Europe’s path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was very far from straight and narrow; rather, it was long and tortuous. It had its origins in the fundamental Christian tenet that Church and state should be separate. ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22: 21) is an injunction radically different from that in the Koran, which insists on the indivisibility of God’s law as revealed to the Prophet and the unity of any power structure based on Islam. It was Christ’s distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, adumbrated in the fifth century by St Augustine’s City of God (as opposed to the Roman Empire’s ‘City of Man’), that enabled successive European rulers to resist the political pretensions of the papacy in Rome; indeed, until the reassertion of papal power over the investiture (appointment) of the clergy by Gregory VII (1073–85), it was the secular authorities that threatened to turn the Pope into a puppet.
Europe before 1500 was a vale of tears, but not of ignorance. Much classical learning was rediscovered in the Renaissance, often thanks to contact with the Muslim world. There were important innovations too. The twelfth century saw the birth of polyphony, a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of Western music. The central importance of the experimental method was proposed by Robert Grosseteste and seconded by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. In around 1413 Filippo Brunelleschi invented linear perspective in painting. The first true novel was the anonymous La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1500). But a more decisive breakthrough than the Renaissance was the advent of the Reformation and the ensuing fragmentation of Western Christianity after 1517. This was in large measure because of the revolutionary role of the printing press, surely the single most important technological innovation of the period before the Industrial Revolution. As we have seen, the Chinese can claim to have invented printing with a press (see Chapter 1). But Gutenberg’s system of movable metal type was more flexible and scalable than anything developed in China. As he said, ‘the wondrous agreement, proportion and harmony of punches and types’ allowed for the very rapid production of pamphlets and books. It was far too powerful a technology to be monopolized (as Gutenberg hoped it could be). Within just a few years of his initial breakthrough in Mainz, presses had been established by imitators – notably the Englishman William Caxton – in Cologne (1464), Basel (1466), Rome (1467), Venice (1469), Nuremberg, Utrecht, Paris (1470), Florence, Milan, Naples (1471), Augsburg (1472), Budapest, Lyon, Valencia (1473), Kraków, Bruges (1474), Lübeck, Breslau (1475), Westminster, Rostock (1476), Geneva, Palermo, Messina (1478), London (1480), Antwerp, Leipzig (1481), Odense (1482) and Stockholm (1483).17 Already by 1500 there were over 200 printing shops in Germany alone. In 1518 a total of 150 printed works were published in German, rising to 260 in 1519, to 570 in 1520 and to 990 by 1524.
No author benefited from this explosion of publication more than Martin Luther, not least because he saw the potential of writing in the vernacular rather than in Latin. Beginning modestly with the introduction to an edition of the Theologia Deutsch and the Seven Penitential Psalms, he and the Wittenberg printer Johann Grunenberg soon flooded the German market with religious tracts critical of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther’s most famous broadside, the Ninety-Five Theses against the Church’s sale of indulgences (as a form of penance for sin), was initially not published but nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. But it was not long before multiple copies of the theses appeared in print.18 Luther’s message was that ‘faith alone without works justifies, sets free, and saves’ and that all men were ‘priests for ever … worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, and to teach one another mutually the things which are of God’.19 This notion of an autodidact ‘priesthood of all believers’ was radical in itself. But it was the printing press that made it viable, unlike Jan Hus’s earlier challenge to Papal power, which had been ruthlessly crushed like all medieval heresies. Within just a few years, Luther’s pamphlets were available throughout Germany, despite the 1521 Edict of Worms ordering their burning. Of the thirty sermons and other writings Luther published between March 1517 and the summer of 1520, about 370 editions were printed. If the average size of an edition was a thousand copies, then around a third of a million copies of his works were in circulation by the latter date. Between 1521 and 1545, Luther alone was responsible for half of all pro-Reformation publications.20
Because of its emphasis on individual reading of scripture and ‘mutual teaching’, the new medium truly was the message of the Reformation. As with so many other aspects of Western ascendancy, however, commercial competition played a part. Luther himself complained that his publishers were ‘sordid mercenaries’ who cared more ‘for their profits than for the public’.21 In fact, the economic benefits of the printing press were spread throughout society. In the course of the sixteenth century, towns with printers grew much more rapidly than those without printers.22
Crucially, the printing press spread teaching other than Luther’s. The New Testament itself was first printed in English in 1526 in Matthew Tyndale’s translation, permitting literate laymen to read the scriptures for themselves. Religious conservatives might denounce that ‘villainous Engine’, the printing press, and look back nostalgically to ‘an happy time when all Learning was in Manuscript, and some little Officer … did keep the Keys of the Library’.23 But those days were gone for ever. As Henry VIII’s minister Thomas More was quick to grasp, even those who opposed the Reformation had no option but to join battle in print. The only way of limiting the spread throughout Scotland and England of the Calvinists’ Geneva Bible (1560) was for King James VI and I to commission an alternative ‘authorized’ version, the third and most successful attempt to produce an official English translation.* Also unlocked and spread by the printing press were the works of ancient philosophers, notably Aristotle, whose De anima was published in modern translation in 1509, as well as pre-Reformation humanists like Nicolaus Marschalk and George Sibutus. Already by 1500 more than a thousand scientific and mathematical works had appeared in print, among them Lucretius’ De natura rerum, which had been rediscovered in 1417, Celsus’ De re medica, a Roman compilation of Greek medical science, and Latin versions of the works of Archimedes.24 Italian printers played an especially important role in disseminating commercially useful arithmetical and accounting techniques in works like Treviso Arithmetic (1478) and Luca Pacioli’s Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita (1494).
Perhaps most remarkably, at a time when anti-Turkish pamphlets were almost as popular as anti-Popish tracts in Germany,25 the Koran was translated into Latin and published in Basel by the printer Johannes Oporinus. When, in 1542, the Basel city council banned the translation and seized the available copies, Luther himself wrote in Oporinus’ defence:
It has struck me that one is able to do nothing more grievous to Muhammad or the Turks, nor more to bring them to harm (more than with all weaponry) than to bring their Koran to Christians in the light of day, that they may see therein, how entirely cursed, abominable, and desperate a book it is, full of lies, fables and abominations that the Turks conceal and gloss over … to honour Christ, to do good for Christians, to harm the Turks, to vex the devil, set this book free and don’t withhold it … One must open sores and wounds in order to heal them.26
Three editions were duly published in 1543, followed by a further edition seven years later. Nothing could better illustrate the opening of the European mind that followed the Reformation.
Of course, not everything that is published adds to the sum of human knowledge. Much of what came off the printing presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was distinctly destructive, like the twenty-nine editions of Malleus maleficarum that appeared between 1487 and 1669, legitimizing the persecution of witches, a pan-European mania that killed between 12,000 and 45,000 people, mostly women.27 To the audiences who watched Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, first performed in 1592, the idea that a German scholar might sell his soul to Satan in return for twenty-four years of boundless power and pleasure was entirely credible:
By him I’ll be great emperor of the world,
And make a bridge through the moving air,
To pass the ocean with a band of men;
I’ll join the hills that bind the Afric shore,
And make that country continent to Spain,
And both contributory to my crown:
The Emperor shall not live but by my leave …
Yet, just seventy years later, Thomas Hooke could publish his Micrographia (1665), a triumphant celebration of scientific empiricism:
By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us … We may perhaps be inabled to discern all the secret workings of Nature. What may not be therefore expected from it if thoroughly prosecuted? Talking and contention of Arguments would soon be turn’d into labours; all the fine dreams of Opinions, and universal metaphysical natures, which the luxury of subtil Brains has devis’d, would quickly vanish, and give place to solid Histories, Experiments and Works. And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden. From hence the World may be assisted with variety of Inventions, new matter for Sciences may be collected, the old improv’d, and their rust rubb’d away …
Hooke’s use of the term ‘cell’ for a microscopic unit of organic matter was one of a host of conceptual breakthroughs, crowded together astonishingly in both time and space, that fundamentally redefined humanity’s understanding of the natural world.
