the bad news executed for bearing evil tidings. He ordered Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa’s execution in Belgrade as well. On Christmas Day 1683, the grand vizier was stripped of the symbols of his office and as leader of holy war: his imperial seal, the banner of Muhammad, and keys to the Ka’ba in Mecca. Alerted to his fate while performing his afternoon prayers in the citadel, Kara Mustafa dismissed his retainers and admonished them to remember him in their prayers. He took off his turban. The executioner entered the room. He raised Kara Mustafa’s beard and passed the noose around his neck, the doomed man telling him to tie it well. After two or three tugs, the former grand vizier took in his final breath. His body was taken out to an old tent and prepared for burial, then his head was cut off. The body was buried in the courtyard of a mosque in Belgrade opposite the citadel, but his head was saved, packed in straw, and sent to Edirne, to be set upon a gate at the entrance to the sultan’s palace.10
Following the disastrous rout at Vienna in 1683, the arguments for Islamic piety and gaza rang hollow. The sultan was pressured into returning to Istanbul and a sedentary life, urged to abandon the military campaign and his inordinate appetite for the hunt. Janissaries and jurists were incensed that the sultan ignored their demands and continued to go to the hunt either before daybreak, returning at night, or at night and returning the following night, seemingly indifferent to the fate of the empire. He neglected his army, his subjects, and his own religious obligations, especially prayer.11 The sultan’s preacher, Vani Mehmed, had made the connection between the Turks’ conversion to Islam and their subsequent conquest and conversion of much of Eurasia by their pious descendants. He had taken an active role exhorting Ottoman troops in battle.12 After the debacle at Vienna, he was blamed for impudently inciting the sultan to launch the campaign by reminding him of his gazi Oğuz forebears and was banished to Bursa, where he passed away.13
The failure at Vienna and the loss of Buda, which the Ottomans had held for over a century and a half, and then Belgrade to the Habsburgs in 1686 contributed to Mehmed IV’s downfall. In the wake of these defeats, with the treasury nearly emptied, the grand vizier imposed an extraordinary tax on the restive religious class. It was taken by force, quarter by quarter, house by house, from all Muslim functionaries save the sheikhulislam.14 In 1687, following another Ottoman defeat—this time by the Holy League of the Habsburgs, Poland-Lithuania, Venice, and the pope at Mohács, Hungary, the scene of a great Ottoman triumph the previous century—the forty-seven-year-old ruler faced revolt by jurists and Janissaries alike.
Executing the grand vizier did not placate them. Janissaries ignored orders to remain in Edirne and marched on the imperial capital.15 Gathering in Hagia Sophia, Janissaries, jurists, and viziers declared it was canonically valid to dethrone a sultan who was occupied with the chase while the enemy attacked and occupied the lands of the empire. They blamed the sultan for having destroyed everything by trusting a few men of evil intention, which included his deceased preacher, Vani Mehmed.16 They deposed Mehmed IV and confined him to house arrest, first in Topkapı Palace and then in Edirne. He asked his guards, ‘Are you going to kill me?’17 He had not forgotten the fate of his father, Ibrahim I, the second Ottoman ruler to be executed.
Mehmed IV’s successor was to be Suleiman, his forty-five-year-old younger brother. But Suleiman, too, was terrified of being killed. He refused to come out of the harem. Breaking down from decades of anxiety about this moment, he asked whether the officials summoning him could understand what it was like to spend a life in terror, how ‘it is better to die at once than to die a little each and every day’, and began to cry.18 He had nothing suitable to wear for the enthronement. The chief eunuch put his own sable over Suleiman’s robe. Thus dressed, he became Suleiman II (reigned 1687–1691), as his brother Mehmed IV, his other brother Ahmed, and the two princes Ahmed and Mustafa were put under house arrest. Mehmed IV died of natural causes six years later.
The sedentary sultan had returned. When writing about Mehmed IV’s death a generation after it occurred, an historian did not call him a pious gazi or mention gaza or jihad. Instead, he claimed that Mehmed IV died in the harem.19 A man who had spent his life breaking free of the harem to establish himself as a manly warrior-sultan nevertheless ended his life in it. That was where he belonged, according to eighteenth-century demands on the sultanate.
At this point, the dynasty began another new phase. Beginning with Osman I and lasting for approximately three centuries, devlet had meant that fortune and power inhered in the sultan, who was coequal with the dynasty. By the time of the two enthronements and depositions of Mustafa I and the murder of Osman II, devlet had come to signify the dynasty and sultanate, as the person of the sultan was made distinct from the sultanate. Loyalty was due to the dynasty rather than to an individual. Beginning with the deposition of Mehmed IV and the decreased power of the sultanate attendant to it, devlet gradually came to have its modern definition: government (or state).20 Obedience was not due to a man, or to an office, but to the administration. Less attention would be paid to the sultan, who had lost his cosmically imbued fortune. To compensate, future sultans would try to increase their Islamic legitimacy. Accordingly, the rest of the chapters of this book will mainly offer less of a personality- or family-dynasty-centred narrative and more of an administration-focused one, because that was the characteristic of the distinct regime that began in this period and lasted to the end of empire.
