Ottoman Empire

The smallest of the beyliks

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)formation

When the Sultanate of Rum was extinguished in 1308, Anatolia broke into a dozen Turkish principalities. Osman's, at Sogut, was among the smallest and was placed on the least promising frontier — facing Byzantium rather than the richer neighbours to the east.

That placement turned out to be the whole advantage. The other beyliks fought each other over Anatolian territory; Osman's fought a Byzantine empire that had been broken by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, had recovered Constantinople in 1261 without recovering its strength, and could not defend Bithynia. Frontier warfare against Christians also gave the Ottomans a claim on the men and the language of gaza, the raiding war of faith, which drew fighters from the rest of Anatolia to them rather than to their rivals.

Bursa fell in 1326, and the Ottomans were across the straits into Europe by the 1350s — earlier than they finished Anatolia, which is the opposite of the usual telling. The Balkans, not Anatolia, were the empire's revenue base for its first century and a half.

The one interruption, in 1402, gets its own telling further on.

The Balkans first

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)expansion

The standard picture has the Ottomans conquering Anatolia and then crossing into Europe. They did it the other way round, and almost everything about the empire follows from that.

Ottoman forces were operating in Thrace by the 1350s and took Edirne, which became the capital, in about 1369 — eighty years before Constantinople and at a point when the beylik still held only a corner of north-western Anatolia. The Balkan campaigns of Murad I and Bayezid I brought in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly and Serbia: Kosovo in 1389, where Murad was killed in his own victory, and Nicopolis in 1396, where a crusading army raised from most of Latin Christendom was destroyed.

Two things about this order of operations shaped the state permanently.

The first is that the empire's richest and most densely populated provinces were European for most of its history, and its army, revenue and administration were built around them. Rumelia — the Balkans — was the senior half of the empire in Ottoman usage, ahead of Anatolia, and stayed so.

The second is the devshirme: a levy of Christian boys from Balkan villages, converted, trained and made into the sultan's household troops and administrators. That institution required a large subject Christian peasantry, and the Balkans supplied it. An empire that had expanded into Anatolia first could not have built it.

The Anatolian beyliks were absorbed afterwards and with more difficulty than the Balkans, because they were Muslim Turkish polities with their own dynastic legitimacy and taking them looked like aggression against fellow Muslims rather than frontier warfare against unbelievers. Bayezid took most of them in the 1390s, and then in 1402 Timur came west, destroyed his army at Ankara, took him prisoner, and restored the beyliks. The Ottoman state broke into a civil war between Bayezid's sons that ran eleven years.

It reassembled. That it could reassemble — that a dynasty could lose its sultan, its army and its Anatolian provinces and be governing all of them again within twenty years — is the first real evidence that this was a state rather than a successful warband.

What a passing ship saw

Drafted from Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy to the Court of Timour at Samarcand (1859)expansion

On 28 July 1402 Timur destroyed Bayezid I's army on the plain outside Ankara and took him prisoner along with one of his sons. Two Castilians were standing in the field when it happened.

Payo de Sotomayor and Hernán Sánchez de Palazuelos had been sent east by Henry III of Castile for the express purpose of finding out how much power Timur and Bayezid each had in the world, and they arrived in time to watch the question settle itself in an afternoon. Timur learned they were there, treated them honourably, took them along with him, and sent an ambassador back to Castile with letters and a present. The second Castilian embassy — the one that reached Samarkand, and whose journal survives — existed because of Ankara.

That journal is why Ankara can be seen as something other than a date. Its author sailed down the length of the Anatolian coast in the spring of 1404 and wrote down, port by port, who was in charge. He was not interested in the Ottoman question. He was making notes on a voyage.

The coast, twenty months later

North of Sinope the ships put in at a harbour belonging to a Muslim lord named Isfendiyar, and the journal explains, as a piece of local colour, why he paid tribute to Timur: Bayezid had killed his father and taken his land, and when Timur won he gave all of it back. Further along was a town with two castles, one held by the Genoese and one, with the town, by a Muslim called Chalabi — that is Süleyman, Bayezid's son, holding a share of his father's inheritance as one lord among the others. At the next anchorage a Greek lord kept a town on the rocks and a castle above it with three hundred Turks in it, and he too paid tribute to Timur.

None of this is presented as news. It is the ordinary furniture of a coastline. A traveller who had never heard of the Ottomans would have taken from that passage the impression of a shore divided among a dozen small powers, two Italian republics, and one distant emperor in Central Asia to whom several of them sent money.

Inland the same arrangement was being enforced in person. At Erzincan the ambassadors were eating with the local lord when a Turkish boy of about seven rode up with ten mounted attendants. He was Isfendiyar's nephew, and he had come from Timur carrying an order that his uncle hand over half his land to him, because he was his sister's son. Anatolia in 1404 was a place where a child with ten servants could arrive at dinner holding a writ that halved a principality.

How he got there, as the Castilians were told it

The version the journal records is a story about temper. The lordship of Erzincan was disputed, Timur wrote to Bayezid about it, and Bayezid — believing there was no man in the world equal to himself — wrote back that he was astonished anyone could be mad enough to send him such folly, that he would do as he chose against every other man in the universe, that he would come and find Timur, and that he would dishonour his principal wife. Timur then marched out of his winter quarters and besieged Sivas. Bayezid sent his eldest son against him with what the Castilians were told was two hundred thousand horse, intending to follow with more. Sivas fell before the relief arrived.

The journal also records the detail that made the disaster complete, and records it as a grievance of Timur's rather than as analysis. The Genoese of Pera had promised him one thing and done another: they let the Turks cross from Greece into Anatolia, and when the Turks were beaten they helped them escape again. Whatever passed between Timur and the Genoese, the ferry across the straits was in Italian hands, and it ran both ways.

