The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (7 page)

Once again an Ottoman prince, fetched from the Fourth Courtyard of the Topkapi Sarayi, was girded with the sword at Edirne rather that at Eyüp. Here, however, a slight change crept into an
otherwise familiar scenario. Unusually, the twenty-nine-year-old Ahmed III was a brother, rather than a half-brother, of his predecessor; their Cretan mother, Rabia Gulnus, was in her early sixties
at Ahmed’s accession and she enjoyed some influence as
Valide Sultana
until her death twelve years later. Yet for a few months it seemed as if the Ottoman dynasty itself was under
notice to quit. Ahmed was forced to pay out a larger amount of Accession Money than any predecessor, satisfying the mutinous Janissaries with funds confiscated from the discredited Feyzullah
Effendi and his circle of intimates. Even so, the Sultan could not distribute an equal sum to every unit of rebellious troops, and there was widespread discontent in Rumelia and south-western
Anatolia.

A hostile army gathered at Silivri, where the road to Edirne turned inland from the Sea of Marmara. If at that moment the commanders
could have agreed on a nominee for the
Sultanate from one of the other leading families, the Ottoman Empire might well have fallen apart, dissolving into a loose confederation of khanates. But Ahmed, and the Empire, survived. He was
prepared to use the Janissaries as protectors of the dynasty. At their approach the rebels fled from Silivri, many becoming brigands in eastern Thrace and the Rodopi Mountains. The threat of civil
war receded.
¹¹

For the first half of his twenty-seven-year reign, Ahmed III showed a political guile which occasionally rose to shrewd statesmanship. In retrospect, the years 1703 to 1718 form a period of weak
government; thirteen Grand Viziers followed one another with disconcerting rapidity; and control of the outlying provinces was so poor that in 1711 there were seventy days of bloodshed in Cairo, as
six military corps collaborated in the ‘great Insurrection’ against Janissary pretensions. But in the imperial capital Sultan Ahmed used these years to consolidate his position on the
throne, playing off rival viziers and ‘Lords of the Divan’ while advancing his own nominees to key posts in the army and at Court. The policy of modernizing the army and navy, begun by
Hüseyin, was cautiously continued and met with some success. While no Ottoman commander could outwit Prince Eugene, the Russians were checked on the river Pruth in 1711, Peter the Great
himself narrowly avoiding capture. But the most striking achievements of this period were in southern Greece. The remarkable speed with which the Peloponnese was recovered testifies to the
effectiveness of the redesigned fleet. It also provides a significant commentary on the status of Ahmed III’s Greek Orthodox subjects.

Over the centuries Ottoman Sultans appropriated many churches as mosques, but they never sought to enforce conversion on the whole Christian community.
¹²
Mehmed II recognized his Orthodox subjects as a religious ‘nation’ (
millet
); they had to pay heavy taxes and accept discriminatory laws—no
proselytizing of Muslims, no church processions, no riding of a horse, no carrying of arms, etc.—but they were permitted self-government in spiritual and secular church affairs under the
leadership of the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople, who was given high Ottoman rank: a Pasha with three horsetails. Later Sultans used Greeks widely in government service; almost invariably, for
example, the
interpreter (dragoman) to a foreign envoy would be a Greek. But it was from commerce that the Greeks grew wealthy. A Greek quarter—which included the
walled residence of the Patriarch—survived in the Stamboul district of Constantinople around Phanar (Fener), the old Byzantine lighthouse above the Golden Horn. By the early eighteenth
century these ‘Phanariot’ Greeks formed a mercantile aristocracy, active not only at the heart of the Empire but throughout Rumelia and the Levant as well. Their greatest commercial
rivals had long been the Venetians and, to a lesser extent, the Genoese. The Phanariots presented Ahmed III with a series of appeals from Greeks under Venetian rule in the Aegean islands of the
Peloponnese imploring the Ottomans to come and liberate them from Latin domination. This influential pressure group was supported by Sultan Ahmed’s Cretan-born mother, who did not die until
November 1715. Military and naval action against the Venetian Republic would be more popular in Constantinople than any campaign on the lower Danube.

