The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (3 page)

A Sultan was more than an all-powerful sovereign. He was the greatest of land-owners; all newly conquered territory passed into his possession. In the cities, especially in the capital, most
landed property constituted
vakif
, a pious foundation (plural
evkaf
) under the control of a religious institution, but when Suleiman came to the throne, almost ninety per cent of land
outside the towns was, technically, crown property and therefore under state ownership. By using this crown land as a basic source of revenue for his government, Suleiman built up an Islamic
counterpart to Western feudalism, exploiting the slave basis of the empire, even at the lowest level in the social scale. In the Balkans and Anatolia a fief (
timar
) of land would be
allocated to a mounted soldier (
sipahi
) who, while having no rights of ownership, became the Sultan’s representative on the ‘estates’ assigned to him. The
sipahi
was
charged with the maintenance of order, and with encouraging agriculture so as to raise the yield from the fields; but, above all, he was responsible for collecting agreed taxes from the peasants
which, after deducting a sum for the upkeep of himself, his horse and his family, he would forward to the central government. It was a cumbrous system, needing the maintenance
of a co-ordinated discipline across the empire in order to intimidate the feudatories into collaboration. Under Suleiman this
timar
system worked; he died with a full treasury.
⁴
Less skilful Sultans did not.

The Caliphate ensured that Suleiman could bring an aura of Koranic respectability to vexatious exigencies of government. If he sought an interpretation of Islamic Holy Law (
ş
eriat
), he
might turn to the collective wisdom of Muslim divines, as voiced by the religious establishment (
ulema
). More specifically, he would seek and receive authoritative advice from its
hierarchical leaders, an inner circle known as the
ilmiye
, whose chief spokesman was the
ş
eyhülislâm
(Chief Mufti). The
ulema
were a favoured section of the
community, exempt from taxation; they decided, not only strictly religious matters, but questions concerning the form of justice practised in the state, and the character and conduct of education
as well. Important rulings would be issued in the form of a carefully considered legal opinion (
fetva
), generally in the name of the Chief Mufti. For Suleiman the
ş
eriat
was a sound
support for government, a source of reference from which there could be no appeal.
⁵

Almost imperceptibly, these religious institutions began to provide Ottoman government with a constitutional check, limiting a Sultan’s autocracy. So respected were the religious leaders
that they could even deliberate on the worthiness of a Sultan to retain his throne. They never questioned Suleiman’s regnal rights nor, more surprisingly, those of his successor, the aptly
named ‘Selim the Sot’. But by 1610 the influence of
ulema
and
ilmiye
in making or breaking sultans was considerable; and it remained so throughout the Empire. Of
twenty-one Sultans whose reigns ended between 1612 and 1922, thirteen were deposed under the authority of a
fetva
given by the Chief Mufti in response to questions framed by political
enemies on a sultan’s observance of Holy Law.
⁶

After Suleiman’s death the qualities of kingship shown by the Sultans deteriorated rapidly. Although Selim was something of a scholar and his grandson Mehmed III led a successful campaign
in Hungary, none were both fine warriors and wise rulers in the old tradition. No Sultan acceding later than 1595 had any experience of active military service before coming to the throne. Murad
IV, the strong-willed sovereign on the throne between 1623 and 1640, showed ability as a military commander
in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, but he was forced to spend much of
his reign reasserting his authority over rebellious soldiery in the provinces. And though Murad was an able Sultan even he died from heavy drinking at the early age of thirty-one. Most rulers
contentedly left the shaping of policy to others at court—to a Grand Vizier or an
aga.
Of particular influence in several reigns during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries were the intrigues of a
Valide Sultana
(Princess Mother); palace power games were played with such intensity in these years that they have been called ‘the Age of the
Favoured Women’.

Modern academics frown austerely at so romantic and evocative a label. But even if they minimize the significance of harem politics, historians concede that by the mid-seventeenth century there
is ample evidence of an empire slipping into decline.
⁷
They can point to at least six signs of chronic weakness: inflation, exacerbated by cheap silver
from Peru circulated by traders from Genoa and Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and causing a threefold increase in the cost of basic food; failings in the pyramidical structure of
timar
tax collection;
the growth of banditry, following a population explosion in Anatolia; ruinous fires in several overcrowded cities; an inflexible adherence to old ways of waging war and governing conquered lands;
and (from 1536 onwards) the grant of ‘Capitulations’—the treaties which, by giving special legal rights and tariff concessions to Europeans who resided within the Ottoman Empire,
ensured that profitable trades should fall increasingly into foreign hands. Yet although modern historians may acknowledge that the Ottoman Empire had passed its zenith, these signs of crumbling
power went unperceived by contemporaries, whether they were the Sultan’s subjects, or foreign observers. Even in decline the Ottomans clung to their cherished mission of thrusting the
frontiers of Islam deeper into the marchlands of Christendom. Only when the seventeenth century was well into its final quarter did the truth begin to dawn on Western monarchs. It was then, in
1683, that, from news of a battle in the hills above Vienna, they recognized that the Sultan’s armies were as fallible as their own. The legendary ‘Grand Turk’ need no longer be
feared.

That he possessed astonishing powers of resilience, they were equally slow to perceive.

C
HAPTER
1

F
LOODTIDE OF
I
SLAM

I
T WAS
7 J
ULY
1683,
AND THE PEOPLE OF
V
IENNA SWELTERED
restlessly under the
sultry heat of a midsummer evening. Since early that Wednesday morning, when Emperor Leopold I returned hurriedly from hunting stags in the Wienerwald, fearful rumours had swept through the city. A
vast Turkish army was said to be advancing westwards from the Alföld, the cultivated Hungarian plain around Lake Balaton. For several days thousands of refugees had poured into the Habsburg
capital, bringing tales of burning villages and of savage atrocities on men, women and children. Now, from high ground east of the city, onlookers could see a great dust storm; it was raised, they
said, by the approach of warrior horsemen following the green banners of Islam in a frenzied assault on Catholic Christendom.

