Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (38 page)

All despotic rule is subject to some checks on power either through religious stricture or as a result of the rise of a necessary commercial or intellectual class. Under the Ottomans, however, the political power of the state was never separate from Islamic control. This general ubiquity of Muslim ideology had the effect of placing most commercial and intellectual life ostensibly under the auspices of the Koran. While Muslim scholars were able to create centers of religious teaching and exegesis revolving around the Koran, no real research in universities that might lead to military innovation, technological progress, or an economic renaissance was possible:

Ottoman scholarship was bounded by traditional Islamic concepts which saw religious learning as the only true science, whose sole aim was the understanding of God’s word. The Koran and the traditions of the Prophet formed the basis of this learning; reason was only an auxiliary in the service of religion. The method of the religious sciences was to seek proof for an argument first in the Koran, then in the traditions of the Prophet, then in recorded precedent, and only as a last resort in personal reasoning. (H. Inalcik,
The Ottoman Empire,
173)

Despite the efforts of recent revisionist scholars to deny the nineteenth-century view of a “stagnant” Ottoman economy, there is little doubt that Islam had a far more deleterious effect on free market activity than did Renaissance Christianity on European capitalism. First, there was never a real system of supply and demand or profit and loss, much less interest under the empire: “Islam categorically disapproves of the existence of interest in all economic transactions. The Quranic concept of
riba
is not limited to loan interest. Literally,
riba
means over and above a thing, be it in money terms or in physical units of good” (M. Choudhury,
Contributions to Islamic Economic Theory,
15).

True banking was nonexistent. European investors, in fact, founded the first Ottoman bank in 1856. Personal fortunes in coinage were more likely buried or sequestered than put on deposit or invested. Prices were regulated by government decree and fiercely watched by guilds. Private property was not protected by constitutional stricture, but subject to imperial confiscation. Taxes were arbitrarily set—high, and capricious in their enforcement. Landowners could never guess when and how frequently the tax collectors might arrive—or how much they would demand. The huge Ottoman bureaucracy and military devoured the budget and absorbed available capital. Literacy was low; not more than 10 percent of the population could read. There were no real secular universities to educate a financial or diplomatic class. Estates owned by mullahs were large and tax-exempt, and Islam itself was often able to curtail lending and borrowing as usurious and against the tenets of the Koran.

Consequently, when radical shifts in the world economy transpired, such as the wholesale importation of bullion from the New World and the opening of alternative trade routes to the East by western European galleons, the Ottomans found themselves relatively powerless to adjust. Any individual, smaller European state—a Venice, Spain, England, France, or the Netherlands—could produce a fleet the size of the sultan’s without the huge territory and manpower of the Ottoman Empire. In short, a disastrous but logical sequence of events overtook the Ottomans right around the time of Lepanto, once the empire reached its maximum point of easy growth:

With military expansion brought to a halt, the state came under severe stress. Revenues sank and the army and navy could not be properly maintained, which in turn reduced the military options. The system turned to prey on itself with a quite indecent haste. Taxes were raised so high as to depopulate. The road to personal wealth for officials and military officers was quickly perceived as the purchase and exploitation of public posts. The rot began to set in as early as the mid-sixteenth century when Süleyman permitted the sale of offices and the accumulation of private fortunes by Turkish élite within the imperial bureaucracy, the members of the so-called Ruling Institution. (E. Jones,
The European Miracle,
186)

The
Meaning
of
Lepanto

Scholars tend to see Lepanto as a tactical victory that led to strategic stalemate. After the crushing defeat of the Turkish fleet—for nearly a year there were few Ottoman warships on the Mediterranean—the Holy League failed to press home its advantage. Cyprus was not retaken, Greece not freed. In but two years Venice, struggling under lost revenues due to the cutoff of its Asian trade, had made peace with the sultan. The Ottoman advance in the next two centuries would overwhelm Crete, sweep into Hungary, and end at the gates of Vienna. Within a year the sultan’s shipyards, copied from the Arsenal at Venice and manned by European engineers, built an entirely new fleet, albeit one of questionable quality.

Lepanto, like Poitiers, was nevertheless a watershed event in the history of East-West relations. The western Mediterranean was to be secure, and the galleys of Islam would rarely venture across the Adriatic—in the same manner that the Muslims in Spain after Poitiers would offer no more threat to northern Europe. Once the Ottomans were stopped at Lepanto, the continued long-term autonomy of the western Mediterranean would never again be in doubt. Lepanto ensured that the growing Atlantic trade with the Americas would continue, as Europeans not only became enriched by New World treasure but found the Ottoman Empire increasingly irrelevant to their growing commercial interests in the Orient via routes around the Horn of Africa. In 1580 Emir Mehmet ibn-Emir es-Su‘udi wrote, “The Europeans have discovered the secret of oceanic travel. They are Lords of the new world and of the gates to India. . . . The people of Islam are without the latest information in the science of geography and do not understand the menace of the capture of the sea trade by the Europeans” (W. Allen, Problems of Turkish Power in the
Sixteenth Century,
30).

