After Tamerlane (22 page)

Failure on the battlefield and in the conference chamber can be seen as the symptom of less visible failings in the political and economic life of the defeated state. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ottoman political ‘decline' after 1600 has been subjected to a keen historical scrutiny. Weaknesses of leadership, policy and institutions have been freely attributed to a variety of causes: the unhealthy seclusion of the sultans and their heirs in the harem and the growth of a secretive and intrigue-ridden court politics; the abandonment of the
devshirme
, which had staffed the sultans' government and armies with loyal slave dependants immune to local influence; the takeover of both the janissary corps and the bureaucracy by Muslim notables hostile to the sultans' authority and much more concerned with the profits of patronage; and the growing decentralization of revenue collection and provincial government that conceded more and more control to local notables (
ayan
) and tax-farmers. As central authority decayed, so runs the argument, local disorder and insecurity increased:
deys
(provincial viceroys), Mamluks and rebellious
derebeys
(‘lords of the valleys') built up their armed retinues and battled for the spoils of provincial power.

Political incoherence was compounded (to continue this theme) by a deepening sense of economic languor. While the transit trade remained important to Ottoman cities on or near the Mediterranean, seaborne trade passed almost completely into the hands of European merchants. Increasingly the Ottoman economy became geared to producing raw materials and commodities for the European market, especially cotton. The trend towards relying upon European manufactures (like textiles) grew stronger and stronger. Craft industries declined. To make matters worse, the Ottoman government conceded trading privileges to European merchants which exempted them from taxes and tariffs and were widely abused. Instead of pursuing a ‘mercantilist' policy of protecting their own producers and merchants, the Ottomans seemed, perversely, to favour foreign interests.
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The result was to expose the empire to deeper and deeper economic penetration by European merchants, to erode craft industries and the urban communities they supported, and to Balkanize the empire as an economic unit.

Predictably, these classic symptoms of ‘peripheralization' have been seen as part of a pervasive cultural malaise. Intellectual failure closed the vicious circle of political failure and economic decline. Gripped by an intense scriptural conservatism, accentuated by the growing political dominance of the Muslim educated class, intellectual life showed little interest in empirical inquiry or the systematic adaptation of foreign ideas. The level of curiosity about Europe remained modest – a relic, it has been argued, of the low cultural esteem in which Europe had been held in the Ottoman age of expansion and of the linguistic difficulty that Europe's polyglot culture imposed on Ottoman scholars.
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Official ignorance of European geography was dire: as late as the 1770s, the Ottoman government imagined that the Russian fleet had reached the Mediterranean via a waterway in Central Europe.
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Without the means or the will to adapt education to a new syllabus, empirical in spirit and technological in bias, the Islamic culture of the Ottomans had become a regressive backwater of illusions.

All this amounts to a formidable indictment of Ottoman failure. But it rests upon two dubious assumptions. The first is the contrast implied between the ‘backwardness' of Ottoman life and the order and progress of Europe's. But Europe was not a uniform landscape of smiling fields and bustling towns. In the east and south it was a region of serfdom, periodic famine and the savage repression of rural discontent. Travel in the interior of Spain, southern Italy or the Scottish Highlands was always difficult and was often dangerous. Rural banditry was rife, especially in regions affected by the wars of the
seventeenth century. Even in Western Europe, a provincial economy within a hundred miles of Paris was a precarious balance between subsistence and dearth, with its agricultural technique hardly changed at all since medieval times.
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The religious intolerance of French and English governments (to take two Western European examples) contrasted strikingly with Ottoman attitudes. Secondly, as Ottoman historians have pointed out recently, much of the argument of Ottoman decline assumes that in its age of expansion the empire had enjoyed a regime of centralized efficiency ruined by the misgovernment of later years.
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Even when judged by the acid test of war, it is far from clear that by 1740 the Ottoman Empire could be written off as a case of terminal decline. The Ottomans had lost Hungary and Transylvania. But at the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739 they recovered what they had lost at Passarowitz in 1718, including Belgrade itself. Ottoman armies showed remarkable powers of recuperation, as Montecuccoli – the wisest of Habsburg generals – had warned. In 1711 they inflicted a stunning humiliation on the Russian armies led by Peter the Great in the Pruth campaign on the (modern) Romanian border. Facing a well-supplied Ottoman force, with much more artillery and a huge cavalry corps, the Russian invaders (inferior in number and badly in need of fodder and food) lost their nerve completely. They surrendered Azov, and Peter abruptly withdrew from the war.
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The sultan's government in Constantinople (often called the ‘Porte', after the great gate where the ministers had their offices) continued to preside over a vast tri-continental empire whose European ‘front' was only one of its geostrategic burdens. But the largely successful defence of its territorial integrity suggests that Ottoman society was more flexible, resilient and cohesive than ‘declinist' histories would have us believe.