Mehmed IV’s successors chose to bury him not in the gazi abode of Edirne but in Istanbul, in his mother Hatice Turhan’s tomb, behind her New Mosque in Eminönü.21 On the explanatory panel in the mausoleum, Mehmed IV is referred to as ‘the Hunter’, not ‘the Gazi’. Entering Hatice Turhan’s mausoleum, one notices how many coffins fill the main room (the remains are buried under the tomb). Unlike the mausoleum of Suleiman I, with few coffins in the centre of the sanctuary, this tomb is chockablock with caskets of princes and sultans. The first large coffin is that of the mausoleum’s patron and main guest, the valide sultan. One has to fully enter the main door before noticing Mehmed IV’s turban-topped casket a little behind his mother’s. In death, as in early life, he could not escape her shadow. Despite his years of independent action, he lies next to her in the earth beneath the tomb. The significance of his reign would be overshadowed by subsequent historical events.
The bureaucracy headed by the grand vizierate desired a sedentary, ceremonial sultan of no real significance in Istanbul, not a restless, virile warrior based in Edirne. In contrast to the previous two decades, after he was dethroned, Mehmed IV was no longer referred to as a gazi and his proclivity for hunting was thereafter widely criticised. After his reign, the term was used pejoratively, and by the nineteenth century he became known as ‘the Hunter’—by that point a symbol of waste and extravagance, not war and manliness. In the Military Museum in Istanbul there is scant trace of Mehmed IV, other than a record of how far he could shoot an arrow, instead of how far he pushed the boundaries of the empire.
Located in an Ottoman-era military school, the massive Military Museum in the Harbiye district of Istanbul narrates the long history of the ‘Turkish’ army from its origins in Central Asia through to the Turkish Republic.22 Like the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle and Holy Relics at Topkapı Palace, this museum, run by the Turkish military, displays ‘sacred relics’: Orhan’s iron battle helmet, part of the chain that the Byzantines futilely stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn in 1453 to keep the Ottomans at bay, Selim I’s horse’s armour. It thrills visitors with daily, boisterous, live performances of the Ottoman military band in its auditorium. But the museum tells a peculiar history of Turkish warfare. It celebrates Seljuk and Ottoman victories, from Malazgirt (Manzikert) near Lake Van in 1071 to Mohács in 1526, but does not include any defeats.
The Ottomans rise at the Military Museum, but they do not fall. The Turkish displays exhibit no seventeenth-century Ottoman campaign tents. To see them, one has to visit the Museum of Military History in Vienna and its permanent exhibit War Against the Ottomans. There, children celebrate their birthdays in Ottoman tents captured at the failed 1683 siege.23 At the Military Museum in Istanbul, the Ottoman period focuses on the rise of the Ottomans, the conquest of Constantinople, and the reigns of Mehmed II, Selim I, and Suleiman I. Missing is a statue or display of Mehmed IV, thanks to whose conquests the Ottoman Empire reached its greatest territorial extension in the Mediterranean (Crete) and Eastern Europe (Poland and Ukraine) but failed, once again, to take Vienna. Turning to Europe as manly conquering warrior, he also promoted widescale conversion of people and Islamisation of territory.
Mehmed IV’s absence and the selective history telling of the Military Museum raise a host of questions. Should we concern ourselves with distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sultans? How accurate are the Ottoman leaders’ reputations and the monikers given them? Ottoman chroniclers and moralists believed they did matter. They focused on character, praising or blaming sultans for the onset of historical processes (whether rise or decline) that had wider and more complicated causes. On the one hand, Suleiman I had been handed the world on a silver platter by his father, Selim I, who had doubled the empire’s territory, taking the three Islamic holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and who identified his son as his successor, sparing him from having to engage in fratricide. Suleiman I also benefited from being born as the master of the auspicious conjunction, the tenth sultan at the dawn of the tenth century in the Islamic calendar, a moment when Muslims believed a well-omened ruler would arrive. With such advantages, it is difficult to imagine him not succeeding. On the other hand, it is doubtful that Mehmed IV’s father, Ibrahim I, was as flawed as chroniclers depicted him. It is also hard to see how Mehmed IV, who tried to break with nearly a century of precedent of a sedentary sultanate, could not have failed.
Mehmed IV is notable for being the second-longest reigning Ottoman ruler and for having one of the worst reputations of any sultan. He presided over stunning military successes, including the conquest of the entire island of Crete in 1669. But he was also responsible for the failed final Ottoman siege of the Habsburg capital in 1683. Having sought a return to an earlier era of pious, manly, gazi sultans and a comparable historical legacy, he is remembered instead as a profligate hunter.
