Oh Thou God Almighty! Thou Creator of Heaven and Earth! Thou who commandest all! Impenetrable is Thy Judgment! Why must Thou condemn Thy servant to die here so unexpectedly, before being able to taste fully his young life? At the very least do not deprive me of Thy Grace and Mercy in granting forgiveness for my sins, and allow me to end my life without being deprived of the True Faith.” So prayed silently the seventeen-year-old Osman Agha, hands tied behind his back, facing the bared sword of a Hungarian pirate, kneeling beside the pirate’s ship on the shore of the Danube on a summer day in 1688. Then aloud: “I testify: There is no god but Allah, the One and Incomparable! I testify: Muhammed is His Servant and His Prophet!”
Osman Agha’s Gavurlarin Esiri (Prisoner of the Unbelievers) is one of the few autobiographies that have come down to us from the Ottoman world. The author, writing in middle life about his youthful adventures, had a vivid, almost cinematic way of recalling his experiences, what people said, the look of the roads he walked, the buildings he stayed in. We have no way of checking the details of his story, but the broad outlines fit known historical events. With him we walk the hot Hungarian plains and the forests of Croatia and sense in the anarchic violence around him a shift of power as momentous as any in the late seventeenth century.
Osman Agha was born about 1671, the son of a commander in the garrison of Temesvár, now Timi
oara in western Romania. At that time it was near the northern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, which dominated all the coasts of the Black Sea, ruled all of Anatolia and Greece and all of the Fertile Crescent, and reached to Yemen, the edge of the Ethiopian highlands, Algiers, and Crete, taken from the Venetians as recently as 1669. The Ottoman Empire’s golden age of military vigor and intelligent central administration had been more than a century earlier, but it still was one of the great powers of the world of 1688. Over the previous century the rising power of the Hapsburg Holy Roman Empire, much better organized than earlier Christian powers in southeastern Europe and drawing on Europe’s steady stream of technical and tactical advances in the arts of war, had posed a new kind of threat that worried Turkish statesmen. In Osman Agha’s childhood the Ottoman Empire still was holding its own and defending its frontiers. The Christian peasants worked their fields in peace and paid their taxes to their Turkish overlords, and his world seemed secure. Then in 1683 the Ottoman rulers thought they saw an opening in Hungarian opposition to the Hapsburgs and mounted a great campaign that threatened to take Vienna itself but then was driven off by a ramshackle coalition to which King Jan III Sobieski of Poland made one of the most important contributions. Ottoman losses, disorderly retreat, and the pursuit of Christian enemies plunged the Danube borderlands into chaos, opening the way for Christian conquests of Buda (modern Budapest) in 1685 and Belgrade in 1688, with much looting and massacre. Mounted bands of freebooters, already sometimes used by the Ottomans to supplement their regular cavalry, now found greater employment by both sides and more chances to pillage on their own in the vacuum of power. Young Osman Agha was able to buy a horse and join in some raids and fights around his hometown in these “bad times” and then managed to get, by the recommendation of a friend of his father, a commission as a junior cavalry officer at the age of fourteen or fifteen.
In June 1688 Osman Agha and his squadron were ordered to convey the pay for the garrison to the neighboring town of Lipova. They did this without incident, then decided to stay in Lipova an extra day because a fresh crop of cherries was in the markets. They still were there when Hapsburg forces besieged the town, set fire to it with artillery and mortars, and took it after four days of fierce resistance and heavy losses on the Turkish side. Osman Agha was allotted as a prisoner of war to a lieutenant, who demanded money from him. When he said he had none, the lieutenant stripped him naked and even checked his genitals to see if any was hidden there. The lieutenant then agreed to ransom him for sixty ducats; he was to go back to Temesvár to get the money as well as ransom money for one of his men who was to stay with the Austrians as a hostage.
