The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History 9004039457, 9789004039452

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Arnold J. Toynbee, The Ottoman Empire's Place in World History
COMMENT
William H. McNeill, The Ottoman Empire in World History
COMMENT
Halil Inalcik, The Turkish Impact on the Development of Modern Europe
COMMENT
Albert Hourani, The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East
Kemal H. Karpat, The Stages of Ottoman History : A Structural Comparative Approach
COMMENT
Charles Issawi, The Ottoman Empire in the European Economy, 1600-1914. Some Observations and Many Questions
Stanford J. Shaw, Ottoman and Turkish Studies in the United
States
COMMENT

Citation preview

THE OTTOMAN STATE AND ITS PLACE IN WORLD HISTORY

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL STUDIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST ÉTUDES SOCIALES, ÉCONOMIQUES ET POLITIQUES DU MOYEN ORIENT VOLUME XI KEMAL H. KARPAT

THE OTTOMAN STATE AND ITS PLACE IN WORLD HISTORY

LEIDEN E .J. BRILL 1974

THE OTTOMAN STATE AND ITS PLACE IN WORLD HISTORY EDITED BY

KEMAL H. KARPAT

LEIDEN E .J. BRILL 1974

Comité de rédaction—Editorial committee F. Barth (University o f Bergen), E. G ellner (London School of Economics), C. IssAWf (Columbia University), S. K halaf (American University of Beirut), M. F. al -K hatib (Cairo University), P. M arthelot (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris), S. H. N asr (Arya-Mehr University o fTechnology Tehran), M .S oysal (Ankara University), M. Z ghal (Université de Tunis). Rédacteur—Editor C. A. O.

van

N ieuwenhuijze

Le but de la collection est de faciliter la communication entre le grand public international et les spécialistes des sciences sociales étudiant le Moyen-Orient, et notamment ceux qui y résident. Les ouvrages sélectionnés porteront sur les phéno­ mènes et problèmes contemporains : sociaux, culturels, économiques et administratifs. Leurs principales orientations relèveront de la théorie générale, de problématiques plus précises, et de la Politologie : aménagement des institutions et administration des affaires publiques. The series is designed to serve as a link between the international reading public and social scientists studying the contemporary Middle East, notably those living in the area. Works to be included will be characterized by their relevance to actual phenomena and problems : whether social, cultural, economic, political or admini­ strative. They will be theory-oriented, problem-oriented or policy-oriented.

ISBN 90 04 03945 7 Copyright 1974 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, Netherlands All rights reserved. No part o f this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means, without written permission from the publisher PRINTED IN BELGIUM

CONTENTS K emal H. K a r pa t , Introduction.....................................................

1

A r n o l d J. T oynbee , The Ottoman Empires Place in World

H istory........................................................................................ Comment by J o h n W. B a r k e r ...............................................

IS 28

W illiam H. M c N eill , The Ottoman Empire in World History Comment by A n d r e w C. H e s s ...............................................

34 47

H a lil I n a lc ik , The Turkish Impact on the Development o f

M odern E u ro p e ............................................................................ Comment by C. M ax K o rtepeter ............................................

51 58

A lbert H o u r a n i , The Ottoman Background of the Modern

Middle E a s t ..................................................................................

61

K emal H. K a rpa t , The Stages of Ottoman History : A Structural

Comparative A pproach................................................................ Comment by C. A. O. van N ie u w e n h u u z e .........................

79 99

C harles I ssaw i , The Ottoman Empire in the European Economy,

1600-1914. Some Observations and Many Questions

. . .

107

Sta n fo r d J. S h a w , Ottoman and Turkish Studies in the United

S ta te s .................................................................................................... 118 Comment by R ic h a r d L. C h a m b e r s .......................................... 126

INTRODUCTION KEMAL H. KARPAT

Ottoman history is the stepchild o f historical studies. M ost works on world history, and many of those dealing specifically with Europe and Asia, have continued to ignore the Ottomans or devoted to them only occasionally a short chapter or a few perfunctory remarks. On the other hand, the basic works on Ottoman history written in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, such as those by Hammer-Purgstall, J. W. Zinkeisen, N. Jorga, while containing useful information culled mostly from Ottoman chronicles and court histories, and Byzantine works, fall short of meeting current standards o f scholarship, method­ ology, and conceptual sophistication. The publication of H. A. Gibbons* The Foundation o f the Ottoman Empire in 1916, brought out a cry of satisfaction among the small group of Ottomanists that a new era of work and understanding had dawned in the study o f Turkish history. Their prophesies and expectations have remained unfulfilled. For the most part Ottoman history, both in Turkey and abroad, is still written in the traditional style, and is deprived more often than not o f a conceptual framework which would permit not only a more objective treatm ent o f the subject, but also would bring forth the social, economic, and organizational features o f the Ottoman system. It is difficult to justify this neglect o f Ottoman-Turkish history, since almost from the beginning to its end, the Ottoman state developed original patterns of social, economic, and political organization, and evolved in close relationship with the history of Europe. Indeed, Ottoman history was influenced by and in turn it affected the course of events in Central and West Europe, while the rise and fall of the Ottoman state itself was governed to a great extent by the same economic and social forces that chartered the path of European history. There are few historians and social scientists who would reject the view that the Ottom an rule transformed and left it mark upon south­ east European, Middle Eastern and even N orth African societies while at the same time it preserved and perpetuated the identity of most of the ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups under its sway. The Ottoman state was the only political organization in medieval and modem times to have given official recognition to all three monotheistic religions,