Mehmed IV’s long reign, which ended in disgrace, was followed by the brief, undistinguished reigns of his brothers, Suleiman II and Ahmed II (reigned 1691–1695), and his son, Mustafa II (reigned 1695–1703). These rulers added religious meaning to their enthronements, utilising the symbols of the Sunni caliphate. Suleiman II was the first to wear the turban ascribed to the biblical Joseph and have descendants of Muhammad play a visible role at his accession. Ahmed II was the first to pray before the mantle of the Prophet as part of his accession rituals. Mustafa II was the first sultan to gird the sword of Muhammad, and not that of an illustrious Ottoman ancestor, at the mosque of Ayyub al-Ansari in Eyüp.24 But these years were memorable more for Janissary rebellion and the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz between the Ottomans and Habsburgs than anything else.
The failed siege of Vienna effectively ended the reign of Mehmed IV, the career of his preacher, Vani Mehmed, and the power of the puritanical Kadızadeli movement. Yet Vani Mehmed’s son-in-law Feyzullah—son of Vani Mehmed’s patron in provincial Erzurum and preacher to Mustafa II—was soon blamed for having inordinate influence over the administration and palace. Feyzullah was condemned for violating protocol, precedent, and the expectations of deserved appointments. He engaged in nepotism, appointing his sons to positions for which they were not qualified. He made his son sheikhulislam designate. He was seemingly too powerful, determining government appointments and domestic and foreign policy decisions. But as conventional notions of the time held, sheikhulislams were meant to be apolitical and act as spiritual and moral checks to temporal power, not wield it. Janissaries demanded that Feyzullah’s power be limited.
Feyzullah Efendi did not offend only the Janissaries. He managed to unite almost the entire Muslim population against himself and the sultan in spring and summer of 1702. He accomplished this feat by attempting to impose Kadızadeli Islam, which emphasised ‘enjoining the good and forbidding wrong’, on the diverse Muslims of the entire realm. He should have realised such austere piety had been discredited since the fall of its main promoter, the preacher Vani Mehmed, and his patron Sultan Mehmed IV after the failed siege of Vienna. Nevertheless, Feyzullah took the Kadızadeli aim of creating a brotherhood of all believers a great step further by promoting standardised beliefs taught to and confirmed by every Muslim.
He had the grand vizier issue an imperial decree in the sultan’s name imposing religious tests on all Sunni Muslims and the sending of agents to instruct and ensure right practice. The decree ordered testing imams and preachers for their knowledge of Islam and adherence to Sunnism. College and primary school teachers were commanded to not deviate from teaching the Sunni curriculum. Those religious functionaries who did not obey were to be dismissed. As leader of the religious hierarchy, the sheikhulislam was in control of the hiring and firing of such officials. But he overstretched by targeting all Muslims from Bosnia to Basra, Belgrade to Beirut, Rûmeli, Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq. Urban dwellers, villagers, and even nomads—‘those who live in woolen tents’—were to be instructed in the basic duties of the faith (praying, fasting, alms giving, pilgrimage), and compelled to attend communal Friday prayers and to instruct their children in right Sunni Muslim practice as well. College students were to be assigned to make sure people fulfilled their Muslim religious obligations. Magistrates were to admonish the people to discharge their moral duties.25 Sweeping in its intentions, and violating the still-prevailing laissez-faire attitude towards Muslim religious diversity, such an order was guaranteed to be met with resistance not only from deviant dervishes but from most Muslims.
In 1703, with wide popular backing, soldiers demanding overdue pay and merchants and Janissaries insisting the court move back to Istanbul fomented rebellion against the sultan’s preacher, Feyzullah. The revolt was a backlash against the attempts to impose religious conformity and to resituate the sultan and his palace school at the centre of power.26 By then, client-patron relationships, blood relationships, and ethnic ties had become the deciding factors by which elite men married to royal women established and maintained their circles of power—known as households rivalling the sultan’s household—and had pushed aside sultanic power.27 Many of those who rebelled in 1703 sided with the grand vizier and pasha households against the sultan and his sheikhulislam. After this rebellion, their situation was confirmed.
The rebellion illustrated the struggle between a decaying Collection system, which had become much less important and ultimately fell into abeyance and then obsolescence as the empire reached the limits of its expansion under Mehmed IV, and an interest group that supported the grand vizier and pasha households. With the end of territorial enlargement, the empire needed men with specialised experience. By the end of the seventeenth century, half of all key administrative posts were staffed by men trained in or attached to these households, rather than the palace. Mehmed IV had been deposed following a conflict with these same interest groups. The 1703 rebellion was caused by Mustafa II’s attempt to neutralise that competing power structure.