True to his word, he stayed at home only four days, then set out with four other prisoners who had made similar deals to find their Austrian masters and pay their ransoms. Reaching the Danube, they saw a ship and sent Osman Agha to it to try to buy food. But the people on the ship were pirates, and when they learned that he was a prisoner carrying ransom money, they decided to kill him. They took him ashore so that they would not get blood all over their ship. At this point Osman Agha said his prayers, but instead of killing him the pirates took him along while they tried to catch his companions. He managed to get away and jump in a stream; his captors concluded that he had drowned and went away. Lost, naked, and hungry on a deserted plain, he again resorted to prayers, and they were answered: He found his companions again, found his master, spotted the pirate ship tied up at shore, and informed the Austrians, who with his help captured several of the pirates. Osman Agha got his money back.
Ever honest, ever credulous, he paid his ransom and allowed himself to be persuaded to accompany his master farther south into Croatia, where the master promised to give him a safe-conduct pass to cross the Sava River into Ottoman territory. But even there, with Ottoman troops right across the river, Osman Agha was talked out of leaving. He now found himself treated as a real prisoner, locked in a barn while the Austrians went off on campaign, and discovered that his master had sold him to a slave buyer from Venice. With the help of a sympathetic priest he managed to escape being sent to the Venetian galleys but still was not released. Accompanying the troops on a march to winter quarters, he pitied the sick soldiers who had diarrhea and had to get down from their wagons to relieve themselves and then hurry to catch up again. In winter Osman Agha found that bread from the commissary ovens was in desperately short supply. Since he was the only person who knew how to make unleavened bread and bake it in the ashes, he soon was able to improve his own position by making bread for the rest of the captives and their guards. But when he fell ill and lay unconscious with a high fever, his guards decided he was done for. They threw him out in the bitter cold; but the warmth from a nearby manure pile kept him alive until his fever broke, and he began to recover. He crawled to a nearby house, where several Croatian peasant families took pity on him. For three days he stayed in their communal kitchen. The women gave him spoonfuls of the heavy bean soup that was their main sustenance. He began to recover his strength. Still unable to return to Ottoman territory, for the next eight or nine years he was employed in Graz, at a castle, and finally in Vienna. In his memoirs he describes the cities, the tavern brawls, the servant’s life in a Vienna mansion, a journey to Bavaria and Italy with his master, and how he avoided temptation with Bosnian peasant girls, a chambermaid, and a young smith who had heard about the peculiar practices of the Turks. The countess whom he served promised him an excellent situation if he would convert to Christianity, but he steadfastly refused. Not until the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699 did he set out for home. He went back to his old post at Temesvár. Eventually his long years of experience with the Austrians, his knowledge of German, and his considerable perceptiveness and intelligence led to his employment as an interpreter in sensitive border diplomacy and then at Istanbul, where he served the Hapsburg ambassador. In the years of his service the Ottoman forces did not lose all the battles, but step by step they lost territory, in a turning of the tide he had seen at its beginning, in the raids and counterraids after 1683 and in the anarchy and devastation along the Danube that he had so improbably survived in the hot summer of 1688.
The Christian traveler arriving at Istanbul by sea in the spring of 1688 was likely to experience a jumble of contradictory impressions and emotions. Wherever he came from around the Mediterranean he had heard stories about the cruelty and fanaticism of the Turks and the Moors, and on his voyage the crew had kept a sharp watch for the sails of Muslim pirates. He might have heard a Christian preacher calling for another Crusade to liberate the Holy Places from the Muslim yoke. And here he was approaching the capital of the Grand Turk, the most feared and powerful enemy of the Christian faith.
It was beautiful almost beyond belief. As his ship turned into the deep, sheltered bay called the Golden Horn, more experienced travelers pointed out to him the walls of the magnificent Topkapi Palace, partly hidden in groves of trees atop the southern headland. There were the domes of the great mosques, of Süleyman, of Mehmet the Conqueror, and dozens more, and close to the Topkapi the dome of the Aya Sofia Mosque, the former Byzantine Hagia Sophia, its mosaics long since plastered over and replaced by intricately inscribed passages from the Quran. Many houses were of wood or of earth with wooden framing, gaily painted in pink, yellow, light blue. The city had few wide avenues but was not uniformly crowded, and there were many trees, gardens, places for a pleasant walk or ride. It also was huge, the biggest city in Europe, with perhaps seven hundred thousand people.