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INTRODUCTION

Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, and to have assured, together with their ethnic and linguistic subdivisions, a harmonious coexistence. The number of ethnic and linguistic groups which had been at one time or another under Ottoman rule is well over sixty. About thirty-eight o f the contemporary states and federated republics in Europe, Asia, and Africa were included totally or partly at one time or another in the Ottoman domains. Thus, Ottoman history is an integral part of the history of a score of contemporary states in the Balkans and the Middle East. The methods used by the Ottoman government to rule for over six centuries (1299-1918) a state which became increasingly heterogeneous as it spread over three continents, and did not possess most of the elements which provide for internal cohesion in the modern states, have not been properly investigated and fully explained yet. M ost of the existing theories concerning Ottoman organization and government, supplied often by the nationals of the ethnic and linguistic groups which had been under Ottoman rule and eventually achieved statehood, have not been supported by the findings of more recent studies. These theories were vitiated from the very beginning by the essential contradiction inherent in the use of a national viewpoint of history in order to explain events in the non-national Ottoman state. Thus, the old arguments of the hellenists that the Ottoman state was a replica of Byzantium, or the contention of some Slavic scholars that the Ottoman ruling class was made up of their own converted kin, and many other ethnocentric theories have proved to be one-sided and incomplete. Some of the more recent studies indicate in fact that the Ottoman state owed its longlasting life to a special internal organization that took due account of the subjects* occupation, personal aptitudes, and religious and communal affiliations, and defined the government’s functions accordingly.1 This multi-ethnic and multi-religious Ottoman state achieved internal cohesion through a socio-ethnic balance whose durability was enhanced by lack of a national ideology at the state and government level. Eventually, new social, economic, and political forces challenged the existing com­

1 The following essay by the distinguished historian A. J. Toynbee, stresses the fact that the Ottoman state was established by a small nomadic group headed by Ertugrufl. Recent research indicates that vast migration by Turkish speaking townsmen and nomads into Anatolia preceded, and paved the road, for the establishment of the Ottoman state. Thus migration appears as a basic factor—still awaiting study—in the founding of the Ottoman state.

INTRODUCTION

3

munal and religious arrangement and prepared the ground for the rise of ethnic nationalism, that is, of a principle of state organization diametrically opposed to the self-balancing multi-ethnic and multi­ religious organization which formed the basic foundation of the classical Ottoman state. The state, unable to meet this challenge, gradually disintegrated, but not before trying in vain to transform itself, first into a universal Muslim, and then a Turkish national state. It is obvious that Ottoman history has been condemned to an unjust neglect. The reasons for this neglect are imbedded in the changing political relations between the Ottoman and European states, the worsening image of the West with regard to Turks, and finally in the rise of nationalism and the emergence of independent states through a struggle against Ottoman rule. It is obvious that these states had no interest in Ottoman history. It is necessary to deal briefly with each one of the causes leading to the neglect of Ottoman history. The fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the ensuing fear that the Turks would attack the West and destroy Christianity, was the most powerful stimulus conditioning the formation of the Western image about Turks. The Europeans, as Robert Schwobel put it, in order to understand the problem posed by the Ottomans, “drew heavily on the medieval corpus dealing with Islam and the L evant... and adapted a large body of new information to the forms of thought and expression developed in the anti-Moslem and crusading literature of the Middle Ages.” Moreover, according to the same author, the Fall of Constantinople occurred at a time when men o f the Renais­ sance were striving to develop a humanistic view of history and society and “had hailed the revival of true poetry and ancient wisdom as ushering in a new age of creative and rational human achievement. Indeed, it seems reasonable to conclude that the success of the Turks contributed to undermining the confidence and optimism o f the humanists ...” The subsequent change of Europe’s image of the Turks from fear to respect and admiration in the sixteenth century, to disinterest and contempt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been masterfully treated by Norman Daniel and does not need further elaboration. Suffice it to mention that even in the modern age, Europe’s image of the Turks and the Ottoman state continued to be nurtured by the same medieval concepts which were used to legitimize the crusades and eventually proved handy in the age of economic and cultural imperialism. On the other hand, some of the European studies, undertaken in the

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INTRODUCTION

late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by men who had intim ate information of the state of afTairs in the Ottoman realm, were more factual and pursued practical goals. D’Ohsson, Engelhardt, Ubicini, U rquhart, and many other individuals who often worked for European governments were preoccupied during this period chiefly with concrete problems of trade, economics, and administrative and political change. Some evaluated often Ottoman problems within the framework of European territorial and economic interests and suggested reformist measures accordingly. They appeared often impatient, as William Langer put it, with the pace of modernization in the Ottoman state, and expecting to see changes effected on the spur of the moment tended to pass negative judgments by ignoring the fact that the difficulties encountered by the Ottomans were much greater than those faced by almost any other nation. The attitude of European writers towards the Ottoman state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was affected profoundly also by the complex issues raised by the Eastern Question, that is, by the anticipated, inevitable downfall of the Ottoman state and the partition of its territory, and determination o f new spheres of influence in the Middle East. One could hardly have expected European scholars to undertake objective studies o f the Ottoman society in what they considered to be its hour of doom. The Europeans’ negative view of the Ottomans was reinforced, beginning mostly in the nineteenth century, by the nationalist historical writings stemming from the Balkans and then the Middle East. The historians of these newly independent countries adopted almost unanim­ ously a nationalist approach and viewed the Ottoman state not as the matrix in which their own national states were germinated, but as an alien power which supposedly thwarted the natural evolution of their medieval states into modern political systems. The Ottoman rule became for these historians a convenient scapegoat on which to heap all blame for national frustrations, social inequities, economic backwardness, and failure to fulfill their national goals and ambitions. Even Turkey, the legal successor o f the Ottoman state, did not treat the Ottomans better, despite the efforts made by the late Fuat Kopriilii both through out­ standing research and personal effort, to gain a place of respect for the Ottoman legacy. The Republican regime made special efforts after 1923, to educate the youth without identifying them historically and culturally with the Ottoman past. In fact, the youth’s view of modernity, Turkishness, and nationhood, was based on the rejection and harsh criticism o f almost everything that was Ottoman. Indeed, the expression Osmanlt