That resilience rested in part upon a strong geopolitical position, much of which lasted into the 1760s. With the loss of Hungary and Transylvania, the Ottomans fell back upon the physical barrier of the Carpathian Mountains. Recovering Belgrade (in 1739) restored their control over the strategic funnel between Habsburg Europe and the Ottoman Balkans. Because they controlled the Black Sea as a maritime highway, the Ottomans and their clients, the Crimean Girays, could frustrate the Russian advance towards the Black Sea – despite the
tsars' furious efforts to capture Perekop and Azov. The logistical nightmare of supplying an army marching across the Ukranian steppe meant that the Black Sea remained a
mare Ottomanicum
– an invaluable asset. Taken together, the fortress at Belgrade, the Carpathian wall and the interior lines that the Black Sea provided secured the Ottoman
limes
against the West. It was further entrenched by strong cultural defences. Apart from the Muslim communities to be found in the Balkans, the Ottomans could also rely on the loyalty of Greek Orthodox churchmen, who had little to gain from the triumph of Catholic Austria. On the most remote and vulnerable maritime frontier of the empire, in North Africa, fear and loathing of Catholic Spain, and economic dependence on piracy, shored up the loyalty of the Maghrib provinces to the distant capital.
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It was geostrategic security that really permitted the decentralization of government after 1600. The larger role played by urban notables in provincial rule and in revenue collection (as official tax-farmers) now appears less like the empire's collapse into widespread kleptocracy than as the timely recognition of newer provincial elites whose cooperation was needed to maintain social order and collect the taxes.
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In the Arab provinces and Egypt, a similar pattern of devolution conveyed much local power to hereditary janissary garrisons and to the Mamluks in Cairo.
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Greek ‘Phanariots', drawn from the wealthy Christian elite of Constantinople, governed the Romanian territories. In the Maghrib, local dynasties with wide autonomy established themselves in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. But until after 1750 there was little evidence that the imperial centre at Constantinople had lost control over these local interests, whose authority and legitimacy still depended upon their loyalty to the Ottoman system. The prime task of the Ottoman government was to maintain the prestige of the
daulat
(the sultan's authority) by resisting foreign intervention and avoiding military defeat.

