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Turgut Özal

The Fall of the Ottoman Empire East-West Differentietion

"Good fortune is not far removed from adversity."
  Koran, XCIV, 5-6

The Christian communities of the Balkans won their independence only after a long and bitter struggle. I will deal later with this conflict which, in the eyes of western Europe, is at the origin of the black propaganda concerning the Ottoman Turks. First I want to speak about the dismantling and fall of the Ottoman Empire.

By the end of the sixteenth century the struggle between the Turks and the West had been going on for five hundred years (from the crusades to the end of the Ottoman expansion in the Balkans). Despite this, the image of the Turks in the West around 1600 was not a bad one. One could even say that in some respects they were regarded favourably. The fear inspired by the Turks was indeed part of it, mixed with the respect and admiration generally accorded to conquerors. We should not forget that feudal values such as heroism, courage, generosity, discipline, and integrity still predominated in the Europe of that time. The Turk and the Frank were enemies during the crusades, but they were united by a belief in certain common values. All men who confront each other in mortal combat know moments of mutual respect, feelings of affinity which bond them to each other. Religious differences cannot alter such feelings-they are fundamental to the man.

However, the differences between them were not limited to religion. Machiavelli was the first to underline the difference in their social structures. To conquer the Ottoman Empire by war was, according to him, a difficult task, because its sovereign, although ruling over vast areas, concentrated in his person the authority necessary to mobilize all the forces of the country. However, if one did manage to win a significant battle against the Ottomans, the Empire might founder rapidly. This was because the absence of local authorities who were subordinated to a central authority would prevent effective local resistance. Conversely, in western Europe the power of the sovereigns was constrained by power at the local level. It was easier to defeat such nations in war, but difficult to conquer them, because of strong local resistance.

These differences, evident from the beginning, were steadily multiplied in the West by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the creation of national states, democracy, and the industrial revolution. As this metamorphosis in the West developed and differentiated it from the Ottoman Empire, so the image the West had of the Turks darkened.

The true reasons for the genesis of empires are as little known as those for their fall. The subjects of an empire in decline know well that `something is wrong'. They make efforts to find solutions but, inexplicably, they remain powerless to reverse the tendency to dissolution, as FitzGerald puts it in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on, nor all thy piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it

Nevertheless, I believe in neither the life cycles of states and civilizations nor the existence of providentially ordained doom for the Ottomans.

Certain circumstantial reasons for their decline are in any case apparent. The first of these concerns those who govern. In a country where the main authority was at the centre, the personality of the Sultans was of vital importance. For some unknown reason, while all the Sultans up to Süleyman the Magnificent were great rulers, after him the system of the Ottoman Palace produced mostly mediocre sovereigns. It is claimed that this may have resulted from the domination exercised by the women of the Palace. Was this so? Or did the Sultans themselves take refuge among the women in order to escape problems too great for them to tackle as mortal human beings? Whatever the reason, it should nevertheless not be forgotten that in the course of a thousand years of Byzantine history there were no fewer than fourteen changes of dynasty, whereas just one Ottoman dynasty stayed in power for six hundred years. Political instability was therefore very relative.

The second reason concerns the size of the Empire. This far exceeded optimum dimensions which could be defended, given the means of transport and communication which existed in those days.

There were two fronts, one to the east, the other to the west, with Istanbul at the centre. In the course of one season a military campaign could not be mounted on more than one front, while the other had to remain undefended. Byzantium had experienced the same strategic dilemma. This was the reason behind the Agreement of Amasya whereby Süleyman ceded Tabriz to Iran. The eastern frontier thus gained a certain stability. The failure of the siege of Vienna in 1529 marked the limit of expansion to the west.

The expedition to Malta in 1565 failed similarly. The victory of Preveza in 1538 was followed by the defeat of Lepanto in 1571 which marked the beginning of the end of Ottoman maritime domination. Certainly, there was still the conquest of Tunisia and of Cyprus in 1571, the victory of Alcazarquivir in 1578, whereby Morocco passed for a short time under nominal Ottoman protection, the capture of Baghdad and Mosul in 1586, the partial occupation of the Caucasian region in 1570-90, and finally the conquest of Crete in 1669 and the taking of Podolia from the Poles. But by 1606 the Habsburg dynasty, after thirteen years of war, had managed to put itself on an equal footing with the Ottoman dynasty. The recapture of Baghdad defined a new Irano-Ottoman frontier in 1639.

