The decline of the Ottoman empire
records. The years 1623-56 have been called the Sultanate of the Agas, the janissary commanders, indicating how all pervasive their power was. Thereafter, for another half century, a dynasty of Grand Viziers, the Koprulu clan, effectively ruled the Empire, bringing it first to the gates of Vienna in 1683, and then watching helplessly as Ottoman power was shattered in Hungary and Transylvania, as confirmed in the treaty of Karlowitz (1699). 23 The Empire’s financial and military systems were becoming quickly outdated by the seventeenth century, and this became very apparent during the war that followed the second Siege of Vienna in 1683. Finkel describes the war between the Empire and a second manifestation of the Holy League as an ‘unravelling of the empire.’ 24 The monetary problems caused by a war on three fronts and the major cor ruption within the chain of command, with huge amounts of tax money often ‘disappearing‘ 25 resulted in a disastrous war that sawmuch of Hungary and Romania lost. This period saw innumerable court intrigues and executions of ministers; these could merely be the result of panic at a losing war, but they also suggest that the appointments to posts made by the Sultan were poor, and as was the case, done not at all meritocratically. Bad leadership in this particular case was a factor, with SultanMehmed IV havin g to call upon Fazil Mustafa Pasha as his ‘word held more weight with the military than the Sultan’s.’ 26 Not only does this speak poorly of Mehmed’s leadership in particular, but also makes clear the gulf that had developed between the state and the army. The distrust between soldier and politician culminated in a Caesar-like approach on Istanbul by the 6th army based in Hungary that Mehmed was hard pressed to prevent becoming a coup. This was in large part due to unpaid wages but was as much due to the simple fact that the troops were losing. The territorially damaging peaces of Karlowitz and Passorowitz in 1699 and 1718 respectively bore testament to this military failure. Had the Empire avoided financial ruin it would likely have survived much longer, or at least remained powerful right up until the Great War, but an empire without money will not survive for long. Ottoman finances, as well as those of the empires that previously existed in the region (Seleucids, Parthians, Safavids, Byzantines, Roman) had relied upon taxing the major trade routes that ran from the far east and the subcontinent through the middle east and into Europe. Many western sources speak of the Ottoman s ‘blocking’ these routes in order to exact huge taxes on goods passing through. During the early years of the Empire these trade routes remained lucrative, but, 1498 saw the discovery of something potentially disastrous for the Ottomans. Vasco de Gama’s C ape Voyage offered an alternative route to India and the far east that avoided slow and costly land travel and, while initially this route was not viable for large-scale trade, by the seventeenth century it thinned the traffic travelling through Ottoman lands, and this problem was only to increase. This is a major reason that the road networks in the Empire were significantly better in the sixteenth century than the eighteenth. Whereas the European nations had previously been forced to communicate with the Ottomans in order to ensure a steady flow of eastern commodities, they no longer needed to and this is a large reason as to why the Ottomans fell behind their competitors technologically, where they had previously been scientific pioneers. Moreover, symptomatic of the new trade route was a major drop in direct trade between the Ottomans and Europe, and it was this that encouraged the sixteenth and seventeenth
23 Goodwin 1999. 24 Finkel 2006.
25 Ibid. 26 Ibid.
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