Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
1700±1922
Donald Quataert
Binghamton University,
State University of New York
P U B L I S H E D B Y T H E P R E S S S Y N D I C AT E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C A M B R I D G E
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Index 199
vii
Plates
viii
1 Why study Ottoman history?
Introduction
This book owes its origins to an event that occurred in Vienna in the
summer of 1983, when lines of schoolchildren wound their way through
the sidewalks of the Austrian capital. The attraction they were lining up for
was not a Disney movie or a theme park, but instead a museum exhibition,
one of many celebrations held that year to commemorate the 300th
anniversary of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna. In the minds of these
children, their teachers, and the Austrian (and, for that matter, the general
European) public, 1683 was a year in which they all were saved ± from
conquest by the alien Ottoman state, the ``unspeakable Turk.''
The Ottoman empire had emerged, c. 1300, in western Asia Minor,
not far from the modern city of Istanbul. In a steady process of state
building, this empire had expanded both west and east, defeating
Byzantine, Serb, and Bulgarian kingdoms as well as Turkish nomadic
principalities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Mamluk sultanate based
in Egypt. By the seventeenth century it held vast lands in west Asia,
north Africa, and southeast Europe. In 1529 and again in 1683,
Ottoman armies pressed to conquer Habsburg Vienna.
The artifacts in the Vienna museum exhibit told much about the
nature of the 1683 events. For example, the display of the captured tent
and personal effects of the Ottoman grand vizier illustrated the panicky
¯ight of the Ottoman forces from their camps that, just days before, had
encircled Vienna. The timely arrival of the central and east European
allies, notably King John ( Jan) Sobieski of Poland, had put the encir-
cling Ottoman armies to ¯ight and turned the second Ottoman effort to
seize the city into a full-blown disaster. For hundreds of years the
Ottoman forces had been pressing northward, ever deeper into the
Balkan peninsula and closer to Vienna and the German-speaking lands.
These Ottomans literally were the terror of their enemies, seemingly
invincible. Viennese mothers put their children to bed warning them to
behave lest the ``Turks'' come and gobble them up. This world changed
1
2 The Ottoman Empire, 1700±1922
that had endured for one thousand years, from the fourth through the
®fteenth centuries. As destroyer, the Ottoman empire in some ways
also was the inheritor of the Roman heritage in its eastern Byzantine
form. Indeed, Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople,
explicitly laid down the claim that he was a caesar, a latter-day emperor,
while his sixteenth-century successor, SuÈleyman the Magni®cent,
sought Rome as the capstone of his career. Moreover, the Ottoman
rulers, having conquered the second Rome, for the next four hundred-
plus years honored its Roman founder in the name of the capital city.
Until the end of the empire, the city's name ± the city of Constantine ±
Konstantiniyye/Constantinople ± remained in the Ottomans' of®cial
correspondence, their coins, and on their postage stamps, after these
came into use in the nineteenth century. In some respects, moreover,
the Ottomans followed certain Byzantine administrative models. Like
the Byzantines, the Ottomans practiced a kind of caesaro-papism, the
system in which the state controlled the clergy. In the Ottoman judiciary
the courts were run by judges, members of the religious class, the
ulema. The Ottoman sultans appointed these judges and thus, like their
Byzantine imperial predecessors, exercised a direct control over
members of the religious establishment. In addition, to give another
example of Byzantine±Ottoman continuities, Byzantine forms of land
tenure carried over into the Ottoman era. While the Ottomans forged
their own unique synthesis and were no mere imitators of their prede-
cessors, their debt to the Byzantines was real.
Other powerful in¯uences shaped the Ottoman polity besides the
Byzantine. As we shall see, the Ottoman empire emerged out of the
anarchy surrounding the Turkish nomadic movements into the Middle
East after 1000 C E , population movements triggered by uncertain
causes in their central Asiatic homelands. It was the last great Turco-
Islamic state, following those of the Seljuks and of Tamerlane, born of
the migration of the Turkish peoples out of central Asia westward into
the Middle East and the Balkans (see chapter 2). The shamanist beliefs
of those nomads remained deeply embedded in the spiritual practices
and world view of the Ottoman dynasty. Similarly, pre-Islamic Turkish
usages remained important in Ottoman administrative circles, despite
the later in¯ux of administrative and legal practices from the Islamic
world of Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately, the Ottoman
system should be seen as a highly effective blend of in¯uences deriving
from Byzantium, the Turkish nomads, and the Balkan states, as well as
the Islamic world.
Shaped by others, the Ottomans in their turn affected the evolution
and formation of many central, east, and west European states and the
Why study Ottoman history? 5
Suggested bibliography
Entries marked with a * designate recommended readings for new students of
the subject.
*Asad, Talal. Anthropology and the colonial encounter (New York, 1973).
Bohnstedt, John Wolfgang. The In®del scourge of God: The Turkish menace as seen
by German pamphleteers of the Reformation (Philadelphia, 1968).
*Brown, L. Carl, ed. Imperial legacy: The Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the
Middle East (New York, 1996).
*CË elik, Zeynep. Displaying the Orient: The architecture of Islam and nineteenth-
century world fairs (Berkeley, 1992).
Daniel, Norman. Islam, Europe, and empire (Edinburgh, 1966).
Islam and the West: The making of an image (Edinburgh, 1962).
*Deringil, Selim. ``The Ottoman twilight zone of the Middle East,'' in Henri J.
Barkey, ed., Reluctant neighbor: Turkey's role in the Middle East (Washington,
DC, 1996), 13±22.
Fischer-Galati, Stephen A. Ottoman imperialism and German Protestantism,
1521±1555 (Cambridge, MA, 1959).
*Karpat, Kemal. The Ottoman empire and its place in world history (Leiden, 1974).
*Mansel, Philip. Constantinople: City of the world's desire, 1453±1924 (London,
1995).
*Rodinson, Maxime. Europe and the mystique of Islam (Seattle, translation of
original French 1980 edition, 1987).
12 The Ottoman Empire, 1700±1922