The Ottoman Empire, having reached its greatest extent, was then obliged to adopt a defensive strategy. Unlike expansion, defence needed a permanent and more numerous army, which soon came to represent an enormous burden on the economy. In addition, superiority of arms henceforth belonged to the West. Having learned the art of war from the Ottomans on the fields of battle, the western generals perfected effective new tactics which resulted in a much higher cost to the Ottomans in both men and material resources.

I do not share the view that the end of expansion financially harmed Ottoman society by being the end of the lucrative mission of the Ghazis (frontier defenders of Islam). Plunder, which was the common practice of the armies of the day, did not constitute an important source of revenue, either for the treasury or for the army. The main revenues came from the fiefs. The loss of timariot lands resulting from defeats was therefore much more significant than the loss of booty. As for the janissaries, they were maintained by the State and received considerable sums of money also during the expansionist period. Moreover, their principles and austere discipline forbade extravagant expenditure. It was the loss of lands, particularly those inhabited by the Muslim population, which weakened the Ottoman treasury and the armed forces.

The same evolution took place at sea. Whereas at the time of the crusades Venice dominated all trade in the eastern Mediterranean, under Mehmet the Conqueror and Selim I the Ottomans challenged their control of the maritime and trade routes. During the reign of Süleyman, the struggle went almost totally in favour of the Ottomans, but the difficulty of the task can be judged by the time that it took to capture the Aegean islands, Cyprus, and Crete.

The Ottomans were not able to conquer three quarters of the islands and the sea routes in the Mediterranean until the sixteenth century, at which time they also gained control of the vital routes of Europe. The encirclement of the West, both in the Mediterranean and in eastern Europe, forced Portugal and Spain, Europe's maritime powers, to turn to outflanking the Ottoman domination. In fact, for the second time - the crusades being the first - Europe expanded overseas. She reached America by crossing the Atlantic, and Asia by rounding the Cape of Good Hope and passing through the Straits of Magellan into the Pacific Ocean. The Ottomans understood only too well what was at stake. As one of our statesmen, Kemalpa?azade, said to Selim I: `My Lord, you dwell in a city whose benefactor is the sea. If the sea is not safe no ships will come, and if ship comes Istanbul perishes.

Around 1580 an Ottoman geographer, in a report to Murat III on the New World, warned of the dangers threatening Islamic countries, and the upheaval in trade that would result from Europeans establishing themselves on the coasts of America, India, and the Persian Gulf. He counseled the Sultan to open a canal across the Isthmus of Suez, and to send a fleet to take the ports of India and Sind.

In 1625 another Ottoman observer, Omar Talip, considered that the danger had become pressing:

Now the Europeans have learnt to know the whole world; they send their ships everywhere and seize important ports. Formerly, the goods of India, Sind, and China used to come to Suez, and were distributed by Muslims to all the world. But now these goods are carried on Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships to Frangistan, and are spread all over the world from there. What they do not need themselves they bring to Istanbul and other Islamic lands, and sell it for five times the price, thus earning much money. For this reason gold and silver are becoming scarce in the lands of Islam. The Ottoman Empire must seize the shores of Yemen and the trade passing that way; otherwise before very long, the Europeans will rule over the lands of Islam.

Such considerations explain the conquests of Syria and Egypt, hastily made by Selim I in 1517. The Mamelukes had no naval tradition, and did not possess the wood to construct ships. The Ottomans, as soon as they had access to the Red Sea, built a large fleet with timber brought from Cilicia. They did not succeed in preventing the Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean, but neither did Portugal succeed in monopolizing the route to India and China. Quantities of Asiatic products continued to arrive in the markets of the eastern Mediterranean, brought in by Turkish ships.

Although during the reign of Süleyman the Ottoman fleet had been sent far to the east at the request of Indonesia and the Muslim Indian maharajas, particularly the Maharaja of Gujurat, it was not possible to prevent western Europe taking over the Asiatic trade little by little.

Through their occupation of the Crimea and the Caucasus, the Ottomans controlled the northern trade route. The taking of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) by Russia placed this route in danger too. To counteract this, the Grand Vizir, Sokullu, proposed joining the rivers Don and Volga by a canal dug at the point where they came nearest to each other. Six thousand workers, protected by an army of thirteen thousand men, set to work in 1559, but the project had to be abandoned because of the rigorous of the winter and the lack of the required technology at that time. Finally the Ottomans also lost the northern trade.

