Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel

    I wanted to read a book about the history of the Ottoman Empire after going to Istanbul and realizing how little I knew about it. Having now visited Topkapi Palace and seen the Bosporus, I was excited to read this book. The book was really good, although it gets hard to read a history this long when things get sort of repetitive over 600 years. There's this plot and that scheme, one vizier after another, and things just sort of blend together politically. But the economic and social parts, although few, were very interesting. I would have also appreciated more discussion of the fall of the empire. I think generally I just wanted more analysis but at least the book was a good survey and primer on the facts of the empire.

    One thing that stuck out to me from the earlier portions of the book was how anti-climactic the fall of Constantinople was. The Ottomans had already vassalized Byzantium by 1391, and besieged from 1394 until before being forced to turn east to face Timur's invasion from Iran (and then being delayed decades by the capture of Bayezid and ensuing civil wars). Moreover, the Byzantine emperors were constantly going back and forth to the west to beg for help, sometimes getting it and sometimes not so much. So it wasn't just that they were abandoned in 1453, it's that the European Christians must have gotten tired of dealing with it. For example, the money collected by Emperor Manuel in England in 1400-03 all disappeared and was still being investigated a quarter-century later.

    During that time in the first half of the 15th century, Constantinople was a thorn in the Ottoman rear, since the Ottomans otherwise controlled both sides of the Bosporus. But in the middle, Constantinople played different Ottoman princes against each other, using them to delay the inevitable. The worst struggle came after 1402, when Bayezid I was defeated by Timur at Ankara. The resulting strife inspired Mehmed II (born just after the civil wars ended) to sanction fratricide as a means of smoothing succession. But with control of everything around Constantinople, it would be hard for the Ottomans not to conquer it, and Mehmed was in the right place at the right time.

    Technically, the Eastern and Western Churches mended the schism in 1439, but no one really paid attention. The problem was that Patriarchs of the church didn't really care about the political situation as long as they could maintain their political primacy, so just like the Patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, the Patriarch of Constantinople rejected the union. Of course, since the conquest was likely inevitable by this point, he may have saved his religion by maintaining its practice under Ottoman rule through submission. When Mehmed II finally took Constantinople, it was the thirteenth Muslim attempt to take the city since 650, and was aided by the construction of the fortress of Bogazkesen, the "Cutter of the Strait."

    In power, Mehmed II cultivated an aura of mystery, preferring to attend council meetings from behind a screen, watching from above. He built Topkapi Palace to seclude him beyond several courtyards, and developed strict court protocol and hierarchy. He rarely appeared publicly, and was even hidden behind a curtain when he met officials four times a week. For a century following Mehmed II, sultans appeared before the court only on two religious holidays per year. Mehmed was also responsible for significant adjustments to the makeup of the ruling class. Of his seven grand vezirs, only one was a Turkish-born Muslim, but two were Christian-born converts raised by the youth-levy, two were Christian-born scions of the Byzanto-Serbian nobility, and the last was also Christian-born bust of unknown origin. The administration and army of the Ottoman Empire was largely made up of men who were pressed into service as boys. This youth levy was imposed on Christian subjects, although Istanbul and Bursa were exempted. The levy began in the Balkans, and extended to Anatolia in the end of the 15th century. Albanian, Bosnian, Greek, Bulgar, Serbian, and Croatian boys were preferred; Turkish, Kurdish, Persian, Ruthenian, Muscovite, Jewish, and Georgian boys were exempted. Armenians were used only in the palace, not in the army. The term "Osmanli" or "Ottoman," which was originally used to refer only to Osman's house, came to refer to the entire ruling class of the sultan's servants. Peasants and provincials were known as the "re'aya," or the flock. The highest officers of government were usually tied to the ruling dynasty by marriage.

    I also found Ottoman foreign relations very interesting, especially with Europe. Despite religious differences, the Ottomans found common cause with European powers, especially the French, who opposed the Austrian Hapsburgs who were also enemies of the Ottomans. They even allied once against the Pope. When the Sultan Bayezid II's brother Cem, was abroad, Bayezid paid European monarchs substantial sums to guarantee his confinement. I thought it was interesting that Cem, who challenged his brother for power, wrote him poems, and Bayezid replied in poems. And this didn't seem to be unusual. Cem wrote:

          A-smile on bed of roses dost thou lie in all delight,
          In dolour's stove-room mid the ashes couch I - why is this?

And Bayezid replied:

          To me was the empire on the
          Fore-eternal day decreed,
          Yet thou to Destiny wilt yield thee not - why, why is this?
          'A pilgrim to the Holy Shrines am I' thou dost declare,
          And yet thou dost for earthly Sultan-ship sigh - why is this?  