Lepanto had also demonstrated that Europe need not be entirely united to beat the Turks: an ad hoc coalition of just a few southern Mediterranean states was enough to check a cumbersome Ottoman state based on theocracy and despotism. The East-West imbalance would only grow worse, as population and economic activity increased at far greater rates under European free markets, Protestantism, and global trade. In contrast, the military culture of the Ottomans, originating in the steppes of eastern Asia Minor and having reached the limits of its easiest extension, found itself for the first time up against states more formidable than the enervated Byzantines and other isolated kingdoms in the Balkans— nations whose continual improvements in gunpowder weapons, advanced fortifications, superior ships, and sophisticated military tactics could easily outweigh the martial prowess of individual Turkish warriors.

There is also an irony in the galley fighting on the Mediterranean between cross and crescent, inasmuch as the North Atlantic states of England, France, and Holland by 1571 possessed better and more numerous ships than the archaic galleys that collided at Lepanto. Even as the Ottomans and the southern European states fought for what they thought was world military supremacy, the oceangoing navies to the north cemented their hold on New World and Asiatic colonies and trading routes, proving that the real strategic prizes were no longer to be found in the Mediterranean. In the new era of guns and sails it made no sense to put between two hundred and four hundred men on an oared vessel that could easily be blown apart at a distance by a man-of-war that had half a galley’s crew. By 1571 the Spanish were the most sophisticated sailors on the Mediterranean, and yet in less than twenty years the galleons and cannon of its armada would prove in all ways inferior to a British fleet that had uniformly superior guns, crews, officers, and sails.

Finally, Don Juan had proved at Lepanto that the southern Europeans no longer need fear the dreaded Turks, whose century-long advance through the Balkans had so terrified Christendom. With the reconquest of Spain (1492) and the victory at Lepanto, the future of military dynamism was no longer with horsemen, nomads, or corsairs, but returned to the old paradigm of classical antiquity: superior technology, capital-creating economies, and civic militias. The Ottomans had fashioned a brilliant military empire based on the courage of nomadic warriors, the purchase of European firearms and military expertise, and the great schisms in Christendom between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. At last, however, there was to be a reckoning once the easy source of Ottoman capital dried up with the collapse of Byzantium and the European opening of maritime commerce with Asia. The sultans would find imported technology increasingly expensive to buy or emulate, and they would learn in the process that European military science was not static, but evolving even as it was sold abroad. “All the world learned,” wrote Cervantes of Lepanto in
Don Quixote,
“how mistaken it had been in believing the Turks were invincible.”

CAPITALISM, THE OTTOMAN ECONOMY, AND ISLAM

Why was the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto the product of booty, raiding, tariffs on trade with the West, and tribute, while the ships of Venice and the Papal States were more the dividends of the capital found in banking, industry, colonization, and exploration? Why as a rule did the Ottomans and other Islamic states trade raw materials for manufactured goods with the Europeans? Why were there renegade European fabricators, munitions and ship designers, and mercenary commanders in Istanbul, but relatively few Turkish counterparts employed in the West? Why did Europe not learn of the mass fabrication of cannon and galleys from the Ottomans? And why were not the novel galleasses in the Turkish rather than the Christian fleet?

True market economies never fully developed in the Muslim world because they were in jeopardy without freedom and antithetical to the Koran, which made no distinction between political, cultural, economic, and religious life, and therefore discouraged unfettered economic rationalism. Scholarly controversy still rages about the nebulous relationship between Islam and free markets, as historians and economists for centuries have attempted to explain why Europe in the past was able to project its power into the heart of the Islamic world, and why today the economies of Islamic states are so much smaller than their Western counterparts—why, for instance, the gross national product of a tiny Israel exceeds the aggregate economic output of all Islamic nations along the northern coast of Africa.

The debate makes strange bedfellows. Progressive Western scholars have tried their best to suggest that Arab economies are merely “different” from, rather than less efficient than, their Western counterparts, since European and American observers do not factor into the equation the salutary benefits of Islamic culture—reduced crime, stronger families, less gratuitous consumerism, and more charitable giving. They add that for centuries Muslim states found ingenious ways to circumvent formal religious strictures against compound interest—forgetting that such stealth and cumbersome procedures in themselves harmed easy capital creation. Oddly, Islamic economists have sometimes taken a much different—and more honest—approach in acknowledging the moral impediments to capital formation inherent in Islamic religion. Many take pride that in Muslim countries today there are religious and ethical checks to materialism and sheer economic rationalism.