The Scientific Revolution may be said to have begun with almost simultaneous advances in the study of planetary motion and blood circulation. But Hooke’s microscope took science to a new frontier by revealing what had hitherto been invisible to the human eye. Micrographia was a manifesto for the new empiricism, a world away from Faustus’ sorcery. However, the new science was about more than just accurate observation. Beginning with Galileo, it was about systematic experimentation and the identification of mathematical relationships. The possibilities of mathematics were in turn expanded when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz introduced, respectively, infinitesimal and differential calculus. Finally, the Scientific Revolution was also a revolution in philosophy as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza overthrew traditional theories about both perception and reason. Without exaggeration, this cascade of intellectual innovation may be said to have given birth to modern anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, mechanics and physics. Its character is best illustrated by a list of just the most important twenty-nine breakthroughs of the period from 1530 to 1789.*
1530 |
Paracelsus pioneers the application of chemistry to physiology and pathology |
1543 |
Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium states the heliocentric theory of the solar system Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica supplants Galen’s anatomical textbook |
1546 |
Agricola’s De natura fossilium classifies minerals and introduces the term ‘fossil’ |
1572 |
Tycho Brahe records the first European observation of a supernova |
1589 |
Galileo’s tests of falling bodies (published in De motu) revolutionize the experimental method |
1600 |
William Gilbert’s De magnete, magnetisque corporibus describes the magnetic properties of the earth and electricity |
1604 |
Galileo discovers that a free-falling body increases its distance as the square of the time |
1608 |
Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Jansen independently invent the telescope |
1609 Galileo conducts the first telescopic observations of the night sky |
|
1610 |
Galileo discovers four of Jupiter’s moons and infers that the earth is not at the centre of the universe |
1614 |
John Napier’s Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio introduces logarithms |
1628 |
William Harvey writes Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, accurately describing the circulation of blood |
1637 |
René Descartes’ ‘La Géométrie’, an appendix to his Discours de la méthode, founds analytic geometry |
1638 |
Galileo’s Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche founds modern mechanics |
1640 |
Pierre de Fermat founds number theory |
1654 |
Fermat and Blaise Pascal found probability theory |
1661 |
Robert Boyle’s Skeptical Chymist defines elements and chemical analysis |
1662 |
Boyle states Boyle’s Law that the volume occupied by a fixed mass of gas in a container is inversely proportional to the pressure it exerts |
1669 |
Isaac Newton’s De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas presents the first systematic account of the calculus, independently developed by Gottfried Leibniz |
1676 |
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers micro-organisms |
1687 |
Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica states the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion |
1735 |
Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema naturae introduces systematic classification of genera and species of organisms |
1738 |
Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica states Bernoulli’s Principle and founds the mathematical study of fluid flow and the kinetic theory of gases |
1746 |
Jean-Etienne Guettard prepares the first true geological maps |
1755 |
Joseph Black identifies carbon dioxide |
1775 |
Antoine Lavoisier accurately describes combustion |
1785 |
James Hutton’s ‘Concerning the System of the Earth’ states the uniformitarian view of the earth’s development |
1789 |
Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie states the law of conservation of matter |
By the mid-1600s this kind of scientific knowledge was spreading as rapidly as had the doctrine of the Protestant Reformers a century before. The printing press and increasingly reliable postal services combined to create an extraordinary network, small by modern standards, but more powerful than anything previously achieved by a community of scholars. There was of course a great deal of intellectual resistance, as is always the case when the paradigm – the conceptual framework itself – shifts.28 Indeed, some of this resistance came from within. Newton himself dabbled in alchemy. Hooke all but killed himself with quack remedies for indigestion. It was by no means easy for such men to reconcile the new science with Christian doctrine, which few were ready to renounce.29 But it remains undeniable that this was an intellectual revolution even more transformative than the religious revolution that preceded and unintentionally begat it. The ground rules of scientific research – including the dissemination of findings and the assigning of credit to the first into print – were laid. ‘Your first letter [paper] baptised me in the Newtonian religion,’ wrote the young French philosopher and wit François-Marie Arouet (better known by his pen-name Voltaire) to Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis following the publication of the latter’s Discourse on the Different Figures of the Planets in 1732, ‘and your second gave me confirmation. I thank you for your sacraments.’30 This was irony; yet it also acknowledged the revelatory nature of the new science.
Those who decry ‘Eurocentrism’ as if it were some distasteful prejudice have a problem: the Scientific Revolution was, by any scientific measure, wholly Eurocentric. An astonishingly high proportion of the key figures – around 80 per cent – originated in a hexagon bounded by Glasgow, Copenhagen, Kraków, Naples, Marseille and Plymouth, and nearly all the rest were born within a hundred miles of that area.31 In marked contrast, Ottoman scientific progress was non-existent in this same period. The best explanation for this divergence was the unlimited sovereignty of religion in the Muslim world. Towards the end of the eleventh century, influential Islamic clerics began to argue that the study of Greek philosophy was incompatible with the teachings of the Koran.32 Indeed, it was blasphemous to suggest that man might be able to discern the divine mode of operation, which God might in any case vary at will. In the words of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, ‘It is rare that someone becomes absorbed in this [foreign] science without renouncing religion and letting go the reins of piety within him.’33 Under clerical influence, the study of ancient philosophy was curtailed, books burned and so-called freethinkers persecuted; increasingly, the madrasas became focused exclusively on theology at a time when European universities were broadening the scope of their scholarship.34 Printing, too, was resisted in the Muslim world. For the Ottomans, script was sacred: there was a religious reverence for the pen, a preference for the art of calligraphy over the business of printing. ‘Scholar’s ink’, it was said, ‘is holier than martyr’s blood.’35 In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.36 This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once provided European scholars with ideas and inspiration, Muslim scientists were now cut off from the latest research. If the Scientific Revolution was generated by a network, then the Ottoman Empire was effectively offline. The only Western book translated into a Middle Eastern language until the late eighteenth century was a medical book on the treatment of syphilis.37
Nothing better illustrates this divergence than the fate of the observatory built in Istanbul in the 1570s for the renowned polymath Takiyüddīn al-Rāsid (Taqi al-Din). Born in Syria in 1521 and educated in Damascus and Cairo, Takiyüddīn was a gifted scientist, the author of numerous treatises on astronomy, mathematics and optics. He designed his own highly accurate astronomical clocks and even experimented with steam power. In the mid-1570s, as chief astronomer to the Sultan, he successfully lobbied for the construction of an observatory. By all accounts the Darü’r-Rasadü’l-Cedid (House of the New Observations) was a sophisticated facility, on a par with the Dane Tycho Brahe’s more famous observatory, Uraniborg. But on 11 September 1577 the sighting of a comet over Istanbul prompted demands for astrological interpretation. Unwisely, according to some accounts, Takiyüddīn interpreted it as a harbinger of a coming Ottoman military victory. But Sheikh ul-Islam Kadizade, the most senior cleric of the time, persuaded the Sultan that Takiyüddīn’s prying into secrets of the heavens was as blasphemous as the planetary tables of the Samarkand astronomer Ulugh Beg, who had supposedly been beheaded for similar temerity. In January 1580, barely five years after its completion, the Sultan ordered the demolition of Takiyüddīn’s observatory.38 There would not be another observatory in Istanbul until 1868. By such methods, the Muslim clergy effectively snuffed out the chance of Ottoman scientific advance – at the very moment that the Christian Churches of Europe were relaxing their grip on free inquiry. European advances were dismissed in Istanbul as mere ‘vanities’.39 The legacy of Islam’s once celebrated House of Wisdom vanished in a cloud of piety. As late as the early nineteenth century, Hüseyin Rıfkı Tamani, the head teacher at the Mühendishane-i Cedide, could still be heard explaining to students: ‘The universe in appearance is a sphere and its centre is the Earth … The Sun and Moon rotate around the globe and move about the signs of the zodiac.’40
By the second half of the seventeenth century, while the heirs of Osman slumbered, rulers all across Europe were actively promoting science, largely regardless of clerical qualms. In July 1662, two years after its initial foundation at Gresham College, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge received its royal charter from King Charles II. The aim was to found an institution ‘for the promoting of physico-mathematical experimental learning’. Significantly, in the words of the Society’s first historian, the founders:
freely admitted Men of different Religions, Countries, and Profession of Life. This they were oblig’d to do, or else they would come far short of the largeness of their own Declarations. For they openly profess, not to lay the Foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind … By their naturalizing Men of all Countries, they have laid the beginnings of many great advantages for the future. For by this means, they will be able to settle a constant Intelligence, throughout all civil Nations; and make the Royal Society the general Banck and Free-port of the World.41
Four years later, the Académie Royale des Sciences was set up in Paris, initially as a pioneering centre for cartography.42 These became the models for similar institutions all over Europe. Among the Royal Society’s founders was Christopher Wren – architect, mathematician, scientist and astronomer. When, in 1675, Charles II commissioned Wren to design his Royal Observatory in Greenwich, he certainly did not expect him to predict the outcomes of battles. Real science, the King well understood, was in the national interest.
