The Ottoman Empire and the World Around it

Suraiya Faroqhi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780857730237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

In Islamic law the world was made up of the 'House of Islam' and the 'House of War' with the Ottoman Sultan - successor to the early Caliphs - as supreme ruler of the Islamic world. However, in this ground-breaking study of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, Suraiya Faroqhi demonstrates that there was no 'iron curtain' between the Ottoman and 'other' worlds but rather a long-established network of connections - diplomatic, trading and financial., cultural and religious. These extended beyond regional contacts to the empires of Asia and the burgeoning 'modern' states of Europe - England, France, the Netherlands and Venice. Of course, military conflict was a constant factor in these relationships, but the overriding reality was 'one world' and contact between cultured and pragmatic elites - even 'gentlemen travelling for pleasure' - as well as pilgrimage and close artistic contact with the European Renaissance. Faroqhi's book is based on a huge study of original and early modern sources, including diplomatic records, travel and geographical writing, as well as personal accounts. Its breadth and originality will make it essential reading for historians of Europe and the Middle East.

1 ~ Introduction

In a sense, this study deals with one of the oldest and most often studied topics in Ottoman history. From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries onwards, European ambassadors, merchants and other travellers made it their business to write about their various receptions in the Ottoman lands and, analysed with due caution, these accounts are germane to our topic. On the other hand, Ottoman writers of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, as the perusal of their chronicles shows, certainly focused on Istanbul and the sultans’ court, but did not totally ignore the world outside the Empire’s frontiers either.¹ After all, the very stuff of such works consisted of campaigns, conquests and the incorporation of foreign territories. But on occasion, these authors also could not avoid including defeats, the losses of provinces and the truces and peace treaties that, provisionally or on a long-term basis, ended inter-state conflicts. All these warlike encounters can be viewed as a way of relating to the outside world: no conquest without something ‘out there’ that is still unconquered.² Certainly the situation at European courts and – albeit to a lesser degree – the institutions characteristic of European societies only became a major topic of Ottoman written texts in the eighteenth century. But given their close concern with war and conquest, it is an exaggeration to claim that the authors of earlier chronicles had no interest at all in what went on outside the borders of the sultans’ empire.

Even more obvious is the interest of Ottoman officials in sultanic campaigns in ‘infidel’ lands, the comings and goings of foreign ambassadors, Central Asian dervish sheiks on their pilgrimages to the holy city of Mecca or traders from Iran bringing raw silk to Bursa. As a result, the sultans’ campaigns in Hungary or Iran after the middle 1500s/930s–970s are best followed not by collating the bits and pieces of information provided in chronicles, as is inevitable when dealing with the fifteenth century. Rather the historian will analyse materials produced by Ottoman bureaucrats, in other words, archival sources.³ Unfortunately the number of spy reports on the internal affairs of Christian unbelievers (kâfir) and Shi’ite heretics (rafızi, mülhid, zındık) in the Istanbul archives is limited, and those that do survive are not necessarily very informative. But even so, the numerous sultanic commands relating to the goods that foreign traders might or might not export, the safe conducts given to Mecca pilgrims from outside the Empire and other documents of this kind show that leading Ottoman officials had to concern themselves intensively with developments that took place in localities outside the Empire’s borders.

~ Islamic law and sultanic pragmatism

In Islamic religious law (şeriat) and also in Ottoman official writing, it was customary to describe the world as being made up of the Darülislam (‘the house of Islam’) and the Darülharb (‘the house of war’). Into the first category belonged not only the domains of the Ottoman sultans themselves, but also those of other Sunni Muslims, such as the Uzbek khans or the Mughuls of India. To what extent the Ottoman elite believed that their sultan was the supreme ruler of the Islamic world, to whom all others were expected to defer, is still in need of further investigation; here we will not attempt to decide this matter. Even more ambiguous was the status of the Shi’ite state of Safavid Iran. In the mid-sixteenth century, a famous Ottoman jurisconsult had refused to recognize the ‘Kızılbaş’ – one of several terms of opprobrium favoured in Ottoman parlance for Shi’ites both Iranian and Anatolian – as part of the Muslim community. But especially after militant Shi’ism had stopped being a major issue between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, as happened in the late sixteenth century, it is unlikely that this exclusionist view remained the dominant one.⁴

Again in conformity with religious law, non-Muslim rulers who had accepted to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan were considered part of the Islamic world. One such polity was Dubrovnik, a city-state that due to its size and location was able to avoid most of the conflicts in which the Empire was involved, while the town’s wealthier inhabitants devoted themselves exclusively to Mediterranean trade. Other dependencies of the Empire governed by non-Muslim rulers, and by virtue of this relationship part of the Islamic world, that one might mention include the principalities of Moldavia, Transylvania and Walachia in present-day Rumania. Of course, the opposite was true whenever this or that ruler sided with the Habsburgs or the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and thus was at war with the sultan. Thus the category, namely ‘the outside world’, that we have adopted here cuts across two categories accepted by Ottoman writers themselves. The Ottomans probably would have spoken of the Islamic world that recognized the paramount status of the padişah in Istanbul on the one hand, and the domains of the various rulers of ‘the house of war’ on the other. High points of inter-empire conflict apart, the ‘Iranian question’ might have been left diplomatically in abeyance.