INTRODUCTION

5

(Ottoman) was in the language of the new generation as contemptuous and degrading an expression as alaturka (à la Turque) had been among those Europeans who witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century. The First W orld W ar, and the final disintegration of the Ottoman state removed it out from the realm of practical politics, and inadvertently prepared the ground for a more objective evaluation of history. More* over, the abolition o f the Sultanate and the Caliphate in 1922 and 1924, respectively, destroyed some o f the institutions which separated the Ottoman-M uslim comity from Europe, and symbolically acknowledged Western superiority, as indicated clearly by Republican Turkey’s efforts to develop a national state based on Western models. It is understandable therefore that most of the European writings on the Ottoman state written after the proclamation of the Republic glorified the new regime’s reform­ ist endeavors and contrasted them glowingly with the dismal inertia and traditionalism prevailing in Ottoman times. As expected, the truly significant studies of the Ottoman state were undertaken in Europe, mostly after 1923, and especially after W orld W ar II. Professors F. Babinger (despite his often subjective judgments), P. W ittek, Bernard Lewis, A. J. Toynbee, Claude Cahen, Robert M antran, H. A. R. Gibb and H. Bowen, just to mention a few names, acknowledged in a series o f outstanding works the intrinsic quality of the Ottoman civilization, emphasized its vital place in Islamic and Middle Eastern history and stimulated new interest in this area. Moreover, after the Second W orld W ar, there was a gradual change of opinion about the Ottoman state both in Turkey and in the Balkans. In Turkey, the early categorical rejection of the Ottomans was replaced by a gradual but increasingly warm identification with the past, both among the radical and conserv­ ative groups. The first strived to explain the economic and social short­ comings o f contemporary Turkey as the dialectical consequence of the deteriorating material conditions, and o f the Ottoman social order which was kept supposedly underdeveloped and was exploited by Western imperialism. The radicals placed the blame on Europe and thus rehabilitated partly the Ottomans, and indirectly reconciled themselves to their own past. The conservatives, in turn, found the basis of the contemporary Turkish culture and values in the Muslim culture and Ottoman political background. The emergence of a new generation o f Turkish scholars capable of viewing their own history in a more detached fashion as well as the achievement o f high standards of scholarship has

6

INTRODUCTION

contributed also to the present popularity of Ottoman studies in Turkey. The Balkan historians in the post-W orld W ar II period, also compelled by political necessities tried to explain the national history of their countries within the framework of Marxist historical determinism, and consequently labeled the Ottoman period as the “ feudal era” which preceded the transition of their respective society to petty bourgeoisie and capitalism in the nineteenth century, and eventually to socialism in the next century. Despite some forced Marxist interpretations, the Balkan historiography after the second World War, nevertheless, has produced valuable quantitative data which threw new light on the social and economic structure of the Ottoman state. Unfortunately, this trend towards a more factual study of Ottoman history seems to be replaced now by a nationalist approach which, wrapped in Marxist terminology, promises to be more virulent than the approach prevailing before World W ar II. The Arabs* approach to Ottoman history also followed closely the pattern of Balkan historiography, but oscillated constantly in antiTurkish vehemence, especially in 1939-45, and 1952-1967, according to the vicissitudes of the Turkish-Arab foreign relations. Recently, a few Arabic-speaking scholars, such as Zeine N. Zeine, have made serious efforts to view Ottoman history in a more objective fashion and to reassess the Ottoman political contribution to Arab culture and society accordingly. The Israeli studies on Ottoman history, although relatively few following the high standards set by the late Uriel Heyd, have been of excellent quality and objectivity. However, all these efforts and achievements after World W ar II, valuable as they are, have failed to win for Ottoman history the recognition and acceptance of the greater community of scholars in the West or elsewhere. Today, the Ottoman studies are still confined to a small group of Turcologists and Orientalists. Many scholars, caught in their own ignorance, regard the Ottoman history as an “esoteric” field of limited significance. This writer addressed recently a letter to the committee planning an annual meeting of a major Historical Association, and suggested a session dedicated solely to Ottoman history. The committee turned down the suggestion because there were other more im portant areas of study—apparently Ottoman history had limited relevance to the general study of history. One could hardly understand the committee’s criteria for evaluating the historical relevance of a specific state, area, or period, especially if one glanced at the minute topics included in the meeting program. Thus, despite the strides made so far,

INTRODUCTION

7

and despite its vital relevance to the history of Europe, the Middle East and N orth Africa, as well as its potential contribution to understanding social and economic transform ation in the non-Western societies, the study of Ottoman history is still one of the most neglected and ignored fields of study. There is a series of compelling reasons calling for new and increased attention and for a more intensive study of Ottoman history, society, and civilization. Moreover, since the Ottoman state is no longer an active factor in international politics or involved in territorial disputes, its study, hopefully, can be undertaken relatively free of partisan polem­ ics and practical motives. The first and basic reason pleading in favor of Ottoman studies is the intimate relationship of the Ottoman state to European history and society. The vast social and economic transform­ ation in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries correlate with the Ottoman changes in land organization, the high rate of urbanization, the increased production and marketing of agricultural commodities, the development of guilds, and with a corresponding change in internal and international trade, including changes in the European trade with the Middle East and the M editerranean basin. The maintenance of the trade relations with the West was a cardinal point in Ottoman foreign relations, although trade stagnated for awhile in the sixteenth century for reasons too complex to deal with in this general introduction. Nevertheless, the sea trade with the Venetians, Genoese, and then the Dutch, English and French, and the land routes extending to N orth Europe enabled the Ottomans to maintain com­ munication with the West throughout its existence. The Ottomans had trade relations with the countries around the Indian Ocean, West Asia, and Africa. One can presume that these commercial relations facilitated social and cultural interaction not only between the Ottoman domains and Europe, but also between Asia, Africa, and Europe as a whole. The Ottoman state opened new opportunities for trade. It put an end to the threat of crusades in the Middle East, and thus created the conditions for a new and broader pattern of exchange between the two areas, based not on dependence as was the case in Byzantium, which was dominated economically by Venice, but on equality. Indeed, the multi-ethnic Ottoman society began to flourish in the second half of the fifteenth century, due in part to protective custom tariffs and the rise of a large and aggressive native middle class of merchants and craftsmen composed of Muslims and non-Muslims. The res turcales were sold on