    Bayezid's son, Selim conquered Egypt, and Bayeid's grandson, Suleiman the Magnificent, brought the Ottoman empire to its apogee. Suleiman added the holy sites of Arabia, Cyprus, Crete, Hungary, and Iraq. See below:

Suleiman's reign was the longest of any Ottoman emperor (46 years) and the most successful. But the most interesting thing to me was Suleiman's relationship with Hurrem Sultan, a freed slave who became not only his wife but his favorite wife and trusted confidant. She bore him six children at a time when legal wives had to be high born and concubines could only bear one son before they were forced to use unknown forms of birth control.

    The Ottoman economy was open to the outside, and dealt with inflation in the 17th century brought on by not only its own debasements of the coinage but the discovery of massive silver deposits in the Americas. It was hard for the Ottomans to deal with economic downturns because they reduced tax revenues while the empire did not engage in borrowing through foreign loans until the 19th century. These economic problems were compounded by the fact that as the treasury shrank, it became very difficult to make the traditional donation to the janissaries on the accession of a new Sultan. The requirement to pay off the troops led to other things being neglected, and many times Sultans could not even afford the donation, sparking revolt.

    After the death of Suleiman, the empire went through a time of long troubles. There's sort of a long historical double dip I notice in the later part of the 16th century and then the entire 18th century, leading into irreversible decline. I think there was a geographic element- which was that the empire couldn't keep expanding forever, and then a political element- that the Ottomans claimed to be a universal empire, but the favor of God had clearly left them since they stopped expanding. A lot of legitimacy came from expanding, so once that stopped, it was very hard to keep popular support. And it was hard to keep expanding because the empire was literally based on a tiny isthmus and only had more land to cover as it spread into Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was at this time in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that the Sultan himself started to decline as a figure. Before, Sultans were overthrown by other dynasty members, but by the 17th century, the Sultans had withdrawn so much from public life that they were almost powerless, and overthrown by those with real power, the courtiers. It sort of ends up similar to Japan where the Sultan ends up a figurehead. And the whole thing about the chief black eunuch and chief white eunuch is just wild to me. It must have felt so natural at the time to have the government run by an ex-slave with no penis, but it just seems off today. During this time of weak Sultans, the principle of seniority was eventually established, as the janissary revolts that overthrew Sultans planted the next younger brother in line each time. The new system was that the Sultan was still the ultimate decisionmaker and legitimate user of power, but there was no more deference from the court towards the Sultan, and often his mother, the grand vizier, the eunuchs, janissaries, or other functionaries were more powerful. 

    But at least there was peace in the east. In 1639, the treaty of Zuhab made peace with the Iranian Safavids, ending a struggle that had gone on since 1514. The peace would last until the end of the Safavid dynasty at the hands of Nadir Shah in the 1720s. Equilibrium was restored by giving Yerevan to Iran while the Ottomans kept Iraq and Baghdad, reestablishing a stable system lost after the 1555 Amasya treaty. Finkel calls this one of Murad IV's greatest accomplishments. I find her historical analysis really intriguing. She's doing some very long-term thinking and it makes me think of Kissinger's book Diplomacy. With the gift of hindsight, we can look back on treaties that cause centuries of violence or end it, usually by restoring some geographical equilibrium. Anyway, I just thought that was interesting.

    

    Despite the decline that began at the later part of the 16th century, the Ottomans spent the 17th century as a major power feared by all who surrounded it. But it fell hard at the end of the 17th century.  In a war against the Holy League of Poland-Lithuania, the Holy Roman Empire/Habsburg Monarchy, Venice, and Russia known in the West as the Great Turkish War, the Ottomans lost significant chunks of territory. In the middle of it, the army mutinied and seized Istanbul, overthrowing Mehmed IV and installing Suleiman II. From age 7 to 45, Suleiman II had been a prisoner in a luxurious prison, and then was suddenly made Sultan. You can see how this system necessitated a weak Sultan since the Sultans had no skills that made them useful leaders beyond their bloodline. The Treaty of Karlowitz ended the war in 1699 and established the Habsburgs as the dominant regional power. It also created a peace between the Ottomans and Austria of 25 years, as well as 30 years with Russia, symbolically ending the age of Ottoman expansion by right of religious conquest. 

   

    With Karlowitz came a new focus on diplomacy. This hurt Ottoman control in the provinces because those provincials had relied on raiding Christian states as a form of income. Now the Sultan had to indemnify the aggrieved for this raiding, and that didn't mean the raiders would stop, they just determined that it was now the Sultan's job to subsidize their way of life. The Ottomans also engaged in diplomacy a half century later with Iran, after decades of war with Nader Shah. This entrance of the Ottomans into modern diplomacy meant a transition from a universal empire with a mandate from God to turn the world Muslim into a state just like the others and an equal player in Europe.

