Ottoman Empire

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The Ottomans are one of the greatest and most powerful civilizations of the modern period. Their moment of glory in the sixteenth century represents one of the heights of human creativity, optimism, and artistry. The empire they built was the largest and most influential of the Muslim empires of the modern period, and their culture and military expansion crossed over into Europe. Not since the expansion of Islam into Spain in the eighth century had Islam seemed poised to establish a European presence as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like that earlier expansion, the Ottomans established an empire over European territory and established Islamic traditions and culture that last to the current day (the Muslims in Bosnia are the last descendants of the Ottoman presence in Europe).

The Ottoman empire lasted until the twentieth century. While historians like to talk about empires in terms of growth and decline, the Ottomans were a force to be reckoned with, militarily and culturally, right up until the break-up of the empire in the first decades of this century. The real end to the Ottoman culture came with the secularization of Turkey after World War II along European models of government. The transition to a secular state was not an easy one and its repercussions are still being felt in Turkish society today; nevertheless, secularization represents the real break with the Ottoman tradition and heritage.

We will start with the greatest figure of Ottoman history, the Sultan Suleyman, who built from the conquests of his father a great city, military machine, empire, and culture. No culture seems to invite such a total association of the entire history and greatness of the culture in a single individual as Ottoman culture does. This is not just a European prejudice; Muslims themselves can hardly resist the temptation of summing up the whole of Ottoman culture and history in this brilliant and dignified human being. For very few figures in history encompassed so much of their culture, and very few near-mythical figures have left so much of their humanity to posterity. For Islam produces an odd relationship between individuals and history. The inherent dignity and perfectibility of humanity in Islam tends to produce mythical figures like Suleyman who seem to master every human art; but the spiritual egalitarianism of the religion also leads to a surprising humanisation of these mythical figures. Sit back and prepare yourself for a tour of one of the great flowerings of human genius, dignity, and cultural creativity.

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The Ottomans arose from the obscure reaches of Anatolia in the west of Turkey; these Western Turks were called the Oghuz. They had come primarily as settlers during the reign of the Seljuks in Turkey (1098-130; the Anatolian frontier was largely hostile to Islam Some of them were warriors to the Islamic faith carrying out jihad, or "holy struggle," to spread the faith among hostile unbelievers. It was a tough life in Anatolia; the Seljuks had been the first to maintain power over the area.

The Ottomans soon ruled a small military state in western Anatolia by 1300, about the time the Seljuk state was crumbling apart. This small state was in conflict with several other small Muslim states, each preying on the other for territory. By 1400, however, the Ottomans had managed to extend their influence over much of Anatolia and even into Byzantine territory in eastern Europe: Macedonia and Bulgaria. In 1402, the Ottomans moved their capital to Edirne in Europe where they threatened the last great bastion of the Byzantine Empire, its capital, Constantinople. The city seemed to defy the great expansion of Islam. No matter how much territory fell to the Muslims, Constantinople resisted every siege and every invasion. The Ottomans, however, wanted to break this cycle. Not only would the seizure of Constantinople represent a powerful symbol of Ottoman power, but it would make the Ottomans master of east-west trade. In 1453, Sultan Mehmed (1451-1481), who was called "The Conqueror," finally took this one last remnant of Byzantium and renamed it, Istanbul. From that point onwards, the capital of the Ottoman Europe would remain fixed in Istanbul and, under the patronage of the Ottoman sultans, become one of the wealthiest and most cultured cities of the early modern world.

The Ottoman Empire had been started. It expanded greatly under Sultan Selim I (1512-1520), but it was under his son, Sultan Suleyman (1520-1566), called "The Lawmaker" in Islamic history and "The Magnificent" in Europe, that the empire would reach its greatest expansion over Asia and Europe.

The Ottoman State
The Ottomans inherited a rich mixture of political traditions from vastly disparate ethnic groups: Turks, Persians, Mongols, Mesopotamian and, of course, Islam. The Ottoman state, like the Turkish, Mongol, and Mesopotamian states rested on a principle of absolute authority in the monarch. The nature of Ottoman autocracy, however, is greatly misunderstood and misinterpreted in the West, particularly in world history textbooks.