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INTRODUCTION

the markets of northcentral Europe, while Ottoman merchants o f all creeds and tongues traveled to and established merchandise emporiums in Ancona, Vienna, and other cities, and engaged in a variety of com­ mercial transactions, and even developed a credit system o f their own. Politically, the Ottoman state used its economic power to bolster the power of its European allies. The capitulations, that is, the trade privileges given to France in 1536, or 1569, then to the Dutch and English, were designated to strengthen these countries in their struggle against the Pope in Rome, and to oppose the Habsburgs of Austria. The rise of France as a national state in the sixteenth century was greatly facilitated by her alliance with the Ottomans. The Turkish fleet in the Western M editerranean protected the southern flank o f France against any attack from her enemies, and allowed the French monarchs to concen­ trate their power in the north and, thus, secure the frontiers o f their French national state. The Ottoman government adopted also a policy of support for the Protestants o f Europe. The Calvinist success in southern Hungary, and even Transylvania, was a direct consequence o f this policy. However, the scholars who have studied the Ottoman support of the Protestants have concluded that this policy was motivated solely by imperial designs. In other words, in the eyes of these scholars, the Ottoman motives were deemed to be a moral reason strong enough to ignore the concrete and longlasting results that stemmed from these endeavors. The fact that the support given to the Protestants was accompanied by an exchange o f letters in which the Ottomans discussed, among other things, the simil­ arities between Protestantism and Islam, failed to receive due appraisal, a t least as a m atter of cultural-philosophical exchange of ideas between East and West. Anyway, the Ottomans followed closely the religiouscultural developments in Europe as clearly indicated by the profound consternation in Istanbul caused by the massacre o f the Huguenots, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. The Huguenots had been supported by the Ottoman governm ent (There were many ex-Catholics in the Ottom an service) It seems that a proper study of the Ottoman policy towards European Protestantism should aim, first at ascertaining whether the Turkish aid affected at all the course o f European cultural history, and second, whether it gave the Ottomans a new understanding of religious protest in general, and Christianity in particular. This is especially im portant since the Ottoman government itself during the same period a t the beginning of the sixteenth century was busy quelling in Eastern Anatolia on behalf o f Muslim orthodoxy, the heretical Kizdba? or Alevis who

INTRODUCTION

9

had rebelled against the central authority and its supporting social order, The history of central Europe, and especially the Habsburg rule developed from the sixteenth century onwards so closely intertwined with the Ottomans as to make impossible the study of one by ignoring the other. The social and political problems which faced the Habsburgs in Transylvania, Banat, northern Serbia in the eighteenth century, and later Bosnia, were the consequences of the changes imposed by the Austrians upon the relatively classless social order created there previously by the Ottomans. After taking these lands, the Habsburgs created a feudal class there consisting largely of Catholic noblemen, and transformed the hitherto free peasants, notably those with different ethnic and religious backgrounds, into serfs. The result was social unrest that culminated in the development o f national consciousness among the serfs and other underprivileged groups. Finally, as though symbolizing the relation o f European history to the Ottoman state, Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, longtime an Ottoman stronghold and major administrative center in the Balkans, and signaled thus the beginning of the First W orld W ar. The relation o f the Ottoman state to the European political, economic, cultural, and social history in the nineteenth century is too well known to w arrant further discussion. Yet, even this period has been studied strictly from the viewpoint o f European foreign policy, while the interaction and mutual influences between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman state have been ignored. A more intensive study o f Ottoman history is warranted not only by historical reasons, but also by a variety of other intellectual and academic considerations. The Ottoman state offers almost boundless opportunities for research to scholars interested in the sociology of history, historical demography, economic and comparative social history as well as in social, cultural and political transform ation, and modernization in general. Moreover, a variety o f cross-cultural and social institutions established by Ottoman rulers for administrative purposes provide useful models for comparative studies in social organization. Thus, the division of the population into social estates according to individuals’ occupation can be used as a basis in studying the patterns of social stratification in the medieval Middle East and the Balkans. A proper understanding o f this social organization provides in turn vital clues for determining the basic function of the government as understood by the Ottoman rulers, namely, to maintain harmony among social groups and to assign duties to individuals in accordance with their position in the social estates.

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INTRODUCTION

Furthermore, the organization of the population into religious commun­ ities according to faith, that is, into Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish, and even Muslim millets, although often mentioned by scholars, is another field still awaiting further detailed study in order to determine their role in the emergence of ethnic consciousness, and of nation form ation in modern times. The place of the local communities (village, town district, tribe) in the Ottoman administrative system is another topic of vital importance in understanding the rise of leadership groups in the Ottoman state. Indeed, the local communities in the Ottoman state enjoyed a degree o f self-government and administrative autonomy and played a crucial role in preserving the folk culture and the customary laws of various ethnic groups. The communal primates, in turn, performed vital roles in mobilizing grass-roots support for the nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An understanding of Ottoman society can shed light on the origin of many social habits and institutions, and may help explain the attitude and philosophies of the leaders governing today the Balkan and Middle East countries. The common Ottoman background of these institutions and attitudes gives to the Balkan, and especially to the Middle Eastern societies, a certain basic and permanent similarity which has survived until today despite regional, cultural, and religious differences and divided political loyalties. Indeed, the state-controlled land system, the intensive process of urbanization which transformed Istanbul from a city with a population of barely 70,000 people at the time of the conquest into a metropolis of several hundred thousand inhabitants, and created a string of new urban centers in Anatolia and the Balkans, the guilds which included craftsmen of all faiths, the increased demand for agricultural commodities which spurred erop production, the intensified exchange of goods which facilitated the rise of trade centers and of new merchant classes among all ethnic groups, are some of the institutions and processes that im­ printed an Ottoman mark upon the peoples of the Balkans and the Middle East. Few, if any, of these background forces have been studied at all. The rise of nationalities and of nationalism in the Ottoman state is another vital topic of study barely touched upon. The existing studies on Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Arab, and other nationalisms are often romantic and distorted accounts of the national struggle for independence and statehood, and thus fail to do justice to the complex social, economic, cultural, and political forces conditioning nation formation in the

