The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (5 page)

S
ULTAN
M
EHMED
IV
WAS SOVEREIGN OF MORE THAN THIRTY
million subjects, twice as many as King Louis XIV and
six times as many as Emperor Leopold I. Even after the disaster on the Danube, his empire remained formidable. He ruled over almost the whole of the Balkans, up to the eastern approaches to Zagreb,
and his troops held outposts along the Polish river Bug and the Russian rivers Don and Dnieper. In Europe alone his lands were greater in area than France and Spain taken together, while in Asia
Minor he was direct ruler over a vast region which stretched as far south as the head-waters of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and he held as tributary states the Caucasian lands eastwards to
the Caspian Sea. Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus acknowledged his sovereignty; so, too, did Egypt and the lower Nile valley, and he could claim vassal authority over Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers.

Along most of these frontiers there was, however, a clear limit to imperial expansion, well defined on the map. In the East the Ottoman advance was checked by a combination of geography and
military science, to which might be added the religious hostility of convinced Shi’ites: the Safavid dynasty of Persia possessed the skill to exploit natural defences high in their
mountainous central plateau; and it was never likely that the Ottomans would emulate the early Arab invaders and reach the Punjab. In the South the barrier to expansion was purely geographical:
sand imposed a natural frontier, and apart from protecting the pilgrim trail to Medina and Mecca, there seemed no reason for the Ottomans to penetrate deeply along caravan routes into the Sahara or
the Arabian deserts. The south-western limits were also settled long before the closing decades of the seventeenth century, for new conquests in that direction depended on
sea power, and Turkish shipyards did not build vessels stout enough to face the challenge of the Atlantic. Although the Sultan’s calm-water fleet was still effective to the east of the
Sicilian narrows, Ottoman maritime pretensions never fully recovered from their defeat in 1571, when Don John of Austria’s Spanish, Genoese and Venetian armada gained a decisive victory at
Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. Thereafter successive Grand Viziers left naval harassment of the Sultan’s Christian enemies in the western Mediterranean to ‘Barbary pirates’,
untrustworthy allies though these notorious corsairs often proved to be.

Yet, while mountains, sands and ocean confined Ottoman power in three directions, there was no natural obstacle to the north of the Balkans, short of the Carpathians and the Alps. An artificial
barrier, a string of fortresses built by the Habsburgs in the late sixteenth century, formed the so-called ‘Military Frontier’ across western Croatia, but the Danubian plain formed a
vast arena in which generals who could master the changing techniques of military science might engage the enemy in battle. In the fifteenth century the Turks had soon perceived the value of
cannon; even as early as 1453 a ‘super-gun’ twenty-six feet long lobbed stone balls against the walls of Constantinople. But they did not maintain their lead in exploiting new weaponry.
The relief of Vienna and the fall of Esztergom showed the world what several foreign travellers had suspected over the past half-century: the Ottoman war machine was beginning to seize up. It may
have enabled the Sultans to raise a standing army earlier than other sovereigns in Europe, but the Danubian campaign had shown that Kara Mustafa’s combination of specialist troops,
feudatories, daredevil light horsemen and untrained auxiliary plodders could not match the new professional soldiery of the West. Turkish flintlock muskets remained deadly, but heavy artillery
trains drawn by oxen, buffalo or camels made slow and lumbering progress across the Danubian plain.

Catholic Christendom sought speedily to exploit the advantage won by Sobieski and Charles of Lorraine by weaving, for the first time, a grand strategic design against ‘the
Turk’.
¹
In March 1684 emissaries
from Venice, Poland and Austria came together, with the backing of Pope Innocent XI, to
create a new ‘Holy League’, an offensive coalition which would threaten other frontiers as well as the Danube basin. During these discussions in Venice the earliest provisional plans
were outlined for partitioning the Ottoman Empire in Europe and—more vaguely—in the Middle East, too. Louis XIV, whose ministers maintained profitable relations with successive Grand
Viziers, was disinclined to associate France with any crusading Holy League, but it was hoped Orthodox Russia, Protestant Germany and even Muslim Persia would act in concert with the three Catholic
Powers.

