The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent (4 page)

A further consequence of this reviving orthodoxy may well have been increased hostility to the Christian churches. While the Orthodox Christian clergy tended to look to the Ottoman government for protection against the encroachments of Roman Catholic missions, and were much alarmed by the multiplication of Uniate churches in communion with Rome, some of them had responded to this Catholic threat by a vigorous movement of reform under Patriarch Cyril Lukaris (executed in 1638). They also began to look with growing attention and sympathy towards the Orthodox Czar and Church of Muscovy, then coming more closely into line with Greek religious practice thanks to Nikon, Patriarch of Moscow (until 1657) and other reformers. The Orthodox rulers of the Romanian principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, over which the Sultan claimed sovereignty, also occasionally looked to Muscovy (and to Catholic Poland) for support. But these developments simply strengthened the Istanbul government’s determination to control its Orthodox subjects with the utmost rigour. Meanwhile, economic pressure by the Christian states of western Europe increased in the Ottoman lands. If an old tactic of the Turkish rulers consisted in playing off the envoys from Protestant Holland and England against the ambassador of Catholic France, and it was often profitable, there could be no doubt that the ‘capitulations’ of these countries with the Sultan formed the basis of their growing commercial supremacy in the Levant. Moslems rightly mistrusted wealthy alien merchants who imported debased currency, manufactured in the west for use in the Turkish dominions.
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Foreign Christians tended to do business, first of all, with the native Christians, and this was a further cause of offence.
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Dislike and alarm were naturally to reach new heights when the French admiral Du Quesne and his ships burst into the Aegean on the prowl after pirates in June 1681, and remained in those waters for nine months. ‘The Gran Visir thunders amongst us,’ the merchants from the west complained, but he had good reasons for doing so.

The state was becoming more obstinately Moslem in personnel and outlook. This is one comment that may be made on old Evliyá’s view of the Ottoman empire’s continuing glory. Other fundamental changes, which he could hardly be expected to grasp, were also taking place.

When the masterful Murad IV died in 1640, a strongly entrenched party of courtiers in the palace soon realised that warfare was the simplest means of keeping the standing troops otherwise quartered in or around Istanbul at arm’s length. This helps to account for the prolongation of the desultory war
against Venice, begun in 1645 for the conquest of Crete. But rivalries at court then tended to make each faction exploit the sympathy of rival contingents in the standing army. It was found that a naval war against Venice involved the defence of the Dardanelles, and of Istanbul itself, so that large numbers of soldiers had to be kept close to the vital centre of government. They were still on the spot to be used by, or to use, the factions. The Grand Vezirs, who often had a clear notion of their imperial responsibilities, sometimes tried to employ the troops against the court, and sometimes regarded military disorders as the primary evil to be stamped out first. Alternatively, without troops they could not hope to repress the mounting tumult in parts of Asia Minor. A final and most important element in an anarchic situation was the temperament of the Sultan: ‘mad’ Ibrahim (1640–7) made courtiers and politicians fearful for their personal safety, and was therefore responsible for kaleidoscopic changes of front, and reversals of alliance by all the interests involved. The minority of Mehmed IV (born in 1640) had very much the same effect on the situation. During this period two main parties, patronised by the mother of Ibrahim and the mother of Mehmed respectively, fought one another to a standstill—the older lady was slaughtered in 1651—but the boy Sultan was so much under the influence of his immediate entourage that the foothold of successive Vezirs was correspondingly weak. Sivash, in office in 1651, and Ipsir, who was Mehmed Köprülü’s patron, were without doubt men of ability.
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Later on the Sultan had grown older and surer of himself, and his determination to maintain the Köprülüs in office as the responsible Grand Vezirs did more than anything else to restore stability while this stability made it easier to increase the revenue of the state and to pay the troops, whose discipline improved accordingly.

The first Köprülü ferociously repressed most of the elements of disorder: the influence of household politicians in court and harem, the perpetual rumbling of stipendiary troops in the larger cities, and the incendiarism of dervishes. His success vindicated Evliyá’s faith in the structure of Ottoman dominion, even if that structure was insensibly changing.