During the 1703 uprising, a Janissary rebel named ‘Deranged’ or ‘Pockmarked’ Ahmed demanded the overthrow of the dynasty and its replacement by a ‘popular assembly’, a Janissary oligarchy.28 Rebel soldiers deposed Mustafa II. In 1703, the Janissaries replaced him with Mehmed IV’s younger son, thirty-year-old Ahmed III (reigned 1703–1730), and arrested, tortured, and executed Feyzullah by beheading him. To make the public spectacle of his humiliation complete, they dismembered the corpse and forced Armenians and Greeks to parade his body through the streets of Edirne as they sang dirges and burned incense, as though the Muslim scholar and former sheikhulislam had been a Christian. The corpse’s feet were tied to the head, the head impaled on a pole and paraded around. The corpse and head were then thrown in the Tunca river. Feyzullah’s eldest son and Vani Mehmed’s two sons were also executed.29
Following this brutal purge, Ahmed III presided over a new age, with Ottomans and Western Europeans again sharing cultural tastes. In eighteenth-century Europe, a culture of pleasure emerged, in which men and women gathered to enjoy themselves in the new gardens, promenades, public squares, and coffeehouses. In the early eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, lifetime tax farms helped propel a Muslim elite to untold riches. Combined with expanded trade with Western Europe, these tax farms helped spawn a new consumer culture never before seen in the empire. As the Christian and Muslim elite built the first multistorey wooden waterside mansions on the Bosporus for which Istanbul is famous, Ahmed III promoted ostentatious displays as well, including lavish circumcision and wedding festivals. He had thirty daughters; thus there were many opportunities for such public events. The sultan, unlike his recent predecessors, who had viewed themselves as nearly godlike, made himself visible to the public. He took pleasure-boat trips along the Golden Horn and Bosporus.30
The nouveaux riches, especially royal and elite women, delighted in the new garden pavilions and pleasure gardens on the Bosporus and Golden Horn, many of which were built by the grand vizier, Damad (Son-in-Law) Ibrahim Pasha (in office 1718–1730), who raised the funds to pay for them by cutting the military payroll, purging soldiers from the ranks, and raising taxes. Men and women wore new, more revealing fashions and enjoyed new foods and drinks—such as coffee, which had been condemned a generation before—and sugar-based sweets. At their festivals they fawned over massive, towering, phallic floral constructions made of sugar, coloured paper, metal, and beeswax.31
Poet Enderunlu Fazıl Bey gives us insight into what went on at these parties. He advised his male reader to wear gold-embroidered robes, drink a couple of cups of wine, let a lock of hair fall jauntily down from his head covering, and recite an erotic poem: ‘That one laughs from behind the veil / That one looks at the ground, blushing modestly / Those chuckles, that flirting, that glance / When she looks at you out of the corner of her eye, oh my!’ The ‘oh my’ was soon to come: ‘One of them starts to sing a song / So they might work their arts on you / One hastens to entice you / [Her] mantle falls from her back’. Two women sitting in a swing set among the cypresses, ‘casually clad / One alluringly rocks the swing / The other recites lovely songs’. The poem becomes pornographic: ‘As she swings her gown falls open / Showing every bit of her to you / To you she lets her trouser-tie be seen / To you, perhaps, her secret treasure’.32
This flirtatious scene took place in one of the gardens of Ahmed III’s ‘abode of felicity’, Sa’dabad Palace in Eyüp, where the ‘sweet waters of Europe’ (Kağıthane stream) end in the Golden Horn. The palace was similar to Louis XIV’s Versailles and Peter the Great’s Summer Palace and Gardens at Petrograd.33
As in contemporary London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, men and women in Istanbul gathered to stroll and sprawl, drink and smoke, sing and dance, feast and flirt, and be entertained in the new public spaces in the city, many featuring coffeehouses.34 The elite loved ‘splash and spectacle’ and building ornate fountains around the city.35 Near Topkapı Palace, Ahmed III built a glittering, gilded, turquoise-tiled domed fountain with overhanging wooden eaves between Hagia Sophia and the palace’s Imperial Gate. Nearly as beautiful is the similar one in the port of Üsküdar on the Asian side of the city. The fountains are marked by floral motifs, especially the tulip, which is the symbol of the age: beautiful on the outside, but lacking utility. The elite collected and planted hundreds of thousands of these flowers for their pleasure gardens. The pleasure-seeking continued at night, as the same tulip beds were bedecked with lanterns.
In the rest of Europe, the Ottomans became associated with beauty, luxury, leisure, pleasure, romance, ostentation, and even intellectual output. Beauty was associated with the Ottoman Empire in the form of the tulip, and the flower was imported into Europe, first by Habsburg ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq and the Fugger merchant family in Germany, and then through the Netherlands. The Netherlands experienced a tulip craze and is today the culture we associate more with the flower than the Ottoman.
Increased trade, travel, peaceful relations, and the first dispatch of more Ottoman ambassadors to Christian Europe (a practice begun at the end of the sixteenth century) led in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the phenomenon of Turquerie, in which goods such as paintings and tapestries were imported from the Ottoman Empire to Central and Western Europe, while literature such as plays, operas, and novels were set against an Ottoman backdrop.36 Especially following the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, which marked an end to the Ottoman-Habsburg conflict, Europeans, above all the French, emulated Ottoman fashions and tastes and expanded diplomatic and commercial contacts. The desire was reciprocated. During this period, the Ottoman court experienced a craze for everything French. This included Louis XV furniture: clocks, mirrors, and European-style chairs and sofas (the first the Ottomans had used, as they had formerly sat on divans, which were armless, backless cushioned seats). French craftsmen were commissioned to decorate interiors, such as Ahmed III’s Chamber of Fruits dining room in the harem in Topkapı Palace. European fascination with the Ottomans and Ottoman openness to European culture allowed an exchange of art and luxuries together with new commercialisation, consumption, and sociability among elite European and Ottoman men and women. And the new sociability included a new way of thinking.