Landing on the northern, or Galata, side of the Golden Horn, across from Istanbul proper, our visitor would feel right at home. This was the quarter of the Latin Christians. There were several Catholic churches, one rebuilt after a fire in 1686 but only after the French ambassador had intervened with the authorities, and many taverns. The visitor might spot an occasional Turk, going on a business or official errand or just slumming, noting the drunks in the gutter so characteristic of non-Muslim immorality. In Galata or anywhere in the great city our visitor, with a European’s eye for variation in skin color and facial type, would notice much variety in the crowd and would hear of more variations that were not often seen in the bazaars. Blond hair and blue eyes were to be seen, in slaves from the Caucasus and the Russian frontier and in descendants of boys brought into Ottoman society in slave levies, largely abandoned earlier in the century. There was talk about the influential African eunuchs in the palaces. If our visitor was French and shared his king’s views on political order, he would have found it hard to understand how Istanbul could be at all peaceful and orderly, with all those different peoples and religions: Latin Christians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and a Muslim majority that was far from uniform in theology and practice. But it did work, for reasons deeply rooted both in Islam and in long-established practices of Asian centers of sea or land trade. An official hierarchy of judges enforced Islamic law for the Muslim majority, but it was normal to allow each people to practice its own religion and to allow the headmen of each community to govern it largely by their own laws and customs. In Istanbul the Jews, the Greeks, the Armenians, and the Latin Christians had their own councils and their own quarters, although residential segregation was not rigidly enforced. The Latin and Orthodox Christians had their bishops and patriarchs, the Jews their own Grand Rabbi. Islam accepted the Jewish prophets and Jesus as prophets, simply insisting that Muhammad was God’s last prophet and the Quran His last Word but enjoining special respect for Jews and Christians as People of the Book.
Taking a boat rowed by one of fifteen thousand boatmen across the Golden Horn and making his way up into the center of the city, the visitor would notice that the areas around the great mosques were full of special public buildings: schools with lodgings for their students, hospitals, lodgings for travelers. If he had a local guide, he would be impressed to learn that although there was no single corporate “church” structure of great wealth, many of these charitable activities, and many of the city’s aqueducts and fountains, were supported by the income from perpetual endowments, derived from donations by pious individuals fulfilling one of their most basic duties as good Muslims. Most people walked, and well-to-do Turks rode horseback; they used carriages only to send their women to the baths. Away from Galata he would see no open taverns and little public drunkenness, but many coffeehouses where men gathered to socialize. These had been features of Muslim urban life for more than two hundred years, although only in recent decades had the people of London, Paris, and Amsterdam started drinking coffee. The public baths in every quarter were another distinctive and civilized feature unknown in Latin Christian cities; our visitor would have had to be a bit brave or have had good local connections to expose his uncircumcised self in order to experience one.
Shops and peddlers were everywhere. The vast central bazaars, carefully divided into zones for different kinds of goods, showed an amazing abundance and variety. Good order was maintained, and there were official prices and standards for each trade. Those who sold cooked sheep’s heads must be sure they were fresh, well done, and free of wool. Slave sellers must not take the clothes off a slave and keep them as soon as the slave was sold. Watchmen patrolling the bazaars, members of various guilds, soldiers, and others all could be identified by differences in their dress and turbans. If he planned to be out after dark, our visitor would be sure to carry a lantern; if he did not, he might be arrested by the night watchmen. A frequent punishment for being out at night without a lantern was to be put to work until dawn prayers, carrying firewood for one of the public baths; it left one unkempt and dirty, an object of general derision. These night watchmen and others especially chosen in each district kept watch for fires, a major danger in a city mostly built of wood. Every house was supposed to keep a ladder and a barrel of water. There had been major fires in 1685 and 1687, and there were more, deliberately set, in the troubles of late 1687 and early 1688.