One more figure walks through these pages. The Castilians were told that Bayezid's father Murad had been killed on a battlefield by a Christian count called Lazaro, two thrusts in the breast that came out at his back; that Bayezid avenged him by killing Lazaro in battle with his own hand; and that Lazaro's son marched with Bayezid, and now lived with Süleyman. The Serbian prince whose father the Ottomans killed, and who fought at Ankara on the Ottoman side, was two years after the defeat attached to the household of the Ottoman claimant in Europe. The arrangement survived the state that made it.

What the news was at Chios

Sailing out in the autumn of 1403 the embassy had stopped at Chios, close enough to the mainland to see it clearly, and picked up the current report: the eldest son of the Turk whom Timur conquered was dead, and his brothers were fighting over the succession.

That is the whole interregnum in one sentence of harbour gossip, heard by people who had no stake in it and were waiting for a ship. It went on for eleven years. The state that reassembled at the end of it was put back together out of the pieces the journal describes in passing — the coastal emirates restored by Timur, the brothers, the Genoese ferry, the Serbian retinue — by men who had been on the losing side at Ankara and had watched the price of losing collected port by port.

Two inheritances

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)peak

Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453 after a fifty-three day siege, ending the Roman empire eleven hundred years after its eastern half had been separated from its western one. He was twenty-one. He also took the title Kayser-i Rum — Caesar of Rome — and moved his capital into the city.

It is the clearest example there is of what claiming an empire actually consists of: not descent, not conquest by itself, but a ruler publicly taking a predecessor's title as the description of his own authority, and then daring anybody to dispute it. The Ottomans also kept the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in being under their protection, which was both a practical arrangement for governing a Christian population and a continuation of an imperial function.

It was the first of two such claims the dynasty would make on the strength of conquest rather than descent. The second, on the Arab lands and the holy cities, came sixty-four years later.

Two years that changed what the empire was

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)peak

Selim I reigned eight years and spent two of them acquiring the Arab world.

The sequence is quick and it is worth separating from the wars around it. In 1514 he beat Shah Isma'il at Chaldiran — Ottoman artillery and janissary firearms against Qizilbash cavalry — which ended Safavid expansion westwards and fixed a frontier in eastern Anatolia that is still roughly where it is. In 1516 he turned south against the Mamluk sultanate, beat it at Marj Dabiq near Aleppo, and in January 1517 at Ridaniya outside Cairo. Syria, Egypt and the Hijaz came in together.

What that acquired was not primarily territory. It was three things the Ottomans had not previously had.

The holy cities. Guardianship of Mecca and Medina passed to the sultan. That was the most valuable symbolic ground in the Islamic world, and had been for six centuries: dynasties in Cairo, Tunis and Baghdad had risen and fallen on whose name was said in the Friday sermon there.

The caliph. The Abbasid line the Mamluks had kept at Cairo since 1261 was taken to Constantinople with the rest of the state's moveable assets. The later Ottoman claim that the caliphate was formally handed over at that moment is largely an eighteenth-century construction, produced when the empire needed an argument for authority over Muslims outside its borders. What was not in doubt after 1517 was that the Ottoman sultan held the holy cities and no rival held anything comparable.

And a Muslim majority. Before 1517 the Ottoman empire was a largely Christian state ruled by Muslims; the Balkan and Anatolian populations together made it so. Afterwards it was the largest Muslim polity in the world and the centre of gravity of its population, revenue and religious institutions moved accordingly. The empire that had grown up on a Christian frontier fighting Christians became the empire that spoke for Sunni Islam against a Shi'i rival in Iran — and the two things Selim did in those two years are what made that argument possible.

The lawgiver, and what he actually did

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)peak

Suleyman I reigned for forty-six years and Europe called him the Magnificent and remembers the campaigns: Belgrade in 1521, Rhodes in 1522, the destruction of the Hungarian kingdom at Mohács in 1526, Vienna besieged and not taken in 1529, Baghdad in 1534, and a Mediterranean fleet under Barbarossa that made the sea contested for a generation. At his death in 1566 the empire ran from Hungary to Yemen and from Algiers to Basra.

The Ottomans called him Kanuni, the lawgiver, and that is the more useful name.

The problem he inherited was specific. A Muslim state's law is the sharia, which the sultan does not make; but an empire needs land tenure, taxation, criminal penalties, market regulation and provincial administration, and the sharia does not supply most of that in the detail a bureaucracy requires. The Ottoman answer was kanun — sultanic regulation, issued by decree, covering what the religious law left open. It had existed since the fifteenth century. What happened under Suleyman was its systematisation into a coherent body, codified province by province, and — this is the difficult part — its formal reconciliation with the sharia by the chief jurist Ebussuud Efendi, who held the office of şeyhülislam for nearly thirty years and whose rulings made the sultan's regulations defensible in religious terms.

That is the settlement the empire ran on, and it is the third answer Islamic history had produced to the same question. The Umayyads claimed to be God's deputy on earth and lost that argument. The Abbasids tried to impose doctrine by inquisition in the mihna and lost it definitively; after that, religious authority in Sunni Islam belonged to the scholars and not to the ruler, and every ruler since has had to work around the fact.

The Ottoman solution was not to claim the scholars' authority but to employ them: a salaried, ranked, promotable religious hierarchy with the şeyhülislam at its head, appointed by the sultan, whose independence was genuine in doctrine and structurally limited in everything else.

Nobody solved that problem. This empire contained it for about three hundred years, which is longer than anybody else managed.

A janissary eating turnips

Drafted from Busbecq, The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1881)peak

Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq arrived in 1555 as the Habsburg emperor's ambassador, stayed seven years, spent much of that time confined to his house, and used it to write four long letters to a friend describing what he could see. He was an enemy. He expected his side to lose. That is what makes the letters useful: almost everything admiring in them is admiration he did not want to feel.