By 1710 a quarter of a century of Venetian administration was bringing prosperity back to the Peloponnese after many years of neglect. The population had increased rapidly, assisted by
colonization from north of the Gulf of Corinth, and in the less arid districts farming was flourishing for the first time since the Classical Age. But, despite this rising standard of living,
Venetian rule was unpopular with the Greeks themselves. When the French traveller Aubry de la Moutraye landed at Methoni in the summer of 1710 he found that the people deeply resented trade
restrictions which, they said, favoured Venetian merchants.
¹³
The Greeks complained, too, of the coming of an Italian priesthood and of Roman Catholic
attacks on the Orthodox Church; they thought their co-believers enjoyed greater freedom of worship in the lands still within the Ottoman Empire. This Greek Orthodox hostility to intrusive Latin
rites, together with Phanariot hopes of crippling Venetian trade, ensured that the proposed war was warmly supported along the Golden Horn. Early in December 1714 occasional exchanges of fire
between Ottoman and Venetian vessels in the Aegean gave the Sultan an excuse to declare war on the Republic of St Mark.

The campaign began in the following summer, when the Grand Vizier’s army advanced into the Peloponnese. The invaders met little
resistance from troops in Venetian
pay and found they could count on ready support from the Orthodox clergy. At the same time Ottoman forces captured the last Venetian strongholds in Crete, at Spinalonga and Kalami, and in the
Cyclades they took Tenos—Venetian for the past five hundred years, strongly Roman Catholic, and not yet the centre of Orthodox pilgrimage which was to make the island famous in the nineteenth
century. With the assistance of ships provided by Pope Clement XI and the Knights of Malta, the Venetians tried to mount a counter-offensive in 1717 at a time when the Ottoman commanders were
reeling from a succession of blows struck by Prince Eugene in the Banat. But this final assertion of Holy League solidarity was little more than a gesture. By the summer of 1718, when peace was
made at Passarowitz, Venice had agreed to abandon the Peloponnese. Although the Republic held the Ionian islands, Kithira and four small harbours on the coast of Epirus for almost eighty more
years, they were retained for commercial purposes, not as strategic bases to support a forward policy in the Aegean and the Levant.

Even though the settlement went almost unnoticed in Western Europe, the Peace of Passarowitz marked the close of an epoch in Mediterranean history. The Ottomans had gained a final strategic
victory, checking the earliest of the maritime challenges from the West. Never again would the lion of St Mark roar across the waters off Lepanto or break the mournful silence of Soudha Bay. Yet as
a sign of sustained Ottoman recovery, these events in the Peloponnese were unconvincing. They were made possible by an identity of interest between Muslims and Orthodox in defeating papal
endeavours to proselytize the eastern Mediterranean. Relations between the thirty Sultans and more than a hundred and fifty Patriarchs who followed the fall of Byzantium were based on a mutual
abhorrence of the Latin religious practice and the hope of mutual respect for the office which each dignitary held. This hope was not always realized; two out of every three Patriarchs were deposed
upon Ottoman insistence after relatively minor deviations in policy; six more grievously offending Patriarchs were hanged, drowned or poisoned. Yet both the Sultanate and the Patriarchate were
naturally conservative institutions, not entirely blind to reform, but instinctively suspicious of beliefs which might disturb the delicate balance of
authority between them.
Neither consciously promoted nationalism: the Patriarch maintained the Byzantine tradition of universalism within an ecumenical church; the Sultan ruled a multinational empire of which
‘Turks’ were only one component, the socially underprivileged Turcoman Anatolian peasantry. The war to recover the Peloponnese showed that the two institutions could achieve an
operational partnership against the Latin church. It remained to be seen how their relationship would respond to any show of missionary crusading zeal among Orthodox believers beyond the Ecumenical
Patriarch’s spiritual jurisdiction.