In discussing the relationship of the Ottoman elites with the world outside the Empire’s borders we have thus intentionally adopted a terminology that is more vague than that employed by the relevant primary sources themselves. While at first glance this seems a clumsy move, some advantages are, or so I think, involved as well. For in reality, there was no ‘iron curtain’ separating the Ottoman elites and their tax-paying subjects from the world outside the borders of the Empire, while the existence of a neat legal dichotomy between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds might cause us to think the exact opposite. In the absence of actual war, foreign merchants from India, Iran, Georgia and the various countries of Christian Europe were admitted with few difficulties. In the case of Venice, France, England or the Netherlands, special privileges formally granted by the Ottoman sultans (ahidname, or ‘capitulations’ in European parlance) established what the subjects of the rulers in question were allowed or forbidden to do.⁵ Long-term residents from Venice, France or England could be found in Istanbul, Izmir or Aleppo; moreover, during the period that concerns us here, contacts were facilitated by the absence of any war between the Ottoman sultan and the rulers of England or France.

On a different level, inter-communication between the Empire and neighbouring states also extended to culturally valued items: maps, books and, in spite of the Islamic ban on images, even sultans’ portraits or pictures showing the exotic animals of the American continent circulated between the Ottoman realm and its western neighbours. One of the major aims of this book is to demonstrate how permeable the frontiers really were in many instances. Of course, this implies that the neat dichotomy between the ‘house of Islam’ and the ‘house of war’ is not very useful for the purposes of this study, as it masks the much more complicated relationships existing in the real world.

Moreover, while fully recognizing that wars between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbours were frequent, and relations even in peacetime marred by numerous misunderstandings both intentional and otherwise, we will here be concerned also with many relationships in which military conflict had no role. These include trade, but also the accommodation of pilgrims, gentlemen travelling for pleasure or instruction, and even Christian missionaries. Thus it is one of our major points that, while the dichotomies established by Islamic law were certainly important, the Ottoman elite also governed a far-flung empire that was at least an indirect heir to the administrative lore of the Sasanid, caliphal and Byzantine traditions.⁶ More importantly, in my view, the Ottoman ruling group also made a large number of very matter-of-fact decisions, based on expediency and taking into account what was possible under given circumstances.

This emphasis on pragmatism, ‘muddling through’ to use an expression current among another group of great empire-builders, may appear old-fashioned to some readers today. In the present conjuncture, it has become current to emphasize religion-based oppositions between the Empire and the non-Muslim world, and also the central place of religion in the Ottoman world view. It would certainly be unrealistic to deny the centrality of Islam; but in my perspective, it was exactly because the elites had no doubt about this centrality that they were able to react to the ‘people outside the pale’ with much more pragmatism than would be possible for an elite whose members felt that the basis of their rule was under constant threat, and therefore in need of permanent defence. As a result the rules of the political game were quite often developed and brought into play without there being a great need for day-to-day references to religious law. In a sense the present volume thus can be read as a plea for the importance of the sultans’ prerogative to set the ground rules by promulgating decrees (kanun). Moreover, since we are concerned with a period in which some sultans were quite young or for other reasons unable to govern in person, this situation meant that the Ottoman elite as a whole was able to run its relations with the ‘outside world’ with a considerable degree of liberty.

Members of the Ottoman ruling group must have been confirmed in their pragmatic attitude by the manner in which the advance of the sultans’ power in south-eastern and later in central Europe was in many instances received by local inhabitants. Both minor aristocracies and tax-paying subjects were often quite ready to make their peace with the sultan, and certain would-be or unstable rulers hoped to garner Ottoman support in order to gain power or else hold on to it. Thus the estates of Bohemia in rebellion against the Habsburgs (1618–20/1027–30) tried to obtain Ottoman aid, but the rapid defeat of the movement after the battle of the White Mountain made this a non-issue as far as Istanbul was concerned. On the European side of the great dividing line, the rhetoric of the crusade certainly survived well into the nineteenth century, but as early as the 1450s/854–64, even a dedicated pope such as Pius II was quite unable to transform it into reality. To mention a later example of the same trend, after Lala Mustafa Paşa’s conquest of Cyprus in 1570–3/978–81, the Venetian Signoria was prepared to cut its losses and abandon its alliance with the pope and the king of Spain, both for commercial considerations and probably also in order not to facilitate the expansion of Spanish power in Italy. Quite a few Christian rulers thus actively sought accommodation. We do not have a large number of Ottoman comments on this situation on their western borders; in the short run, the permanent disunity of Christian rulers doubtless was viewed as facilitating future conquest. But in the long run, close relations with at least the elites of certain states of Christian Europe must have led to situations in which ‘established arrangements to mutual advantage’ were preferred over permanent warfare; once again, pragmatism became the order of the day.