Western European guests, Greek-speaking Muslims, and Ottoman Turkish–speaking Greeks gathered at Ahmed III’s court to discuss the natural sciences, including astronomy, the utility of knowledge, natural philosophy, and virtue.37 No Ottoman court since that of the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II, had seen such discussions of ancient and modern knowledge or witnessed such a predominance of Greeks—both those who had remained Christian and those who had converted to Islam.38 The Greek-speaking Muslims included the sultan’s (and former sultan Mustafa II’s) Cretan convert mother, Rabia Gülnüş (valide sultan 1695–1715); the fellow Cretan convert and head of the privy physicians Nuh Efendi; Ioannina-native palace librarian Esad Efendi; and the historian and Chios native Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi. The Ottoman-speaking Greeks included Alexander and Nicholas Mavrokordatos, the patriarch of Jerusalem Chrysanthos Notaras, and the historian Demetrius Cantemir.39
The host of this amiable, like-minded circle of thinkers and courtiers, Ahmed III, permitted the establishment of the first Ottoman-language printing press. It boasted Esad Efendi as editor and a Hungarian convert to Islam, Ibrahim Müteferrika, as head. It mainly published histories, grammars, and dictionaries, as well as works on geography. The sultan authorised translations of a number of French, Greek, and Latin works into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. Praising the ancients for having the courage to innovate, Müteferrika published the first work of Cartesian philosophy in Ottoman Turkish, a book on magnetism. Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha ordered telescopes and microscopes from France and conducted physics experiments in the palace.40
Ottoman Greek thinkers’ interest in translations and telescopes is considered part of the first phase of the ‘Greek enlightenment’, which connected Greek intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire to those in other parts of Europe including the Venetian Republic and Habsburg Vienna. But few scholars have considered the Greek enlightenment as a component of a broader ‘Ottoman enlightenment’.41 If we recognise the Ottomans as being part of Europe, however, there is nothing keeping us from using the phrase to at least describe the agnostic freedom of inquiry shared by Christian and Muslim intellectuals at Ahmed III’s court.
What is remembered about Ahmed III’s era is that Ottoman artists began to work directly for other Europeans, producing costume albums or illustrated erotic manuals. Europeans acquired Ottoman illustrated manuscripts, as well as their first Ottoman chronicles. European travellers also produced images based on their observations. All of these representations and new forms of knowledge circulated in Europe, often reinterpreted in the form of novels and plays set in Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Many European artists produced tragedies or operas about life in the empire. With its choruses of singing Janissaries, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s wildly popular The Abduction from the Seraglio (1782) demonstrated how Central Europeans imagined Ottomans at the time. Racy scenes of a Spanish hero rescuing his betrothed from slavery in the palace (‘seraglio’) harem of lusty Pasha Selim (Sultan Selim I?) by outwitting the evil vizier Osmin (Osman?) gave audiences an impression of Ottoman wealth, sensuality, magnanimity, and sadistic violence.
Along with the tulip, another good that symbolised the cultural diffusion of leisure and pleasure was coffee, imported to the rest of Europe almost exclusively from the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but mainly from the Dutch colony of Java in Southeast Asia from the beginning of the eighteenth century.42 As coffee shops sprouted across Europe, they inevitably added storefront signs of turbaned Ottomans. The Haus zum Arabischen Coffe Baum (1720) in Leipzig, Germany, for example, boasts a large figure of a reclining Turk giving a cup of coffee to Eros over its main door. This was the period when Johann Sebastian Bach composed his short comic opera dedicated to women coffee addicts, the Coffee Cantata (ca. 1735), for the Zimmerman coffeehouse in that same city.43
Just as they had done with tea obtained from China, the European elite made coffee consumption the central part of polite ceremonial. Some European coffeehouses even offered the same services as their Ottoman counterparts, including storytellers and poets, waiters in ‘Ottoman dress’, Turkish carpets, or the serving of coffee with sherbet and tobacco. Public baths in London offered coffee as refreshment.44
In some European countries, the Turquerie would prove so long-lasting as to be assimilated as a crucial element of the national culture. The ‘national dish’ of Sweden, köttbullar, or Swedish meatballs, are none other than Ottoman köfte. The Ottomans’ ally against Russia, Swedish king Charles XII (reigned 1697–1718), fell in love with the little meatballs while in Ottoman Moldova. He returned with the recipe, but substituted pork for lamb. He also introduced stuffed cabbage and coffee to the Nordic land.45
Along with meatballs, coffee and coffeehouses, and tulips, Ottoman military music conquered Europe. The Ottoman military bands were the first in the world. European publics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thrilled to the discordant sounds of the bands smashing their cymbals and playing their horns as they marched in battle and at diplomatic exchanges. Europeans created their own moustachioed, turbaned Ottoman bands, performing at carnivals and weddings. Three hundred ‘Janissaries’ played at the wedding of Prince Friedrich August II and Maria Josepha of Austria in Dresden in 1719.46 European armies adopted the practice, and by the end of the eighteenth-century military bands across Europe boasted bass drums, cymbals, kettledrums, tambourines, and Turkish crescents (jingling Johnnies).47
