Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (28 page)

Historians have long debated what changed the Ottoman Empire in the three centuries between the glorious days of Suleyman and its description as the sick man of Europe. In particular, was it a process of decline – the traditional view – or was the empire adapting, with some success, to changed circumstances? One historian, Daniel Goffman, who himself argues for adaptation, puts the decline view with some force: ‘If defeats on the battlefield, ostensibly insane Sultans, scandals in the imperial household, threats from reactionaries, rebellions in the provinces, chronically mutinous janissaries, and widespread bribery were not symptoms of decay, then what were they?’
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Others see the decay idea as springing from a false analogy, mistakenly likening an empire to a living organism that makes a natural and inevitable progress from birth to maturity and then to deterioration and death. Another historian, Molly Greene, wearily describes the decline thesis as a meat-grinder, which converts all the facts into the homogenised elements of a single story rather than the distinct indicators of many different stories.

In the present context we are only partly concerned with whether the changes in the Ottoman Empire represent decline or adaptation, and with debating the exact period at which the changes began. Our main interest is in what changes actually occurred, and in the effect of these changes on the Greeks and on other non-Muslim subjects of the empire.

Broadly speaking, the changes can be seen in the power of the Ottoman military; in Ottoman administration; perhaps at a deeper level in Ottoman psychology; and very definitely in the Ottoman economy. Daniel Goffman’s list of Ottoman weaknesses is a good starting point.

There were certainly some military defeats, on both land and sea, though there is a ‘but’ attached to many of them. In 1565 the Ottomans failed, despite a long siege, to take Malta from the Knights of St John, although that was under Suleyman, when Ottoman power was thought to be at its height. In 1571 the Ottomans’ success in taking Cyprus was immediately followed by their disastrous defeat by a Holy League fleet at Lepanto; but the Ottoman fleet was quickly rebuilt, though quality may have been sacrificed to speed of construction. The Holy League triumph at Lepanto was short lived; its fleet was soon disbanded and Venice, one of the Lepanto victors, accepted a humiliating peace treaty with the Ottomans only two years later. In the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire Baghdad was lost in 1624, but only briefly, and was recovered in 1638. In 1669 the Ottomans were strong enough to capture Crete, albeit after a prolonged siege at Iráklion. In 1683 they besieged Vienna without success; but the earlier sieges by Suleyman in 1529 and 1532 had also been failures. So far the Ottoman military record was mixed, but far from being catastrophic.

However, as we have seen, the last years of the seventeenth century brought major Ottoman reverses. In 1684 a new Holy League in which Austria and Venice were dominant attacked the Ottoman provinces in Europe from both north and south. In the northern offensive the Austrians drove them out of Hungary and pushed on beyond Belgrade to Skopje. In the south Venice seized the Peloponnese and advanced as far as Évia. The conflict was ended by the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz by which Hungary, Belgrade and territory south as far as Skopje were ceded to Austria and the Peloponnese to Venice. But even these losses were temporary; in 1715 the Ottomans drove the Venetians out of the Peloponnese, and in 1739 Austria ceded back to the Ottomans Belgrade and most of the territory acquired 40 years earlier under the Treaty of Karlowitz.

Nevertheless, Hungary was permanently lost to the Ottoman Empire. The war with Russia from 1768 to 1774 brought further losses. By the 1774 Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainardji, the most humiliating that the
Ottomans ever signed, they gave up territory in today’s Romania and granted extensive navigation rights to Russia and to other vessels, including Greek merchant ships, which flew the Russian flag. The treaty also allowed Russia a right – vaguely worded but energetically used by Russia – to protect the Greeks and other Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Only now did the so-called Eastern Question begin to be asked: whether the Ottoman Empire would survive, and what would happen if it did not.

The problem for the Ottoman Empire was not so much that its forces were too weak on the battlefield but that they were too strong at home. The original army, dating back to the fourteenth century, had two main components. One was the cavalry, the timar-holders living off their estates, liable for military service when summoned, and obliged to bring with them a number of armed retainers. The number of timar-holders is first reliably reported in 1525, when there were 10,600 in the European provinces and 17,200 in Asia Minor and Syria. Even if only a third were available at any one time, bringing an average of five retainers, they would form a force of about 50,000 men.

