What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, page 2
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Persia once again became a factor of importance in the struggle. Shāh ‘Abbās I, known as the Great, was in many ways the most successful ruler of his line. In 1598, returning to his capital after a victory against the Uzbeks of Central Asia, he was approached by a group of Europeans led by two English brothers, Sir Anthony and Sir Robert Sherley. Probably at their suggestion, he sent letters of friendship to the Pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, and various European monarchs and rulers, including the Queen of England and the Doge of Venice. These missives produced little result. Of greater importance was a reorganization and reequipment of his armed forces, undertaken with the Sherleys’ and other Europeans’ help. Between 1602 and 1612, and again between 1616 and 1627, Persia and Turkey were at war, and the Persians won a number of successes. Distracted by this struggle in the East, the Turks were obliged, in 1606, to make peace with the Austrians.
The Treaty of Sitvatorok, signed in that year, is notable for a number of reasons. All previous treaties had been dictated by the Turks in their capital, Istanbul. This one was negotiated on neutral ground, on an island in the Danube between the two sides. Perhaps even more significant was the recognition of the Emperor as “Padishah.” Until then it had been the normal practice of the Ottomans to designate European rulers either by subordinate Ottoman titles such as bey, or more commonly by what they thought to be European titles. Thus, for example, Ottoman letters to Queen Elizabeth addressed her as “Queen (Kiraliçe) of the Vilayet of England,” while the Emperor was addressed as “King (Kiral) of Vienna.”6 Kiral and Kiraliçe are of course terms of European, not Turkish origin, and were used by Ottomans in much the same way as imperial Britain used native titles for native princes in India. Addressing the emperor as “Padishah,” the title that the Ottoman sultans themselves used, was a formal recognition of equality.7
While generally contemptuous of the infidel West, Muslims were not unaware of Western skills in weaponry and warfare. The initial successes of the Crusaders in the Levant impressed upon Muslim war departments that in some areas at least Western arms were superior, and the inference was quickly drawn and applied. Western prisoners of war were set to work building fortifications; Western mercenaries and adventurers were employed, and a traffic in arms and other war materials began that grew steadily in the course of the centuries. Even when the Ottoman Turks were advancing into southeastern Europe, they were always able to buy much needed equipment for their fleets and armies from Christian European suppliers, to recruit European experts, and even to obtain financial cover from Christian European banks. What is nowadays known as “constructive engagement” has a long history.
All this, however, had little or no influence on Muslim perceptions and attitudes, as long as Muslim armies continued to be victorious in the heartlands. The sultans bought war materials and military expertise for cash, and saw in this no more than a business transaction. The Turks in particular adopted such European inventions as handguns and artillery and used them to great effect, without thereby modifying their view of the barbarian infidels from whom they acquired these weapons.
There were some dissenting voices. As early as the sixteenth century, an Ottoman Grand Vizier in his retirement observed that while the Muslim forces were supreme on the land, the infidels were getting stronger on the sea. “We must overcome them.”8 His message received little attention. In the early seventeenth century another Ottoman official noted an alarming presence of Portuguese, Dutch, and English merchant shipping in Asian waters, and warned of a possible danger from that source.9
The danger was real, and growing. When the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed round Africa into the Indian Ocean at the end of the fifteenth century, he opened a new sea route between Europe and Asia, with far-reaching consequences for the Middle East, first commercial, later also strategic. As early as 1502, the Republic of Venice, the prime European beneficiary of the eastern spice trade, sent an emissary to Cairo to warn the sultan of Egypt of the danger that this new sea route presented to their commerce. At first, the sultan paid little attention, but a sharp decline in his customs revenues focused his attention more sharply on this new problem. Egyptian naval expeditions against the Portuguese in eastern waters were however unsuccessful and no doubt contributed to the defeat of the Egyptian sultanate in 1516–1517 and the incorporation of all its dominions in the Ottoman realm.
The Ottomans now took over this task, but fared little better. Their efforts to counter the Portuguese in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea were at best inconclusive. The lack of Ottoman interest in these developments is best illustrated by the response to an appeal for help from Atjeh, in Sumatra. In 1563 the Muslim ruler of Atjeh sent an embassy to Istanbul asking for help against the Portuguese and adding, as an inducement, that several of the non-Muslim rulers of the region had agreed to turn Muslim if the Ottomans would come to their aid. But the Ottomans were busy with more urgent matters—the sieges of Malta and of Szigetvar in Hungary, the death of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. After two years delay they finally assembled a fleet of 19 galleys and some other ships carrying weapons and supplies, to help the beleaguered Atjehnese.
Most of the ships, however, never got there. The greater part of the expedition was diverted to the more urgent task of restoring and extending Ottoman authority in the Yemen, and in fact only two ships, carrying gun founders, gunners, and engineers as well as some guns and other war material, actually reached Atjeh, where they were taken into the service of the local ruler and used in his unsuccessful attempts to expel the Portuguese. The incident seems to have passed unnoticed at the time and is known only from documents in the Turkish archives.10
Whether through negligence or design, the Ottomans were probably fortunate in not challenging the Portuguese naval power in the eastern seas; their fleet of Mediterranean-style galleys would have fared badly against the Portuguese carracks and galleons, built for the Atlantic, and therefore bigger, heavier, better armed, and more maneuverable.