The central function of the ruler or Sultan in Ottoman political theory was to guarantee justice ('adala in Arabic) in the land. All authority hinges on the ruler's personal commitment to justice. This idea has both Turco-Persian and Islamic aspects. In Islamic political theory, the model of the just ruler was Solomon in the Hebrew histories (Suleyman is named after Solomon). The justice represented by the Solomonic ruler is a distributive justice; this is a justice of fairness and equity that comes closer to the Western notion of justice. In addition, however, 'adale has Turco-Persian coordinates; in this tradition, 'adale, or justice, is the protection of the helpless from the rapacity of corrupt and predatory government. In this sense, justice involves protecting the lowest members of society, the peasantry, from unfair taxation, corrupt magistracy, and inequitable courts. This, in Ottoman political theory, was the primary task of the Sultan. He personally protected his people from the excesses of government, such as predatory taxation and the corruption of local officials. For the Ottomans, the ruler could only guarantee this justice if he had absolute power. For if he was not an absolute ruler, that meant that he would be dependent on others and so subject to corruption. Absolute authority, then, was at the service of building a just government and laws rather than elevating the ruler above the law as Europeans have interpreted the Sultanate.

In order to ensure 'adale , the Ottomans set up a number of practices and institutions in the central government surrounding the Sultan. The first was the establishment of a bureaucracy drawn from the Sultan's inner circle. This bureaucracy in turn controlled local governments; this would become the model of European absolutism in the seventeenth century. Other institutions and political practices were:

Observance of government : The Sultan's job was primarily to keep a watch on all the officials. In some cases, this observance of government involved the personal involvement of the Sultan. He would sometimes observe in secret the proceedings of the Diwan, which was the central advisory group to the sultan, and sometimes observe proceedings of ulama courts. For instance, at about the same time that Martin Luther was condemned to death by the Diet of Worms, Sultan Suleyman secretly observed the trial of Molla Kabiz who asserted the spiritual superiority of Jesus Christ over Muhammad. After questioning by the ulama court and refusing to recant, Molla was sentenced to death. Suleyman, however, overturned the verdict because the arguments the courts made had not disproven Molla's arguments (eventually, Molla's arguments were overcome in a later trial). Periodically, the Sultan was required to tour local governments in disguise to ensure that magistrates and justices were operating justly. If the Sultan believed that an injustice was being committed against the people, he would interfere directly and overturn the decision. Islamic historians argue that the Ottoman Empire decline primarily because later Sultans took less and less interest in maintaining justice in their Empire. For the most part, however, the Sultan monitored local officials through a vast, complex, and elaborate system of spies who would report back to the central bureaucracy. The intelligence gathering system in the Ottoman Empire was the best in the world until the twentieth century!

Siyasa : Rooting out corruption meant nothing if nothing was done about it. Public agents and officials that abused their power and the peasantry were subjected to a special jurisdiction called the siyasa. The siyasa were a set of severe punishments imposed by the Sultan on corrupt officials; there was no way out, no cash compensation could take the place of the corporeal or, more often, capital punishments swiftly and severely meted out to corrupt officials. In the siyasa system, the most severe crimes involved illegal taxation or forced labor of the peasantry, staying in their homes without permission or billetting troops without permission, and requiring peasants against their will to provide food for them or for soldiers. Such crimes almost certainly meant the death penalty.

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Public declaration of laws and taxes : In order to prevent fraudulent taxes and arbitrary laws by public officials, the Sultanic "orders" (firman ) and taxes were declared and posted in public. There was, then, always direct dissemination of central government to the people directly.

Accessibility : Perhaps the most important aspect of Ottoman centralized government was universal access to centralized authority. The highest reaches of power—with the exception of the person of the Sultan—was available to each and every citizen of the Empire. Every single member of Ottoman society could approach the Imperial Council with grievances against government officials; these official petitions were called ard-i mahdar and were always treated with the utmost seriousness. If the Imperial Council ruled against the officials, they would often be subjected to the siyasa .

Public opinion : The most common misconception about Islamic rulers in general and Ottoman rulers in particular was that they were removed, aloof, and uninterested in their people. While this may be physically true, it was not ideologically true. In fact, in the Ottoman state, public opinion was regarded as the only true foundation on which state authority rested. If the people ceased to support their rulers, it was argued, then the rulers would soon fall from power. The Sultanic government, then, assiduously cultivated public opinion, for it was recognized that the enemies of the Sultan were also cultivating adverse public opinion. The government did this not only through propaganda, but through policy as well. In addition to prosecuting corrupt government officials and publicly declaring taxes and laws, the Ottoman government also cultivated public opinion in its wars of conquests. Soldiers were not allowed to mistreat peasants nor take anything from them without their permission or reimbursement. All the Ottoman wars of the conquest in the sixteenth century were assiduously planned years in advance. The government would lay up stores of supplies all along the campaign route so that the armies could feed themselves without taking anything from the general population. The Ottoman conquerors believed that no conquest could stand without the goodwill of the general population of the conquered, so military campaigns were remarkably fair and easy on the average person.