That challenge was closer to hand than either Sultan Ahmed or the Patriarch realized. After rebuffing the Russians on the Pruth in 1711 Ahmed and his Viziers affected a careless contempt for
Tsar Peter, who had vainly attempted to stir up a Balkan Christian revolt. To underestimate what was happening in Russia was a mistake. Within three years of the Peace of Passarowitz, Peter sought
to elevate his status by assuming the title of Emperor of All the Russias; and in the same year, by his ‘Spiritual Regulation’, he subjected the church of Muscovy to a state control
more binding than that imposed by any other European sovereign on a religious hierarchy. Soon new Russian agents, emissaries of Holy Church as well as of an imperial State, began to infiltrate the
Sultan’s Balkan lands where they encouraged a latent patriotic sentiment, especially in the districts which had shown the greatest hostility to Venetian rule. With Holy Russia assuming the
role of militant guardian of the True Faith, it became increasingly difficult for Orthodox believers within the Ottoman Empire to maintain their passive acceptance of second-class citizenship under
the Sultan’s rule. In 1452 a Byzantine official, critical of his Emperor’s attempts to reunite the Eastern Church with Rome, is said to have remarked, ‘It would be better to see
the royal turban of the Turks in the midst of this city than the Latin mitre’; and in 1710 that view still prevailed among most Greek churchmen.
¹⁴
But, however much they might mistrust the Latins, respect for the turban was wearing thin. By the second half of the century there were many Greeks who hoped that the finest of
their dreams would soon become a reality: to hear the Holy Liturgy sung once more in Constantinople’s domed Basilica of the Divine Wisdom no longer seemed an impossibility.

C
HAPTER
3

T
ULIP
T
IME AND
A
FTER

T
HE DECLINE OF THE
O
TTOMAN
E
MPIRE WAS NEITHER RAPID NOR
continuous. By 1700 the age of Islamic conquest
in Europe was over; frontiers had contracted after lost or indecisive campaigns; and peripheral provinces, acquired somewhat haphazardly in North Africa and the Yemen, would soon be slipping into
virtual independence. From the closing years of the seventeenth century outsiders predicted the collapse of the Sultanate time and time again. Yet, against all expectancy, the Ottoman Empire
outlived imperial Spain, republican Genoa and republican Venice, the elective monarchy of Poland, British colonial America, the vestigial Holy Roman Empire, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, and the
temporal power of the Papacy; it even survived by a few years the Habsburg and Romanov empires, so long its apparent residuary legatees, and the Hohenzollern empire which had aspired to overtake
France as its chief creditor.

It is easier to identify signs of decay in the Ottoman Empire than to discover why it became such a durable institution. Undoubtedly one source of vitality was a conviction within the ruling
élite and the
ulema
that the Ottoman Empire
was
Islam. The prestige of the Caliphate, whether held legitimately or by appropriation, enhanced the secular power of a Sultan
after he was girded with the Sword of Othman at Eyüp, however feeble his personality might be. ‘May it be known to His Imperial Majesty that the origins of good order in kingship and
community and the guarantee of a stable foundation for the faith and the dynasty lie in a firm grasp on the strong cord of the law of Muhammad,’
the Ottoman counsellor
Mustafa Koçi Bey wrote in 1630 in a famous treatise which he presented to Murad IV; and later memoranda to several of Murad’s successors similarly stressed the wisdom of basing public
and private life on Holy Islamic Law (the
ş
eriat
).
¹
But there remained in the structure of the Ottoman state an innate conservatism which was
always restorative and reformist in character rather than narrowly obscurantist, as some members of the
ulema
wished. This is a thin distinction, but an important one: provided outward forms
looked familiar, the military and naval techniques of Western Europe might be adopted and changes of practice introduced into the day-to-day business of government. Already, under the
Köprülüs, the Grand Vizier had acquired an official residence, in a road skirting the outer wall of the Topkapi Sarayi, and from 1654 he retained there an administrative staff in the
residence which because of its lofty gate became known as the Sublime Porte (
Bab-i Ali
) and remained the recognized seat of government until the fall of the Empire. There were several
periods in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries when a Sultan or a Grand Vizier cautiously experimented with westernization, seeking to introduce a European style to the well-worn
fabric of Ottoman rule.