The impact of the new open ocean route between Europe and Asia on the transit commerce of the Middle East was less than was at one time thought. Throughout the sixteenth century, the Middle Eastern transit trade in spices and other commodities between South and Southeast Asia on the one hand and Mediterranean Europe on the other continued to flourish. But in the seventeenth century a new and—for the Middle East—far more dangerous situation arose. By that time Portuguese, Dutch, and other Europeans in Asia were no longer there simply as merchants. They were establishing bases that in time became colonial dependencies. As their power was extended from the sea to the seaports and even to the interior, the new European empires in Asia, controlling the points both of arrival and of departure in East–West commerce, effectively outflanked the Middle East.
The danger was not confined to West European expansion into South Asia. There was also the Russian expansion into North Asia where, again, Muslim rulers turned to the greatest Muslim power of the time, the Ottoman Empire, for help. There was some response. In 1568, the Ottomans drew up a plan to dig a canal through the isthmus of Suez from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea; the following year they actually began to dig a canal between the Don and Volga rivers. Their purpose, clearly, was to extend their naval power beyond the Mediterranean, on the one hand to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, on the other to the Black Sea and the Caspian. But both operations, so it seems, were seen by the Ottomans as sideshows, and abandoned when they proved troublesome. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Ottomans withdrew from active participation on both fronts—against the Russians in North and Central Asia, against the West Europeans in South and Southeast Asia. Instead, they concentrated their main effort on the struggle in Europe that they saw, not without reason, as the principal battleground between Islam and Christendom, the rival faiths competing for the enlightenment—and mastery—of the world.
Western successes on the battlefield and on the high seas were accompanied by less resounding but more pervasive and ultimately more dangerous victories in the marketplace. The discovery and exploitation of the New World for the first time provided Christian Europe with ample supplies of gold and silver. The fertile lands of their new colonial possessions enabled them to grow new crops, including even such previous imports from the Middle East as coffee and sugar, and to export them to their former suppliers. The growing European presence in South and Southeast Asia accelerated and expanded this process, and old-established handicrafts faced the double challenge of Asian cheap labor and European commercial skills. The Western trading company, helped by its business-minded government, represented a new force in the Middle East. Here again an occasional voice expressed some concern but was little heeded.
Yet these developments and the accompanying changes in both internal and external affairs aggravated old problems and created new ones of increasing range and complexity—monetary, fiscal, financial, and eventually economic, social, and cultural.11
For most of the seventeenth century there were no major changes in the balance of military forces. Until almost the midcentury, Europe was absorbed in the Thirty Years War and its aftermath, while the Ottomans were preoccupied with problems at home and on their eastern frontier. A war with the Republic of Venice began in 1645, and at first went rather badly for the Turks. In 1656 the Venetians, who for some years had blockaded the Straits, were even able to send their fleet into the Dardanelles, and win a naval victory.
In that same year Mehmed Köprülü, an Albanian pasha, was appointed grand vizier. During his term of office (1656–1661) and that of his son and successor Ahmed Köprülü (1661–1678) the Ottoman state underwent a remarkable transformation. These skilled, energetic, and ruthless rulers were able to reorganize the armed forces of the Empire, stabilize its finances, and resume the struggle in Christian Europe. An area of intensive activity was Poland and the Ukraine, and it was here that, for the first time, the Ottomans came into conflict with Russia. By the Treaty of Radzin of 1681, the Turks gave up their claims on the Ukraine and agreed to give the Cossacks trading rights in the Black Sea. It was a portentous change, marking the emergence of a new and more dangerous enemy, and the beginning of a long, hard, and bitter struggle.
Meanwhile a new grand vizier had been appointed. Kara Mustafa Pasha was a brother-in-law of Mehmed Köprülü, and felt it his duty to restore the glory of the Köprülü vizierial dynasty. In 1682 he launched a new war against Austria, culminating in a second siege of Vienna, between July 17 and September 12, 1683. This second unsuccessful attempt to capture the city is best described in the words of the contemporary Ottoman chronicler Sılıhdar: “This was a calamitous defeat, so great that there has never been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state.”12 One must admire the frankness with which the Ottomans faced unpleasant realities.
The failure before Vienna was followed by a series of further defeats. In 1686, with the loss of Buda, a century and a half of Ottoman rule in Hungary came to an end. The event is commemorated in a Turkish lament of the time:
In the fountains they no longer wash
In the mosques they no longer pray
The places that prospered are now desolate
The Austrian has taken our beautiful Buda.13
The retreat from Vienna opened new opportunities. In March 1684 Austria, Venice, Poland, Tuscany, and Malta, with the blessing of the Pope, formed a Holy League to fight the Ottoman Empire. Russia joined the Catholic powers in this enterprise. Under Czar Peter, known as the Great, they went to war against the Ottomans and achieved signal successes. On August 6, 1696, Peter the Great captured Azov—the first Russian stronghold on the shore of the Black Sea.