The Ottomans also paid attention to an early form of public opinion polling and were probably the first government to actively monitor public opinion through quantifiable means. The "opinion poll" that they used was the Friday prayers. In most Islamic states, one of the aspects of Friday prayer is to pray for the welfare and life of the ruler. This is an optional part of the Friday prayer, so its inclusion generally means that the members of the mosque think well of the ruler. Its omission frequently means the opposite. The Ottomans paid very strict attention to Friday prayers throughout the Empire in order to precisely guage public sentiments.

The Structure of Government
Officially, the Sultan was the government. He enjoyed absolute power and, in theory at least, was personally involved in every governmental decision. In the Ottoman experience of government, everything representing the state government issued from the hands of the Sultan himself.

The Sultan also assumed the title of Caliph, or supreme temporal leader, of Islam. The Ottomans claimed this title for several reaons: the two major holy sites, Mecca and Medina, were part of the Empire, and the primary goal of the government was the security of Muslims around the world, particularly the security of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. As Caliph, the Sultan was responsible for Islamic orthodoxy. Almost all of the military conquests and annexations of other countries were done for one of two reasons: to guarantee the safe passage of Muslims to Mecca (the justification for invading non-Muslim territories) and the rooting out of heterodox or heretical Islamic practices and beliefs (the justification for invading or annexing Muslim territories).

Historians simply can't agree on how the Sultanate was passed from generation to generation among the Ottomans. In the early history of the Empire, the Sultanate clearly passes from father to eldest son; in 1603, at the death of Ahmed I (1603-1617), the Sultanate passed to the brother of the Sultan. Still, the Ottomans did not seem to have a hereditary system based on primogeniture (crown passes to the eldest son) or seniority (crown passes to the next oldest brother). In both Turkish and Mongol monarchical systems, the passing of the crown is a haphazard affair. Both the Turkish and Mongol peoples believed that the crown fell to the most worthy inheritor. Each individual in the hereditary line, brothers and sons, were equally entitled to the crown. This meant that successions were almost always major struggles among contending parties. The Ottomans seem to have operated in a similar system. When a Sultan passed away, the crown, it was believed, fell to the most worthy successor (almost always the eldest son). Selim I had to fight for the Sultanate, but Suleyman was the only son of Selim and so inherited the crown without a struggle. Once a Sultan had assumed the throne, all his brothers were executed as well as all their sons—had Selim I lost his bid for the crown, Suleyman would have been killed. These executions guaranteed that there would be no future wars or struggles between claimants to the throne since all the contenders but one were out of the picture.

In the seventeenth century, Ottoman Sultans began to revise this practice and simply imprisoned their brothers—this is what permitted Ahmed I to be succeeded by his brother. Western historians point to this practice as one of the central reasons why the Sultanic government failed. Since the crown was falling to individuals that had been imprisoned much if not most of their lives, the Ottoman state saw a succession of mad Sultans and the corresponding increase in power of a corrupt bureaucracy.

The fundamental qualification for the Sultanate was the individual's worthiness to fill the position. The Ottomans believed that simple succession proved that the Sultan was worthy of the crown; however, the Sultan may grow old, feeble, or corrupt and thus lose his worthiness to serve as Sultan. Selim I came to the throne by deposing his old father, Bayezid II (1481-1512), who was too old to lead the army against external threats. When Suleyman had become an old man, his two sons, Bayezid and Mustafa, his favorite son, plotted to overthrow him. Faced with this treason, the old Suleyman had to execute them both and this seems to have broken his spirit completely.

The Ottomans followed the old Turkish and Mongol tradition of considering the Sultan's lands to be a joint possession of the Sultan's family. Accordingly, the Ottoman lands were parcelled out to members of the royal family when each Sultan came to power. Conquered lands were considered the private property of the Sultan.

Although the Sultan was regarded as personally responsible for every government decision, in reality the government was run by a large bureaucracy. This bureaucracy was controlled by a rigid and complex set of rules, and the Sultan himself was constrained by these rules. At the top of the bureaucracy was the Diwan ("couch"), which served as a cabinet to the Sultan for making decisions. The most powerful member of the Sultan's government was the Grand Vizier who largely oversaw all the executive functions of the government. Appointments to these positions were not arbitrary but followed strict rules.

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Suleyman in his time was regarded as the most significant ruler in the world, by both Muslims and Europeans. His military empire expanded greatly both to the east and west, and he threatened to overrun the heart of Europe itself. In Constantinople, he embarked on vast cultural and architectural projects. Istanbul in the middle of the sixteenth century was architecturally the most energetic and innovative city in the world. While he was a brilliant military strategist and canny politician, he was also a cultivator of the arts. Suleyman's poetry is among the best poetry in Islam, and he sponsored an army of artists, religious thinkers, and philosophers that outshone the most educated courts of Europe.