First displayed onstage, Ottoman fabrics, furniture (the divan, the ottoman), and décor entered European homes. European elite women—even Empress Maria Theresa—were especially enamoured with ostentatious Ottoman clothing.48 They admired the Ottomans’ presumed hedonism. According to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who resided in Istanbul as the wife of the British ambassador in 1717 and 1718 and enjoyed the coffee served to her by Ottoman ladies, the Ottomans were not as unpolished as Christian Europeans represented them. She depicted them instead as true libertines. She declared they had ‘a right notion of life; they consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics or studying some science to which we can never attain.… Considering what short liv’d, weak animals men are, is there any study so beneficial as the study of present pleasure?’49
For the first fifteen years of his reign, Ahmed III had been served by a dozen grand viziers. But in 1718, nepotism became the determining factor for the awarding of high positions of government. In 1717, Ahmed III married Nevşehirli Ibrahim Pasha to his daughter Fatma Sultan and the following year appointed him grand vizier. He became known as Damad (Son-in-Law) Ibrahim Pasha. Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s son from his first marriage was married to Ahmed III’s daughter Atike Sultan. The navy admiral Kaymak (Cream) Mustafa Pasha married Fatma Hanım, one of Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s daughters from his first marriage.50 The chief assistant to the grand vizier, Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha, who also came from Nevşehir, in central Anatolia, was married to Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s other daughter from his first marriage, Hibetullah Hanım. Two of Damad Ibrahim Pasha’s nephews were also married to daughters of Ahmed III. Two of his great-grandchildren (the offspring of Kaymak Mustafa Pasha’s daughter and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha’s son) married each other.51
Between 1718 and 1730, the husbands of six of Ahmed III’s daughters were viziers. So, too, were the husbands of four daughters of the sultan’s predecessor, Mustafa II. Ahmed III’s sister Hatice Sultan was married first to a boon companion of the sultan, then to a grand vizier, and finally, at the age of eighty, thirty years after her second husband had passed away, to another grand vizier. Jurists also tried to enter the elite through marriage ties with the dynasty and statesmen.52
What these intricate ties of nepotism illustrate is how power was held collectively. The dynasty allied with high officials connected through the sultan’s daughters and sisters. Rather than the sultan alone, or even his family, it was as if nonroyal dignitaries ensured the continuity of the dynasty and empire. And to do so, these men displayed their wealth and generosity, as if they were members of the Ottoman house. Royal women had a share in this, as they built lovely waterside mansions on the Bosporus or Golden Horn where they and their husbands, who were viziers or other high administration officials, hosted lavish banquets, ostentatious displays of consumption. At the two-week princely circumcision and princess wedding festival in 1720, there was a significant change in protocol, as Ahmed III’s imperial tent was set up alongside those of Damad Ibrahim Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha, as if they together shared power. All four tents offered visitors pomp and circumstance, feasts, and gifts.53
Damad Ibrahim Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha exhibited their blood affinity to the royal family, pretensions to being as wealthy as the dynasty, and generosity by conspicuously displaying their large collections of bejewelled, golden weapons; precious furs and fabrics; jewellery; thousands of pieces of silver, crystal, and Chinese porcelain and greenware (celadon) serving sets; enough bedding to furnish several palaces; and libraries’ worth of precious Islamic manuscripts at their many waterside pavilions and mansions on the Bosporus and Golden Horn. Damad Ibrahim Pasha named three of the rooms in one of his waterside mansions after Mehmed II, Bayezid II, and Suleiman I. He possessed a gold sword inscribed ‘Sultan Suleiman son of Sultan Selim Khan’ and other priceless weapons bedecked in dozens of diamonds and hundreds of rubies and emeralds. He also obtained dynastic genealogies containing miniature portraits of sultans owned by previous sultans, gifted to him by Ahmed III.54 Opposition to the dynasty sharing power, the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of this small group of relatives, and the policies they imposed led to revolt.
In the Ottoman domains the new wealth and ostentatious display of luxury grew alongside an expansion of the underclass. For every partying prince and smiling princess there were thousands of down-and-out commoners who did not receive taxpayer money with which to live a luxurious lifestyle and who resented those who did. As Ottoman military losses and shrinking borders in Southeastern Europe propelled people to travel to the imperial capital in search of homes and work, Istanbul was flooded with immigrants from former Ottoman territories. What they found were slums and poverty in an economically polarised city.55 The regime was unable to control their movements. When the Janissaries revolted in 1726, they were joined by members of this underclass, who even stoned Ahmed III’s palace in Beşiktaş on the European shore of the Bosporus.56 Worse was to come for the dynasty in 1730—and from a not unexpected quarter.