The other main element was the janissary corps of infantry, initially drawn exclusively from devshirme conscription. Originally a few hundred men forming the Sultan’s personal bodyguard, their numbers were increased to about 10,000 by Mehmed the Conqueror and remained at that level until about 1550. But battlefield tactics were changing: battles were increasingly dominated by infantry using firearms rather than cavalry firing arrows or wielding swords, and the infantry fought from entrenched positions that cavalry could not easily overrun. So infantry became more important than cavalry, more janissaries were needed, and by 1600 their number had quadrupled to about 40,000. Janissary ranks were now open to volunteers and not restricted to recruits from the increasingly infrequent devshirme. Meanwhile the number of timar-holding cavalry was declining: they were less needed, and less effective, since comfortable landholders gave little thought to military preparedness, as the Venetians had discovered in their equivalent system in Crete. By the end of the seventeenth century the timars had been largely taken over by the treasury in Constantinople, and the rights to their revenues sold to tax farmers – in part to provide pay for the increased number of janissaries.

Almost from their inception the janissaries were a force to be reckoned with in the internal politics of the empire. It was largely due to the janissaries that in 1446 Mehmed II was deposed, to return to the throne five years later and win renown as the conqueror of Constantinople. Other Sultans were in effect deposed by the janissaries: Bayezid II in
1512, Osman II in 1622, and the mentally unstable Ibrahim I in 1648. In this last case at least the janissaries presented themselves as law-abiding guardians of the state who took care before acting to get approval from both the religious establishment and from Ibrahim’s mother, who was acting as regent for him.

However, it was often the more basic issue of pay that sparked a janissary revolt. Even the earliest, the deposition of Mehmed II in 1446, was in part due to the janissaries being paid in debased coinage. There was a revolt for the same reason in 1589, when it was said that the new coins issued to the janissaries were ‘as light as the leaves of the almond tree and as worthless as drops of dew’.
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While the state treasury tried to reduce the cost of paying the janissaries by debasing the coinage, the janissaries turned to other ways of making money. They took up civilian trades, which meant that they were unwilling to move when called on to fight. Their commanders inflated the payrolls by including janissaries’ children and janissaries long dead. It is remarkable that such a flawed system was still able to put such an effective army in the field.

It was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that Selim III attempted a radical reform, the establishment of an Army of the New Order to replace the janissaries. But the attempt met violent janissary opposition and was abandoned, those responsible losing their lives and Selim III losing his throne and ultimately his life as well. In 1826 the janissary corps was destroyed forever on a single June day of carnage in the capital’s At Meydan Square, an occasion known in Turkish history as the Auspicious Event.

There were indeed some ostensibly insane Sultans, or at least ones who were mentally unstable. Perhaps the most extreme example was Mustafa I, who reigned briefly from 1617 to 1618 and again from 1622 to 1623. As one Turkish chronicler records, he was in the habit as Sultan of ‘scattering the gold and silver coins with which he filled his pockets to the birds and to the fish in the sea and to paupers whom he met in the street’.
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Selim II (1566–74) was known as the Sot but it was in his reign that the Ottomans acquired Cyprus. The deranged Ibrahim I (1640–8) has already been mentioned, but it was under him that Crete, apart from Iráklion, was conquered.

Whatever the quality of the Sultans, the functioning of the Ottoman state largely depended upon the grand vizier. At some periods the office-holders alternated rapidly, the grand vizier being deposed and often executed at each setback. But a long period of stability began in the mid-seventeenth century under the remarkable Koprulu family. The first of these was Mehmed Koprulu, originally a devshirme conscript
from Albania who served from 1656 to 1661, though already in his seventies when appointed. In 38 of the next 47 years the office was held by members of the Koprulu family – Mehmed’s son Ahmed (1661–76) who successfully concluded the long siege of Iráklion, another son, two sons-in-law, and two nephews. The one major gap in Koprulu tenure was from 1683 to 1689 when an anti-Koprulu faction secured the office, and it was no coincidence that those were the years when the Ottoman Empire lost Hungary and the provinces south of Belgrade.