Suleyman the Just
In Islamic history, Suleyman is regarded as the perfect Islamic ruler in history. He is asserted as embodying all the necessary characteristics of an Islamic ruler, the most important of which is justice ('adale ). The Qur'an itself points to King Solomon as embodying the perfect monarch because he so perfectly embodied 'adale ; Suleyman, named after Solomon, is regarded in Islamic history as the second Solomon. The reign of Suleyman in Ottoman and Islamic history is generally regarded as the period of greatest justice and harmony in any Islamic state.

Suleyman the Lawgiver
The Europeans called him "The Magnificent," but the Ottomans called him Kanuni, or "The Lawgiver." The Suleymanie Mosque, built for Suleyman, describes Suleyman in its inscription as Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye , or "Propagator of the Sultanic Laws." The primacy of Suleyman as a law-giver is at the foundation of his place in Islamic history and world view. It is perhaps important to step back a moment and closely examine this title to fully understand Suleyman's place in history.

The word used for law here, kanun, has a very specific reference. In Islamic tradition, the Shari'ah, or laws originally derived from the Qur'an , are meant to be universally applied across all Islamic states. No Islamic ruler has the power to overturn or replace these laws. So what laws was Suleyman "giving" to the Islamic world? What precisely does kanun refer to since it doesn't refer to the main body of Islamic law, the Shari'ah ?

The kanun refer to situational decisions that are not covered by the Shari'ah . Even though the Shari'ah provides all necessary laws, it's recognized that some situations fall outside their parameters. In Islamic tradition, if a case fell outside the parameters of the Shari'ah , then a judgement or rule in the case could be arrived at through analogy with rules or cases that are covered by the Shari'ah . This method of juridical thinking was only accepted by the most liberal school of Shari'ah , Hanifism, so it is no surprise that Hanifism dominated Ottoman law.

The Ottomans, however, elevated kanun into an entire code of laws independent of the Shari'ah . The first two centuries of Ottoman rule, from 1350 to 1550, saw an explosion of kanun rulings and laws, so that by the beginning of the sixteenth century, the kanun were a complete and independent set of laws that by and large were more important than the Shari'ah . This unique situation was brought about in part because of the unique heritage of the Ottomans. In both Turkish and Mongol traditions, the imperial law, or law pronounced by the monarch, was considered sacred. They even had a special word for it: the Turks called it Türe and the Mongols called it Yasa . In the system of Türe and Yasa , imperial law was regarded as the essential and sacred foundation of the empire. When this tradition collided with the Islamic Shari'ah tradition, a compromised system combining both was formed.

The Sultanic laws were first collected together by Mehmed the Conqueror. Mehmed divided the kanun into two separate sets or laws. The first set dealt with the organization of government and the military, and the second set dealt with the taxation and treatment of the peasantry. The latter group was added to after the death of Mehmed and the Ottoman kanun pretty much crystallized into its final form in 1501. Suleyman, for his part, revised the law code, but on the whole the Suleyman code of laws is pretty identical to the 1501 system of laws. However, it was under Suleyman that the laws took their final form; no more revisions were made after his reign. From this point onwards, this code of laws was called, kanun-i 'Osmani , or the "Ottoman laws."

Suleyman the Conqueror
Western historians know Suleyman primarily as a conqueror, for he made Europe know fear like it had never known of any other Islamic state. Conquest, like every other aspect of the Ottoman state and culture, was a multicultural heritage, with origins as far back as Mesopotamia and Persia, and as far afield as the original Mongol and Turkish peoples in eastern and central Asia.

Suleyman had many titles; in inscriptions he calls himself:
Slave of God, powerful with the power of God, deputy of God on earth, obeying the commands of the Qur'an and enforcing them throughout the world, master of all lands, the shadow of God over all nations, Sultan of Sultans in all the lands of Persians and Arabs, the propagator of Sultanic laws (Nashiru kawanin al-Sultaniyye ), the tenth Sultan of the Ottoman Khans, Sultan, son of Sultan, Suleyman Khan.
Slave of God, master of the world, I am Suleyman and my name is read in all the prayers in all the cities of Islam. I am the Shah of Baghdad and Iraq, Caesar of all the lands of Rome, and the Sultan of Egypt. I seized the Hungarian crown and gave it to the least of my slaves.
He called himself the "master of the lands of Caesar and Alexander the Great," and later as simply, "Caesar." It's hard, of course, not to be slightly humbled by assertions of such greatness, and no ruler in the sixteenth century was more adept at diminishing the egos of all the other rulers surrounding him.