Nor was the economic scene one of unrelieved gloom. Craft industries decayed under European competition, but Constantinople, Izmir and Cairo remained great commercial cities – in Cairo's case as a result of the huge new trade in coffee from Yemen.
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The production of commodities like cotton, wool and tobacco brought a new prosperity to some regions at least, reflected in a great burst of new
building.
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The internal trade that supplied most consumer demand remained in local hands.
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It was clear by 1740 that the Ottoman Empire could not match the most prosperous parts of Europe in artisan production or agrarian improvement. It also lacked the means to transform itself into a nation state or a national economy along the classic lines of European mercantilism. Nevertheless, by accident or design, Ottoman governments had devised a surprisingly successful formula for imperial survival in the more difficult conditions that they faced from the mid seventeenth century. After 1739, their strategic defences against the West looked more secure than they had for several decades. They had learned to play the European diplomatic game, exploiting French antipathy towards the Habsburgs to help regain Belgrade. The reform policies of the ‘Tulip Period' may have ended in acrimony, but Ottoman rulers could still buy the military expertise and technology that they needed ‘off the shelf' in Europe, without risking the cultural and social upheaval that a more ambitious programme of change might bring. Nor were the commercial privileges that they granted foreign merchants under the ‘Capitulations' system a purely one-way bargain. They encouraged foreign trade while segregating foreign merchants and reducing the West's gravitational pull upon Muslim society. With their sovereignty unimpaired, with their unchallenged status as guardians of the holy places (in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem), and as the overlord of Cairo, the cultural and intellectual capital of Islam, the Ottomans had been able to keep the delicate balance between the different elements of their extraordinary system: a multi-ethnic empire perched on the flank of Europe, and the political embodiment of orthodox Islam in its Near Eastern heartlands.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the wealthiest and most dynamic part of the Islamic realm lay under Mughal rule. The core of the Mughals' empire was the ‘fertile crescent' of North India: the Indo-Gangetic plains that stretched from the far north-west to Bengal and the Ganges delta. Its strategic centre was the Delhi ‘triangle', which commanded the passage between the two great river systems and the 100-mile-wide ‘corridor' between the Himalayan foothills and the uplands of the Deccan. It was to Delhi, and the purpose-built palace-city of Shahjahanabad, that the Mughals moved their capital
from Agra in 1648,
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a feat that reflected the colossal wealth on which the rulers of this plains empire could draw. By the 1650s this new imperial metropolis, with its countless aristocratic households clustered round the imperial court, was as large as Paris.

The rise of Mughal power had been a key factor in early modern world history. Mughal rule had unified and pacified northern India. It promoted India's overland trade into Central Asia and beyond. The Mughal conquest of Bengal had quickened the agrarian colonization of its jungle and marsh
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and its trade in textiles up the Ganges to the inland plains of Hindustan.
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Trade with ‘Mogor', as the Portuguese called the sphere of Mughal rule, drew European merchants to the great port city of Surat in western India, from where the trade routes led north and east to Delhi and Agra. The skill with which Akbar had fused Muslim warrior nobles from Central Asia, Muslim scribes and clerks from Iran (still the cultural magnet of the Islamic world), Hindu Rajput warlords and Brahmin literati into a stable political system favoured the empire's economic expansion. As local ‘dynasties' of landholders consolidated their control, and tapped agricultural wealth, they increased the consumption of manufactures and luxury goods and encouraged the building of towns and
ganjs
or markets. With its large population (the Indian subcontinent was at least as populous as contemporary Europe), rich farmlands and accessible raw materials, India became the world's greatest centre of textile production, exporting cotton cloth to the Middle
East and West Africa as well as to Europe. The range and quality of Indian cottons and their relative cheapness (by one contemporary estimate, Indian labour costs were one-seventh of Europe's)
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conferred an enormous advantage in European markets. By the later 1600s the English East India Company had long since given up its old obsession with buying eastern spices to concentrate on the import and resale of Indian textiles
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– increasingly from Bengal, which was becoming the main centre of its operations and the most dynamic of Indian regions.

In these ways, Indian merchants and artisans played a large role in the growth of international trade that was an important feature of the early modern centuries. Though detailed records are lacking – except for those kept by the Portuguese, Dutch and English companies – it seems likely that the bulk of India's maritime trade with the Middle East – its most important market – was in the hands of Indian merchants and shipowners.
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Without the dynamic response of Indian producers, the thickening strands of seaborne trade along which Europeans moved so profitably would have remained tenuous and fragile.
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Politically and culturally, the result of this vigorous participation in the expanding networks of international trade was the subcontinent's receptiveness to foreign influence. This was true of the coastal regions of South India where Mughal authority was only partial or never fully asserted. But it was also the case in North India, where Mughal power was concentrated. In the seventeenth century, Europeans could be found in all the large cities of the empire as merchants, physicians and artisans.
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European artillerymen served in Mughal armies. Jesuit missionaries were licensed to preach and convert – though their efforts seem to have been chiefly directed towards the wandering Europeans
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and their few converts were drawn from the poor or outcaste. Mughal taste, especially in literature, still prized Persian models above all else. But the religious imagery and portraiture introduced by the Jesuits had a striking influence upon Mughal art.
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