INTRODUCTION

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Ottoman state.1 Actually, the development o f nationalism in the Ottoman state could be better understood if it were studied in relation to the expansion of trade, the rise of merchant and intellectual elites, the gradual fusion of the isolated ethnic and linguistic groups into larger social units, the transform ation o f the religious communities into national groups, and the Western ideological influences prevailing in all these areas o f social-cultural and economic interaction. One can say that the transform ation into nations of various ethnic groups in the Ottoman state, besides being one of the earliest forms of modem nationalism, followed its own path of development and belongs to a special category of its own. Thus, a proper study of nationalism in the Ottoman state, as well as the comparative analyses of nation formation among Muslims and Christians—the two followed rather different courses—should contribute significantly to broadening our understanding of this vital political phenomenon. The study of Ottoman society can yield significant information also on religious coexistence and organization. The undeniable fact is that the Ottoman government became the defender and promoter, both of Muslim and Christian Orthodoxy, and played a vital, though inadvertent, role in conditioning their present modem forms. The writings of G. Trapezuntis, and some Orthodox Patriarchs dealing with the Sultan’s relations with the Orthodox Church, and with the Christian subjects’ obligations towards the Sultan, as well as the practical measures developed by the Ottoman government in order to implement these theories formulated by the Orthodox Christian prelates, make the study of religion and of the ecclesiastical organization in the Ottoman state a challenging task. Moreover, the study of the institutional and ideol­ ogical manifestations of Islam in the Ottoman state and of the dual judicial system based on ecclesiastical and customary law, long ignored by Western Islamists, could broaden greatly our present dogmatic and narrow understanding of Islam. Related to the study of religion in the Ottoman state there are other topics of interest, such as the Muslim and non-Muslim folk religions, religious orders, fraternities of mystics, associations of heretics, and a variety of other religious movements which expressed the spiritual needs as well as the social discontent and aspirations of the diverse groups under the Ottoman sway. All 1 A detailed analysis on this point can be found in Kemal H. Karpat, An Inquiry Into the Social Foundations o f Nationalism in the Ottoman State. Princeton (Center of International Studies), 1973.

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INTRODUCTION

these, needless to say, provide almost inexhaustible subjects for scholarly investigation. Finally, Ottoman poetry, literature, music, decorative arts, painting, architecture, town planning, and a variety of other artistic endeavors o f the highest quality remain largely unknown to the world despite their basic intrinsic value. The study of these fields could enrich significantly mankind’s cultural and artistic treasury, and help develop new bonds of understanding between peoples with different cultures and backgrounds. Ottoman history, culture, and society deserve the scholar’s interest and attention because they are part of total human experience. The Otto­ man civilization, and all it represents is not outside the world stream o f history but an organic part of it. The Ottomans had their qualities and defects, achievements and failures. All these must be criticized as the case may require. However, both criticism and praise must be based on facts and must represent objectively reached conclusions rather than be indiscriminate condemnation or glorification of all that is Turkish and Ottoman, as has been the case until now. I am pleading not for partisan support for the Ottomans but only for fair treatment. In fact, 1 am merely asking that the standard objectivity and detachment required in a scholarly work be applied also to Ottoman studies. A t this stage o f intellectual development one cannot continue to regard Ottoman history solely as another battlefield episode in the long struggle between Islam and Christianity. The Ottoman state must be seen also as an economic and social order, as a cultural and political system in which men lived and developed by obeying the same laws o f history as did men living in other systems. The practical measures necessary to develop Ottoman studies would call, first, for their inclusion in the curriculum of the Middle East, Balkan, and even Slavic studies. Second, the general works dealing with W orld History and Civilization should provide an adequate treatm ent o f the Ottoman state by relating it properly to the history of other regions and peoples as was attempted by H. A. Cole in his general but pioneering work : The Ottoman Impact on Europe. The third step necessary for the development o f Ottoman studies calls for a drastic improvement in the teaching of Turkish so as to enable the researchers to use profitably the existing Ottoman documents containing invaluable information on the history and civilization of peoples in East Europe, West Asia, and N orth Africa. Fourthly, it is highly desirable to establish an institute dedicated solely to Ottoman studies in a place

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where research can be carried out in relative calm, freedom, and detachment. Finally, it is essential to establish closer cooperation among several scholarly organizations dealing with Ottoman studies. The South East Europe an Studies Association, as international organization whose headquarters is in Bucharest, the International Association of Orientalists and its affiliate, the Council of Turkish Studies in Paris, the International Committee of Ottoman and pre-Ottoman Historical Studies, and the Turkish Studies Association of the U.S.A., are some of the scholarly organizations which can take the initiative and develop further Ottoman studies. Thus it may be possible to make better use of the extraordinary rich Ottoman source material in various archives in Turkey for studying in depth the history and social change of the Middle East, the Balkans, and N orth Africa, and for providing relevant background information for other fields of learning. The present volume is the expression of the growing interest in Ottoman studies and represents a joint effort to reassess the place of the Ottoman state in world history. It consists of seven interdisciplinary essays written by some of the leading Ottomanists, and by authorities on world history and on the politics and economics of the Middle East. Some o f the relevant comments on these papers have been included in this volume too. The original essays, some of which were revised subsequently, and the comments were presented to a conference on Ottoman studies held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on May 6-9, 1971. Three of the papers presented to the conference, two dealing with the teaching of Turkish and one with Islam as practiced in contemporary Turkey, were left out for reasons of space and topical unity. Special thanks go to the International Studies and Programs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which financed the conference. Thanks are also due to my distinguished colleagues in the Department of History at the same university, whose wholehearted support for the conference not only assured its success, but also confirmed once more their dedication to perpetuating the Department’s deep-rooted tradition as a trail blazer in historical studies. Madison, May 12, 1973.