He was taken to see the army in camp before a campaign, and asked to be shown the slaughterhouse, to judge the supply from the meat. There were four or five sheep hanging, for a camp that contained, he reckoned, no fewer than four thousand janissaries. He said so, and was told that few of them ate meat; most had their food brought from Constantinople. Somebody pointed out a janissary at his dinner. He was eating, off a wooden or earthen trencher, a mess of turnips, onions, garlic, parsnips and cucumbers seasoned with salt and vinegar, and drinking water, and to all appearance enjoying it as much as if it had been pheasant.

Busbecq could not stop looking at it. The cloth for their clothes was issued by the state, given out at nightfall by companies, in packets; twenty-five or thirty men slept in a tent apportioned so that each had room for his body and no more; they wore three garments even in summer because they feared cold; the baggage animals carried armour and tents rather than delicacies; and when the camp moved, men who had lost their horses stood in a line by the road with their saddles on their heads, so that the Sultan could see how many of them there were and make an allowance.

The passage everybody quotes

Then he wrote the comparison, and the reason it has been quoted for four centuries is that it is a defeated man's inventory made before the defeat.

On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories, readiness to endure hardships, union, order, discipline, thrift, and watchfulness. On ours are found an empty exchequer, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits, a raw and insubordinate soldiery, and greedy generals; there is no regard for discipline, license runs riot, the men indulge in drunkenness and debauchery, and, worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we, to defeat.

He adds the qualification that turned out to matter more than the list. The only obstacle, he says, is Persia, whose position on the Sultan's rear forces him to take precautions; the fear of Persia gives Europe a respite, but only for a time. Busbecq's Vienna was safe because Suleyman had a second front, and he knew it, and he wrote it down.

What he thought the state actually ran on

The other passage is about who gets promoted. He was in the Sultan's crowded hall, among the household cavalry and a large force of janissaries, and what struck him was that in the whole assembly there was not one man who owed his position to anything but his own service.

No distinction is attached to birth among the Turks; the deference to be paid to a man is measured by the position he holds in the public service. There is no fighting for precedence; a man's place is marked out by the duties he discharges.

Those who received the highest offices, he was told, were mostly the sons of shepherds and herdsmen, and far from being ashamed of it they boasted of it, because they held that high qualities are not inherited any more than a talent for music or mathematics is inherited, but come partly from God and partly from training and industry. And then Busbecq turns the knife on his own world: with us there is no opening left for merit; birth is the standard for everything. He asks his correspondent to treat the remark as strictly private.

It is not a neutral report. It is a European civil servant using a foreign system to complain about his own, and he is describing the recruited household at its best moment and not the provincial cavalry, the tax farms, or the households of the great men where patronage worked much as it did anywhere. But he was in the room, he counted the sheep, and the thing he says the empire ran on is not gunpowder or numbers. It is that the men at the top had been selected and the men in the tents did not expect to be comfortable.

The part he got wrong on purpose

Busbecq also watched the succession crisis of Suleyman's last years — the killing of Mustafa, the war between Bayezid and Selim — and reported the Turkish argument for it as he heard it: that to fall fighting for the chance of empire is a more honourable lot than to be butchered like a sheep by a brother's hangman. He offers it as evidence of barbarism. It reads now as evidence of something else, which is that an empire selecting its servants by merit had not found any way at all to select its rulers, and that the same household which produced the janissary with his turnips also produced two princes with armies who had to fight each other because the alternative was to be strangled.

The levy of boys

Drafted from Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (2002)aside?What aside means

The slave-soldier institution had been running in the Islamic world for six hundred years by the time the Ottomans built theirs, and it almost always worked the same way: a ruler buys foreign boys, trains them, arms them, and is deposed by them within a few generations. Samarra, Ghazna, the Bahriyya. The Ottoman version was different in three specific ways, and it is the only version that produced an administration rather than a coup.

The devshirme was a levy rather than a purchase. Officials went into Christian villages in the Balkans and Anatolia at intervals and took boys — a proportion of households, selected on physical and mental promise, mostly aged between eight and eighteen. They were converted, taught Turkish, and sorted. The most able went into the palace school; the rest went to Turkish farming families for some years to learn the language and the country, and then into the janissary corps.

The three differences. First, they were the sultan's household in law: legally his slaves, with no lineage, no property rights independent of him, and no tribal or provincial constituency — which is the standard design — but the levy took them from inside the empire rather than off a foreign frontier, so the system did not depend on a slave market anyone else controlled. Second, it staffed the government and not only the army: grand viziers, provincial governors, admirals and treasurers came out of the palace school for two centuries, so the ruling class of the empire was, by design, a body of converted Christian peasants' sons who owned nothing and could be dismissed. Third, it was not hereditary, and enormous effort went into keeping it that way, because the whole point was a service class that could not become an aristocracy.

It did not hold. From the later sixteenth century janissaries married, took trades, enrolled their sons, and turned into a hereditary urban corporation with property, guild connections and a decisive voice in politics — including in the deposition of sultans. That is the same ending every other slave soldiery reached, arrived at about two centuries later than usual.

The moral question does not dispose of itself in a sentence and should not be made to. The devshirme took children from their families by force and converted them; it was resented, evaded and occasionally resisted; and it was also, for a Balkan peasant's son, the only route in that world from a village to the grand vizierate, and some families are recorded trying to get their boys included. Both of those are true and the sources record both.