By now the Turks were ready to discuss peace. The peace process began with secret negotiations between the Austrian chancellor and the newly-appointed Ottoman grand vizier, who—significantly—was accompanied by his grand dragoman, the Istanbul Greek Alexander Mavrokordato. In October 1698, the diplomats met at Carlowitz in the Voivodina, newly conquered by the Austrians from the Turks. Finally on January 26, 1699, with the help of British and Dutch mediation, a peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League was signed at Carlowitz. A little later a separate agreement with the Russians confirmed the cession to them of Azov.
The Ottomans had suffered serious territorial losses. They had also been obliged to abandon old concepts and old ways of dealing with the outside world, and to learn a new science of diplomacy, negotiation, and mediation. The war was not a total defeat and the Treaty was not a total surrender. In the early eighteenth century they were even able to make some recovery. But even so the military result was unequivocal—the shattering defeat outside Vienna, the devastating loss of lives, stores, and equipment, and of course the cession of territory. The lesson was clear, and the Turks set to work to learn and apply it.
* The name Persia in its various classical and modern European forms comes from Pars, the name of the southwestern province of Iran, along the shore of the Gulf. The Arabs, whose alphabet contains no equivalent to the letter “p,” called it “Fars.” In the way that Castilian became Spanish and Tuscan became Italian, so the dialect of Fars, known as Farsi, came to be accepted as the literary, standard, and ultimately national language. In the classical and Western world, the regional name was also applied to the whole country, but this never happened among the Persians, who have used the name Iran—the land of the Aryans—for millennia and formally adopted it as the official name of the country in 1935. In speaking of past centuries, I have retained the accepted Western name.
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The Lessons of the Battlefield
The Treaty of Carlowitz has a special importance in the history of the Ottoman Empire, and even, more broadly, in the history of the Islamic world, as the first peace signed by a defeated Ottoman Empire with victorious Christian adversaries.
In a global perspective, this was not entirely new. There had been previous defeats of Islam by Christendom; the loss of Spain and Portugal, the rise of Russia, the growing European presence in South and Southeast Asia. But few observers at that time, Muslim or Western, could command a global perspective. In the perspective of the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East, these events were remote and peripheral, barely affecting the balance of power between the Islamic and Christian worlds in the long struggle that had been going on between them since the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the irruption of the Muslim armies from Arabia into the then Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and, for a while, Southern Europe. The Crusaders had briefly halted the triumphal march of Islam, but they had been held, defeated, and ejected. The Muslim advance had continued with the extinction of Byzantium and the Ottoman entry into Europe. The Empire of Constantinople had fallen; the Holy Roman Empire was next. Ottoman and more broadly Muslim consciousness of the world in which they lived is reflected in the very copious historical literature that they produced and, in greater detail, in the millions of documents preserved in the Ottoman archives, illustrating the functioning of the Ottoman state year by year, almost day by day, in its manifold activities. There are occasional references to the loss of Spain, but it appears as a relatively minor issue—far away, not threatening. There is some mention of the arrival of Muslim refugees and of Jewish refugees who came from Spain to the Ottoman lands, but little more.
The peace signed at Carlowitz drove home two lessons. The first was military, defeat by superior force. The second lesson, more complex, was diplomatic, and was learnt in the process of negotiation. In the early centuries of Ottoman experience, a treaty was a simple matter. The Ottoman government dictated its terms, and the defeated enemy accepted them. After the first siege of Vienna there was, for a while, some sort of negotiation, and even—a startling innovation—a concession to the kaiser of equal status with the sultan, but no conclusive result one way or the other. In negotiating the Treaty of Carlowitz, the Ottomans had, for the first time, to resort to that strange art we call diplomacy, by which they tried, through political means, to modify, or even to reduce the results of the military outcome. For the Ottoman officials this was a new task, one in which they had no experience: how to negotiate the best terms they could after a military defeat.
In this, they had some assistance, some guidance, from two foreign embassies in Istanbul, those of Britain and of the Netherlands. The Ottomans at first were unwilling to accept what they regarded as Christian interference, but they soon learned to recognize and make use of such help. The Western maritime and commercial states had no interest in the consolidation and extension of Austrian power and influence in Central and Eastern Europe, and thought it would be more to their advantage to have a weakened but surviving Ottoman Empire, in which their merchants could come and go at will. The British and Dutch emissaries managed to provide the Ottomans with some discreet help and advice, and were even able to take part in the negotiation of the peace treaty.
Western help was not limited to diplomacy. Military help—the supply of weapons, even the financing of purchases, were old and familiar, going back beyond the beginnings of the Ottoman state to the time of the Crusades. What was new was for the Ottomans to seek European help in training and equipping their forces, and to form alliances with European powers against other European powers.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the struggle was indecisive, and even brought some gains for the Ottomans. In 1710 and 1711 they won a significant victory over the Russians who, by the Treaty of the Pruth (1711), were obliged to return the peninsula of Azov. But another war against Venice and then against Austria ended with another defeat and further territorial losses, specified in the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718.