The historical importance of these events cannot be overstated. At a time `when a few ships' companies of Western mariners embarked on the enterprise of unifying the world, Emperor Babur, `a descendant in the fifth generation of Tamer lane, the Transoxanian conqueror, made the last attempt to unify the world by land operations from a continental centre. Babur started his career as prince of Farghana in the upper valley of the Jaxartes: a small country which had been the centre (of the sedentary world) since the second century BC. Babur invaded India overland twenty-one years after da Gama had arrived there by sea. Babur refers to his own distant kinsmen, the Ottoman Turks in his famous autobiography as `happy warriors who had succeeded where the primitive Arabs had signally failed, in conquering for Islam the homeland of Eastern Orthodox Christendom.' In that world, Babur's Farghana was the central point, and the Turks were, in Babur's day, the central family of nations. A Turco-centric history of the world has been published by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk' which was `a brilliant feat of genuine historical intuition; far from the fourth century of the Christian era, when they (Turks) pushed the last of their Indo-European-speaking predecessors off the Steppe, down to the seventeenth century, which witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman, the Safawi and Timurid Turkish dynasties in their respective domains of Rum, Iran and India, the Turkish-speaking peoples really were the keystone of the Asiatic arch from which the pre-da Gaman belt of civilizations hung suspended. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. In Babur's lifetime the centre of the world made a sudden jump to its extreme western verge. . .' The consequences of this discrete development in terms of geopolitics and economics have been realized only in the course of the following centuries.

The loss of the trade routes did not immediately put an end to trade, but revenues gradually diminished, while the volume of transactions covered by the Capitulation's increased.

These famous Capitulation's were one of the factors that brought about the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The word is little understood in the Europe of today. The Capitulations were a system of trade agreements which granted certain fiscal privileges to foreign importers and exporters. These advantages were denied to indigenous merchants, who were thus forced to focus exclusively on internal commerce.

It should be remembered that the first Capitulations were granted by Byzantium to the Republic of Venice in 1082, and later were endorsed by the Anatolian Seljuks. The first Ottoman Capitulations were granted to the Genoese in 1352, but the most significant were those given to Venice in 1454, one year after the conquest of Istanbul.

There is a clear contradiction here. On the one hand the Ottomans were fighting Venice for commercial domination in the eastern Mediterranean, while they were at the same time granting her commercial privileges-concessions made, it should be noted, while the Porte was in a position of strength. Earlier Venice had had to obtain concessions from Byzantium through the use of force. For the Ottomans it was clearly not a question of acquiescence, but of choice.

Why, then, did they do this? We should remember that, before the Ottoman era, Venice was trading in the eastern Mediterranean without paying any duties. The Ottomans did at least institute a tax of about five per cent on importing and exporting. Then, when the war with Venice began in 1463, they annulled all the Capitulations in favour of Venice and gave them to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and Florence.

The Capitulations seem incomprehensible today. There is a tendency to explain them simply as due to ignorance and rashness on the part of the rulers, though, in fact, they do have a fairly logical explanation if one thinks of the economic conditions which existed in the Middle Ages.

External trade played only a minor part in the economies of that time. States extending over large areas, such as the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires, were worlds unto themselves. People living outside their frontiers were looked on as barbarians, and dealings with them were kept to a strict minimum. Such relationships as did exist had been established through the initiative of the foreigners, because in order to avoid undesirable contacts the subjects of the Empire were forbidden to engage in foreign trade. The imperial economy was large enough to be virtually self-sufficient anyway.

Furthermore, the economic concept of that time tended to be acquisitive and preferred to import merchandise, thereby, it was believed, increasing the prosperity of the country. In a world based on such ideas the effect of the Capitulations had little chance of being destructive. It only became so when the economy of the countries which profited from the Capitulations had evolved into a capitalism which created a relationship of unequal exchange.

The different nature of the economic forces at work on both sides thus gradually transformed the Capitulations into a means of exploitation.

However, one should not exaggerate the harmful role played by the Capitulations before the industrial era. It was only after the West had undergone its Industrial Revolution that the unilateral profits drawn from the Capitulations increased. Their destructive effect naturally afflicted all the countries which had not yet experienced their own industrial revolution.

The Capitulations themselves then became an actual obstacle to the industrialization and economic development of the disadvantaged countries. Understandably, efforts made to annul the Capitulations came up against not only economic but political and military resistance from the industrialized nations.

The most serious of the Capitulations was that which Süleyman accorded to France in 1536. These privileges subsequently served as models for those granted to England, Holland, and other countries.