    

    Just as the Ottomans were late to diplomacy, they were late to other things as well. One big one was the printing press. The first Arabic-language printing press was established in 1727. Presses had been brought from Spain after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, but were banned by Bayezid II. And even then, few books were printed in Arabic in the 18th century. Literacy was still too low, and those who were literate were scholars who preferred manuscript books. The Ottomans struggled mightily for money at the end of the 18th century, and were unable to get financial assistance from North African states or from France. They tried traditional solutions like increasing taxes, debasing the coinage, melting down valuable objects, and confiscating estates, but nothing worked. There was talk of an international loan, but it came to nothing. It was in this crisis that Sultan Selim III emerged, and ruled from 1789 until he was deposed in 1807 and assassinated the next year. Finkel makes him out to be a real reformer who could have taken things in another direction, but was unable to do so. His reign is somewhat parallel to the formation of some democratic institutions in other absolutist states, calling a counsel of 200 high-ranking state officials months into his reign. But he was unable to implement his reforms and was overthrown, also losing control over Mecca and Medina in the same year.

 

    The coup that put Mustafa IV in power was countered quickly by another coup that brought Mahmud II into power. Mahmud was a much more successful reformer and implemented Tanzimat, a major reorganization of the state and army. The result was a janissary revolt, as predicted, but this time Mahmud was able to put it down and disbanded the janissaries once and for all. Finkel ascribes Selim's failure of reorganization contrasted with Mahmud's success to the fact that the former's reforms were seen as an imitation of Western ways whereas the latter's were perceived as more uniquely Ottoman. I think it is controversial whether or not getting rid of the janissaries was good for the state, but it seems like Finkel's perspective is that it was. With so many janissary revolts, these guys just seem terrible. They had revolts in 1809, 1810, and 1811, with most of those being called up in the 1811 campaign deserting before they even left Istanbul.

   

    With the janissaries gone there were big changes. The janissaries were made up of Christian converts, but some of the dead in the final revolt were found to have crosses tattooed on their arms, fueling fears that they weren't true Muslims. The new army would be an all-Muslim force, with no converts enlisted. But the new military reorganization failed to keep the empire together. A Greek revolt ended in a new independent state in 1832, sponsored by the European powers. The Straits Convention of 1841 forced the Ottomans to close the Bosporus to warships in times of peace. Business interests were all being bought up by Europeans, especially the British, who dramatically increased trade with the Ottomans earlier in the century to avoid Napoleon's "continental system." In 1852, the Ottomans handed over the keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to the French, and in 1853 the French and British fought the Russians in the Crimean War over who would get the right to colonize the Ottoman Empire. The end of the war brought the Ottomans into equal international affairs with the Europeans, but only as a way to keep Russia out, and forced the Ottomans to guarantee certain protections to their Christian subjects. The all-Muslim military brought new problems. Now, Muslim men in their prime were away from home, and Christians were buying up more land and becoming more powerful. There was also a demographic issue, as the Christian population was growing faster than the Muslim population.

    I wish Finkel had discussed the reasons for the fall of the Ottoman Empire more. She doesn't give us a ton, but she gives the reader some hints at her perspective. It seems like a lot of it comes down to the end of expansion heralding the end of the empire. As a universal empire that aspired to bring Islam to all people, once the Ottomans stopped expanding in the late 17th century, the state lost its reason for being. It struggled with that for two more centuries, eventually settling into a focus on welfare of religion and state in the 19th century. But that was unsuccessful with the achievements of the Europeans so glaringly superior right next door. Sultan Abdulhamid II attempted to invoke Islamism as a new purpose of the state, but that too failed. Then, nationalism emerged and split the empire for good after centuries of other empires and revolts nibbling away at the edges. Ultimately, legitimacy came down to "the people," defined as the nations. Islamism didn't seem to develop quickly enough to defeat nationalism. And while it would seem like an old idea, "Islamism," as Finkel refers to it, is something new at the end of the 19th century. In the old way of Ottoman life before the 19th century, Islam was like the water fish swim in. When it is everywhere, it isn't noted. And people didn't have enough interactions outside the Islamic world to think much about it. There was more tolerance because following Islamic customs all the time and living a life organized by Islam actually made the religion less salient. It was when the world became less ordered under the traditional Islamic rules that people were drawn more closely to the word of the Koran as true religious inspiration. As religious governance declined, observance of religious ritual increased.