The empire that was not declining

Drafted from Tezcan, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (2010)contraction

The standard account of the Ottoman empire after Suleyman is three centuries of decline: the sultans stop leading armies, the janissaries get above themselves, the harem interferes, the provinces slip, and Europe pulls ahead until the whole thing expires in 1922. It is a tidy story, it was written substantially by Ottoman critics of their own government and then by nineteenth-century European observers who had reasons to believe it, and modern scholarship has spent forty years taking it apart.

What actually happened in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a transformation, and the direction of it is the opposite of the usual reading.

Power moved out of the palace. The sultan stopped campaigning and became a sedentary monarch in Constantinople; the grand vizier and the bureaucracy ran the state; the janissaries became a propertied urban corporation with an interest in policy; the religious hierarchy acquired independent weight; and the household of the sultan's mother became a real institution of government rather than a scandal. Between 1617 and 1622 four sultans were enthroned or deposed in circumstances that no earlier Ottoman rule would have permitted, including one deposed and murdered by the janissaries. Read that way, these are not symptoms of collapse but the constitution of a different state — one in which the ruler was answerable to identifiable constituencies with the means to remove him, which is a recognisably early modern arrangement rather than a failing absolutist one.

The empire also went on working. It held Crete after a twenty-four year siege in 1669, was at the walls of Vienna again in 1683, lost that badly, ceded Hungary at Karlowitz in 1699 — the first treaty in which the Ottomans conceded territory as a defeated party — and then survived another two hundred and twenty-three years, through the loss of the Crimea, Greek independence, the Tanzimat reforms that rebuilt the administration on European models, a constitution in 1876, and a young officers' revolution in 1908.

Nobody conquered the empire. It joined a world war on the losing side, was partitioned by the victors, and the state that emerged from the war of independence that followed abolished the sultanate itself.

Three and a half centuries is a long time to summarise in one word, and the word was chosen by people with an argument to make: Ottoman officials complaining that the old order had been let go, and European observers who wanted the thing to be dying. What the years after Suleyman actually contain is a state being governed differently, badly at times and effectively at others, by men whose names are not on the coinage.

The treasure in the city

Drafted from Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (1756)contraction

Demetrius Cantemir was a Moldavian prince held in Istanbul for some twenty years as a hostage and a client of the Ottoman court, fluent in Turkish, Persian and Arabic, on speaking terms with the men who ran the empire, and eventually a defector to Peter the Great. In exile he wrote the history of the state that had kept him, and he divided it in two: growth, and then decay. The place he put the join was the summer of 1683.

Cantemir was ten years old when Kara Mustafa marched on Vienna, so the campaign comes to him from men who were on it, and he is at his most detailed and least trustworthy exactly where it matters most. He names his informants, including his father. He also reports what the grand vizier was privately thinking, which he cannot have known.

The council

Before the army moved, the vizier called a council of his pashas and asked them whether Vienna should be attacked this year or next. Cantemir's explanation of why he asked is not flattering: so that if anything went wrong it could be imputed to the authors of the advice rather than to him, and so that the pashas, gratified at being consulted, would carry out his orders more readily. The Hungarian rebel Thököly was called in and made to speak first, because he was supposed to know the ground, and his speech begins with a sentence a quartermaster could have written — that three things are needed for a great undertaking: money, men, and above all prudence, which moderates the excessive ardour of heroic minds.

The advice against the siege was given. Cantemir notes, in a long footnote of the kind he is good at, that most Christian writers blamed Thököly for urging the attack, and that this is implausible, since a rebel trying to free his country from a foreign yoke would naturally use whatever means served his own faction.

Why the city was not stormed

Then comes the charge on which the whole of Cantemir's account of the defeat rests, and it is a charge about greed rather than about arms.

The vizier was convinced the city could not escape him. So he refused to let it be closely blockaded on every side, and refused to let the army attack the breaches everywhere at once; he ordered daily assaults by small parties only, so that the garrison would be worn down by constant watching and forced to surrender. When the janissaries complained publicly that more of them were being killed in these skirmishes than a single general assault would have cost, the vizier let slip why. He knew there were great treasures in that city, and he could not let it be given up to plunder. He then had it proclaimed in camp that any troops who got over the walls were to stop there, entrench themselves, and on no account enter a house until he came and gave fresh orders.

The siege therefore took much longer than expected. The convoys from Hungary were intercepted by the garrisons downriver, exactly as the army had been warned they would be, and a thing previously unknown in a Turkish camp happened: ten drams of bread, without salt, sold for a rhub, and everything else rose in proportion.

The relief arrived. Cantemir's description of what followed is of a rout that began before the battle did — janissaries and cavalry thinking less of fighting than of flight — and of Kara Mustafa returning to an empty tent, weeping, taking up the standard of the Prophet alone and riding after his army. Men who had complained of the least labour covered fifty hours on foot without food or drink before they stopped.

Cantemir keeps one story that says more about the aftermath than the casualty figures do. A Jewish merchant in the vizier's service was asked at Buda whether he had anything valuable to send the Sultan as a present. He answered that his best effects were at Belgrade. The vizier offered him five hundred light horse to fetch them safely through the bands of plunderers on the road, and the merchant replied that three men would do, because he had a German cap, and the sight of it was enough to frighten off the largest band.

What it cost, and what it did not

Kara Mustafa spent the autumn sending rich presents to court as the strongest argument for his innocence, and for a while it worked: the Sultan confirmed him in the vizierate and in command of the new army he was raising. Then the order came the other way. He was seized in his own house at Belgrade, in the presence of the aga of the janissaries, on the fifth of Muharram, and put to death.

Karlowitz was sixteen years off, and it was there rather than at Vienna that the empire first signed away territory as a beaten party. But Cantemir put the turn in 1683, and the reason is worth stating plainly, because it is a claim and not an observation. He was writing for European patrons, in Latin, about a state he had left; a history that ran downhill from a date made his own defection look like foresight. The detail in his pages is first-hand and the shape he gives it is an argument, and both are his.