These plans were over-ambitious: Persia failed to respond to the Capuchin missionaries who served as envoys from Venice; German Lutheran participation was minimal; and another two years passed
before the Russians went to war, then only to mount an expedition against Mehmed’s tributary ruler, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea. But, although the coalition remained incomplete, the Holy
League was able to attack Mehmed IV in rapid succession on several fronts. These operations marked the start of thirty-five years of almost continuous warfare, in which the Sultan’s enemies
sought to roll back the frontiers of Islam and prove that the great empire built up by Suleiman was set in fatal decline.

The fighting began where it had ended in the previous autumn. Duke Charles of Lorraine continued the war in the Alföld, securing Pest and most of northern Hungary in two summer campaigns,
taking Buda after a month’s siege on 2 September 1686, and defeating the Turks heavily eleven months later near the historic battlefield of Mohács. Charles’s victory allowed
Habsburg armies to clear the Ottomans from most of Croatia and Transylvania. In the first week of September 1688 the Austrians carried the war into the Balkans by storming Belgrade, the capital of
a provincial pashalik for more than a century and a half. In the following summer they advanced to Niš and Skopje, penetrating to within four hundred miles of Constantinople by the
autumn.

Meanwhile Venice, too, opened up a battle front in the Balkans. Raids on Ottoman outposts along the southern Dalmatian coast and in Bosnia were followed in 1685 by a new campaign in Greece.
Francesco Morosini, a former Doge in his late sixties, landed at Tolon in the
Peloponnese—the ‘Sanjak of the Morea’—and encouraged revolts in Epirus
and the Mani. By August 1687 this ‘Venetian’ force, which included Lutheran mercenaries under the Swedish adventurer Count John Königsmarck, had ejected the Turks from all the
Peloponnese except the defiant rocky promontory of Monemvasia. A month later Morosoni’s men swept across the isthmus of Corinth and thrust forwards, by land and by sea, to the Piraeus. They
then attacked the tumbledown cluster of homes and shops around the Acropolis which was all that remained of the greatest of classical cities. After ten days of intermittent bombardment the Ottoman
troops surrendered. Not, however, before irreparable disaster had hit Athens.
²
On the evening of 26 September 1687 a German mercenary fired a mortar
from the Mouseion Hill which blew up a Turkish powder magazine in the Parthenon; the frieze and fourteen columns crashed to the ground. A few days later Morosini ordered the carved horses and
chariot of Athena to be removed from the west pediment and shipped to Venice as a trophy of war, following the marble Lion of the Piraeus which was already on its way to embellish the gates of the
Doge’s arsenal. The task of lowering the group proved too hard for Morosini’s unskilled labourers. Horses and chariot fell to the ground, in ruins. The classical heritage of Athens
suffered more from Morosini’s expedition than from any depredations inflicted during the past two centuries of Ottoman rule—although it was, of course, the Turks who used the Parthenon
as a gunpowder store.

Alarming rumours of the Holy League’s strategic counter-offensive filtered through to Constantinople. So, too, month after month, did thousands of hungry and desperate refugees. There was
no escaping the effects of the war in the capital or on either shore of the Bosphorus. Bread prices doubled in 1686 and again in 1687; banditry flourished in Rumelia; fields went untilled in the
fertile regions because labourers had been conscripted into Kara Mustafa’s army. Sultan ‘Mehmed the Hunter’ chose to remain as long as possible at Edirne, fearing for his life in
the capital. Early in his reign Mehmed had been well served by two members of the Köprülü family. Now a third, Ahmed’s younger brother Mustafa, became the natural leader of an
opposition group, intent on checking the decline of the Sultan’s authority in the Empire’s outlying provinces.

Mehmed was hopelessly discredited and it was too late for Mustafa Köprülü to save him. Defeat at Mohács, followed closely by news of Morosini’s
advance into Attica, cost him the Sultanate. Four predecessors had already been cast from the throne in the first half of the century. Last of them was Mehmed’s father Ibrahim ‘the
Mad’, deposed on 8 August 1648 after an eight-year reign made memorable by a frittering-away of harshly extorted funds, and by tales of one terrible night on which he was said to have ordered
the drowning of two hundred and eighty concubines. No one grieved for Ibrahim when, ten days after losing his throne, he was strangled by his own
cellad
(Chief Executioner). Now, in 1687,
with angry and underpaid soldiers flocking into the capital, it seemed probable that Mehmed would suffer his father’s fate. But neither the Divan nor the
ulema
wished to weaken further
the twin institutions of Sultanate and Caliphate by a second murder. Mustafa Köprülü favoured bloodless deposition, with Mehmed IV surrendering sovereignty to his forty-five-year-old
half-brother Prince Suleiman.