Janissary-connected, beardless Albanian youth who worked in public baths as shampooers and prostitutes pleasuring mature men bedevilled Ottoman authorities throughout the eighteenth century.57 As the Collection fell into disuse, Janissary applicants as young as eight years old but most on the verge of puberty were permitted to live in the Janissary barracks and serve Janissaries until they grew facial hair. In private, they attended to their master’s needs. In public, the young boys wore veils over their faces so that other men could not gaze upon their beardless faces and desire them.58 Because they were not paid a salary, some of these Janissary interns worked in the public baths as shampooers and prostitutes in order to earn a living.59 One such man led a revolt that toppled a sultan.
Patrona Halil was originally a beardless youth of Albanian origin who had worked as a shampooer in the Bayezid Bath in Istanbul.60 In September 1730 when the city’s elites were away planting tulip bulbs in a garden on the Dardanelles, Patrona Halil led a rebellion joined by artisans, the petty bourgeoisie, small-scale merchants, religious students, and scholars.61 They blamed the Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, Kaymak Mustafa Pasha, and Kethüdha Mehmed Pasha for the situation they detested. They united around their distaste for the public picnicking and frolicking of Christians and Jews, and especially the newfound public presence of elite women. Women dared to wear their hair loose, show cleavage, and don light, transparent clothing—to the joy and ire of men. In the words of Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, an Istanbul Armenian and French Catholic historian who served as translator at the Swedish diplomatic mission and late in life settled in Paris, ‘No woman covers her breast, especially in the summer, except with a blouse that is usually made of thin gauze’.62 The rebels aimed to ‘stop the regime that robbed them of their daily living’ through extraordinary war taxes to finance campaigns in Iran after the Safavid dynasty had collapsed in 1722.63 In contrast to the conspicuous consumption of the nouveaux riches, Patrona Halil wore simple clothes and went about barefoot like a radical Sufi, a deviant dervish. Perhaps he was a Bektaşi Sufi.
The second day of the rebellion was a Friday, the day when Muslim men gather for communal prayer.64 It was the day when it was the norm to complain to the sultan about injustices after the communal prayer, either through petition or protest. Because of this timing, rebel ranks grew larger and began to include Janissaries, a menacing sign for the dynasty. The demonstrators refused to break up, instead demanding to speak to high officials, including Grand Vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, whom they blamed for their troubles. On the third day of rebellion, as the insurgents first blockaded and then attacked Topkapı Palace, the sultan decided to sacrifice his grand vizier as a scapegoat to end the dangerous uprising. The grand vizier was executed on the sultan’s orders and his corpse given to the angry mob to desecrate. They claimed he was not a Muslim, but an Armenian or Greek, as proven by his allegedly being uncircumcised and having a tonsure.65 After parading the corpse around the city, the rebels ripped it into pieces and dumped them in Ahmed III’s babbling fountain outside Topkapı Palace. But even this did not curb the rising demands of the crowds who wanted the sultan’s neck too. Realising he had to abdicate to protect the peace and save his own life, Ahmed III declared thirty-five-year-old Mahmud, son of his brother Mustafa II, his successor rather than either of his own eldest sons and gave up his throne.
The new sultan, Mahmud I (reigned 1730–1754), agreed to have the palace and gardens at Sa’dabad and those of his ministers burned to the ground.66 Palace librarian, first printing-press editor, and Greek speaker Esad Efendi and Ottoman-speaking Greek patriarch Chrysanthos Notaras soon passed away, and the Müteferrika printing press ceased its operations. The Ottoman enlightenment proved short-lived (although the Greek enlightenment flourished again later in the century). Mahmud I also cancelled some of the grievous taxes established by the executed grand vizier and allowed thousands of rebels to register as the sultan’s salaried troops. Their demands met, the popular rebels, who had even established a shadow cabinet and demanded the right to make administrative appointments, did not last long in power. A little over a week after he was enthroned, the sultan decided to wipe them out. He waited until he had the support of the Janissaries, who had had a falling out with these armed commoners after they murdered one of their own. The sultan arranged for Patrona Halil and his men to be called into the palace on the pretence of honouring them with government positions. Instead, they were murdered inside the Yerevan pleasure pavilion, built by Murad IV to celebrate his conquest of the fortress in Armenia from the Safavids in 1635.67 After this massacre, Janissaries killed the rebels’ supporters who tried to flee.