The real authors

Drafted from Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e, Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (1790)contraction

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went to Constantinople in 1716 as the wife of the British ambassador, stayed until 1718, learned some Turkish, and got into houses and conversations that no male traveller could enter. Her letters were published after her death and have been read ever since for the wrong reason — as descriptions of baths and dress — when the sharpest thing in them is a constitutional analysis.

Who governed

She states it in one sentence, from Adrianople, and it is worth quoting exactly because it is an eyewitness saying in 1717 what historians would take two and a half centuries to say again:

The government here is entirely in the hands of the army, the grand signior, with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janizary's frown.

She is not admiring. She goes on about the spies in the coffee-houses and the house razed to the ground for a careless remark, and she draws the English moral — that she wishes Parliament would send over a shipload of young passive obedient men to see arbitrary government in its clearest light, where it is hard to judge whether the prince, the people or the ministers are most miserable. When a minister displeases the people, she writes, in three hours he is dragged from his master's arms; they cut off hands, head and feet and throw them before the palace gate, with all the respect in the world, while the sultan sits trembling in his apartment and dares neither defend nor revenge his favourite.

But she does not stop at the soldiers, and this is where she is better than her contemporaries. She had lodged three weeks at Belgrade with an effendi, a scholar, and came away with a view of where power actually sat. Law and religion in that empire were one profession; its men held the profitable offices and the religious revenues; the sultan, though heir to his subjects in general, never presumed to touch their lands or money, which passed in uninterrupted succession to their children — a privilege forfeited only by taking a court post or the title of pasha, and there were few such fools among them. Then the conclusion:

'Tis they that are the real authors, though the soldiers are the actors of revolutions. They deposed the late sultan Mustapha.

Mustafa II had been deposed in 1703. She was told who did it by the class that did it, fourteen years later, in a private house.

A nutshell full of the matter

Drafted from Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e, Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (1790)aside?What aside means

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was writing home from Constantinople about the plague, which she had just travelled through and which she thought could be rooted out as easily in Turkey as in Italy or France, when she changed subject: A propos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make you wish yourself here. Smallpox, so fatal and so general in England, was harmless there, by the invention of what they called ingrafting.

A set of old women made it their business to perform the operation, every autumn, in September, when the great heat had abated. People sent to one another to know whether anyone in the family had a mind to have the smallpox, and fifteen or sixteen would meet for the purpose. The old woman came with a nutshell full of the matter of the best sort of smallpox and asked which vein you would like opened. She ripped it with a large needle, no more painful than a scratch, put in as much matter as would lie on the needle's head, bound the wound with a hollow bit of shell, and opened four or five veins in all. Greek patients often chose the forehead, both arms and the breast, to make the sign of the cross, which left scars; those who were not superstitious chose the legs or the concealed part of the arm. The children played together the rest of the day, kept their beds two days when the fever came, and were well within eight. The French ambassador said they took the smallpox there by way of diversion, as people took the waters elsewhere.

She ends by saying that she is satisfied enough of the safety of the experiment to intend it on her own small son, and that she is patriot enough to take pains to bring the invention into fashion in England — and then says exactly what she expects to be up against:

I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue, for the good of mankind.

An empire that Europe was learning to describe as backward was in 1717 running, as a matter of ordinary autumn routine performed by old women for a fee, a preventive procedure that England did not have and would resist for a generation. The letters were written by someone who despised its politics and said so on the same page.

Beards and turbans

Drafted from Slade, Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea with the Capitan Pacha (1854)contraction

Mahmud II spent years thinning the janissaries before he broke them. Each campaign in Greece a body of them was embarked on the fleet and landed in small parties, purposely unsupported, and none came back; only a few thousand were left in Constantinople when, on 30 May 1826, the sultan issued a decree announcing the formation of a new victorious army. The janissaries understood at once why their companions had not returned from Greece. On 15 June they reversed their soup-kettles, the signal of revolt, and demanded the heads of the ministers and the revocation of the decree; the sultan had the aga of their own corps, the Bosphorus garrisons, the gunners and the marines already on his side, and on the morning of the sixteenth he raised the Prophet's standard in the hippodrome and had the religious establishment call the people out against them.

Two years later Russia crossed the Pruth. Adolphus Slade, a British naval lieutenant, arrived in the middle of the war that followed, went to sea with the Ottoman fleet, and eventually spent seventeen years in its service. He is a hostile, opinionated, deeply condescending witness who thought the reform was being done the wrong way, and the detail he collected to prove it is the best account there is of what the first years of the new army looked like. He calls those troops by an older name, the nizam dgedit, the new order — the label of an earlier attempt that had cost a previous sultan his throne, and the choice of word is part of his argument.

The war the new army had to fight

When the declaration of war reached the capital, the sultan sent couriers across the empire with pressing orders to the pashas and beys to furnish contingents. The orders were ill obeyed. Slade's judgement is that if the truth had reached the sultan's ears it would have shown him the cost of having broken the derebeys, the provincial notables: in consequence, and for the first time, a Turkish army took the field almost unaccompanied by cavalry.

From Bosnia, full of a warlike Muslim population, the sultan expected serious help, and ordered its governor to march forty thousand men to the Drina to watch the Serbs. The governor, afraid of what would happen, sent a subordinate officer with the mollah to read the decree to the troops in his place. Having heard it, the men burst into murmurs, then into violence. The officer and the mollah were shot dead, and the new uniforms that had been brought to dress the troops in were piled on the spot and burnt. The Porte changed the governor for a milder man, and no help at all came from Bosnia for the whole campaign; the difficulty was keeping the Bosnians already garrisoning the Danube fortresses from deserting.