The first of the line, Mehmed Koprulu, showed how forceful action could deal with two of the other supposed signs of Ottoman decay: threats from reactionaries and rebellions in the provinces. From the early 1650s a call to return to the basic principles of Islam had been preached by a fiery preacher, Mehmed Kadizade, whose followers were called kadizadelis. Kadizade condemned not only the non-Islamic consumption of wine, coffee and tobacco, but also the religious institutions in general and the dervish orders in particular. His slogan was: ‘Every innovation is heresy, every heresy is error, and every error leads to hell.’
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Mehmed Koprulu, after securing the support of the clerical establishment, rounded up the kadizadeli leaders and, refraining from execution, which he used against other opponents, simply exiled them to Cyprus. Mehmed Koprulu dealt as forcefully and more brutally in directing the campaign against a major rebellion in Anatolia. Any deserters from government forces to the rebels were executed on his orders, and possibly 1,000 such men were killed in a few days. The revolt ended when its leaders were lured to Aleppo and there treacherously killed by Mehmed Koprulu’s commander, though not apparently with Mehmed Koprulu’s complicity.

Finally there is the question of bribery and corruption. In the provinces this seems to have been widespread from an early date. A justice decree of 1609 issued by Sultan Ahmed I describes and condemns many examples. Troop patrols, in unnecessarily large numbers, were entering villages and seizing goods, often on the flimsy pretext of pursuing criminals. ‘If somebody falls out of a tree,’ says the decree, ‘you make this out to be a murder, you go to a village, settle down, and in order to rout out the supposed killer you harass the people.’
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Furthermore the judges, the kadi, were descending with their retinues on villages to try supposed wrongdoers or on other legal business, and were taking goods without payment – sheep, chickens, oil, honey, barley, straw and wood are mentioned. Judges were also juggling with inheritance taxes, inflating the value of the inheritance to increase the tax, and reassessing and reimposing the tax several times on the grounds that
the previous settlement was unjust. Finally the villagers who had suffered these extortions were forced to borrow from moneylenders, often at crippling rates of up to 50 per cent.

There was also bribery and corruption in Ottoman governing circles. It is sometimes assumed that these factors made effective government impossible, because officials had no interest in policy apart from bribes they might receive for supporting one faction or another, or revenge that they might wreak on their opponents. But factions and the attendant self-seeking were common in virtually all major European states of the time, and it would be hard to find one where policy was formed solely by a body of high-minded altruists. Suraiya Faroqhi, who has written extensively on the Ottoman Empire, will have none of the idea that the Ottomans were exceptional in this respect. ‘In my view’, she writes emphatically, ‘it is an “orientalist” assumption of the most outmoded variety to postulate an atomized Ottoman elite unable to formulate even a loose consensual framework.’
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There is another view of Ottoman weaknesses that looks beyond particular instances to a deeper psychological flaw at the heart of the Ottoman system. This view was the staple of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment commentators. It portrayed Ottoman power as based on a fantasy. The Sultan was, by virtue of his office, all powerful, his subjects including his highest officers being promoted, demoted or indeed executed at his will. But actual power was wielded by the grand vizier, though only so long as he enjoyed the Sultan’s favour. Thus the Sultan’s supposed omnipotence masked his actual abdication of power. He merely signified power rather than wielding it, while in person he might be, and often was, ‘this feeble-minded, fatuous, weak, effeminate, trivial, spoiled, cowardly being lost in his lust and enjoyment: this half-human and sub-human being which the despot ultimately turns out to be’.
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This view is elaborated in detail by Alain Grosrichard in
The Sultan’s Court
, a work that can be read in various ways. From one aspect it is an examination of how Enlightenment writers portrayed the Ottoman Empire, often to contrast its despotic otherness with the supposedly reason-based societies of Europe. The book can also be read as an application to the Ottoman Empire of the post-Freudian psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan. It is Lacan who provides the idea of enjoyment as central. Grosrichard, following Lacan, represents the Ottoman system as a mechanism for the exchange of enjoyment, or rather the particular form of enjoyment that Lacan calls ‘jouissance’. In this scheme goods and all sources of pleasure, especially sexual, are channelled to the Sultan, while the subjects’ enjoyment comes from providing these goods
to the great personage at the centre, in whom they can see themselves reflected.