But it was the commercial agreement with England, imposed on the Porte in 1838, which, by its unilateral character, constituted an example of a Capitulation aimed at virtually colonizing the Ottoman economy. This agreement undermined all the Empire's efforts towards economic development. It provoked enormous debt, bankruptcy, and sequestration of national internal revenues by creditors; it accelerated, by economic debilitation, the Empire's political decline; it was one of the main reasons why the Ottomans entered into the First World War; and it constituted one of the principal objects of negotiations in the Treaty of Lausanne.

One of the profound reasons for the policy of the closed economy, pursued by Turkey right up until the 1980s, was the heritage of fear left by the Capitulations. The primary objective of successive Governments became the avoidance of a balance of payments deficit. With this aim in mind, their habitual reaction was to limit imports rather than to increase exports.

Turkey did not export, they thought, for she did not have the economic capacity. In reality, her political will and self-confidence were deeply impaired by the past. During the first sixty years of the Republic, foreign capital in Turkey hardly exceeded 200 million dollars. At long last the domestic political forces which so violently opposed our entry into the EC, despite the Accord of Ankara which made Turkey an Associate Member, lost their influence. This was thanks to the free market policy pursued since 1980, and particularly since 1983 when Turkey was finally liberated from the spectre of the Ottoman Capitulations. Turkey could then ask for full membership of the EC.

After this digression, I should like to return to considering the visible causes of the Ottoman decline.

The influx of cheap silver coming from America is one of them. At that time the abundance of silver and the possession of silver-bearing lodes was regarded by all states as a measure of prosperity. From 1580 the importation of silver under franchise was encouraged, but it led to silver money quickly losing its value, thus precipitating a financial crisis.

A piece of gold corresponding to 54 akçe (pieces of silver) in 1510 was worth 120 in 1584. The Empire required the price of its exports to Europe to be paid in silver money, but continued to pay in gold for its imports of eastern origin; hence the transfer outside the Empire of part of our wealth.

From 1590 the Ottoman budget showed large deficits. To reduce these it was necessary to raise principal taxes, and make taxes of a temporary nature permanent. In spite of these measures, the revenues calculated in gold fell from 5.8 million in 1567 to 2.5 million in 1597. The permanent upkeep of a large regular army required ever-increasing expenditure. An example of this is the war fleet of two hundred galleys built to replace the ships which were destroyed at Lepanto: they alone cost 1.2 million in gold each year.

Tax increases and inflation destroyed one of the pillars of imperial society, the fiefs (timar), because price controls meant that their produce only yielded a fixed income. The timariots, unable to live, began to leave their lands, as did the peasants. However, the peasants did not have the right to move to the towns, and the craft guilds put up impassable barriers to the entry of newcomers. Popular uprisings were therefore quick to erupt.

As the raising of taxes became more and more difficult, it was entrusted to local notables. The excessive burden of taxes, and their enforced collection, only accelerated the rural exodus and stirred up revolts. Land was accumulated into the hands of feudal landlords (derebeyi), who were the people most skilled at exacting taxes. The Sultan then had to deal with the influence of these men, since they were withholding the major part of the revenues of the State. Most of them were unproductive absentee landlords, so agricultural production quickly declined.

The ruin of such a fundamental institution as the timar had direct repercussions on the landowning regime, the whole fiscal system, and the army. From the seventeenth century onwards, the efforts of the Ottoman administration were directed towards restoring the timar or replacing it with something similar. But, in an economy which had not yet reached the stage of capitalism, this effort encountered enormous difficulties. The end of timar had not automatically created private property, with all the rights and privileges attached to it. Its only consequence was to render the derebeyi proprietors of vast lands which they had acquired but did not know how to exploit. In a climate of instability, punctuated by frequent revolts, neither private enterprise nor agricultural production was able to prosper.

At the same time, the population increased rapidly. Towns registered a huge influx of peasants, but the reasons for this phenomenon are difficult to understand. One cannot tell whether it came from the impoverishment of the fiefs or a real population increase. What is certain is that the equilibrium of the landowning system had been disturbed.

Also at this time the Anatolian ecosystem would have been experiencing certain difficulties. According to a report presented to the Turkish Government in 1958 by Professor Baade, tests carried out on sections of tree trunks in central Anatolia showed that during the last thousand years periodic droughts and shortages caused the death of herds about every five years, and that every ten years there was a major famine, causing human death by starvation. Another researcher, William J. Griswold, claims that the then climatic regime of north-west Europe, known as the little ice age, would have influenced conditions in the north-eastern Mediterranean, making the winters colder and the summers hotter, thus altering the normal climatic cycles. Seeds would therefore have degenerated, causing a drop in agricultural production. The technology of the time was powerless to avoid the consequences of such natural catastrophes. These problems undoubtedly contributed to the general disorganization of the rural world. Between 1585 and 1640 the revolts called 'Celali', which were put down with force and caused the loss of generations of young people, were, according to Griswold, brought about directly by this climatic change.