~ Determining the parameters of Ottoman ‘foreign policy’: some general considerations

In the course of this study, we will often speak of ‘the Ottoman Empire’, ‘the Ottoman administration’, ‘Ottoman officials’ or ‘the authorities in Istanbul’. These are shorthand formulas that need some explanation. Among political historians, it was customary for a long time to assume that states acted in the international arena primarily due to their economic and ‘security’ interests; in other words, because of considerations involving power struggles with other states. This is the ‘primacy of foreign politics’ dear to many historians until well after World War II, a theory that regards the political opinions of the relevant elites as reasonably homogeneous. However after World War II, and more vigorously from the 1960s onwards, a school of thought has emerged that emphasizes the fact that major foreign policy decisions may be taken on account of purely domestic power struggles within the ruling elite. Or, at least in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, members of these elites may act in response to what they perceive as public opinion – and in the Ottoman realm, a comparable tendency went back very far, as high-level officials ignored the wishes and expectations of Istanbul’s rank-and-file janissaries and even ordinary craftsmen at their own peril.⁷

It is unnecessary to be dogmatic about these matters and assert that all major foreign policy decisions are taken for domestic reasons. But the phenomenon is certainly common enough to be taken seriously, for the early modern period as well as for the twentieth century. Thus we may assume that Ottoman decisions concerning war and peace were often made after struggles between different factions within the elite, struggles which are, in fact, well documented from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards.⁸ A certain faction might assume that its interests were best served by war with Iran rather than by another campaign against the Habsburgs, and vice versa. In the case of serious reverses, a different faction might gain the day and initiate a change of policy. Once again, this is a widespread phenomenon in all manner of states, which can be observed in the Ottoman polity.⁹

At the same time, an emphasis upon domestic divisions also serves to place ‘geopolitical’ claims into perspective; to take but one example, it has sometimes been asserted that the Ottoman Empire was obliged to conquer Crete because the island’s geographic situation allowed its possessor to impede communications between Istanbul and Egypt.¹⁰ A glance at the map shows that Crete did, and does, in fact occupy a strategic position. But if holding the island had been as vital to Ottoman state interests as some defendants of geopolitics may claim, then it is hard to understand why neither Süleyman the Magnificent nor his immediate successors made any attempt to conquer it. I would therefore assume that the undoubted strategic value of the island became an issue over which an Ottoman government decided to go to war only during a very specific conjuncture. Once again, factional struggles within the elite during the reign of the mentally unbalanced Sultan Ibrahim surely played a part. But, in addition, a major factor was doubtless the weakness of Venice. For centuries, the Signoria had governed the island, but during the years following 1600/1008–9, Venetian commerce had contracted and its traditional hinterland in central Europe had been lost, due to the devastation caused by the Thirty Years War.¹¹ Thus the time seemed propitious for annexing yet a further piece of the erstwhile colonial empire of the Signoria. Throughout the present book, we will encounter cases in which momentary expediency of the kind alluded to here inflected long-term policies, and we will have occasion to argue the case of contingency versus system-based constraints. Similar struggles among the governing elite are well attested for other major campaigns as well, including the re-conquest of Yemen in the 1560s/967–77 and the war over Cyprus during the early 1570s/978–81.¹² In the present study ‘imperatives’ of all kinds, religio-legal as well as geopolitical, will be played down; and this means that intra-elite conflicts will be given their due weight, particularly in matters of what we today would call ‘foreign policy’.

~ A few ground rules of Ottoman ‘foreign politics’

When it comes to Ottoman views of their neighbours, most of our information concerns those living to the west and to the north; but even in this limited sphere, there are serious deficiencies. While numerous envoys/messengers (çavuş) visited Venice in the 1500s and early 1600s/X.–early XI. centuries, and one or two of them showed up in France as well, written reports about these missions do not seem to have survived.¹³ Only in the early eighteenth century did Ottoman ambassadors begin to write in extenso about their experiences in foreign parts, with the well-known Yirmisekiz Mehmed Efendi pioneering the rather novel genre of embassy reports with an account of his visit to Paris in 1720/1132–3.¹⁴ It was at this time too that the authors of Ottoman chronicles made occasional comments about the activities of this or that foreign ambassador present in Istanbul; in earlier periods these men were simply not considered important enough to figure in formal writing. If European ambassadors and their personnel had not written so much about their missions to Istanbul, we would simply have to confess our ignorance and leave it at that; but as these men did write a good deal, and usually had a rather narrow horizon, a book of the kind undertaken here must attempt to redress the balance and highlight the Ottoman viewpoint by means of whatever sources are available.¹⁵

Matters are complicated by the fact that in some early modern polities, even foreign relations in the narrow sense of the word were not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• A note on transliteration and dates
• Acknowledgements
• Map of the Ottoman Empire in Asia and Africa
• Map of the Ottoman Empire in Europe
• 1 ~ Introduction
• 2 ~ On sovereignty and subjects: expanding and safeguarding the Empire
• 3 ~ On the margins of empire: clients and dependants
• 4 ~ The strengths and weaknesses of Ottoman warfare
• 5 ~ Of prisoners, slaves and the charity of strangers
• 6 ~ Trade and foreigners
• 7 ~ Relating to pilgrims and offering mediation
• 8 ~ Sources of information on the outside world
• 9 ~ Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Notes