Suleyman believed, however, that the entire world was his possession as a gift of God. Even though he did not occupy Roman lands, he still claimed them as his own and almost launched an invasion of Rome (the city came within a few hairbreadths of Ottoman invasion in Suleyman's expedition against Corfu). In Europe, he conquered Rhodes, a large part of Greece, Hungary, and a major part of the Austrian Empire. His campaign against the Austrians took him right to the doorway of Vienna.

Besides invasions and campaigns, Suleyman was a major player in the politics of Europe. He pursued an aggressive policy of European destabilization; in particular, he wanted to destabilize both the Roman Catholic church and the Holy Roman Empire. When European Christianity split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states, Suleyman poured financial support into Protestant countries in order to guarantee that Europe remain religiously and politically destabilized and so ripe for an invasion. Several historians, in fact, have argued that Protestantism would never have succeeded except for the financial support of the Ottoman Empire.

Suleyman was responding to an aggressively expanding Europe. Like most other non-Europeans, Suleyman fully understood the consequences of European expansion and saw Europe as the principle threat to Islam. The Islamic world was beginning to shrink under this expansion. Portugal had invaded several Muslim cities in eastern Africa in order to dominate trade with India, and Russians, which the Ottomans regarded as European, were pushing central Asians south when the Russian expansion began in the sixteenth century. So in addition to invading and destabilizing Europe, Suleyman pursued a policy of helping any Muslim country threatened by European expansion. It was this role that gave Suleyman the right, in the eyes of the Ottomans, to declare himself as supreme Caliph of Islam. He was the only one successfully protecting Islam from the unbelievers and, as the protector of Islam, deserved to be the ruler of Islam.

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While the expansion of European power helps explain Suleyman's conquest of European territories, it doesn't help us when it comes to the vast amount of Islamic territory that he invaded or simply annexed. How does conquering Islamic territory "protect" Islam? The Ottomans understood this as belonging to Suleyman's task as universal Caliph of Islam. This role demanded that Suleyman also see to the integrity of the faith itself and to root out heresy and heterodoxy. His annexation of Islamic territory, such as the annexation of Arabia, were justified by asserting that the ruling dynasties had abandoned orthodox belief or practice. Each of these invasions or annexations were preceded, however, by a religious judgement by Islamic scholars as to the orthodoxy of the ruling dynasty.

Suleyman the Builder
Suleyman undertook to make Istanbul the center of Islamic civilization. He began a series of building projects, including bridges, mosques, and palaces, that rivalled the greatest building projects of the world in that century. The greatest and most brilliant architect of human history was in his employ: Sinan. The mosques built by Sinan are considered the greatest architectural triumphs of Islam and possibly the world. They are more than just awe-inspiring; they represent a unique genius in dealing with nearly insurmountable engineering problems.

Suleyman was a great cultivator of the arts and is considered one of the great poets of Islam. Under Suleyman, Istanbul became the center of visual art, music, writing, and philosophy in the Islamic world. This cultural flowering during the reign of Suleyman represents the most creative period in Ottoman history; almost all the cultural forms that we associate with the Ottomans date from this time.

The reign of Suleyman, however, is generally regarded, by both Islamic and Western historians, as the high point of Ottoman culture and history. While Ottoman culture flourishes during the reign of Selim II, Suleyman's son, the power of the state, internally and externally, began to perceptibly decline. Islamic historians believe that the decline was due to two factors: the decreased vigilance of the Sultan over the functions of government and their consequent corruption, and the decreased interest of the government in popular opinion. Western historians are not sure how to explain the decline after the death of Suleyman. A major factor seems to be a series of eccentric and sometimes insane Sultans all through the seventeenth century. When the Ottomans abandoned the practice of killing all rivals to the throne, they began to imprison them. The Sultanate, then, often fell to individuals who had been imprisoned for decades and, well, there was often no cream filling in those Twinkies. This led to the growth of the power of the bureaucracy and its consequent corruption (this does not fundamentally disagree with the Islamic version of Ottoman history). The decline in the Ottoman Empire in the Western tradition is also considerably determined by the ever-increasing expansion of the European powers. How much this played a direct part in the decline of the Ottomans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is difficult to determine, but there is no question that the last century of the Ottomans (19th), the principle historical factor in Ottoman decline was the hyper-aggressive expansion of European colonial powers. Whatever the reason, the Ottoman Empire begins its slow transformation under Selim II, the son of Suleyman.