What the sultan had instead, in Slade's description, was an army of regular troops — that is, an army of conscript boys, most of them under eighteen, hastily raised, rawly instructed, without efficient officers, but armed with the musket and bayonet, which the sultan believed to be the only real advantage Europeans had over Asiatics. Slade thinks that ill-placed confidence was the true reason the war was accepted at all.

He also records how the fighting was read at the time. That the sultan could resist Russia at all, so soon after the disasters in Greece, struck European observers as extraordinary and was credited to the reform — and even when the Russian army stood at Adrianople with its Cossacks twenty hours' march from the capital, parts of Asia Minor in revolt, Albania and Bosnia turning hostile and the streets of Constantinople running with blood, few of them could bring themselves to blame reform for anything.

He watched the new troops on parade at Büyükdere when the British ambassador was received in the imperial tent — about two thousand of them lining the ground from the tent to the landing-place, the Christian population of the capital packed in behind, a battery of nine-pounders overlooking the scene — and could not resist the comparison with the marines of the frigate that had brought the ambassador: a gratifying contrast, he writes, to the slouching, short, ill-dressed nizam.

The argument underneath it

Slade's case is not that the janissaries should have been kept. He is savage about them: lords of the day, ruling Constantinople with uncontrolled insolence, enormous turbans and bulky sashes full of weapons, thrusting everybody out of their path without regard to sex or age, pistols let off in sport during the bayram and often followed by a shriek. No man who was not of them and no property that was not theirs was safe.

His case is about method, and he makes it by comparing Mahmud with Murad, the sultan Slade credits with creating the janissaries in the first place. Both measures were the same kind of thing — a mighty innovation, an entirely new military force imposed on the institutions of the country. But Murad, he argues, had a master mind: instead of keeping his new army distinct from the nation he incorporated it into the nation, made it conform in all respects to national usage, and it spread into a vast national guard. Mahmud, having destroyed the self-appointed battalions, should have made the rest of that body available to him instead of outlawing it. By respecting what Slade calls their traditionary whims and social rights, he says, the sultan could easily have given his subjects a taste for European discipline.

Then the sentence that carries the whole argument:

They never objected to it in principle, but their untutored minds could not understand why, in order to use the musket and bayonet, and manoeuvre together, it was necessary to leave off wearing beards and turbans.

That is a British officer's summary of a foreign reform, delivered with the usual contempt for the people whose objection he is reporting, and it is still among the sharpest things said about the whole nineteenth-century Ottoman reform programme. The drill was not the difficulty. The dress was, because the dress was the claim: that becoming effective required becoming European, and that the state's own subjects were the thing needing correction.

He adds one qualification that undercuts his own case, and lets it stand. Whatever the janissaries were as a bar to the free will of the sultan, he writes, it is doubtful whether their influence materially affected the empire, the elements of its decay being deeper seated. He never says what those elements were. And on his own account the remnant, left alone after June 1826, would have died a natural death and left only a name; it was the campaign to erase every token of them, down to Oriental usage in eating and dressing, that turned a beaten party into a principle worth defending — because trampling on their principles meant trampling on the nation's.

The slip of a typographist

Drafted from Midhat, The Life of Midhat Pasha: A Record of His Services, Political Reforms, Banishment, and Judicial Murder, Derived from Private Documents and Reminiscences (1903)contraction

Midhat Pasha arrived at the Danube province in 1864 to run an experiment: could the reforms decreed piecemeal from Constantinople since 1839 — the Tanzimat, promising equality before the law and regular taxation to subjects who had mostly never seen either — actually be built, in one province, all at once? Aali and Fuad Pashas gave him Widdin, Silistria and Nish combined into a single government and told him to find out.

He divided the province into districts, cantons and communes, and put an elected council at each level for tax assessment and local administration. Forced labour was abolished. Fourteen hundred bridges and two thousand miles of road were built. Brigandage was put down and a local gendarmerie raised in its place. Agricultural banks were founded to get farmers out from under moneylenders, funded by bringing waste land under cultivation rather than by a new tax. Two Ottoman-flagged steamers appeared on the Danube where none had sailed before, then four. A postal service started. A carriage works at Rustchuk paid a ten per cent dividend in its first year. Orphan asylums took in Christian and Muslim children on the same terms and taught them trades.

None of it worked by decree alone. The councils did the property valuations themselves, which is why the new taxes were paid without the complaints that had followed every earlier attempt, even though officials' salaries went up and a long list of vexatious levies came off the books at the same time. Revenue rose regardless. Within a year the Sublime Porte was congratulating its governor and ordering every other province to copy what he had done.

The schools

Midhat's own account of what he thought the Danube reform was actually for comes through most clearly in the one project that never happened.

Bulgarian families with any ambition for their sons had one real option for a higher education, which was to send them to the Russian universities at Odessa, Kharkov and Kiev — and a good number of the young men who came back from that route came back as organisers for the Panslav committees working to detach the province from Constantinople altogether. Midhat's answer was to build the university at home: modern schools in the province's main towns, Christian and Muslim students together, paid for out of the reform's own revenue surplus and by subscription, so that the choice of Odessa never had to be made.

The Russian ambassador, Nikolai Ignatiev, understood exactly what the schools were for and worked to kill them before they opened, arguing to the sultan that elected local councils were themselves a step toward the province declaring independence, as Egypt effectively had. It should not have been enough on its own — Abdulaziz was not an easy man to move by argument alone. What finished it, on the account of a man well placed to know, was a single word: the province's official gazette, describing the vilayet council, printed the members as deputies. A compositor's mistake, corrected the following issue, was still in circulation long enough for Ignatiev to put it in front of the sultan as proof of what the councils really meant. Abdulaziz withdrew his consent, citing the expense.

The reform that had built the roads and the banks and the gendarmerie survived the refusal. The reform meant to give the empire's own subjects a reason not to look toward Odessa did not, and no substitute for it was tried again before the province was gone.

The Balkans, last

Drafted from Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (1913)contraction

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was the Daily Telegraph's correspondent accredited to Abdullah Pasha's army in Thrace when the First Balkan War began in October 1912, and he spent most of it fighting the Ottoman press office for permission to see anything at all. What he did see, at the three-day battle of Lüleburgaz and the retreat that followed it, is the empire's presence in the Balkans ending the way it began: on the same roads, moving the other direction.

The rout

At five in the morning on 31 October his Ottoman orderly Ismet shook him awake: Abdullah and his staff have left. The village has been evacuated. At any minute the Bulgarians may enter. Nobody had thought to warn the correspondents. By the time Ashmead-Bartlett's cart cleared the village the enemy's guns had opened, and he found himself, in his own words, "amidst a crowd of stragglers and wounded, ox-wagons, stray batteries of artillery, and all the manifold debris of a defeated army." Whole brigades had simply come apart. Officers were scarce — the army had begun the campaign two thousand short of its full complement and lost heavily among the rest in the battle — and without them nothing held the fleeing mass together.

Men who had gone three days without food dug up raw cabbages and turnips in village gardens and ate them where they stood; an old soldier, too weak to do more than stumble, told Ismet that "a Turkish soldier is not worth the price of a dog these days" and kept walking rather than abandon his rifle, which almost nobody did even when they threw away their boots. An artillery major, who had fought two days at Lüleburgaz under what he called the worst shrapnel fire he had ever seen, begged Ashmead-Bartlett for brandy and then refused a lift: "No, I will stay with my guns. You had better push on as fast as you can. For us it is the end. But what would you? We have no roads, no food, no organisation." He had eighteen more guns already lost behind him.

The migration

Mixed into the retreating army were the Muslim inhabitants of the countryside themselves, driving their households ahead of the front line in ox-carts. Ashmead-Bartlett watched them for a full day's march and called it correctly: "It was the migration of a whole people, the return of the Turks to Asia." Three and a half centuries earlier, Ottoman forces had crossed the other way, taking Edirne before they had finished conquering Anatolia, and had built the empire's wealthiest and most populous provinces on that ground. What he was describing was the same population moving back along the same roads, ahead of the same kind of army that Murad and Bayezid had once put to flight.

Adrianople held out under siege into the spring; when it fell in March 1913, the news of the surrender terms triggered a coup in Constantinople and the murder of the war minister who had agreed to give it up, because the men who seized power judged — rightly, on the ground the correspondent had just crossed — that there was nothing left to negotiate with. The lines the retreating army finally held, at Çatalca, were the last ones before the capital itself. By the Treaty of London that May, the empire's frontier in Europe had been pushed back to a strip of eastern Thrace it would fight to keep for the rest of its existence. Rumelia, the senior half of the empire in its own reckoning for five hundred years, was mostly gone in eight months.

The room on the sea

Drafted from Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (1940)end

General Sir Charles Harington had commanded the Allied occupation forces at Constantinople for two years when, in the summer of 1922, the war he thought he was policing turned into one he might have to fight himself.

The Greek army occupying western Anatolia since 1919 had pushed inland toward Ankara and been held on the Sakarya river by Mustafa Kemal, who spent the following year building an army out of what Harington calls "peasants and followers" while the Greek position slowly rotted: bad finance, a war-weary army, a commander Harington had already told London privately would not stand if seriously attacked. In August 1922 Kemal struck a lightly held stretch of the Greek line near Afyonkarahisar. "The whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards." Harington's liaison officer wired that the Greek army could not be made to hold; when a second officer confirmed it, Harington wired back the only question that occurred to him — "Can't someone get on a tub and stop them?" — and watched what he called one of the great debacles in history end at Smyrna.

Kemal's forces reached the Dardanelles, opposite the small Allied garrison holding Chanak on the Asian shore under British, French and Italian flags, with orders to hold the straits at all costs. For several weeks in September the two armies faced each other across barely a mile of contested ground, and London came close to authorising Harington to open fire on a Turkish force his own government had, a year earlier, been arming.

The conference

He was not made to. A conference of the Allied generals with İsmet Pasha, Kemal's commander and the man who would shortly be sent to negotiate at Lausanne, was arranged at Mudania in early October. Harington went by battleship. The room was, in his own description, "just a bare room on the sea" — and dead Greek soldiers, recently pushed off the pier by Turkish troops, were still washing up against it while the generals talked.

He had never seen Kemalist soldiers before. During the lunch recess he asked an interpreter to put a question to the ones posted outside — had any of them been British prisoners during the war, and had they been well fed? "Their faces lit up and they were full of smiles," he wrote; it was evident they had never eaten so well before or since.

The talks nearly broke down on twenty-eight separate points of disagreement. A French politician who had recently been to Ankara tried to press his own settlement on Harington in the recess, offering to have the French general sign over Harington's head if Harington would not. Harington told him he had never asked anyone to take his responsibility and was not going to start, went back to his ship, and returned the following afternoon for what he told İsmet Pasha plainly was the Allies' final word. It held. A convention was signed on 11 October 1922, restoring eastern Thrace to Turkish administration and requiring the Allies to treat the Ankara government, not the sultan's, as the authority they were dealing with.

Three weeks later, on 1 November, the Grand National Assembly voted the sultanate out of existence. By then the question the vote settled — who in Turkey actually held the power to make the state's decisions — was one Harington had already been forced to answer at a bare table by the water, weeks before anybody in Ankara asked a committee to debate it.