What made the Royal Society so important was not so much royal patronage as the fact that it was part of a new kind of scientific community, which allowed ideas to be shared and problems to be addressed collectively through a process of open competition. The classic example is the law of gravity, which Newton could not have formulated without the earlier efforts of Hooke. In effect, the Society – of which Newton became president in 1703 – was a hub in the new scientific network. This is not to suggest that modern science was or is wholly collaborative. Then, as now, individual scientists were actuated by ambition as much as by altruism. But because of the imperative to publish new findings, scientific knowledge could grow cumulatively – albeit sometimes acrimoniously. Newton and Hooke quarrelled bitterly over who had first identified the inverse-square law of gravity or the true nature of light.43 Newton had an equally nasty argument with Leibniz, who dismissed gravity as having ‘an occult quality’.44 There was indeed an important intellectual fault-line here, between the metaphysical thought of the continent and the empirical practice of the British Isles. It was always more likely that the latter, with its distinctive culture of experimental tinkering and patient observation, would produce the technological advances without which there could have been no Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 5).45 The line that led from Newton’s laws to Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine – first used to drain the Whitehaven collieries in 1715 – was remarkably short and straight, though Newcomen was but a humble Dartmouth ironmonger.46 It is not accidental that three of the world’s most important technological innovations – James Watt’s improved steam engine (1764), John Harrison’s longitude-finding chronometer (1761) and Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769) – were invented in the same country, in the same decade.
When Newton died in March 1727 his body lay in state for four days at Westminster Abbey, before a funeral service in which his coffin was borne by two dukes, three earls and the Lord Chancellor. The service was watched by Voltaire, who was astonished at the veneration accorded to a scientist of low birth. ‘I have seen’, the famous philosophe wrote on his return to France, ‘a professor of mathematics, only because he was great in his vocation, buried like a king who had done well by his subjects.’ In the West, science and government had gone into partnership. And no monarch would better exemplify the benefits of that partnership than Voltaire’s friend Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Seventy years after the siege of Vienna, two men personified the widening gap between Western civilization and its Muslim rival in the Near East. In Istanbul Sultan Osman III presided indolently over a decadent Ottoman Empire, while in Potsdam Frederick the Great enacted reforms that made the Kingdom of Prussia a byword for military efficiency and administrative rationality.
Viewed from afar, the Ottoman Empire still seemed as impressive an autocracy as it had been in the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. In truth, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the empire was afflicted by acute structural problems. There was a severe fiscal crisis as expenditure ran ahead of tax revenue, and a monetary crisis as inflation, imported from the New World and worsened by debasement of the coinage, drove up prices (as also happened in Europe).47 Under the vizierate of Mehmed Köprülü, his son Ahmed and his ill-fated foster-son Kara Mustafa, it was a constant struggle to cover the expenses of the Sultan’s huge court, to restrain the Janissaries, the once celibate Ottoman infantry who had become a kind of hereditary caste and a law unto themselves, and to control the more remote imperial provinces. Corruption was rife. Centrifugal forces were strengthening. The power of the landowning class, the sipahi, was in decline. Insurgents like the celali in Anatolia were challenging central authority. There was religious conflict, too, between orthodox clerics like Kadızâde Mehmed, who attributed all Ottoman reverses to deviations from the word of the Prophet,48 and Sufi mystics like Sivasi Efendi.49 The Ottoman bureaucracy had formerly been staffed by slaves (under the system of devşirme), often taken as captives from Christian communities in the Balkans. But now selection and promotion seemed to depend more on bribery and favouritism than on aptitude; the rate of churn became absurdly high as people jostled for the perquisites of office.50 The deterioration in administrative standards can be traced today in Ottoman government records. The census of 1458 is a meticulous document, for example. By 1694 the equivalent records had become hopelessly sloppy, with abbreviations and crossings out.51 Ottoman officials were well aware of the deterioration, but the only remedy they could recommend was a return to the good old days of Suleiman the Magnificent.52
But perhaps the most serious problem was the decline in the quality of the sultans themselves. Turnover at the top was high; there were nine sultans between 1566, when Suleiman the Magnificent died, and 1648, when Mehmed IV succeeded to the throne. Of these, five were deposed and two assassinated. Polygamy meant that Ottoman sultans did not have the difficulties of Christian monarchs like Henry VIII, whose struggle to produce a male heir required no fewer than six wives, two of whom he executed, two of whom he divorced. In Istanbul, it was being one of the sultan’s usually numerous sons that was dangerous. Only one of them could succeed as sultan and, until 1607, the others were invariably strangled as an insurance against challenges to the succession. This was hardly a recipe for filial love. The fate of Suleiman’s talented eldest son, Mustafa, was not entirely untypical. He was murdered in his father’s own tent as a result of successful intrigues by the Sultan’s second wife, his stepmother, on behalf of her own sons. Another son, Bayezid, was also strangled. At the accession of Mehmed III in 1597 nineteen of his brothers were put to death. After 1607 this practice was abandoned in favour of the rule of primogeniture. Henceforth, the younger sons were merely confined to the harem – literally ‘the forbidden’ – inhabited by the sultan’s wives, concubines and offspring.53
To describe the atmosphere in the harem as unhealthy would be an understatement. Osman III became sultan at the age of fifty-seven, having spent the previous fifty-one years effectively as a prisoner in the harem. By the time he emerged, almost wholly ignorant of the realm he was supposed to rule, he had developed such a loathing for women that he took to wearing iron-soled shoes. On hearing his clunking footsteps, the ladies of the harem were expected to scurry out of sight. Half a century of dodging concubines was hardly the best preparation for power. Royal life was very different in the lands that lay to the north of the Balkans.
‘The ruler is the first person of the state,’ wrote Frederick the Great in 1752, in the first of two Political Testaments written for posterity. ‘He is paid well so that he can maintain the dignity of his office. But he is required in return to work effectively for the well-being of the state.’54 Very similar sentiments had been expressed a century earlier by his great-grandfather the Elector Frederick William, whose achievement it was to turn the Mark of Brandenburg from a war-ravaged wasteland into the core of the most tightly run state in Central Europe, its finances based on the efficient administration of the extensive royal domain, its social order based on a landowning class that loyally served atop horses or behind desks, its security based on a well-drilled peasant army. By the time his son was acknowledged as ‘King in Prussia’ in 1701, Frederick William’s realm was the closest approximation in existence to the ideal absolute monarchy recommended by the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes as the antidote to anarchy. It was a young and lean Leviathan.
