The decline of the Ottoman empire
this seems a rather reductive way of approaching three hundred years’ worth of problems. Certainly, the reign that followed that of Suleiman was ultimately a bad eight years for the Ottomans. Selim II failed to inherit his father’s magnificence and became known as ‘the drunkard,’ provoking the creation of the Holy League with his capture of Cyprus and then losing close to the entire Ottoman fleet, expensively built up by his father, at the disastrous Battle of Lepanto. However, Selimwas the eleventh Sultan, and the 25 that followed were by no means all terrible. Murad IV was an ‘impeccable Sultan’ 20 who finally brought peace to the eastern front. Furthermore, many of the reformist Sultans of the 1800s, notablyMahmud II who brought in the Tanzimat reforms that attempted to liberalize the nation, were sound leaders with a firm grip on the state of their nation. For these Sultans, the problemdid not lie within themselves, but in the systems of government that had been laid in place centuries earlier, preventing genuine reform from taking place. 21 The faults in the mechanisms of the Ottoman state had been masked by successes on the battlefield, but quickly became apparent once victory in war could not offer such a distraction. The example of the Janissaries illustrates this perfectly: while serving the empire brilliantly in the first few centuries of its existence, playing a major role in taking Constantinople and defeating the Mamluks, they became a thorn in the side of every late 18 th and early 19 th century Sultan, none of whom could ignore their looming, conservative power until their successful abolition in 1826. The first standing army in Europe, the corps had developed froman elite group of s lave soldiers who played a huge part in the Empire’s early success, to a bloated, politically active group of free men desperate to retain their privileged place in society having become a hereditary order that were given land and offices as rewards. They revolted multiple times in the centuries after killing Sultan Osman II in 1622. 22 When the reformist Sultan Selim III attempted to abolish the corps in 1807, they revolted and assassinated him, replacing him with his conservative minded cousin, Mustafa IV. There were also problems with the system of succession. The system laid out in the fourteenth century was ‘open succession’ where the Sultan could not choose his heir, and could only go so far in picking a preferred candidate by appointing them to a governorship closer to the capital and hope that they reached Istanbul first upon hearing of his death. This almost inevitably invited civil war, and so in the eighteenth century was replaced by Agnatic Seniority, whereby the eldest man in the family would succeed. This resulted in very elderly Sultans coming to the throne, as well as these Sultans having had very little experience of the outside world, as, later on in the existence of the Empire, the systematic killing of all the Sultan’s brothers upon accession was replaced with forced confinement within the ‘Golden Cage,’ or Kafes - a windowless room that one could only leave having acceded to the throne. The drop in average reign from 26 years to just 12 after Suleiman, and the ten Sultans deposed or executed, are proof of the outdated mechanisms of Ottoman succession preventing Sultans from establishing an effective rule. Once again, the Janissaries, as well as other powerful ministers, abused these deficiencies, on more than one occasion freeing easily manipulated, mentally unwell heirs in order to replace unwanted Sultans. In 1618, for example, Osman II, who dreamed of destroying ‘the Drones that eat up his estate’, attempted to wrest control of the Empire, but was taken into custody by the janissaries, who t hen ‘drew his starving, raving uncle out of a dungeon by a rope and made him Sultan’. The newGrand Vizier put Osman to death ‘’by the compression of his testicles’’, as Eyliya Celebi
20 Treasure 2003. 21 Lewis 2005. 22 Finkel 2006.
142
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs