Ottoman Empire Is Among the Most Fascinating

¶ … Ottoman Empire is among the most fascinating periods in the history of civilization, and it remains the subject of scholarly study because of the impact it had on the world, and continues to have today.

The empire began around as a medieval state in the late 13th Century around what is now known as Turkey; the region had largely been unaffected, either socially, militarily or economically by the social progress in the rest of Europe. Hence, this empire was largely frozen in time, according to www.infoplease.com.

The Ottoman Empire began modestly enough, with many small Turkish states bonding together in Asia Minor following the disintegration of the Seljuk Turks' empire.

And it is important to note that Turkey's domination over Africa's northern areas was not entirely well defined, and the Ottoman Empire did not really have permanent, clear-cut borders; rather, the empire was more of a military administration over a vast region of diverse cultures and geography.

And when it was at its peak of power and influence in the Middle East and Africa, between the years 1683 -- 1699, the Ottoman Empire controlled an area which includes these nations today:

Hungary, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, southern Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iraq, Kuwait, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, eastern and western Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, eastern Yemen, Egypt, northern Libya, Tunisia, and northern Algeria.

The early structure of political and military power in the Ottoman Empire

The successor to the thrown -- prior to the emergence of Ahmad I in 1603 -- was "habitually contested by all the sons of the deceased sultan," which is a corrupt and barbaric style of administration, but must be understood to gain a perspective into this era; in addition, it was the patriotic duty of the victor " ... To kill his rivals in order to restore order."

Turkish Military: The first place the Turks occupied in Europe was Gallipoli

According to Theodore Spandounes (Nicol, 1997), the first place that the Turks occupied in Europe was Gallipoli; and the ruler of the Turks, Orhan, " ... went on to lay siege to Constantinople" (20). When Orhan had taken Constantinople, John Paleologo (son of a deceased sultan) "then entered the palace and paid Orhan all that he had promised" (20) for the taking of Constantinople. And this was how it worked in the 14th century, as the Ottoman Empire was taking shape.

The Janissaries

The growth and expansion of Russia from the 18th Century onwards

Migration is always one of the negative products of war (McGowan, 1994), and the many wars fought by (against) the Ottoman empire sent hundreds of thousands scurrying for greener and more peaceful pastures. Migrations were in part set off by the expansion and growth of Russia in the 18th Century. Russian expansion and growth during the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries caused a tremendous upheaval in countries where Russia came marauding into previous peaceful settlements, and also where Russia and the Ottoman Empire forces clashed in bloody and long wars.

The Ottoman war against Russia in 1768, a resumption of previous wars, caused "new waves of migration" (648), and were "followed by others still later, caused by the provincial chaos which prevailed in the final two decades of the period (1792-1812)."

These late 18th Century migrations -- including the northward migration of the Serbs, and the migration of peasants into Habsburg territory driven by the "harsh Russian occupation during the war of 1736 -- 39" -- immediately affected the "Serbs, the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Tartars and the Arab villagers of the Syrian periphery," according to Bruce McGowan, former U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg, Russia.

But of all the civil upheaval and migrations occurring during that period, the "single greatest surge of migration during the eighteenth Century," McGowan writes on page 650, "was up to 200,000 Tatars emigrated out of the reach of the Russians." Many of the Tatars settled on the western shore of the black Sea, in the Dobruja province.

And meantime a "deluge" of Christians -- most likely, according to McGowan, Slavs and Greeks -- were driven towards Azov by the Russians, around 1778. The Russians had driven the Christians and Tatar nation out, and the Tatar peoples -- who once had posed a threat as a force inside Russia -- survived, according to McGowan, "only as a diaspora" (650) (diaspora: an ethnic or cultural group scattered far from their homeland).

Between 1768 and 1812, there were three wars between Russia and Turkey, causing chaos and more migrations of ethnic peoples. Russia, meantime, was occupying Rumanian provinces, and as Bucharest recovered from the worst of Russian repression during that occupation, approximately 200,000 Bulgarians crossed over into the Rumanian provinces. A good many of those refugees, McGowan suspects (650), continued into "the newly conquered Russian territories where they crossed paths with the retreating Tatars."

The second of the three Russo-Turkish wars drove many Bulgarians into Thrace and Macedonia, which was bad timing for the Bulgarians, since "the newly risen warlords of Ottoman Europe (the ayans) were locked in a [two-decade-long] struggle for dominance." Newly arrived peoples, forced out of their homeland, could not have been pleased to be in the cross-fire of brutal Ottoman warlords, to paraphrase McGowan.