THE OTTOMAN EM PIRE’S PLACE IN WORLD HISTORY ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE Chatham House, London

The Ottoman Empire took shape in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era, but its geographical extension was at its maximum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During those two centuries, the Empire’s western frontier in Europe was within short range o f Trieste and Vienna. The northern frontier adjoined Poland. The Black Sea and the Sea of Azov were Ottoman lakes. From 1475 to 1768, no state except the Ottoman Empire and its dependencies had a seaboard in those waters. The western side of Caucasia was under Ottoman rule, and so, in western Asia, were the basins o f the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates down to the head of the Persian Gulf. The Empire also held Syria, in the widest geographical meaning of the name, and the whole western side o f Arabia as far south as the Yaman inclusive, which gave the Empire a seaboard on the Indian Ocean. N orth Africa, too, was Ottoman from Egypt to as far westward as the eastern frontier of Morocco. Thus the Ottoman Empire occupied the focal area o f the Old W orld, where the backwaters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans approach closest to each other. The Empire bestrode the portages from the Persian G ulf and the Red Sea to the M editerranean, and it commanded the straits linking the M editerranean with the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The importance of the lines of communication across this once Ottoman area is brought out by the present-day map of the W orld’s air-routes. This is a zone through which nearly all the round-the-world air-routes pass. It is true (and may also be significant) that, in the Ottoman Empire’s heyday, the Middle Eastern routes were less frequented than the Oceanic routes. But this was an exceptional and temporary state of afTairs. The present-day airways map of world-communications has been the usual map o f surface routes since the date of our earliest records. In any case, the region in which the three Old-World continents meet played a part of first-class importance in the Ottoman stage of its history, as well as before and after. In its pre-Ottoman age this region gave birth to the earliest o f the W orld’s civilizations and to three religions—Judaism, Christianity, and

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Islam—which, between them, have almost as many adherents today as the religions that originated in India. Thus this meeting-point of con­ tinents has been creative, and, perhaps just for this reason, it has also been turbulent. It has usually been disunited politically and has conse­ quently suffered from chronic warfare. The Ottoman Empire has been the most recent of four empires—only four, in all—that, within the last 5000 years, have each in turn succeeded in imposing political unity, and, with it, peace, for a time on the greater part of this usually distracted area. The Ottoman Empire’s three predecessors have been the First Persian Empire (538-334 B.C.), the Roman Empire (62 B.C.-A.D. 602) in the N ear East and the Arab Empire (effective from A.D. 650 to A.D. 850 approximately). It will be noted that these spells of unity and peace in this area have been rare occurrences, and that each of them has been short-lived. O f the four Middle Eastern Empires, the Ottoman Empire has been the only one that has managed to unite the whole o f the area, even momentarily. The Persian and Arab Empires each failed to incorporate the Greek part of the area; the Roman Empire failed to incorporate ’Iraq. The Persian, Arab, and Ottoman Empires did incorporate both ’Iraq and Egypt, which were the W orld’s two chief exporters of cereals before the opening-up of N orth America and the Ukraine for cereal cultivation in the nineteenth century. Each o f the four empires, in turn, suffered a decline and fall. It ceased to be able to keep the peace, and it then lost the respect of its neighbors and its subjects. They became im patient to inherit its dominions. Yet, when these were eventually divided up among a number of neighboring powers or indigenous successor states, the region relapsed, each time, into anarchy. By comparison, the imperial régimes were more tolerable, even when they were in decline, while in their heyday they were veritable golden ages. After the Persian Empire had failed to incorporate the Greeks, one of the Greek states, Macedón, tried to impose its rule on all the others and on the Persian Empire too. Philip of Macedón united the Greeks and his son Alexander overthrew the Persian Empire; but, after Alexander’s death, his generals partitioned the Persian Empire, Greece fell to pieces again, and there was another bout of anarchy until the establishment of the Roman Empire. There was anarchy again after the decline and fall of the Arab Empire and of the remnant of the Roman Empire in Asia M inor and in south-eastern Europe. The Ottoman Empire went the same way. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it became less and less able to maintain domestic unity and law and order,