When Mehmed Köprülü died in office in 1661 his son Fazil Ahmed succeeded him unopposed, and ruled fifteen years. He too died in office and Kara Mustafa, a son-in-law, took his place in 1676. This long span of time, hardly interrupted by such easy transfers of power, gave a continuity and firmness to the central authority which made it more formidable than at any period earlier in the century. Much depended on the Sultan’s willingness to tolerate Vezirs who acquired greater effective power the longer they remained in office. But Mehmed IV, like his exact contemporary Louis XIV, had endured years of misery during his minority, and unlike Louis he never dreamt of being his own first minister. The development of court protocol, with its deliberate denial of an education in politics to members of the ruling house, made this improbable in any case. Only someone of exceptional quality could break down such a barrier, and Mehmed’s virtues as a prince were the simple ones:
to survive his minority, to prefer hunting to politics, and not to die for many years. His vices were said to be avarice, and occasional fits of acute jealousy.

The Köprülüs, father and son, were not the men to elaborate a system. They felt their way, a step at a time, but recognised with great perceptiveness the unalterable facts of their situation. In consequence they were remarkably consistent statesmen. It was necessary to satisfy the Sultan, and this meant giving him funds enough to lead the easy, expensive life he craved, dedicated above all to the pleasure of hunting on a fabulous scale. It was necessary to tame the capital city, and the unruly elements there which had supported so many palace upheavals in the past; significantly Mehmed IV did not visit Istanbul once in ten years (1666–76).
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Finally, the Köprülüs had to accept the whole burden of empire, to keep in due subordination the provincial pashas, the tributary rulers along the frontiers, and neighbouring princes who threatened the frontiers. All these needed resolute and aggressive statesmanship. Under Fazil Ahmed, himself an administrator rather than a military commander by training, it became clear that intensive military activity presented the most reasonable answer to this threefold problem.

Warfare was expensive, but it justified heavy taxation from which the Sultan took his full share. It beat the big Moslem drum against the non-Moslem world, which helped to control the religious fervour inspiring ordinary public opinion at a time when tension between orthodoxies and heresies kept such fervour at a high pitch. War likewise drew off troublesome forces from the capital, both the Janissaries and the tradesmen who worked for them. More important, campaigning on a large scale justified enlarging the army to a maximum, and within this expanded force it was easier to contrive a balance of power which subdued the more refractory elements. Even among the standing troops the Köprülüs checked the Janissaries and the cavalry (these Spahis, recruited from the household pages, had been one of the most uncontrollable bodies of men in the 1650s) by careful attention to the separate cadres of gunners and armourers. All these units were counterweighted again by the fiefholders and their contingents summoned from the provinces, by other groups of paid soldiery, and by the increasingly large personal followings of provincial governors. By his emphatic and peremptory summons the Grand Vezir rallied the empire’s military resources. All together, if the giant Ottoman armament wasted the many areas through which the contingents passed on their way to the allotted theatre of war, it also maintained stability and discipline by an approximate internal balance of power. Of course, the manoeuvre roused grumbling. The more closely many
ortas,
or companies, of Janissaries became associated with the guilds and the artisan population of Istanbul, the more they aspired to be civilians with the privileges of soldiers, and the less they liked a summons to war which seemed partly designed to decimate them. The more the old fiefs (the so-called
timars
and
ziamets
) tended to become negotiable sources of revenue for courtiers and politicians, the less enthusiastically many fiefholders obeyed the same summons. Yet, for the
government, the policy justified itself, forcing the old military institutions to continue functioning, with some benefit to the empire.

Distant warfare strengthened the Grand Vezirs at court. Mehmed IV had now realised that his own interest required a strong chief Vezir to govern for him, but he could hardly help hearing the whispered hints of his household servants, or realising that the Köprülüs enjoyed a power which might be said to rival his. Intrigue always continued, and there was a danger that the Sultan would one day be tempted to depose the man who was nominally the Sultan’s ‘slave’. At court, also, the Vezir was overshadowed by the Sultan’s precedence. Almost paradoxically he became stronger
in absentia.
Whatever his enemies might suggest to discredit him, it was on balance dangerous to tamper with his appointment in the course of a military campaign. Then, if he concluded it successfully, it seemed senseless to try and depose him at a moment when victory enhanced his prestige. A little later was too late: campaigning had already recommenced, so that the cycle of events which left the Grand Vezir in power, and his enemies partially silenced, began again.