In an economy with high taxes, accelerated inflation, and reduced production, the Government maintained artificially low fixed prices. At the same time, emerging industrialization in Europe created an increasing demand for raw materials, the price of which increased rapidly. In spite of the prohibition on exporting, great quantities of raw materials were smuggled to Europe, reaping large profits for some. Local industry consequently suffered a shortage of raw materials, and the importation of manufactured products increased inexorably.

I should like to recall that this old reflex of checking inflation by the expedient of price control was not abandoned until 24 January 1980. With its extremely harmful consequences for production, such a policy was enough by itself to destroy an entire economy. While the producers became poorer, a class of profiteers became richer at their expense. These were largely non-Muslim middlemen who worked with foreign beneficiaries of the Capitulations.

In sum, at a time when public expenditure was steadily increasing, particularly for a greatly enlarged defensive army, now confronting stronger and better equipped Western and newly emerging Russian forces, public income was declining. Among other causes was the loss of maritime and some terrestrial routes and of Balkan territories containing timars, with all that this involved in terms of fighting men, agricultural production and tax revenues, combined with the disruptive effects of worsening climatic conditions.

The emerging structural public deficit had invariably been met by increased taxation, which spared the tax-exempt higher classes but ended up being levied mainly on the agricultural sector and the peasants. There had been no industrialization which might have closed the deficit by generating additional production and income. For want of adequate revenues from taxation, the Porte had resorted to inflation as a means of raising funds for defence. The economic situation was further exacerbated by the abundance of cheap imported silver.

When revenues cannot be increased to meet expenditure through a compensating increase in production, the only way out is to curb the income of the society and transfer it to the budget. It is understandable that the various segments of the society should defend their purchasing power in the measure of their relative strengths and pass the burden on to the weaker. The Janissaries, better organized and fully armed, defended their narrow interests more effectively than most. Peasants, finding themselves unable to pay their taxes, abandoned their land to absentee landlords and the timar system collapsed, with a further decline in agriculture and tax revenues. Guilds and corporations survived, at the cost of greater rigidity, which ruled out the possibility of evolving into an industrial structure. Thanks to the Capitulations and the loss of control over the sea routes, as foreign trade became more important in the economy it generated excessive profits for foreigners and their collaborators from among the minorities, while impoverishing the masses.

A fundamentally wrong and harmful economic policy which aimed at freezing prices despite inflation simply led to further decline in production and the smuggling of exportable goods out of the economy.

What is perhaps crucial is that with the foundering of the established order there came every lawless practice imaginable, a weakening of public morality and revolts that were violently suppressed.

Every person and every institution was bent on expropriating the wealth of every other by any means deemed convenient and effective.

In short, the transfer of wealth from the people to the government, which could be characterized as a zero-sum game, deteriorated, in the absence of a compensatory increase in production, into a negative-sum game whereby everybody lost in consequence of the collapse of the order. All institutions of society went over to the defensive, clinging to their short-term interests, thus blocking the way to innovation and evolution. Sclerosis set in and gradually the dead weight of inertia took possession of the masses.

Besides the timar institution, another corner-stone of the Ottoman Empire was the Janissary corps. As a result of the process I have outlined, the Janissaries, the force on which the security of the Empire depended, became a threat, because they were continually underpaid. Muslims obtained entry to the corps and the authorities were forced to concede to them the right to marry and to follow a trade. Having made money, they took to paying replacements to fight in their stead, while themselves militantly opposing reforms, in particular resisting any improvement or modernization of the army.

The mortal danger they thus constituted, at a time when the Empire was engaged in decisive wars on its frontiers, lasted until 1826, by which date it became possible to abolish the institution, though not without difficulty.

By the end of the eighteenth century there was nothing left of the Empire but uncultivated land, impoverished villages, large numbers of unemployed peasants, and craftsmen imprisoned in a rigid guild system. The capital was prey to corruption, the provinces to the derebeyi; industry lay in tatters, the Janissaries partly usurped political authority, the Sultans revealed themselves incapable. Only a small group of men were aware of the decline and endeavored to introduce remedies.

Finally, the struggle of the Balkan nations for their independence, undertaken with the support of the outside world, was at the same time both a further cause and a consequence of the accelerating Ottoman decline, representing as it did the failure of that other corner-stone of the Empire, the millet system.

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