Ottoman Ghosts (Page 2)

The Ottomans continued to advance, however, thanks in no small part to the deep disarray on the European side. The Papacy was divided into warring factions for much of the fourteenth century, and the longstanding rancor between Greek and Latin Christianity prevented the West from mounting more than a token defense of the beleaguered Byzantines. Indeed, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it appeared that Mehmed II might be gearing up for a similar assault on the other great Christian capital, Rome. As Finkel recounts: "Among the titles Sultan Mehmed claimed for himself was that of 'Roman Caesar', signifying his aspiration to succeed to the mantle of the Byzantine Empire at the height of its greatness under Constantine and Justinian.... After Constantinople, the capture of Rome represented the ultimate prize." In 1480 Europe watched with growing alarm as an Ottoman force seized a fortress in the town of Otranto on the Italian heel. But the final assault never came, and the empire turned its attention in other directions--toward Syria, Egypt and North Africa, toward Iran and toward the Muslim Tartars on the other side of the Black Sea.

The Ottoman political structure evolved in tandem with its conquests. Sultan Orhan I, who succeeded his father, Osman I, around 1323, was a frontier warrior who, according to Finkel, "moved constantly between the hundred or so fortresses he commanded, in order to make sure they were in good repair." But as the empire expanded and wealth poured in, his successors responded by retreating ever more deeply into the recesses of their harems in Topkapi Palace, seldom showing themselves to the public or even to their closest advisers. Rather than participating in meetings of his imperial council, Suleiman the Magnificent, whose reign from 1520 to 1566 marked the apogee of Ottoman power, preferred to observe them through a latticed window set high up in a nearby wall. On the rare occasions when he did appear before the public--when attending Friday prayers, for instance, or making a show of leading his army off to war--the event was carefully stage-managed to enhance the royal mystique.

Paralyzing as this sort of royal reclusiveness could be, it had the curious effect of binding the center more closely to the periphery. Figuring that outlying elements would have few local ties to divide their loyalties, the Ottomans created a professional army, the famous janissaries--from yeniceri, or "new force"--composed of conscripted Christian youths forcibly converted to Islam, who answered to the sultan alone. Of Mehmed II's seven grand viziers, according to Osman's Dream, two were Christian-born converts raised via the janissary youth-levy, two were Christian-born scions of the Byzantine or Byzanto-Serbian nobility, and a fifth was also Christian-born but of unknown ethnic origin. High-ranking Ottomans even relied on outsiders for their wives and concubines, whom they acquired either as war booty or as slaves.

As profitable (or pleasurable) as such policies might be, their negative consequences grew more and more apparent as the years wore on. The janissaries turned increasingly into a racket--ill disciplined, poorly trained, their ranks padded with no-shows. As their effectiveness on the military field plummeted, their rebelliousness in the capital grew. As the harems expanded--by the 1680s, the sultan needed eighty coaches to transport his wives and concubines and their various attendants--so did the number of royal progeny, and palace politics grew increasingly deadly and complex. Princes raised in this fetid atmosphere were supremely unsuited for the hard-nosed business of running an empire. Slavery was especially crippling: At a time when the practice had long vanished from Western Europe, Tartar raiders ranged far and wide in order to satisfy a seemingly inexhaustible demand in Constantinople, reportedly seizing 18,000 in 1468 in Poland alone. Since slave labor is notoriously unproductive, one consequence was long-term technological stagnation, which is one reason why the empire, according to neocon historian Bernard Lewis, had proportionally fewer water- and windmills in the sixteenth century than England did in the eleventh. Constant slave raids caused Slavic resistance to stiffen so that the Turks eventually faced a serious rival to the north in the shape of the Russian czars.

With the path blocked to the west, moreover, expansion eastward and southward into Syria, Iraq and North Africa led to a prolonged fiscal crisis, as the Christian population declined relative to the empire as a whole and the poll tax on non-Muslim dhimmis failed to provide an adequate source of revenue. Anxious to preserve their privileges, those on top responded as those on top always do, i.e., by shifting the burden onto those below. At one point, peasants in outlying portions of Anatolia were reportedly so hungry they were reduced to eating grass--and that was in the early seventeenth century, when the empire was still in its prime. Much worse was to come.

Yet the Ottomans could not simply abandon policies that had provided the basis for their expansion. This is why the response among Ottoman intellectuals to the empire's lengthening list of troubles was initially a conservative one: If things were going poorly, then the answer was to turn the clock back to the days when the empire was young and vigorous and things were going well. Only in the nineteenth century did it begin to dawn on high-level government functionaries that the answer was to move forward. The result beginning in the 1830s was a period of force-marched progress and reform. Legal codes were imported from the West, the dhimmi tax was abolished (although it persisted in other forms) and trade was liberalized. But reformers faced a dilemma: The more they relied on the sultanate to institute such reforms, the more they wound up feeding its tyrannical tendencies. Yet there was no other force capable of holding together, say, an Eastern Orthodox peasant in Serbia and a Jewish merchant in Constantinople, or a Muslim fellah in the Hijaz. While some Ottomans looked to Islam as a binding agent, stepped-up religious orthodoxy would alienate Christians in Armenia and the Balkans all the more. Indeed, thanks to the notorious "capitulations" system--which granted special privileges to foreign merchants and encouraged Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews to throw in their lot with major trading powers like Britain and France--Muslims were already the most economically backward segment of the Ottoman population. Islamicization would only add to the economic malaise.

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