The contrast with the Ottoman system was exemplified by Frederick the Great’s favourite royal residence at Potsdam. Designed by the King himself, it was more a villa than a palace and though he called it Sanssouci – ‘Carefree’ – its royal master was anything but free of care. ‘I can have no interests’, he declared, ‘which are not equally those of my people. If the two are incompatible, the preference is always to be given to the welfare and advantage of the country.’
The simple design of Sanssouci served as an example to the entire Prussian bureaucracy. Strict self-discipline, iron routine and snow-white incorruptibility were to be their watchwords. Frederick maintained only a small retinue of staff at Sanssouci: six running footmen, five regular footmen and two pages, but no valet owing to the simplicity of his wardrobe, almost invariably a threadbare military uniform, stained with snuff. In Frederick’s opinion, regal robes had no practical purpose, and a crown was merely ‘a hat that let the rain in’.55 In comparison with his counterpart in the Topkapı Palace, he lived like a monk. Instead of a harem, he had a wife (Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick) whom he detested. ‘Madam has grown fatter,’ was how he greeted her after one of many lengthy separations.56 The contrast is there in the written record too. The minutes of the Prussian Royal Cabinet – page after page of crisply recorded royal decisions – are the antithesis of eighteenth-century Ottoman documents.
The poet Lord Byron once wrote to a friend: ‘In England, the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey sodomy and smoking, we prefer a girl and bottle, they a pipe and pathic [catamite] …’ Ironically, Frederick the Great, the pioneer of enlightened absolutism, might well have been happier in the Ottoman court as a young man. A highly sensitive and probably homosexual intellectual, he endured an austere, and at times sadistic, schooling under the direction of his irascible, parade-loving father, Frederick William I.
While Frederick William unwound with boorish drinking companions at his ‘Tobacco Ministry’, his son sought solace in history, music and philosophy. To his martinet of a father, he was ‘an effeminate boy, who is without a single manly inclination, who cannot ride nor shoot, and who, into the bargain, is dirty in his person, never has his hair cut, and curls it like an idiot’.57 When Frederick was caught attempting to flee Prussia, his father had him imprisoned in Küstrin Castle and forced him to watch the beheading of the friend who had helped plan the escape, Hans Hermann von Katte. His friend’s body and severed head were left lying on the ground outside the Crown Prince’s cell.58 He remained in captivity at Küstrin for two years.
Yet Frederick could not afford to repudiate his father’s passion for the Prussian army. As colonel of the Goltz Regiment (following his release from prison), he sought to hone his military skills. These were to prove indispensable as he strove to compensate for Prussia’s vulnerable geographical position, stretched as it was almost diagonally across Central Europe. In the course of his reign, Frederick increased the size of the army he inherited from 80,000 to 195,000 men, making it Europe’s third largest. Indeed, with one soldier for every twenty-nine subjects, Prussia was in relative terms the most militarized country in the world by the end of Frederick’s reign in 1786.59 And, unlike his father, Frederick was prepared to deploy his army beyond the parade ground in pursuit of new territory. Within months of his accession in 1740, he stunned the continent by invading and seizing the wealthy province of Silesia from Austria. The sensitive aesthete who had once struggled to remain in the saddle and who preferred the sound of the flute to the click of heels had emerged as an artist in the exercise of power: der alte Fritz.
How can one explain this transformation? One clue lies in Frederick’s early work of political philosophy, The Anti-Machiavel, one of a number of royal refutations of the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli’s notoriously cynical user’s manual for rulers, The Prince. In his version, Frederick defends the right of a monarch to wage preventive war ‘when the excessive greatness of the greatest powers of Europe seems about to overflow its banks and engulf the world’, in other words to maintain the balance of power, ‘that wise equilibrium by which the superior force of some sovereigns is counterbalanced by the united forces of other powers’: ‘It is … better to engage in an offensive war when one is free to opt between the olive branch and the laurel wreath than to wait until those desperate times when a declaration of war can only momentarily postpone slavery and ruin.’60 Frederick later described neighbouring Poland as ‘an artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf’ – and consumed it duly was when the country was partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia.61 Frederick’s seizure of Silesia was thus no spur-of-the-moment affair. Prussia’s expansion was to be like a mirror image of Ottoman contraction: the achievement of a new kind of power based on ruthless rationalism.
Frederick William I had hoarded money, squeezing every penny out of his extensive Crown lands, and bequeathing his heir a chest of 8 million thalers. His son was determined to put his treasure to use, not only to enlarge his domain but also to give it a capital worthy of a first-ranking kingdom. One of the first grand edifices in what he intended to be a splendid forum in the heart of Berlin was the State Opera. Next to it he built the magnificent St Hedwig’s Cathedral. In the eyes of the incurious modern tourist, these are little different from the opera houses and cathedrals to be seen in other European capitals. But they repay closer scrutiny. Unusually in northern Europe, the Berlin State Opera House was never connected to a royal palace. It existed not for the monarch’s personal pleasure but for the enjoyment of a wider public. Frederick’s cathedral, too, was unusual, as it was a Catholic church in a Lutheran city – built by an agnostic king, not grudgingly at the margins, but at the heart of the city’s grandest square. The portico of the cathedral is consciously modelled on the Pantheon – the temple to all the gods – of ancient Rome.62 It remains as a monument to Frederick the Great’s religious tolerance.
The liberalism of the decrees issued at Frederick’s accession is startling even today: not only complete religious toleration but also unrestricted press freedom and openness to immigrants. In 1700 almost one in every five Berliners was, in fact, a French Huguenot, living in a French ‘colony’. There were also Salzburg Protestants, Waldensians, Mennonites, Scottish Presbyterians, Jews, Catholics and avowed religious sceptics. ‘Here everyone can seek salvation in the manner that seems best to him,’ declared Frederick, including even Muslims.63 True, Jews and Christians were tolerated in the Ottoman Empire, in the sense that they could live there. But their status was closer to that of the Jews in medieval Europe – confined to specified areas and occupations, and taxed at higher rates.64
Invigorated by the combination of freedom and foreigners, Prussia experienced a cultural boom marked by the founding of new reading societies, discussion groups, bookshops, journals and scientific societies. Though he himself professed to despise the language, preferring to write in French and speak German only to his horse, Frederick’s reign saw a surge of new publications in German. It was under his rule that Immanuel Kant emerged as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century, his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) probing the very nature and limitations of human rationality itself. Living and working throughout his life at the Albertina University at Königsberg, Kant was an even more austere figure than his king, taking his daily walk so punctually that locals set their watches by him. It mattered not one whit to Frederick that the great thinker was the grandson of a Scottish saddle-maker. What mattered was the quality of his mind rather than his birth. Nor did it bother Frederick that one of Kant’s intellectual near-equals, Moses Mendelssohn, was a Jew. Christianity, the King remarked sardonically, was ‘stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it’.65
Here was the very essence of that movement we know as the Enlightenment, which was in many – though not all – ways an extension of the Scientific Revolution. The differences were twofold. First, the circle of philosophes was wider. What was happening in Prussia was happening all over Europe: publishers of books, magazines and newspapers were supplying an enlarged market, thanks to a significant improvement in literacy rates. In France the proportion of men able to sign their own name – a good enough proxy for literacy – rose from 29 per cent in the 1680s to 47 per cent in the 1780s, though the rates for women (from 14 per cent to 27 per cent) remained markedly lower. In Paris by 1789 male literacy was around 90 per cent, female literacy 80 per cent. Competition between Protestant and Catholic institutions as well as increased state provision, high rates of urbanization and improved transportation – all these things together made Europeans better able to read. Nor was the Enlightenment transmitted purely through reading. The public sphere of the eighteenth century also consisted of subscription concerts (like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s in Vienna in 1784), new public theatres and art exhibitions, to say nothing of a complex web of cultural societies and fraternities like the Freemasonic Lodges that proliferated at this time. ‘I write as a citizen of the world,’ enthused the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller in 1784:
The public now is everything to me – my preoccupation, my sovereign and my friend. Henceforth I belong to it alone. I wish to place myself before this tribunal and no other. It is the only thing I fear and respect. A feeling of greatness comes over me with the idea that the only fetter I wear is the verdict of the world – and that the only throne I shall appeal to is the human soul.66
Second, the principal concern of Enlightenment thinkers was not natural but social science, what the Scottish philosopher David Hume called the ‘science of man’. How scientific the Enlightenment actually was is debatable. Especially in France, empiricism was at a discount. The seventeenth-century scientists had been interested in discovering how the natural world actually was. The eighteenth-century philosophes were more concerned to propose how human society might or ought to be. We have already encountered Montesquieu asserting the role of climate in shaping China’s political culture, Quesnay admiring the primacy of agriculture in Chinese economic policy and Smith arguing that China’s stagnation was due to insufficient foreign trade. Not one of these men had been to China. John Locke and Claude Adrien Helvétius concurred that the human mind was like a blank slate, to be formed by education and experience. But neither had the slightest experimental evidence for this view. This, and much else, was the result of reflection, and a great deal of reading.