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and its frontiers receded in Europe and in Africa. Yet it kept its Asiatic dominions virtually intact, and even re-established its effective authority there, down to 1914. In the nineteenth century, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia called the Ottoman Emperor ‘the sick man of Europe.* By 1913, all the Ottoman Empire’s former European dominions to the west of Edirne had either been annexed to the Habsburg and Russian Empires or been carved up into new national states (Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania). By 1918, all the Arab countries that had once been under Ottoman rule, from Algeria to ’Iraq inclusive, except for the Hijaz and the Yaman, had fallen into the hands of either France or Britain or Italy. These successors of the Ottoman régime felt confident that they were going to do better than the ’Osmanlis. But the sequel has shown that, for a majority of the ex-Ottoman peoples, the change has been very much for the worse. The Crimean Tatars have been deported en masse to Soviet Central Asia. Rumania and Bulgaria have become the Soviet Union’s unwilling satellites. Algeria has had to fight first a stubborn losing war against a Western invader and then an agonising successful war of independence. Syria’s experiences under a French mandate, and Libya’s under Italian rule, have been hardly less grim. It took Egypt seventy or eighty years to extricate herself from British toils, and, since then, she has been re-invaded once by Britain and France and has been invaded twice by Israel. Part of the territories o f two other A rab successor states of the Ottoman Empire, Jordan and Syria, have also been under Israeli occupation, as part of Egypt has been, since 1967. The Hijaz has quickly exchanged Ottoman for Sa’udi rule, and this W ahhabi régime is probably less congenial to the Hijazis, in spite of the fact that their present Najdi rulers are their fellow Arabs. The Yaman has been torm ented by a civil war in which the opposing parties have been backed, respectively, by two other A rab states, Sa’ûdi Arabia and Egypt. The most unfortunate o f all the ex-’Osmanli peoples have been the Palestinian Arabs. In the First World W ar, Palestine was conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Britain, and, without the inhabitants o f the country being consulted, Palestine was placed under a British mandate, the terms of which incorporated the ’Balfour Declaration’ o f 1917. In this declaration the British Government had committed itself to supporting the creation, in Palestine, of a national home for the Jews. Under Ottoman rule, the Palestinians had not been in danger of being swamped by foreign settlers in their own homeland. Under the British

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occupation o f Palestine (1918-1948), Jewish settlers were enabled, by British force o f arms, to establish themselves in Palestine against the Palestinians’ will. In 1948, this resulted in the setting-up of the state of Israel, and a majority of the Palestinian Arabs whose homes lie on the Israeli side of the armistice-lines of 1949 have been deprived o f their homes and their property. Those Palestinians who have not lost their homes are now either subjects of Israel or are under Israeli military occupation. For the Palestinians, the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire has been an utter calamity, and it has been hardly less calamitous for those of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab successor states—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt—that are now Israel’s nextdoor neighbors. This survey of the experiences of a number of ex-Ottoman peoples, since the dates at which they ceased to be under Ottoman rule, shows that Ottoman rule, like Habsburg rule, has been unjustly maligned. Even in its last phase, which was not its best phase, this imperial régime was a happier dispensation for its subjects than their subsequent tribulations. For the Arabs, Bulgare, Rumans, and Crimean Tatars, the sequel to the Ottoman Empire has not turned out to have been a change for the better. But there is one successor state of the Ottoman Empire, namely the Republic o f Turkey, for which the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire certainly has been a change for the better. The Ottoman Empire was liquidated juridically on 29 October 1923, when the Turkish National Assembly passed a law proclaiming Turkey a republic. The last o f the Ottoman Pàdishâhs, Vâhid-ed-Din, had gone into exile on 17 November 1922, and no Pádisháh had been appointed to replace him. On 18 November 1922, the Turkish National Assembly had appointed a successor to Vähid-ed-Din in his capacity as Caliph of Islam, but on 3 M arch 1924, the Assembly passed a law abolishing the Caliphate and banishing all members of the Ottoman Imperial family from the territory of the Turkish Republic. These were historic events in the history of the W orld; for the state founded by ’Osman son of Ertoghrul had been, for six centuries, an effective force in world affaire. In the history of Islam, the Caliphate had been a symbol of Islamic political unity since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in A.D. 632. These revolutionary acts of state were responses, by the Turkish ’Osmanlis, to a challenge to their capacity to survive. The truth was that the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire, which had been a safeguard, so long as it had lasted, for the survival of the

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Palestinian Arab ’Osmanlis, had been a menace to the survival of the Anatolian Turkish ’Osmanlis unless and until they were relieved of this incubus. Since the reorganization and modernisation of the Ottoman Army by Sultan Mahmud II after his destruction of the Janissary corps in 1826, all Sunni Muslim Ottoman nationals had been subject to conscription for military service, but the brunt of this had fallen on those of them who were Turks. During the intervening century the toll on Ottoman Turkish lives had been heavy. The Ottoman Empire had been at war with Russia three more times, and it had been continuously at war from 1911 to 1913 and from 1914 to 1918, first with Italy, then with a coalition of the Empire’s own south-east European successor states, and finally with Russia, France, and Britain simultaneously. Worse still, during the periods during which the Empire had not been at war with foreign states, Ottoman Turkish conscripts had had to serve in Macedonia, Albania, and the Yaman, trying to hold down local insur­ gents who were freedom-fighters and patriots from their own point o f view. In these campaigns on Ottoman soil, the casualties from sickness were probably greater than those inflicted by weapons. The Sisyphean task of trying to shore up the Ottoman Empire was bleeding the Ottoman Turkish people to death. Political and military force majeure relieved the Turkish ’Osmanlis of most of their Ottoman burden. By 1918, almost the only non-Turks still remaining within the contracted frontiers of the Ottoman Empire were a Greek diaspora in Anatolia and in Istanbul and a Laz and Kurdish population in eastern Anatolia. However, nations have usually found it psychologically difficult to renounce their title to lost territories, even when the population of these lost territories is alien and hostile and even when there is also no prospect of regaining what has been lost. When a nation voluntarily accepts a territorial fait accompli that has been to its own national disadvantage according to the conventional view, this is an unusual, and therefore a notable, event. In the Turkish ’National Pact’, which was adopted by some of the Turkish members of the Ottoman Parliament in Constantinople on 28 January 1920, and was then endorsed, in 1921, by the Turkish National Assembly at Ankara, the Ottoman Turkish people explicitly acknowledged the Ottoman Arabs’ right to self-determination, and it implicitly limited its own claims in Europe to Istanbul and Thrace. This was a declaration of the Turkish people’s decision to cut its territorial losses. Instead o f trying to retain or recover any of the nonTurkish parts of the former Ottoman Empire, except for the Laz and