On page 682 McGowan discusses the primitive peasant conditions in Rumania in the 18th Century, in part due to the "harsh Russian occupation in the late 1730s" -- who required far more work out of peasants than the Ottoman's 12 days of servitude:

'In winter they [peasants under Ottoman in Rumania] retire to cells underground, easily kept warm by means of a little fire made of dried dung and some branches of trees." Each family -- men, women, children -- "are all heaped together; and their respective beds consist of one piece of coarse woolen cloth ... "

Egypt (because of cotton) begins a move away from the Ottoman Empire

Meanwhile, between 1798 and 1882, the cultivation of cotton brought capitalism to Egypt, which brought revenue into Egypt, with which to defend its claim to autonomy from the Ottoman Empire (Richards, 1987). It also helped initiate Egypt into the Western economic milieu -- further distancing Egypt from the "old ways" of doing things in the Ottoman Empire.

Moreover, the coming of capitalism and cotton resulted in peasant land loss in Egypt, because cotton required more capital than wheat (it required more water than wheat, and digging canals was expensive), and the "increased tax burden" was more than many peasants could afford (238).

Where does Russia come into this picture? Russian expansion into the Caucasus "inhibited the flow of Mamluks, and [Egypt] ... chose conscription [for his army] because its goals and the prevailing political constraints gave him little choice."

Demands pressed upon the Ottoman state -- and Russian expansion -- led to a further weakening of Ottoman

As many European nations made strides toward a more progressive, modern approach to government and social change, and as the Ottoman state continued to refuse to change, the Ottoman Empire would slowly lose its power, and find itself capitulating to treaties and policies other nearby states elected to enforce.

In fact, by the mid eighteenth century, "increased European demand for Balkan production of cotton, grains, maize, cattle, and tobacco led the European states to press upon the weakened Ottoman state their demands for further commercial concessions" (Wallerstein, et al., 1987) (91). The Ottoman monopoly of trade in the Black Sea -- once a key military, economic and geopolitical trump card in the Ottoman deck -- ended with the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774, which in fact opened the Straits to the Russians, among the main adversaries of the Ottoman world.

The Kucuk Kaynarca treaty was indicative of the fact that foreign ambassadors and consuls were now, in the late 18th Century, able to procure from Ottoman "privileges such as tax exemptions for non-Muslim Ottoman subjects" (92). And indeed, things were slipping badly for the Ottoman Empire even by the middle of the 18th Century, when imports to the Empire were greater than exports out of the Empire, according to Wallerstein.

The combination of the old-fashioned "tax-farming" -- and the resulting weakened state controls on production -- plus the ever-increasing list of "concessions to foreign merchants ... created a set of centrifugal forces that undermined the basic authority" of the Empire.

The separatists' movements in the Balkans and in the Middle East resulted from the forced openness of the Ottoman Empire, an openness that occurred in the tide of the European world economy. And what was the response of the Empire to lands seceding from the Empire, lands that had been "annexed through military occupation and had been controlled militarily at the zenith of the Ottoman expansion"? The response was a series of "political measures seeking to recreate Ottoman centralism on an imperial scale," which, according to Wallerstein, "proved to be largely ineffective."

When the economy began to show serious signs of faltering -- "financial difficulties of the Ottoman state apparatus persisted" (94) -- the Empire resorted to "borrowing from abroad." Unfortunately, the debt grew at an accelerating pace, and in 1881, the Empire had failed to pay the interest on a foreign debt of over 200 million pounds sterling, and as a result, "was forced to permit its creditors to take charge of certain imperial revenues."

The Janissary Corps

The military corps within the Ottomans was the Janissary Corps, which "dated back to the late fourteenth century when Ottoman power was shifting from Asia Minor to the Balkans" (Palmer, 1992). The corps was created by Sultan Murad I, "as a slave bodyguard." And fifty years later, the Devsirme corps was introduced, Palmer explains, and served "as the chief source from which the Janissary Corps was raised." Christian peasant fathers were required once in five years to tell local Ottoman officials how many sons they had; one in five of their boys were taken (at age six or seven) by the Sultan's officers and obliged to become Muslims.

"The Janissaries were a highly visible check on the sultan's personal authority" (Imber, 2002). As an armed force, they "were also in a position to defend their own interests and secure their own political ends." They could also be "decisive in the accession and deposition of sultans, in the conduct of campaigns and in extracting money from the Treasury" (322).

'The old fiction [is that] the janissaries won for the Balkan people the sympathies of Western Europe" (Gibbons, 1968); but, Gibbons continues, "there is no historical basis for the assertion that the Osmanlis conquered the Balkan states by use of the janissaries."