The sultan’s court in Topkapi Palace, with its many gates and guards, had an air of unapproachability, but in fact the political structure was rather simple and visible. The chief administrative officer of the empire, the grand vizier, inspected the bazaars every Wednesday and approved the lists of fair prices to be charged for each kind of good. He and the other high officials then held their weekly council, divan. On Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, the sultan and his court and the high officials went in magnificent procession to prayers at one of the great mosques. Through the headmen of guilds and communities, the judges of Islamic and customary law, and the high officials who were seen every week in public, there was a general sense, much valued in Islamic political culture, that the ordinary man could have access to someone with authority if he had a real grievance and, if he were dissatisfied with a legal decision, could appeal it all the way to the sultan. Of course every Muslim was equal to every other in his prayers and in his reading of the Quran and the other basic sources of teaching and could and should sort out for himself the different understandings of them available in the great city. Members of various orders of dervishes, committed to lives of prayer and teaching, were conspicuous in their plain brown cloaks and tall hats. The Mevlevi dervishes, noted for their inducing of religious ecstasy by whirling dances, had four big study houses and many smaller ones in the city. Other kinds of innovative and mystical teachings also had their adherents, especially among soldiers and merchants, but there were those too who vehemently defended traditional teaching and practice.
Outside the city and especially along the Bosporus strait, the Ottoman elite enjoyed the civilized pursuit of leisure in their fine country houses and gardens. In Üsküdar, right across the Bosporus from Istanbul, where all the trade routes from Anatolia and farther east converged, there were many mosques and schools and many caravanserais, lodgings for travelers and storehouses for their goods. The quantities of grain, cattle, and sheep that arrived every day to feed the huge city were mind-boggling. Most of the food supply came by sea, from Greece, Egypt, and the region around the Black Sea. Greeks, Jews, and Armenians all were important in these large-scale trades, with Armenians probably gaining influence in the late seventeenth century.
The Ottoman Turks had come out of Central Asia into Anatolia in the 1200s, drawing together nomadic and trading peoples fleeing from the disorders of the Mongol conquests, sometimes putting their military forces at the disposal of the Byzantine emperors. In the 1300s they already were powerful in the Balkans, and although the Serbs would never forget their defeat at Kosovo in 1389, they and the Bulgarians sometimes found it possible to preserve their own societies while acknowledging Ottoman supremacy. The Ottomans gradually closed in on their onetime suzerains in Constantinople and in 1453 took the city. (Thereafter they sometimes used forms of this name but more often shortened it to Istanbul.) The formidable order the Ottomans built in Istanbul drew on Byzantine and so ultimately on Roman precedents—from bureaucratization to baths—and retained many features of a Central Asian heritage, as well as the discipline and moral seriousness of Islam. High office could be held by the descendants of foreigners as well as Turks. Like many Central Asian conquerors, the Ottomans drew levies of slaves from their subject populations. These slaves not only did much of the hard work but provided precious skills and might rise to great power in their masters’ service. The Köprülü dynasty of grand viziers who dominated much of the late seventeenth century were descendants of an Albanian slave boy, the product of the last days of this system. Native-born Turks were predictably hostile to the domination of the administration by former slaves of foreign origin and thus were highly motivated to advance some of their own capable men and to perform well once in office.
Ottoman political writers of the late seventeenth century, deploring the violence and confusion of their own times, looked back to a golden age under Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, who reigned from 1520 to 1566. Then Ottoman conquests had reached all along the south side of the Mediterranean and down the Red Sea, far into southeastern Europe, and their forces had held their own against the formidable power of Persia. Then the sultan had set out every summer from the capital at the head of a magnificent, well-organized military expedition. Then there had been much building of mosques and schools in the capital and all over the empire. Then all the systems had worked right, and everyone had known his place and done his duty. But in retrospect we might wonder if there had been such a golden age or such an early decline, and if there Was trouble in the seventeenth century, as there surely was, had it been avoidable when a state so deeply rooted in conquest and military organization now had to be content with stability and prosperity?