Where the Enlightenment scored easy points was in pitting reason against the superstitions associated with religious faith or metaphysics. In heaping scorn on Christianity, Frederick the Great was putting very bluntly what Voltaire, David Hume, Edward Gibbon and others suggested more subtly in their philosophical or historical writings. The Enlightenment was always most effective when it was being ironical – in Gibbon’s breathtaking chapter on early Christianity (volume I, chapter 15 of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) or in Candide, Voltaire’s devastating mockery of Leibniz’s claim that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.*
Yet perhaps the greatest achievement of the era was Smith’s analysis of the interlocking institutions of civil society (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) and the market economy (The Wealth of Nations). Significantly, by comparison with much else that was written in the period, both works were firmly rooted in observation of the Scottish bourgeois world Smith inhabited all his life. But where Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ of the market manifestly had to be embedded in a web of customary practice and mutual trust, the more radical Francophone philosophes sought to challenge not just established religious institutions but also established political institutions. The Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) cast doubt on the legitimacy of any political system not based on ‘the general will’. Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, questioned the legitimacy of unfree labour in his Reflections on Negro Slavery (1781). And if a Prussian king could deride the Christian faith, what was to stop Parisian hacks from heaping opprobrium on their own monarch and his queen? The Enlightenment had a very long tail, stretching down from the rarefied heights of Kant’s Königsberg to the insalubrious depths of the Parisian gutter, home of such so-called libelles as Le Gazetier Cuirassé, edited by Charles Théveneau de Morande. Even Voltaire was appalled by the Gazetier’s scurrilous attacks on the government, calling it ‘one of those satanic works where everyone from the monarch to the last citizen is insulted with furor’.67
The irony of the Enlightenment’s half-intended revolutionary consequence was that it was itself a highly aristocratic affair. Among its leading lights were the baron de Montesquieu, the marquis de Mirabeau, the marquis de Condorcet and the arch-atheist baron d’Holbach. The lower-born philosophes all depended more or less on royal or aristocratic patronage: Voltaire on the marquise de Châtelet, Smith on the Duke of Buccleuch, Friedrich Schiller on the Duke of Württemberg, Denis Diderot on Catherine the Great.
Like other European monarchs, Frederick the Great did more than merely give intellectuals freedom from religious and other constraints. His patronage extended far beyond offering Voltaire a roof over his head at Sanssouci. In June 1740 – impressed by Maupertuis’ vindication of Newton’s hypothesis that the earth was an oblate sphere, somewhat flattened at the two poles – Frederick invited the Frenchman to come to Berlin and help found a Prussian equivalent of the Royal Society. This project suffered a setback when Maupertuis was ignominiously taken prisoner by the Austrians during the first Silesian War, but the project survived.68 In January 1744 Frederick created the Prussian Academy of Science and Belles-Lettres, amalgamating an earlier Royal Academy of Science and a non-governmental Literary Society established the year before, and persuaded Maupertuis to return to Berlin as its president – ‘the finest conquest I have ever made in my life’, as the King put it to Voltaire.69
Frederick was without doubt a serious thinker in his own right. In its insistence on the monarch’s function as a public servant, his Anti-Machiavel is a remarkably revolutionary document:
the true wisdom of sovereigns is to do good and to be the most accomplished at it in their states … it is not enough for them to perform brilliant actions and satisfy their ambition and glory, but … they must prefer the happiness of the human race … Great princes have always forgotten themselves for the common good … A sovereign pushed into war by his fiery ambition should be made to see all of the ghastly consequences for his subjects – the taxes which crush the people of a country, the levies which carry away its youth, the contagious diseases of which so many soldiers die miserably, the murderous sieges, the even more cruel battles, the maimed deprived of their sole means of subsistence, and the orphans from whom the enemy has wrested their very flesh and blood … They sacrifice to their impetuous passions the well being of an infinity of men whom they are duty bound to protect … The sovereigns who regard their people as their slaves risk their lives without pity and see them die without regret, but the princes who consider men as their equals and in certain regards as their masters [comme leurs egaux et à quelques egards … comme leurs maitres], are economists with their blood and misers with their lives.70
Frederick’s musical compositions, too, had real merit – notably the serene Flute Sonata in C major, which is no mere pastiche of Johann Sebastian Bach. His other political writings were far from the work of a dilettante. Yet there was an important difference between the Enlightenment as he conceived it and the earlier Scientific Revolution. The Royal Society had been the hub of a remarkably open intellectual network. By contrast, the Prussian Academy was intended to be a top-down hierarchy, modelled on the absolutist monarchy itself. ‘Just as it would have been impossible for Newton to delineate his system of attraction if he had collaborated with Leibniz or Descartes,’ noted Frederick in his Political Testament (1752), ‘so it is impossible for a political system to be made and sustained if it does not emerge from a single head.’71 There was only so much of this kind of thing that the free spirit Voltaire could stand. When Maupertuis abused his position of quasi-royal authority to exalt his own principle of least action, Voltaire wrote the cruelly satirical Diatribe du Docteur Akakia, médecin du Pape. This was precisely the kind of insubordinate behaviour Frederick could not stand. He ordered copies of the Diatribe to be destroyed and made it clear that Voltaire was no longer a welcome guest in Berlin.72
Others were more inclined to submit. An astronomer before he became a philosopher, Kant had first come to public attention in 1754 when he won a Prussian Academy prize for his work on the effect of surface friction in slowing the earth’s rotation. The philosopher showed his gratitude in a remarkable passage in his seminal essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, which called on all men to ‘Dare to reason!’ (Sapere aude!), but not to disobey their royal master:
Only one who is himself enlightened … and has a numerous and well-disciplined army to assure public peace, can say: ‘Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!’ A republic could not dare say such a thing … A greater degree of civil freedom appears advantageous to the freedom of mind of the people, and yet it places inescapable limitations upon it. A lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity.73
Prussia’s Enlightenment, in short, was about free thought, not free action. Moreover, this free thought was primarily designed to enhance the power of the state. Just as immigrants contributed to Prussia’s economy, which allowed more tax to be raised, which allowed a bigger army to be maintained, which allowed more territory to be conquered, so too could academic research make a strategic contribution. For the new knowledge could do more than illuminate the natural world, demystifying the movements of heavenly bodies. It also had the potential to determine the rise and fall of earthly powers.
Today, Potsdam is just another dowdy suburb of Berlin, dusty in summer, dreary in winter, its skyline marred by ugly apartment blocks that bear the hallmarks of East German ‘real existing socialism’. In Frederick the Great’s time, however, most of the inhabitants of Potsdam were soldiers and almost all the buildings in Potsdam had some sort of military connection or purpose. Today’s film museum was originally built as an orangery but then turned into cavalry stables. Take a walk through the centre of town and you pass the Military Orphanage, the Parade Ground and the former Riding School. At the junction of Lindenstrasse and Charlottenstrasse, bristling with military ornamentation, is the former Guardhouse. Even the houses were built with an extra storey on top as lodgings for soldiers.