Coffeehouses and public baths favoured by Albanians were shut. Albanians were banished from the city. It became illegal to employ Albanian men as shampooers in the bathhouses.68 But even these measures did not prevent another revolt in Istanbul the following year, fomented by rebels who had escaped the dragnet and returned to attack the Janissaries. It was quickly suppressed and accompanied by more measures to restrict migration to the imperial capital. Restrictions were also reimposed on male prostitutes. To uphold the gendered religious hierarchy of society, gender segregation was reinstated in public spaces. Because the norms delineating the clothing permitted to be worn by Muslim women and by all Christians and Jews had been openly flaunted by the nouveaux riches during Ahmed III’s reign, sumptuary laws were also reintroduced.69
Whereas once the Safavids were the main danger to the eastern frontier of the Ottoman realm, in the second half of the eighteenth century a new threat rose to replace that of the fallen Shi’i empire: Russia. The Ottoman sultans who first faced this new threat were less prepared to handle it, as seniority was the only reason they had ascended to the throne. When Mahmud I died in 1754, he was replaced by his fifty-five-year-old brother, Osman III (reigned 1754–1757). Osman III poisoned Ahmed III’s forty-year-old son, Mehmed, in 1756, leading to the oldest remaining of Ahmed III’s sons, Mustafa III (reigned 1757–1774), taking the throne after Osman III. He was replaced by Ahmed III’s third and youngest son, the forty-eight-year-old Abdülhamid I (reigned 1774–1789).
One significant carryover from the era of Ahmed III was the emphasis on diplomacy with Western Europe, especially the courts of Maria Theresa (reigned 1740–1780) in Vienna and Frederick II (reigned 1740–1786) in Berlin. But relations with a newly powerful Russia under German-born empress Catherine II (reigned 1762–1796) were belligerent. Catherine II continued the military and naval expansion of Peter I (reigned 1696–1725), who had established a regular army provisioned with the latest artillery weapons and constructed a sizeable fleet. Russia aimed to attack the Ottoman Empire from Ukraine, to seize the Crimean peninsula and control the Black Sea, and to stir up Orthodox Christians in Southeastern Europe against the Ottomans. During this half century under Catherine II the Russians accomplished all these plans.
To block the Dardanelles and cut off Istanbul from the south, a Russian fleet launched from a naval base in Peter I’s capital of Saint Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, travelled all the way around Europe, entered the Mediterranean, and arrived off the Aegean coast of Anatolia in 1770. Smaller in number yet better armed, the Russian navy destroyed an Ottoman fleet in a surprise attack at Çeşme off the coast of İzmir, killing thousands of sailors, leading to Russian control of the Aegean. At the same time, a Russian army routed a much larger Ottoman-Tatar force on the Danube frontier. Russians instigated rebellion among Greeks in the Morea (the Peloponnese peninsula). The next year, Russia invaded the Crimea and extended its frontier to the Black Sea. The Ottoman vassal the Crimean khan sided with Russia, which granted him independence, although under Russian protection.70 The Ottomans were compelled to agree to Russian territorial gains through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, some of whose planks Russia interpreted as giving it the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, by war if necessary. In 1783 Russia annexed the Crimea. When the last Crimean khan, Şahin Giray, seen as the puppet of Catherine II and a traitor, arrived an exile in the Ottoman Empire, Abdülhamid I had him executed.
From their new Black Sea bases, the Russians had moved their fleet to within two and a half days’ sail from the Ottoman capital.71 Catherine II quickly moved to annex half of Ukraine. In 1795, Russia, Prussia, and Austria partitioned the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania among themselves. In all of her newly won territories, the Russian ruler expelled Muslims and resettled Christians, especially Greeks from the Ottoman Empire, in their place.72 Many of these Greeks became wealthy merchants connecting the overland but especially maritime trade of the Russian and Ottoman Empires with Central and Western Europe. Others entered Russian military and diplomatic service and would return to the Ottoman Empire in the future to play an important role in rebellions.73 Catherine II called for the conquest of Istanbul, the reestablishment of the Byzantine Empire under Russian control, and the reconsecration of the Hagia Sophia as the main church of Christianity.74 A new rival had arisen claiming the mantle of the Romans. The Ottomans had great reason to fear their northern neighbour.
The deposition of Mehmed IV led to the return of a weak sultanate whose officeholder was manipulated by pashas and viziers and deposed at will by Janissaries and jurists. The subsequent era of cultural openness and exchange with Europe and intellectual innovation under Ahmed III, too, was undone by Janissary revolt, as soldiers continued to have the final say over who sat on the throne. Humiliating territorial losses, including that of the Crimean khanate—the remnant of Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire, which had given liege to the Ottoman sultan for several centuries—to a new enemy, Russia, whose strength rested on an army made up of well-trained conscript soldiers, an expanded navy, and a class of officers trained in war colleges, offered lessons to the Ottomans. A cycle of opulence, rebellion, and military defeat propelled the empire to an era of reform. In order to break this cycle, the dynasty had to do away once and for all with its greatest rival power centre: the Janissaries.
The final six chapters of this book narrate the period from 1789 to 1922, the last 133 years of the Ottoman dynasty and empire. This era was marked by diverse attempts by administrators, intellectuals, sultans, and military leaders to save the empire from its own worst tendencies and dismemberment by foreign powers. As the Ottomans became ever more connected to the rest of Europe, for good and for ill, they sought to hold the empire together in the face of internal rebellion and revolution. They grasped for new ways to link the dynasty to its subjects, experimenting with ever more radical and modern forms of governance, war, and violence.