Sovereignty is not given

Drafted from Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1927 (1929)end

On 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly at Ankara abolished the Ottoman sultanate. Mustafa Kemal's own account of the day, delivered in a speech five years later, is the best evidence there is of how it was done and what he thought he was doing.

The obstacle was a committee. Three committees of the Assembly had been put in one room to work out whether the caliphate could be separated from the sultanate, and the religious scholars on the Şeriye committee were arguing that it could not. The men who disagreed with them, Kemal says, would not come forward and say so. He watched the debate from a corner of a crowded room and concluded that nothing he wanted was going to come out of it.

Then he asked the chairman for permission to speak, stood on the bench in front of him, and said this in a loud voice:

Gentlemen, neither the sovereignty nor the right to govern can be transferred by one person to anybody else by an academic debate. Sovereignty is acquired by force, by power and by violence. It was by violence that the sons of Osman acquired the power to rule over the Turkish nation and to maintain their rule for more than six centuries. It is now the nation that revolts against these usurpers, puts them in their right place and actually carries on their sovereignty. This is an actual fact.

And then the sentence that ended the discussion:

If those who are assembled here, the Assembly and everybody else, would find this quite natural, it would be very appropriate from my point of view. Conversely, the reality will nevertheless be manifested in the necessary form, but in that event it is possible that some heads will be cut off.

One of the scholars, the deputy for Ankara, replied: Pardon me, we had regarded the question in another light. Now we are informed.

The vote

The draft act was written the same day and read that afternoon. Somebody moved a roll-call vote and Kemal went to the tribune to say the procedure was useless, because he believed the Assembly would adopt the principles unanimously.

There were shouts of Vote! The chairman put the motion and declared it unanimously agreed. One voice was heard saying I am against it, and was drowned in cries of Silence!

Kemal's own summary of the afternoon is the last line of the section:

In this way, Gentlemen, the curtain fell on the last act of the overthrow and breakdown of the Ottoman Monarchy.

What the last sultan did

Mehmed VI did not contest it. On 17 November the British commander in Constantinople, General Harington, notified Ankara by letter that His Majesty had placed himself under the protection of England and left the city on a British man-of-war.

The communiqué appended to it explains that the sultan, appreciating the danger threatening his life and freedom, had appealed for English protection in his capacity as Caliph of all the Mohamedans, and asked to be taken somewhere else, and that his desire had been fulfilled that morning.

Kemal also prints a second letter, from Harington to one of the sultan's daughters, relaying a wireless message from the ship as it approached Malta: the sultan wished to know how his family were, the general had gone to the Yıldız palace to find out, and the sultan's wife was in the best of health.

Kemal's comment on that letter is four words. This last letter is not worthy of notice.

Six centuries of the house of Osman, and the reigning head of it leaving his capital on somebody else's warship, asking by radio after his wife.

And the office

Drafted from Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1927 (1929)afterlife

The sultanate went in 1922 and the caliphate did not. It was separated off and given to a cousin, Abdülmecid, who held it for sixteen months as a religious dignity with no state attached.

On 3 March 1924 the Assembly abolished that too, in a package of measures Kemal lists together and which are more revealing as a set than singly. The Ministry for Religious Affairs and the pious endowments were suppressed. Every educational institution in Turkey, the religious schools included, was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction. And:

The Caliph is declared deposed and the dignity abolished. All members of the deposed Ottoman dynasty are for ever forbidden to reside within the frontiers of the territory of the Turkish Republic.

That is the whole of it. An office that had existed since the death of the Prophet, and had been claimed by the Ottoman sultans for four centuries, ended in a clause of a bill about schools.

He was offered it

Twice, and he says so.

Certain persons, he writes, who wrongly believed that the caliphate had to be maintained for religious and political reasons, proposed at the last moment that he should take the office himself. He gave a negative reply immediately.

Then a deputy called Rasih Efendi, an ecclesiastic who had been leading a Red Crescent delegation in India, came back through Egypt and asked for an interview, and reported that Muslims across the countries he had travelled through wanted Kemal to become caliph, and that he had been commissioned to say so.

Kemal's reply to him is the most interesting sentence in the whole business:

You are a Doctor of Religious Right. You know that Caliph signifies Chief of the State. How can I accept the proposals and desires of people who are governed by kings and emperors?

That is a refusal on a specific ground, and it is not piety and it is not secularism exactly. It is that the caliphate is a political office; that the people offering it to him were subjects of the British and Dutch empires; and that accepting authority over them would make the Turkish republic responsible for them, which was the last thing it wanted after nine years of war.

The office was abolished, in other words, partly because taking it seriously would have been an unlimited liability.

Three endings of the same thing

The caliphate had stopped before. It stopped at Baghdad in 1258, when Hulagu had al-Musta'sim killed. It stopped at Cairo in 1517, when Selim removed the last of the shadow Abbasids to Constantinople with the rest of the moveable property of the Mamluk state.

The third time, in 1924, is the only one that was not done by an army. It was done by a vote, in a parliament, in the successor state of the empire that had been holding the office — and the man who could have taken it declined on the grounds that it would have obliged him to have opinions about India.

What the dissolution left

The family went into exile and mostly stayed there; the ban on the dynasty was lifted for women in 1952 and for men in 1974.

What the empire left on the ground is harder to summarise and much larger. The political map of the modern Middle East, the Balkans and the Caucasus is substantially the shape this dissolution produced, and a great many of the borders drawn after 1918 follow lines the Ottomans had used as provincial boundaries — because the mandate authorities used the administrative divisions they found.

And the argument did not stop. Every movement since 1924 that has proposed to restore a caliphate has been arguing with a vote taken in Ankara on a Monday afternoon, in a bill that also nationalised the schools.