Military Labour Productivity in the French Army:
Rate of Successful Fire per Infantryman, 1600–1750
Potsdam was Prussia in caricature as well as in miniature. Frederick’s adjutant Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst once observed, only half in jest: ‘The Prussian monarchy is not a country which has an army, but an army which has a country in which – as it were – it is just stationed.’74 The army ceased to be merely an instrument of dynastic power; it became an integral part of Prussian society. Landowners were expected to serve as army officers and able-bodied peasants took the places of foreign mercenaries in the ranks. Prussia was the army – and the army was Prussia. By the end of Frederick’s reign over 3 per cent of the Prussian population were under arms, more than double the proportion in France and Austria.
A focus on drill and discipline was widely regarded as the key to Prussian military success. In this respect Frederick was the true successor to Maurice of Nassau and the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, the masters of seventeenth-century warfare. The blue-clad Prussian infantry marched like clockwork soldiers at ninety paces a minute, slowing to seventy as they neared the enemy.75 The Battle of Leuthen was fought in December 1757, when the very existence of Prussia was threatened by an alliance of three great powers: France, Austria and Russia. True to form, the Prussian infantry surprised the long Austrian line, attacking on its southern flank and rolling it up. But then, as the Austrians tried to regroup, they encountered something far more lethal even than a swiftly marching foe: artillery. For deadly accurate firepower was as crucial to Prussia’s rise as the legendary ‘cadaver-like obedience’ of the infantry.76
In his early years, Frederick had dismissed artillery as a ‘pit of expense’.77 But he came to appreciate its value. ‘We are now fighting against something more than men,’ he argued. ‘We must get it into our heads that the kind of war we shall be waging from now on will be a question of artillery duels …’78 At Leuthen the Prussians had sixty-three field guns and eight howitzers as well as ten 12-pound guns known as Brummer – ‘growlers’ – because of their ominous rumbling report. The mobile horse-artillery batteries Frederick created soon became a European standard.79 Their rapid and concentrated deployment on an unprecedented scale would be the key to Napoleon Bonaparte’s later victories.
Weapons like these exemplified the application of scientific knowledge to the realm of military power. It was a process of competition, innovation and advance that quickly opened a yawning gap between the West and the Rest. Yet its heroes remain largely unsung.
Benjamin Robins was born with nothing but brains. Without the means to attend university, he taught himself mathematics and earned his crust as a private tutor. Already elected a member of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-one, he was employed as an artillery officer and military engineer by the East India Company. In the early 1740s Robins applied Newtonian physics to the problem of artillery, using differential equations to provide the first true description of the impact of air resistance on the trajectories of high-speed projectiles (a problem that Galileo had not been able to solve). In New Principles of Gunnery, published in England in 1742, Robins used a combination of his own careful observations, Boyle’s Law and the thirty-ninth proposition of book I of Newton’s Principia (which analyses the movement of a body under the influence of centripetal forces) to calculate the velocity of a projectile as it left the muzzle of a gun. Then, using his own ballistics pendulum, he demonstrated the effect of air resistance, which could be as much as 120 times the weight of the projectile itself, completely distorting the parabolic trajectory proposed by Galileo. Robins was also the first scientist to show how the rotation of a flying musket ball caused it to veer off the intended line of fire. His paper ‘Of the Nature and Advantage of a Rifled Barrel Piece’, which he read before the Royal Society in 1747 – the year he was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal – recommended that bullets should be egg-shaped and gun barrels rifled. The paper’s conclusion showed how well Robins appreciated the strategic as well as the scientific importance of his work:
whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages of rifled barrel pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their construction, shall introduce into their armies their general use with a dexterity in the management of them; they will by this means acquire a superiority, which will almost equal any thing, that has been done at any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of arms.80
For the more accurate and effective artillery became, the less valuable were sophisticated fortifications; the less lethal were even the best-drilled regular infantry regiments.
It took Frederick the Great just three years to commission a German translation of Robins’s New Principles of Gunnery. The translator Leonard Euler, himself a superb mathematician, improved on the original by adding a comprehensive appendix of tables determining the velocity, range, maximum altitude and flight time for a projectile fired at a given muzzle velocity and elevation angle.81 A French translation followed in 1751. There were of course other military innovators at this time – notably Austria’s Prince Joseph Wenzel von Liechtenstein and France’s General Gribeauval – but to Robins belongs the credit for the eighteenth-century ballistics revolution. The killer application of science had given the West a truly lethal weapon: accurate artillery. It was rather a surprising achievement for a man born, as Robins was, a Quaker.
The Robinsian revolution in ballistics was something from which the Ottomans were of course excluded, just as they had missed out on the more general Newtonian laws of motion. In the sixteenth century Ottoman arms from the Imperial State Cannon Foundry were more than a match for European artillery.82 In the seventeenth, that began to change. As early as 1664, Raimondo Montecuccoli, the Habsburg master strategist who routed the Ottoman army at St Gotthard, observed: ‘This enormous artillery [of the Turks] produces great damage when it hits, but it is awkward to move and it requires too much time to reload and sight … Our artillery is more handy to move and more efficient and here resides our advantage over the cannon of the Turks.’83 For the next two centuries that gap only widened as the Western powers honed their knowledge and weaponry at institutions like the Woolwich Academy of Engineering and Artillery, founded in 1741. When Sir John Duckworth’s squadron forced the Dardanelles in 1807, the Turks were still employing ancient cannon that hurled huge stone balls in the general direction of the attacking ships.
Montesquieu’s epistolary novel Persian Letters imagines two Muslims embarking on a voyage of discovery to France via Turkey. ‘I have marked with astonishment the weakness of the empire of the Osmanli,’ writes Usbek on his journey westwards. ‘These barbarians have abandoned all the arts, even that of war. While the nations of Europe become more refined every day, these people remain in a state of primitive ignorance; and rarely think of employing new inventions in war, until they have been used against them a thousand times.’84
Such expeditions to investigate the reasons for the West’s manifestly growing military superiority did in fact happen. When Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed was sent to Paris in 1721 he was instructed ‘to visit the fortresses, factories and works of French civilization generally and report on those which might be applicable’. He wrote back glowingly about French military schools and training grounds.
The Ottomans knew by this time that they had to learn from the West. In 1732 İbrahim Müteferrika, an Ottoman official born a Christian in Transylvania, presented Sultan Mahmud I with his Rational Bases for the Politics of Nations, which posed the question that has haunted Muslims ever since: ‘Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?’ Müteferrika’s answer ranged widely. He referred to the parliamentary system in England and Holland, to Christian expansion in America and the Far East and even mentioned that, while the Ottoman Empire was subject to sharia law (sheriat), Europeans had ‘laws and rules invented by reason’. But it was above all the military gap that had to be closed:
Let Muslims act with foresight and become intimately acquainted with new European methods, organization, strategy, tactics and warfare … All the wise men of the world agree that the people of Turkey excel all other peoples in their nature of accepting rule and order. If they learn the new military sciences and are able to apply them, no enemy can ever withstand this state.85
The message was clear: the Ottoman Empire had to embrace both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment if it was to be credible as a great power. It is no coincidence that it was Müteferrika who finally introduced the printing press to the Ottoman Empire in 1727 and, a year later, published the first book to use movable Arabic type, the Van Kulu dictionary. In 1732 he published a compilation of several English and Latin works as Fuyuzat-ı miknatisiye (‘The Enlightenment of Magnetism’).86
On 2 December 1757 the Ottoman civil servant and diplomat Ahmed Resmî Efendi left Istanbul for Vienna to announce the accession of a new sultan: Mustafa III. This was to be a very different Ottoman expedition from the one led by Kara Mustafa in 1683. Resmî was accompanied not by an army but by more than one hundred military and civilian officials; his mission was not to besiege the Habsburg capital but to learn from it. After a stay of 153 days he wrote a detailed – and enthusiastic – report of over 245 manuscript folios.87 In 1763 he was sent on another diplomatic mission, to Berlin. If anything, he was even more impressed by Prussia than by Austria. Though a trifle disconcerted by Frederick’s outfit (‘dusty with daily use’), he applauded the King’s dedication to the business of government, his lack of religious prejudice and the abundant evidence of Prussian economic development.88
Earlier accounts of Europe by Ottoman envoys had dripped with derision. Indeed, a chronic superiority complex had been another obstacle to Ottoman reform. Resmî’s enthusiastic accounts marked a dramatic – and painful – shift. Not everyone in Istanbul was receptive, however. Resmî’s implicit and explicit criticisms of the Ottoman systems of civil and military service were probably the reason this gifted official never became grand vizier. To describe the superiority of European governments was one thing. To implement reforms of the Ottoman system was quite another.