For the Ottomans and all other large empires of early modern times, the achievement of unity and peace had paradoxical consequences. Trade flourished; population grew; people moved to the cities; prices rose. Provincial officers who were supposed to live off their land grants, like Osman Agha’s father, found their incomes inadequate. The central authorities needed professional, paid “new soldiers,” called janissaries by the Europeans, to defend and control Istanbul and other growing cities. Janissaries depended on continuous employment, and when mustered out or defeated in factional warfare in the capital, they might fan provincial revolts. Provincial magnates found new sources of revenue in the growing economy and resisted attempts to recapture them for the capital. Farmers, hard pressed by the pressure of population growth, new taxes, and “tax farmers,” who contracted for fixed payments of revenue to the state and kept whatever additional sums they could collect, rose in desperate revolt. If janissaries did not cause trouble in the provinces, they might settle in the capital, open shops, deepen their experience in bullying the palace, and spend their time listening to innovative or dissident Muslim teachers. In 1687 the state counted 38,131 Janissaries in Istanbul.
Mehmet Köprülü, grand vizier from 1656 to 1671, labored to restore discipline and increase revenues. With some order reestablished and some effectiveness restored to the military forces, the Ottoman forces mounted a conquest of Crete from the Venetians in 1669. Mehmet Köprülü was succeeded by a son and then a son-in-law, Kara Mustafa, who, tempted by the prospect of cooperation with Hungarian opponents of the Hapsburgs, mounted a massive expedition that besieged Vienna in 1683 but ultimately was driven off. In the anarchy of the no-man’s-land of the Danube plain, evident in the adventures of Osman Agha, the imperial authorities made frantic efforts to gain control. Soldiers drawing pay were not even showing up for musters. But when new muster rolls were compiled, they objected to being listed individually, “like slaves.” New efforts to tax more of the wealth of rich Muslims in the capital fared no better.
The situation deteriorated. A grand vizier was deposed, but when his successor appeared in the Hungarian garrisons, he encountered so much hostility that he fled to Belgrade. The soldiers chose a leader to present their complaints, and the sultan, needing them to turn back Christian advances near Belgrade, gave way at once. Sensing weakness, the soldiers streamed toward the capital. The sultan continued to give way, executing first the grand vizier and then his deputy. Now the leaders of the revolt targeted the sultan himself, accusing him of ignoring the problems of ruling while wasting his time in hunting and enjoying his harem. On November 8, 1687, a meeting of high officials and religious leaders in the Aya Sofia Mosque declared that Sultan Mehmet no longer was performing his duties, deposed him, and confined him to a remote part of the palace. Süleyman IV, named in his place, was thought to be relatively warlike but was unknown and totally inexperienced. Huge gifts were distributed to the rebels, and their leaders were named to high positions. Istanbul descended into a nightmare of looting and pillage, in which more and more ordinary people joined. By February 1688 the anarchy was nearly complete. The janissaries of the capital, with their own professional and commercial stakes in law and order, had resisted the chaos, but when their leader stabbed the leader of the rebels, he in turn was torn apart on the spot. Women were carried away from their homes. Several women related to the Köprülü brothers were maimed, their hands and noses cut off, and were driven naked through the streets.
On March 1, 1688, Sultan Süleyman held a meeting of the high officials and religious leaders in one of the great mosques. He called on them to join him in restoring order and in marching to defend the Danube frontier against the Christians. The elite and the janissaries rallied to him and eventually restored order. But as late as March 15, when the French ambassador’s courier left to carry dispatches to Versailles, there still were new fires breaking out. In 1689 yet another Köprülü was named grand vizier and continued his relatives’ efforts to remove useless troops from the rolls and get finances and administration in hand. Some see the Ottoman Empire enjoying a few decades of late prosperity and order down to about 1730. If this is correct, it may be partly because so many had stared anarchy in the face in the first weeks of 1688 and realized that there were worse things than indolent sultans and grasping officials.