The Ottoman failure to reform the inefficient system of government they were using

One of the problems encountered by the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) involved the so called "cotton famine" -- which was not a "famine" at all, but points to the sluggish nature of the Turkish economic system in the 19th Century. The American Civil War was looming in 1857, and there were serious worries in Europe (England and Turkey in particular) that the war would curtail the free flow of cotton out of the U.S. To Europe.

By 1806, "the average share of U.S. cotton in total British cotton imports was 53.1%" (Kurmus, 1987), and twenty years later that rose to 74.5%; by 1850, the U.S. cotton reaching England accounted for 81.1% of imports.

The amount of cotton furnished to England by America is pertinent, because Turkey had previously been the main cotton supplier to England, but began to fail in its ability to raise quality cotton and export it. Indeed, cotton previously had been imported into England from Turkey, as far back as 1586, and in fact until 1780, Kurmus writes (161), "almost all cotton imported into England" came from Turkey.

Besides cotton wool, Turkey had also supplied England with considerable cotton yarn; in fact, in 1725, 146,340 pounds of cotton yard was sold to England by Turkey, and during the period 1783-93, Turkey exported 252,000 bales of cotton wool and about 16,500 bales of cotton yarn to France, according to Kurmus (161).

These numbers are significant because they show that the Ottoman Empire (Turkey in this case) had a good thing going economically, and could compete on the world market with other nations when it came to products like cotton.

However, at the dawn of the 19th Century, there came a "fall in the quantity of cotton imported into England from Turkey" (162). Two reasons for the fall in quantity were apparent: one, cotton from America (grown largely by black slaves in the southern U.S. states, a fact over which the Civil War would eventually be fought) was "better in quality and cheaper in price"; and two, the British Levant Company (responsible for importing Turkish produce) was prohibited by English law from buying Turkish cotton unless "it was exchanged in payment for British goods exported to Turkey."

And so it came to pass that cotton was so expensive, and the Turkish government was so inept, that a great product was no longer feasible as far as trading with England. And here is another example of Turkey (Ottoman) not having an efficient system of government and hence not keeping up with the economic realities of the emerging European market.

The fact is that the Ottoman hard and fast rule for taxing local growers for their produce was still the ancient tax, the tithe. "Under the existing tax system," according to a report from Turkish agents who were trying to explain their plight to the British, "it [is] unrealistic to expect a considerable increase in the output of cotton. The tithe on cotton should be abolished altogether," (163), the agents' report explained.

Meantime, the British (through training and advocacy), and Americans (by providing "good-quality American [cotton] seed for native seed), tried to help Turkey jumpstart it's potentially massive cotton production abilities; this was done partly to make more cotton available in Europe, and also partly because the threat of a Civil War in the U.S. was imminent, and that would most certainly mean a dearth of cotton coming out of the American south.

So, the Turkish government was persuaded to take action to re-kindle the flagging cotton industry, but giving free land to cotton growers, by not taxing that land for five years, by exempting tools and machinery used in cotton growing from import duty, and free seed would be given to growers -- along with training and literature on proper growing and harvesting techniques.

That all sounded very good; but, as Kurmus writes on page 164, "reports by the agents of the Association produced serious doubts about the credibility of the intentions of the Turkish government to encourage cotton growing. It was alleged that the abolition of tithes and other exemptions had not in fact taken place but existed only in paper." The allegations were investigated, and found to be true.

And how did the Turkish government respond? Did they come out with a progressive attitude and new plans? Quite the contrary: "The reaction of the Turkish government was very harsh." And so, the continuing story of how the failure to reform the inefficient system led to one downfall after another for the Ottoman Empire.

Did attitudes of many of the powers in the west (including Russia in the east) before the first world war cause the collapse of the ottoman Empire, or was the collapse caused by the Ottomans themselves?

The collapse was most certainly caused -- with perhaps a few exceptions -- by the Ottomans themselves. First, it should be noted that, as for the continuing hostility that many European nations feel towards Turkey, "Old memories of Ottoman military successes against the European states clearly are at work" (Quataert, 2000). It is not fair, perhaps, that Europeans see Turkey as the only Ottoman successor state, because there are many.

In the Balkans, for example, a Muslim issue comes into play, very much a part of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and its successor states, and symptomatic of the failure of the Empire to reform itself in time to avoid its own fall: "Present day political frontiers follow old Ottoman provincial administrative boundaries," Quataert writes (196). But, he writes, "few administrative practices or structures" from the old Ottoman Empire actually transferred to the post-Ottoman states in the Balkans, simply because, "following independence, almost all of the Muslim administrative classes fled or were expelled."