Ottoman Turks had fought Christians, Orthodox or Catholic, for many generations, and there is no doubt that by now the Sultan’s armies were less formidable than when the Janissaries
stormed the walls of Constantinople. But even if the people of Vienna had been aware of signs of weakness in the approaching enemy, the knowledge would have brought them little comfort. In 1683, as
in Shakespeare’s day, ‘the Turk’ was still regarded as ‘the terror of the world’. For a century and a half, the heartland of Hungary had been subject to the
Sultan’s rule. As far west as Esztergom, where Hungary’s sainted king Stephen was born long before Habsburg or Ottoman entered history, a cluster of minarets crowned the fortress hill
above the Danube. And, for the Viennese, it remained an unpleasant thought that Esztergom was within a hundred miles of the Wienerwald.

Yet, as an episode in folk legend, the peril was not unfamiliar to them. Three years after Hungary’s disastrous defeat at Mohács it had looked as if the
Habsburg capital, too, might soon pass under Turkish rule. In September and October 1529 Sultan Suleiman I had encircled Vienna with a quarter of a million men and three hundred siege guns, only to
pull back into Hungary when endless rain threatened to bog down his army in the mire. The danger had receded, but the nightmare fear of Turkish invasion remained throughout the years of the
Counter-Reformation. After 1529 Austrian prelates, alarmed by Suleiman’s deep incursion into Catholic Christendom, insisted that the parochial clergy of central Europe should establish a
warning system, the
Türkenglocken
, a peal of bells which would alert the soldiery to the coming of the Turks and summon the Catholic faithful to pray for deliverance from Islam.

A century passed with no need for the
Türkenglocken
to ring out across Austria. Once Suleiman’s long reign ended in 1566 the Sultanate, weakened by palace rivalry and intrigue,
became militarily a less formidable institution. But the latent menace of Ottoman invasion was ever-present; and the church bells tolled their warning in July 1664, when a powerful army was thrown
back at Szentgotthárd on Hungary’s historic western frontier. Now, in this stifling summer of 1683, Vienna was threatened yet again with Turkish occupation. After a winter and spring
of negotiations between Austrian and Ottoman diplomats, the vanguard of a massive army had crossed the western edge of the Hungarian plain in late June. Fighting alongside the invaders were
Hungarian insurgents led by an ambitious Magyar nobleman, Imre Tököly. But what most alarmed the Austrians were the irregular
akinji
outriders, undisciplined skirmishers plundering
far ahead of the main, well-disciplined Ottoman army. When, on this first Wednesday in July, news reached Emperor Leopold that the crescent flag was flying over the citadel of Györ, he thought
the threat imminent. Györ was only eighty-five miles away: the imperial family would leave Vienna at once before the dreaded
akinji
closed in upon the capital.

At eight o’clock that evening a cavalcade of heavy carriages set out from the Hofburg, lumbering across the moat bridge of the Schweizerhof Court to head for the road westward, towards
Melk and Linz. The
departure of the imperial family confirmed the people of Vienna’s worst fears. Hundreds of refugees sought to accompany the Emperor and his escort,
so impeding their progress that the nine-mile journey to Korneuburg took four hours. As Leopold stepped down from his carriage soon after midnight, he could look back over Vienna and see the spire
of the Stephans-Dom silhouetted against a glowing eastern rim of hills fringed with fire.
¹

But as the invaders approached Vienna they checked their pace of advance. The best troops had already travelled more than halfway across Europe, covering almost a thousand miles since leaving
their barracks beside the Bosphorus at the end of March. Now, with the wooded hills of the Wienerwald in sight, their commander anticipated a stiffening resistance. He was not to know there were
serious gaps in the defences of the
Antemurale Christianitatis
, ‘the Front Line of Christendom’ (as a Dutch contemporary called Vienna); and he was sceptical of reports from
deserters that the city was garrisoned by no more than 12,000 regular troops. Not until Tuesday, 16 July—six days after Emperor Leopold’s flight—did the Turkish vanguard reach the
outer line of Vienna’s fortifications.

In 1529 Sultan Suleiman I had conducted the siege of Vienna in person, receiving on the plains beside the Danube the first check to Ottoman arms in seventeen years of war on three continents.
Not that Suleiman had been defeated; he had merely failed to capture a city which seemed less naturally defensible than so many fortresses already taken along the middle Danube. But by 1683 the
character of the Sultanate was different. Mehmed IV, who had been on the throne for the preceding thirty-five years, was a spendthrift hedonist, a vigorous horseman but no soldier; in Ottoman
history he is labelled ‘
Mehmed Avçi
’ (Mehmed the Hunter) and he is remembered, in epic verse as well as in prose, for mobilizing thousands of peasants as beaters in the
woods around Edirne. Eight years after his accession he had the good fortune to find a gifted family who provided him with two first-rate Grand Viziers, Mehmed Köprülü and his son,
Fezil Ahmed. Their reforms and administrative efficiency brought him the full treasury into which he dipped for his hunting campaigns, but they also enabled him to raise the powerful force
which set out on this second march on Vienna. Sultan Mehmed was prepared to ride as far as Belgrade with his troops. He would not, however, risk a personal rebuff. Far better
to entrust so ambitious an enterprise to his close companion Kara Mustafa, who on Fazil Ahmed’s death in November 1676 had become Grand Vizier.
²