In 1688 no state faced a more daunting task of frontier defense than the Ottoman Empire. A century before, one of the most dangerous of these had been the eastern border with Shia Persia, where theological enmity added a charge to the confrontation of two centralized empires. In 1688 Persia still was a rich and sophisticated country, a major producer of silk for the world market, but it seemed little interested in confronting its western neighbor. The sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire had sought to counter the Portuguese thrust into the Indian Ocean by extending its own power to the mouth of the Red Sea and occasionally sending a fleet to India. As a by-product of that effort it had controlled most of the cities and trade routes of Yemen for some decades. But Yemen, with its tough mountaineers in their high, inaccessible villages, has resisted every would-be conqueror from the Roman Empire to Nasser’s Egypt, and the Ottomans were no exception. By 1688 they held only a few beleaguered outposts. Then there were the plains stretching from Poland and Hungary along the north side of the Black Sea, where the Ottomans faced fractious Christian subjects and the perpetual hostility of the rulers of Poland and Russia; they, to the great relief of the Ottoman rulers, hated each other as much as they hated the Turks. The mountains south and west of the Danube were an impossible patchwork of people speaking almost the same language, some of them good Muslims, some Turk-hating Serbs and Croats.
The Ottomans, heirs of Central Asian traditions of cavalry warfare, knew or thought they knew how to marshal their power to maintain these borders. The annual summer campaign, often commanded by the sultan himself, was a central motif of their political order. The state-subsidized pilgrimage caravans to Mecca looked and behaved like military expeditions. But the conquest of Constantinople and the eastern shore of the Mediterranean also had made the Ottomans a sea power. Their success at sea had been remarkable. They had built fleets of ships and galleys commanded by great admirals and had joined their sea and land forces to conquer Egypt, the southern shore of the Mediterranean all the way to Algeria, and Greece. The famous defeat by Spanish and Hapsburg forces at Lepanto in 1571 was a major setback, but they had revived to conquer Crete in 1669. In the late seventeenth century their organized sea power did not often reach west of Crete, but their support of Muslim redoubts as far west as Algiers formed one side of a nasty, ongoing Christian-Muslim confrontation. No one, Christian or Muslim, sailed on the Mediterranean without keeping an eye on the horizon for the sail of a ship from the other side. Christians captured by Muslims became slaves, most notoriously in Algeria. Muslims captured by Christians might wind up on the Slaves’ Quay not far from the Doges’ Palace in Venice. People with rich relatives, political influence, or luck, might be ransomed from slavery; of the rest, many of the men would pull an oar in a galley. Fernand Braudel, the twentieth century’s great historian of the Mediterranean, writes of this as a “perpetual brawl.”
In 1688 the brawl had turned into full-scale warfare in the Peloponnese. After the Christian victory at Vienna, Venice sought to carry the war to the Turks by sea. It found few allies, and thrusts by land near the Adriatic coast and landings at various points down the coast accomplished little. In 1687 Francesco Morosini, who already had won fame in the unsuccessful defense of Crete against the Turks, was placed in command of a major expedition on a large fleet of galleys. Venice was able to hire German troops and to obtain the services of French and German noble adventurers and some capable commanders. Venice’s efficiency of command and logistics, backed by the massive production of arms and galleys by the Arsenal of Venice, had been a daunting force in the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years, but now it seemed increasingly marginal as the Atlantic powers gained strength and as Amsterdam and London replaced Venice as Europe’s emporiums for Asian goods.
The Venetian expedition arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens, on September 21, 1687. The Ottoman garrison was dug in and prepared to defend itself on the Acropolis but did not contest the Venetian advance on the city. The Venetians were told that the Turks were using the Parthenon as a storehouse for powder and ammunition and also had some of their women and children in it, relying on the thick walls and roof for safety. Big mortars were brought up. On September 26 several mortar rounds hit the Parthenon, setting off massive explosions that shook the whole city. At least two hundred people died. The fires burned for days, forcing the Ottoman garrison to surrender. But what could the Venetians do with such a large city, several miles from the harbor? Some Ottoman reinforcements had fled when confronted, but the next ones might be better trained. Already there were worrisome raids along the road from Piraeus to the city and reports of plague in the Pelopbnnese. The Venetians settled down for a miserable winter in Athens. In the spring of 1688 they made plans to withdraw, taking the people of Athens with them so that any returning Turks would find a deserted city. It took months to find enough shipping, and it is not clear how fully this depopulation was ever carried out.