Abdications seldom go smoothly, even among the dynasties of monogamous societies, and in the Ottoman Empire the structure of the harem system constantly raised succession problems.
³
Before the nineteenth century it was rare for there to be an heir-apparent, a well-groomed prince ready to come forward immediately after a Sultan’s death or
deposition. Most Ottoman rulers favoured several Sultanas, as well as concubines lower down the harem hierarchy who might have borne them sons. So intricate was the problem that in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries the brothers and half-brothers of a new Sultan were generally strangled on his accession day, thus eliminating rival claimants who might become the centre of palace
intrigue: five brothers of Murad V had perished by the bowstring on 21 December 1574; and on 28 January 1595 the killing of a record eighteen brothers of Mehmed III left the dynasty so short of
males that religious leaders began to question the morality and wisdom of mass fratricide. It was accordingly decided that close male relatives should henceforth be confined to a
kafe
(cage), one of several small apartments in the Fourth Courtyard of the Sultan’s principal palace, the Topkapi Sarayi. Apart from Mehmed himself, who acceded at the age of six, all fifteen
Sultans between 1617 and 1839
awaited the call to the throne in this small world, with its marble terrace looking out across a garden to the Golden Horn and the
Bosphorus.
⁴

Some princes suffered no more than nominal confinement. But Suleiman, only three months younger than Mehmed, entered the
kafe
at the age of six and reached middle age knowing nothing of
the world beyond what he could see from the Fourth Courtyard. Thirty-nine years in the
kafe,
out of touch with public affairs, was no preparation for a reign. Nevertheless, on 9 November
1687 the Viziers duly produced the dazed, puzzled and half-forgotten Prince from the inner apartments of the Topkapi; he was, a Frenchman noted, of ‘long, lean and pale
appearance’.
⁵
The Viziers waited on Mehmed IV with a
fetva
requiring his abdication. He accepted his deposition fatalistically and was duly
transferred to the
kafe
, while Suleiman II was ceremonially girded with the sword in the sacred mosque at Eyüp, an occasion corresponding to a coronation. At least Mehmed’s life
was spared. But a final irony was reserved for him. Eventually he left the Topkapi and, under close escort, journeyed northwards, back to Edirne and the favourite palace from which he had so often
ridden out hunting. But there were to be no more ‘sporting campaigns’ for Mehmed. His life ended in a virtual imprisonment which denied him all pleasure. When he died in January 1693
some said it was of gout, some of poison, but many maintained that it was from melancholia.

By then Suleiman II was dead, too. In June 1691, barely three and a half years after being girded with the sword, he succumbed to dropsy as he was about to set out from Edirne on a campaign
against the Austrians. In death he was honoured as never in life, for his embalmed body was brought to the
turbe
(tomb) of his great namesake in the Suleimaniye complex, beside the finest
imperial mosque in the capital. He had achieved more than seemed likely when he emerged from the
kafe.
In the first days of March 1688 he personally led troops who hunted down rebels,
outlaws and the most blatant racketeers in the Stamboul and Galata districts of Constantinople; he promised to lift the burden of extra war taxes; and at last, in October 1689, appointed Mustafa
Köprülü as Grand Vizier—a courageous decision, for the Köprülüs were a formidable family with the confidence to make or unmake Sultans. The Grand
Vizier showed himself a sound general; Niš and Belgrade were recaptured in the autumn of 1690 and a defence line re-established along the Danube. Suleiman II was ready to ride
northwards with him for an advance into Hungary when death struck the Sultan down.

Mustafa Köprülü did not return to Stamboul for Suleiman II’s funeral. The Viziers fetched from the back apartments of the palace yet another half-brother, Prince Ahmed, ten
months junior to Suleiman and with a full forty-three years of the
kafe
behind him. There was no time for the sword-girding ‘coronation’ at Eyüp, only for an improvised
ceremony in Edirne’s E
ş
ki mosque. Then Mustafa Köprülü set out at once for the Danube battle front, leaving Ahmed II to receive instruction in government from the Divan. Less
than a month later, the Grand Vizier’s army was ambushed at Szlankamen, thirty miles north-west of Belgrade, on the edge of the wooded Fruska Gora. Mustafa Köprülü was fatally
wounded and his army scattered.