If the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto was less advanced than its European counterpart, and if a single European state had the ability to construct and finance a near equal number of ships as the sultan’s empire, so today the entire Islamic world of well over 1 billion people—albeit hardly monolithic—finds itself at a clear military disadvantage against individual Western militaries, despite the enormous wealth created by oil production and exportation. Just as Venice might match the Ottomans in galleys, so now a France, England, or America singly possesses air forces, ships, and nuclear weapons beyond the aggregate strength of the entire Islamic world. Twenty-four hundred years after Cyrus the Younger hired the Ten Thousand to win his kingdom, and five hundred years after the Ottoman emulation of the Arsenal at Venice, Saddam Hussein was buying all his arms from Western merchants with the profits from oil revenue, an industry created and maintained by hired Western technological expertise.

Free capital is the key to war making on any large scale, what Cicero called “the sinews of war,” without which an army cannot muster, be fed, or fight. Capital is the wellspring of technological innovation, which is inextricably tied to freedom, often the expression of individualism, and thus critical to military success throughout the ages. That capitalism was born in the West, expanded through Europe, survived the alternate Western-inspired paradigms of socialism and communism, and found itself inextricably tied with personal freedom and democracy in its latest global manifestation explains in no small part Western military dominance from the age of Salamis to the Gulf War. There is past and present a vast difference between Western and Islamic approaches to capitalist economies:

Whereas democratic capitalism is a development of human experience, the basis of the economic doctrine of Islam is divinely inspired. Therefore, the economic life of a Muslim is not entirely a materialistic or this-worldly vocation. Its stimulus is derived both from the individual’s drive to gain wealth and from his wish to be an obedient servant of God. Thus intent counts, and the type of economic activity a Muslim engages in must be legitimate (M. Abdul-Rauf,
A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism,
60).

The purpose of capitalism, even sixteenth-century Mediterranean capitalism, was not social justice or “intent” or the desire to be “legitimate,” but, as it has always been, the acknowledgment of the eternal greed of man—critical in crafting a system that recognizes natural self-interest. What made seventeenth-century Cypriots and Greeks despise the Turks was not merely ethnic and religious hatred but the gradual destruction of their own economic and material life under Ottoman rule. As absentee landowners Venetians in the eastern Mediterranean had been every bit as merciless to their Greek-speaking sharecroppers and peasants as their later Ottoman successors—the rich palaces still seen today in Venice are proof enough of their eastern Mediterranean extortion—but their knowledge of export trade, their ability to sell agricultural produce at the highest prices in Mediterranean ports, and their propensity to set up some industries all resulted in a trickle-down prosperity.

For oppressed peasants to be better off in the long run under Ottoman rule, taxes would have to be markedly lower than under the Europeans, since the latter created far more capital, some of which eventually enhanced the population at large. The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgment that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.

For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently, the imports were always welcomed and encouraged, and exports discouraged. (H. Inalcik, in K. Karpat, ed., The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History, 57)

Capitalism is not merely commerce, but brings with it a sophisticated infrastructure of insurance, corporations, bookkeeping, dividends, interest, freely accessed information, and official government protection of property and profit. Without free prices and free markets that best judge what people need and want, efficient production is impossible, since the appetites and requirements of millions are not immediately known, but only poorly guessed at and then often ignored by a coercive central state.

Lepanto bought time for a beleaguered Mediterranean West to replace its lost power of classical political unity with the much stronger force of a transoceanic market. If the Middle Ages (A.D. 500–1500) had seen a holding action in Europe, as small squabbling monarchies kept out a series of Arabs, Vikings, Mongols, and Ottomans from central Europe and conducted the Crusades and
Reconquista,
so the new nation-states of the West would move to the offensive against not merely the Islamic world but indigenous peoples in Africa, Australia, and the New World as well. It was not that there was not innate, even superior genius at Istanbul: the Turkish lighthouse on the Bosphorus with its leaded-glass windows and lanterns fueled by wicks floating in oil was far superior to European models. There were a number of brilliant Ottoman mathematicians, medical writers, and engineers. But all such thinkers usually worked in isolation from contemporary research in Europe. None enjoyed broad domestic institutionalized support—ever wary about possible counterreaction from Islamic fundamentalists.

Absent was a holistic system that might translate individual brilliance into mass-produced items that would benefit and enrich the population without regard to state, religious, or cultural interests. The result was that while the sultan could hire a Venetian ship designer and set up dockyards patterned after the Arsenal of Venice, there was no indigenous theory or practice to advance Ottoman ship construction or to ensure continual nautical innovation apart from Western emulation. To do so would require competitive bidding, unrestricted profits, a monetized economy integrated with the Mediterranean, and a publishing, banking, and university presence in Asia Minor. Anything less meant that the sultan had to employ his enormous capital from conquest, taxation, and raiding to buy what he could not fabricate himself—a strategy that guaranteed his soldiers would never have as many or quite as effective weapons as their Western enemies. Thousands would die at Lepanto for those very reasons.