Most of the isolated Ottoman garrisons in the Peloponnese had surrendered quickly when the Venetian fleet appeared in 1687 on its way to Athens. The one at Mistra, in the vicinity of ancient Sparta, had not. When the Ottoman soldiers finally began to seek terms of surrender, the Venetians told them they had waited too long, and unless they could pay an impossibly big ransom, all the men would be sent to the galleys. But the Athens campaign intervened, absorbing all the Venetians’ attention, and it was only in January 1688 that they insisted on settling the Mistra case. When it was found that the people under guard in the citadel had not turned in all their arms, Morosini felt justified in making the terms of surrender even harsher: All the children, women, and men over fifty would be brought to Athens to be exchanged for Christian prisoners in Ottoman hands. But no such exchange had been worked out when the Venetians withdrew. The children were distributed among the ships, and the women and old people were abandoned on the nearly deserted shore at Piraeus.
The doge, the elective prince of Venice, Marc Antonio Giustiniano, died early in 1688. Morosini was elected his successor. Putting on the cap and robe of his new office, he seated himself in a special chamber on his command galley and received the homage of his officers. But the expedition had accomplished nothing. It is remembered today only for the destruction of the Parthenon and for the cruelty shown to the people of Mistra, which horrified even many Venetians.
The Ottoman presence in Algeria had been established by Muslim corsairs in the early sixteenth century, even as the main forces of the empire were preoccupied on its eastern and northern land frontiers. An Ottoman provincial capital took form at Algiers, with an appointed governor and a large garrison of janissaries, mostly recruited in the Levant. Its main business was trade up and down the south side of the Mediterranean and on the caravan routes across the Sahara. It also launched raids on Christian shipping, which produced loot, slaves for households and for the galley oars, and ransoms. European powers made treaties exempting a particular power’s ships from attack in return for payments to Algiers. This business was in the hands of great independent entrepreneurs who always kept some distance from the Ottoman governors and janissaries. In 1671, with Algiers in constant turmoil from janissary factions and uprisings, the entrepreneurs revolted, made the Ottoman governor a figurehead, and elected a respected retired corsair as dey, “elder hero.”
In the 1680s France played a leading role among the Christian powers attempting to reduce the threat of the Algiers regime to their shipping. It had a treaty with Algiers but was not living up to many of its provisions. In particular it refused to return or exchange able-bodied Muslim captives, sending back only the sick and aged. In a bit of arrogance and overreaching typical of France in these years, it provoked a war, and French ships bombarded Algiers in 1682 and in 1683, killing hundreds of people and destroying hundreds of houses. A huge mortar with an explosive projectile was especially effective. A local leader known to the Europeans as Mezzo Morto, “half dead” in Italian, was a hostage in French hands. Sent ashore to broker a deal, he overthrew the aged dey, killed the latter’s powerful son-in-law, and had himself elected dey. He then told the French that Algiers had its own uses for big cannon; if the bombardment continued, the French consul, priests who sought to arrange prisoner exchanges, and other French residents would be shot from a great cannon one by one. The French, with no forces or supplies for a landing, sailed away, leaving Algiers alone for several years. Negotiations led nowhere, and in 1687 Algiers declared war again.
On June 13–16, 1688, a substantial French fleet appeared off Algiers. The French made it clear that they had not come to negotiate and a week later began their bombardment. The French consul and four other Frenchmen were fired from the great cannon. The French killed three hostages and floated their bodies ashore on a raft. On the twenty-fifth five more Frenchmen were fired from the cannon; the next day three more Muslim corpses were floated ashore. Early in August, with the European political situation heating up, the French fleet was ordered home. Even the courtiers at Versailles noted that the Algerians were “as obstinate as ever.” Englishmen and others who hoped for peaceful trade and sensible dealing with the ports of northern Africa thought their efforts had been set back by at least twenty years.