III

The assault on Vienna was therefore only one of a long series of campaigns, all caused in part by the special character of Ottoman court politics. But its timing and direction owed even more to the complex history of the Ottoman frontier lands in Europe. These stretched in a wide arc for 1,200 miles from the Adriatic to the Sea of Azov, combining military strongholds with an amazing variety of political checks and balances. They were the outworks in Dalmatia, Slavonia, Hungary, Transylvania, Moldavia, Podolia, the Ukraine and the Crimea, which protected the inner Balkan lands and the Black Sea. They confronted the enemy states of Venice, Austria and Poland, as well as the Cossacks and the Muscovites; they confined, and helped to control, the Christian populations under the Sultan’s rule. From one point of view Kara Mustafa inherited and exploited a remarkable system of defence, which the Ottoman government had built up in Europe after two centuries of experience. From another he mishandled and perverted it, thereby compelling the Poles and the Austrians to unite against him.

In Hungary direct occupation of the frontier had existed since 1541. The pashas of Bosnia and Kanisca faced a miscellaneous array of forces, garrisons, irregular bands and noblemen’s troops nominally subject to the government of Inner Austria at Graz, or to the Ban (the Viceroy) of Croatia. The pasha of Buda kept watch over the Habsburg citadels on or near the Danube below Pressburg, as well as over the mountainous territory north and north-east of Buda. The pasha of Timisoara meanwhile governed an inner part of this broad frontier zone, and with other commanders in the Tisza valley safeguarded the Ottoman interest in Transylvania, lying east of Hungary.
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The forces controlled by a man like the pasha of Buda were usually a match for the local Habsburg commanders, or for Magyar raiders along the middle Danube. Yet this was a remote frontier, close to one of the stronger Christian states. Larger armaments were needed from time to time. In such an emergency the standing troops of the Sultan, and the enormous reserves of manpower available in the empire, could be moved up from the Balkans and Asia to Belgrade and Buda. His permanent military strength distinguished the Sultan’s dominion from almost every Christian government until the mid-seventeenth century, and the campaigns in Transylvania and Hungary between 1659 and 1664 showed that it was still effective.

Moreover, the Turkish administration had now lasted so long in Hungary that the subject populations were acquiescent. Though oppressive, it avoided certain major errors which might have caused trouble. The Turks tended to keep to the towns, where they often pushed the Magyars into the suburbs. Inside the walls Moslemised Serbs and Bosnians, rather than the Turks themselves, replaced the native inhabitants and for their benefit mosques were built or, more commonly, old churches were converted into mosques. The secular testimonies of this Moslem dominance appeared at the same time, the baths and fountains and hostelries. Negotiations between Turkish officials and ordinary folk were made easier by a small class of Magyar scribes who had attended both at Christian and Moslem schools.
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Outside the towns, the conquerors never tried to ‘plant’ the countryside. There could be no immigration of the kind noticeable in Bulgaria out of Anatolia in this and earlier periods. In Hungary the Turks simply took over from the old, and became the new, absentee landholders. They funnelled taxes and revenues from a given piece of ground into their own feudal system for the upkeep of troops, into their tax-farming system, and into their system of charitable and private endowments of various kinds. The treasury at Istanbul tried hard to keep copies of the main local schedules which listed the proper allocation of Hungarian resources. In a few areas, curiously enough, families long resident in Habsburg Hungary were able to preserve fragmentarily some of their original sources of revenue in spite of the Turks; but this was part of the double-taxation and mutual raiding common along the fringes of Christian and Turkish dominion, the normal fate of boundary lands which were ‘contribution country’. Apart from this special type of exception, the class of substantial or hereditary Christian landowner had disappeared after the Turkish conquest, a fact which was one guarantee of the regime’s stability. Others were a population gradually declining (in all probability), and a feeble economy. It was stability of a dismal kind, but adequate for its predominantly military function north of the area already protected by great and uncontrollable rivers, the Danube, Drava and Tisza, flowing amid miles of marshland in the region where their courses converge.