Western experts were invited to Istanbul to advise the Sultan. Claude Alexandre, comte de Bonneval oversaw reform of the Ottoman Corps of Miners and Artillery Transport as well as the Corps of Bombardiers. A French officer of Hungarian origin, Baron François de Tott, was brought in to oversee the construction of new, effective defences for the Ottoman capital. As he boated along the Bosphorus, de Tott realized with amazement that many of the fortifications were not merely outdated but also wrongly located, so that any enemy ships would be completely out of range even of modern guns. In his memoirs he described them as ‘more like the ruins of a siege than preparations for a defence’. He set up the Sür’at Topçulari Ocaği, modelled on the French Corps de Diligents, and the Hendesehane (Military Academy), where a Scotsman, Campbell Mustafa, instructed the cadets in mathematics. De Tott also built a new foundry for the manufacture of cannon and encouraged the creation of mobile artillery units.89
Time and again, however, attempts at change fell foul of political opposition, not least that of the Janissaries, who in 1807 succeeded in dismantling altogether the New Order Army (Nizam-ı Cedid) instituted under the direction of another French expert, General Albert Dubayet. By now the Ottoman army appeared to be run primarily for the enrichment and convenience of its officers. Increasingly vulnerable in battle, it was no longer even effective at suppressing internal revolts.90 It was not until the Tanzimat (Reorganization) era – the reigns of the reforming sultans Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I – that a sultan was prepared to confront such opposition head on.
On 11 June 1826, on a large parade ground near the main Janissary barracks, 200 soldiers were put through their paces wearing new European-style uniforms. Two days later some 20,000 Janissaries gathered to protest, shouting: ‘We do not want the military exercises of the infidels!’ They symbolically overturned their pilav cauldrons and threatened to march on the Topkapı Palace. Mahmud II seized his moment. Either the Janissaries would be massacred, he declared, or cats would walk over the ruins of Istanbul. He had prepared well, ensuring the loyalty of key army units like the artillery corps. When their guns were turned against the Janissary barracks, the forces of reaction were thrown into disarray. Hundreds were killed. On 17 June the Janissaries were abolished.91
It was not only the army’s uniforms that were Europeanized. Soldiers also had to march to a brand new beat, following the appointment as instructor general of the imperial Ottoman music of Giuseppe Donizetti, brother of the more famous Gaetano Donizetti, the composer of Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti wrote two distinctly Italianate national anthems for his employer as well as overseeing the creation of a European-style military band, which he taught to play Rossini overtures. Gone were the war drums that had once struck the fear of Allah into the defenders of Vienna. As the French journal Le Ménestrel reported in December 1836:
In Istanbul, the ancient Turkish music has died in agony. Sultan Mahmoud loves Italian music and has introduced it to his armies … He particularly loves the piano, so much so that he ordered many instruments from Vienna for his ladies. I do not know how they are going to learn to play, since no one has so far succeeded in going anywhere near them.92
The most enduring symbol of the era of reform was built by Sultan Abdülmecid I. Constructed between 1843 and 1856, the Dolmabahçe Palace has no fewer than 285 rooms, forty-four halls, sixty-eight toilets and six hammams (Turkish baths). Fourteen tons of gold leaf were used to gild the palace ceilings, from which hung a grand total of thirty-six chandeliers. At the top of the dazzling Crystal Staircase, the palace’s biggest room, the Muayede (Ceremonial) Hall, boasts an immense one-piece carpet measuring 1,300 square feet and a chandelier that weighs over 4 tons. It looks rather like a cross between Grand Central Station and a stage set at the Paris Opéra.
All that remained was to implement, after a lag of roughly 200 years, the Scientific Revolution. A government report published in 1838 confirmed the new importance of Western knowledge: ‘Religious knowledge serves salvation in the world to come, but science serves the perfection of man in this world.’ However, it was not until 1851 that an Assembly of Knowledge (Encümen-i Daniş) was established on the model of the Académie Française (members were expected to be ‘well versed in learning and science, having a perfect knowledge of one of the European languages’), followed ten years later by an Ottoman Scientific Society (Cemiyet-i İlmiye-i Osmaniye).93 At the same time, with the creation of something like an industrial park west of Istanbul, there was a concerted effort to build factories capable of manufacturing modern uniforms and weaponry. It seemed that the Ottomans were at last sincerely opening to the West.94 The Orientalist James Redhouse, who was first employed as a teacher at the Ottoman Naval Engineering School after jumping ship at the age of seventeen, toiled for decades to translate English works into Turkish and to compile dictionaries, grammars and phrasebooks that would make European knowledge more accessible to Ottoman readers, as well as improving Western understanding of the disreputable Turk. In 1878 Ahmed Midhat founded the Interpreter of Truth newspaper, in which he serialized many of his own works, including Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan (‘A Tour of Europe, 1889’), which described his experiences at the Exposition Universelle in Paris and in particular his impressions of the Palace of Machines.95
Yet, despite sincere efforts by grand viziers like Reshid Pasha, Fuad and Ali Pasha and Midhat Pasha, none of these changes was accompanied by the kind of reform of the Ottoman system of administration that might have provided a solid foundation to support this fine façade.96 New armies, new uniforms, new anthems and new palaces were all very well. But without an effective system of taxation to finance them, a rising share of the cost was met by borrowing in Paris and London. And the more revenue that had to be spent on interest payments to European bond-holders, the less there was to finance defence of the now crumbling empire. Driven from Greece in the 1820s, and losing large chunks of Balkan territory in 1878, the Ottoman Empire appeared to be in terminal decline, its currency debased by the issue of crude (and easily forged) paper notes known as kaime,97 a rising share of its revenues consumed by interest payments to European creditors,98 its periphery menaced by a combination of Slavic nationalism and great-power machination. The attempt to introduce a constitution to limit the Sultan’s power ended with the exile of Midhat Pasha and the reimposition of absolute rule by Abdul Hamid II.
In one corner of the Dolmabahçe Palace’s many vast halls stands the most extraordinary clock, which is also a thermometer, a barometer and a calendar. It was a gift from the Khedive of Egypt to the Sultan. It even has an inscription in Arabic: ‘May your every minute be worth an hour and your every hour, a hundred years.’ It looks like a masterpiece of Oriental technology – except for one small detail: it was made in Austria, by Wilhelm Kirsch. As Kirsch’s clock perfectly illustrates, the mere importation of Western technology was no substitute for a home-grown Ottoman modernization. The Turks needed not just a new palace, but a new constitution, a new alphabet – in fact a new state. The fact that they finally got all these things was largely due to the efforts of one man. His name was Kemal Atatürk. His ambition was to be Turkey’s Frederick the Great.
I have serious reason to believe that the planet from which the little prince came is the asteroid known as B-612. This asteroid has only once been seen through the telescope. That was by a Turkish astronomer, in 1909. On making his discovery, the astronomer had presented it to the International Astronomical Congress, in a great demonstration. But he was in Turkish costume, and so nobody would believe what he said … Fortunately, however, for the reputation of Asteroid B-612, a Turkish dictator made a law that his subjects, under pain of death, should change to European costume. So in 1920 the astronomer gave his demonstration all over again, dressed with impressive style and elegance. And this time everybody accepted his report.