  

    Under outside and inside pressures, Sultan Abdulhamid II declared an Ottoman constitution in 1876. But this failed to appease outside powers hungry to "protect the Christian population of the empire" (take a piece of the empire), and Russia attached the next year, leading to the abolition of the constitution. Due to internal organizing, a new constitution would be declared in 1908. After that point, the Sultan was essentially a figurehead. But in that same year, the empire lost Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Austrians, Crete to Greece, and more of Bulgaria to Bulgaria. When WWI came, the Ottomans had two enemies that they could choose between- Russia on one side and Austria on the other. The Ottomans chose to attach Russia, and I wish it was clearer why that happened. Alliance with Germany made sense since Germany never had any interest in taking a piece of Ottoman land, but between Russia and Austria it seems like the Ottomans would have more to gain from attacking Austria. I wish that was better explained. The Ottomans would have been wiser to not enter the war at all. Their infrastructure had improved towards the end of the 19th century, but it still took a month to get to Syrai from Istanbul and two months to reach Mesopotamia. Roads were poor and the sea was not an option in the face of British naval might. So the Ottomans lost.

   

    After the First World War, the Turks of Anatolia led by Ataturk fought a war against the Greeks and the British and won, creating modern Turkey. The result of the war was the elimination of the non-Muslim part of Turkey, which went from 20% of the population to 2% of the population. The population also became more rural, as the cities emptied out since the Christians were more likely to be cosmopolitan.

    I wish I came away understanding a little more about the relationship between Islamism and nationalism from this book, but it was a good survey to start with. I would enjoyed it but not I'm tired of history for a little while.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Finkel describes dervishes like Christian monks, either wandering the countryside or living in other communities of holy men. Stories of they deeds and piety formed a long oral tradition, and they were linked to the Ottoman's from the beginning. Osman's son, Orhan, granted land for a dervish lodge. Lodges often formed the nuclei of new communities and became sites of pilgrimage as popular expressions of Islam.
• The Ottomans ended up having an issue later as the dynasty became more successful. Since the inferiority of the bride's family was implicit in noble marriages where the male could marry multiple women, Ottoman girls would only be given to Muslims in marriage not Christians. Ottoman boys, however, could receive Christian girls as wives. Ottoman girls could also not be given to their fellow warrior lords, since that might embolden them to challenge Ottoman leadership. So the most common partners for the Ottoman girls were advisors and bureaucrats of lower birth but high importance to Ottoman administration.
• Hungary was considered the eastern bulwark of Catholicism by the end of the 14th century since it had withstood Mongol invasion and the Bogomil heresy. 
• The Ottomans often gave administrative positions to defeated rebels.
• The Galata Tower was reduced in heigh by 7.5 meters after the Turks conquered Constantinople to reduce the visibility of the foreign presence.
• The Tatars, descended from Genghis Khan, were the only vassals whose khan received an annual stipend and gifts from the Ottomans, and they contributed skilled horsemen to the Ottoman armies. 
• The Ottoman economy was dependent on agriculture well into the 20th century, and even today 40% of the Turkish Republic's population is rural.
• The Ottomans derived great value from Jizya taxes on non-Muslims, discouraging conversions.
• Sultan Bayezid II welcomed Spanish Jews, and observed: "Can you call such a king [i.e. Ferdinand] wise and intelligent? He is impoverishing his country and enriching my kingdom."
• Greek-speaking Jews are called Romaniotes.
• Suleiman I continued the trend of removing the Sultan more and more from daily affairs. By the time he died, an advisor of his was able to hide his death for weeks so that his favored heir could arrive to the capital, and no one seemed to notice.
• Something interesting was the number of Christian Europeans who entered Ottoman politics and converted to Islam, like Cigalazade Sinan Pasha, a noble-born Genoese boy who was captured at sea and converted to Islam.
• The princes of the empire were essentially kept as prisoners in the palace their whole lives until they were either murdered/executed or made Sultan.
• In 1620-21, the Bosporus froze and people could walk across the Golden Horn on the ice.
• I noticed that the Sultans needed juridical opinions to get a lot of things done like starting wars. More interesting was how Finkel just discounted those juridical opinions completely as political tools. I would be interested to read more about those opinions, and I wonder if that is how historians will see our Supreme Court opinions years from now.
• I thought this sentence was taken straight out of 2023: "The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was greatly weakened by this time, the Cossack uprising which had begun in 1648 having developed, by 1654, into a war between the Commonwealth and Muscovy over the question of sovereignty in Ukraine."
• In the 18th century, it was ordered that new coinage be marked "Struck in Istanbul" instead of Constantinople, and from that point on the city was also often called "Islambol."
• The Ottomans participated in the Second Coalition against Napoleon.
• Armenians occupied a similar financial role to Jews in Ottoman society.
• Tanzimat included the introduction of the fez to replace the turban. The fez was then eliminated 100 years later by Ataturk.
• I found it interesting that in the late 19th century Britain was involved in significant efforts to end the Ottoman slave trade. There were some successes, but the trade continued in the east and in Arabia. And the British were never successful at abolishing the sex slave trade, as Ottomans didn't consider that slavery at all.