In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story, The Little Prince, the modernization of Turkey was gently mocked. To be sure, the Turks changed their mode of dress after the First World War, increasingly conforming to Western norms, just as the Japanese had after their Meiji Restoration (see Chapter 5). But how profound a change did this represent? In particular, was the new Turkey really capable of playing in the same scientific league as the Western powers?
Mustafa Kemal was not born to power in the way that Frederick the Great had been in Prussia. A hard-drinking womanizer, Kemal was a beneficiary of the late nineteenth-century overhaul of the Ottoman army overseen by Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz (Goltz Pasha) in the 1880s and early 1890s. Goltz was the personification of the Prussia created by Frederick the Great: born in East Prussia, the son of a mediocre soldier and farmer, he rose to the rank of field marshal with a combination of bravery and brains. Kemal learned the German way of warfare and turned theory into practice at Gallipoli in 1915, where he played a key role in the successful Turkish defence against the British invasion force. After the war, with the Ottoman Empire disintegrating and a Greek army marching into Anatolia, it was Kemal who organized the decisive counter-attack and proclaimed himself the father – Atatürk – of a new Turkish republic. Though he moved the capital from Istanbul to Ankara in the heart of Anatolia, there was no question in Atatürk’s mind that the state he had forged should face westwards. For centuries, he argued, Turks had ‘walked from the East in the direction of the West’.99 ‘Can one name a single nation’, he asked the French writer Maurice Pernot, ‘that has not turned to the West in its quest for civilization?’100
A key part of Atatürk’s reorientation of Turkey was the radical alphabet reform he personally introduced. Not only was Arabic script symbolic of the dominance of Islam; it was also poorly suited to the sounds of the Turkish language and therefore far from easy for the bulk of the population to read or write. Atatürk made his move in Gülhane Park, once a garden of the Topkapı Palace, on an August evening in 1928. Addressing a large invited audience, he asked for someone who could read Turkish to recite from a paper in his hand. When the volunteer looked in obvious bafflement at what was written on the sheet, Atatürk told the crowd: ‘This young man is puzzled because he does not know the true Turkish alphabet.’ He then handed it to a colleague who read aloud:
Our rich and harmonious language will now be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice … You must learn the new Turkish letters quickly … Regard it as a patriotic and national duty … For a nation to consist of ten or twenty per cent of literates and eighty or ninety per cent of illiterates is shameful … We shall repair these errors … Our nation will show, with its script and with its mind, that its place is with the civilized world.101
The Westernization of the alphabet was only part of a wider cultural revolution designed by Atatürk to propel Turkey into the twentieth century. Modes of dress were Westernized for both men and women; the fez and turban were replaced by the Western hat, the wearing of the veil discouraged. The Western calendar was adopted, including the Christian numbering of years. But the single most important thing Atatürk did was to establish the new Turkey as a secular state quite separate from all religious authority. The caliphate was abolished in March 1924; a month later religious courts were shut down and sharia law replaced by a civil code based on Switzerland’s. In Atatürk’s eyes, nothing had done more to retard the advance of the Ottoman Empire than religious interference in the realm of science. In 1932, after consulting Albert Malche of the University of Geneva, he replaced the old Darülfünun (Abode of Sciences), which had been firmly in the hands of the imams, with a Western-style University of Istanbul, subsequently opening its doors to around a hundred German academics fleeing the National Socialist regime because they were Jews or on the political left. ‘For everything in the world – for civilization, for life, for success,’ he declared in words inscribed on the main building of Ankara University, ‘the truest guide is knowledge and science. To seek a guide other than knowledge and science is [a mark of] heedlessness, ignorance and aberration.’102
In breaking up the Ottoman Empire and propelling its Turkish core towards secularism, the First World War struck a blow – admittedly an unintended one – for the values of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. To ensure victory, however, the British sought to mobilize internal enemies against the Sultan, among them the Arabs and the Jews. To the Arabs the British promised independent kingdoms. To the Jews they promised a new ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. These promises, as we know, proved to be incompatible.
Though holy to all three monotheistic religions, Jerusalem today sometimes seems like the modern equivalent of Vienna in 1683 – a fortified city on the frontier of Western civilization. Founded in May 1948 as a Jewish state, by Jews but not exclusively for Jews, the State of Israel regards itself as a Western outpost. But it is a beleaguered one. Israel, which claims Jerusalem as its capital,* is menaced on all sides by Muslim forces that threaten its very existence: Hamas in the occupied territories of Gaza (which it now controls) and the West Bank, Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon, Iran to the east, not forgetting Saudi Arabia. In Egypt and Syria Israelis see Islamists making inroads against secular governments. Even traditionally friendly Turkey is now clearly moving in the direction of Islamism and anti-Zionism, not to mention a neo-Ottoman foreign policy. As a result, many people in Israel feel as threatened as the Viennese did in 1683. The key question is how far science can continue to be the killer application that gives a Western society like Israel an advantage over its enemies.
To an extent that is truly remarkable for such a small country, Israel is at the cutting edge of scientific and technological innovation. Between 1980 and 2000 the number of patents registered in Israel was 7,652 compared with 367 for all the Arab countries combined. In 2008 alone Israeli inventors applied to register 9,591 new patents. The equivalent figure for Iran was fifty and for all majority Muslim countries in the world 5,657.103 Israel has more scientists and engineers per capita than any other country and produces more scientific papers per capita. As a share of gross domestic product its civilian research and development expenditure is the highest in the world.104 The German-Jewish banker Siegmund Warburg was not wrong when, at the time of the Six Day War, he compared Israel with eighteenth-century Prussia. (Warburg was especially impressed by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth, a research centre established in 1933 by Chaim Weizmann, the distinguished chemist who had gone on to become the first president of Israel.)105 A sandbox surrounded by foes, each country needed science to ensure its strategic survival. Today, nothing illustrates better the nexus between science and security than the police surveillance control room in the heart of Jerusalem. Literally every crowded street in the old city has its own closed-circuit television camera, allowing the police to monitor, record and where necessary thwart suspected terrorists.
Yet today that scientific gap finally shows signs of closing. Although it is an Islamic republic, Iran hosts two annual science festivals – the International Kharazmi Festival in Basic Science and the Annual Razi Medical Sciences Research Festival – designed to encourage high-level research in both theoretical and applied fields. The Iranian government recently committed 150 billion rials (roughly $17.5 million) to build a new observatory as part of a major investment in astronomy and astrophysics. Surprisingly, given the strictness of the regime’s application of sharia law, around 70 per cent of its Science and Engineering students are now women. From Tehran to Riyadh to the private, Saudi-financed Muslim girls’ school I visited last year in West London, the taboo against educating women is receding. That is in itself a welcome development. What is much less welcome is the use to which Iran is putting its newfound scientific literacy.
On 11 April 2006 the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran had successfully enriched uranium. Ever since, despite the threat of economic sanctions, Iran has been closing in on its long-cherished dream of being a nuclear power. Ostensibly, this is a programme designed to produce nuclear energy. In reality, it is an open secret that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad aspires to own a nuclear weapon. This would not make Iran the first Islamic nuclear power, however. Thanks to the pioneering work of the unscrupulous Dr A. Q. Khan, Pakistan has for years been the principal locomotive of nuclear-arms proliferation. At the time of writing, it is far from clear that Israel alone has a viable military answer to the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Today, then, more than three centuries after the siege of Vienna, the key question is how far the West is still capable of maintaining the scientific lead on which, among many other things, its military superiority has for so long been based. Or perhaps the question could be phrased differently. Can a non-Western power really hope to benefit from downloading Western scientific knowledge, if it continues to reject that other key part of the West’s winning formula: the third institutional innovation of private property rights, the rule of law and truly representative government?