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Kurdish districts in eastern Anatolia, the Turkish people were going, henceforward, to concentrate their energies on developing their own national resources within the portion of the former Ottoman Empire in which the Turks themselves constituted a decisive majority of the population. The Turks not only made this resolve in 1920. They have acted on it steadfastly and consistently during the half century that has elapsed since then. In consequence, the Turkish people today is more populous and more prosperous than it has ever been. There has also been a notable extension of modern education and, with it, an equally notable increase in the mastery o f modern technology. In less than ten years, starting in 1919, the Turkish people carried out a series o f fundamental reforms which had taken the Western peoples more than a century to achieve. The emancipation of women and the substitution of the Latin for the Arabic alphabet are two o f the most striking changes. So great a trans­ formation o f Turkish life at so fast a pace put a psychological strain on the generation that subjected itself to this ordeal. It accepted the strain, and stood it, because it realised that its survival was at stake. This Turkish tour de force was accomplished successfully because, a t this critical moment in the Turkish people’s history, it had the good fortune to find a great leader and also had the good sense to follow his lead. Could the Turkish people have survived without Ghazi M ustafa Kemal Atatiirk’s leadership? And could A tatürk have been a successful leader if the Turkish people had not followed his lead and had not shown the courage, endurance, solidarity, self-discipline, and understanding that were the necessary conditions, on the people’s side, for enabling AtatQrk’s leadership to be effective? A tatürk had the two gifts of imagination and will-power, but these gifts would have been fruitless if the Turkish people had not responded to his tremendous demands on them. The people and their leadership share, between them, the credit o f having snatched Turkey out of the jaws of death. However, this is no longer part o f the history of the Ottoman Empire. It is the first chapter in the history o f the youngest and the most successful of the Ottoman Empire’s successor states. We now have to analyze the political and social structure of the Ottoman Empire itself, and to trace the sources of its statesmen’s inspiration. W hat was it that enabled these Ottoman statesmen, in the Empire’s great days, to give to the peoples of the N ear and Middle East a spell of political unity and peace that contrasts strikingly with the anarchy by which these same peoples were afflicted both in the period before the Ottoman Empire’s establish­ ment and in the period after its dissolution?

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The Ottoman Empire inherited three distinct traditions. It was the heir of the Muslim Arab Empire; it was the heir of the Christian Roman Empire; and it was founded by a small band of pastoral nomads from the Eurasian steppe. These nomadic founders of the Ottoman Empire were refugees. They had been driven off the steppe into the alien world of fields and cities by the eruption of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. This was the most titanic o f all the successive eruptions o f the nomads out of their native environment on the steppe into the domains of the surrounding sedentary societies. ’Osman’s father Ertoghrul and his followers were some of the many victims of their Mongol fellow nomads. The ’Osmanlis had to start life again in a new economic and social environment, but they brought with them, and applied to their new circumstances, institutions and habits that were legacies of the pastoral nomad way of life. Though the nomad ancestors of the original ’Osmanlis had become Muslims in the course of their trek through Muslim Central Asia and Iran to north-western Anatolia, their heritage from the Muslim A rab Empire was perhaps the least im portant of their three heritages. After the extinction of the ’Abbasid Arab Caliphate at Baghdad by the Mongols in A.D. 1258, every regional Muslim ruler o f any importance usurped the title ’caliph’ (khalifah, meaning ’successor of the Prophet Muham­ mad’) which had been borne by the political head of the Arab Empire. The Ottoman Padishah M urad I (1360-1389), for instance, took to calling himself Caliph. After the extinction o f the Caliphate at Baghdad, the Mamluk rulers o f Egypt had installed a refugee branch of the ’Abbasid House as puppet caliphs at Cairo, and the Mamlüks ruled in their puppets’ name. The Mamlüks were usurpers, and this was a device for legitimising their rule. After the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and the death o f the last of the Cairene ’Abbasid Caliphs in 1543, the Ottoman Pádisháhs styled themselves caliphs, as M urad I had done already. But it was not till the Ottoman Empire had fallen into decline that the title ‘Caliph’ was discovered to have practical uses. It gave the Ottoman Padishah prestige among Sunni Muslims beyond the shrinking Ottoman frontiers —in Central Asia, for instance, and in British India. Moreover, Ottoman diplomacy was able to take advantage o f the fact that the rulers o f Christian states to which the Ottoman Empire was compelled to cede territories inhabited by Sunni Muslims mistakenly believed that, as ’Caliph’, the Ottoman Padishah was the religious head o f all Sunni Muslims, whoever their political sovereign might be. The Christians

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were imagining that the Caliph’s relation to Sunni Muslims was the same as the Pope’s relation to Roman Catholic Christians. Actually, the Caliphs were merely Muhammad’s political successors. His religious successors are the ’ulamâ (i.e. the doctors of Islamic law). On religious questions, the ’ulamâ’s pronouncements are authoritative when there is a consensus among them; the Caliph has no say. However, in the negotiation of peace-treaties concluded in 1774, 1912, and 1913 with Russia, Italy, and Bulgaria respectively, the Ottoman Government secured the inclusion of a clause providing that the Ottoman Padishah, as Caliph, should continue to exercise ’spiritual* authority over the Sunni Muslim inhabitants of ceded territories. This is why, in 1922, the Turkish National Assembly appointed a Caliph when it abolished the office of Pâdishâh (alias Sultan). But they soon found their puppet a nuisance, since every Muslim knows that the Caliphate is really a political, not a religious, office, and that it cannot logically coexist with a republican régime. The Turkish National Assembly therefore abolished the Caliphate too in 1924. This caused dismay among Indian Muslims, but no Caliph has been appointed by the nonTurkish Muslims to take the Ottoman Turkish Caliph’s vacant place. The Ottoman Empire’s heritage from Rome is much more im portant Like other empires—for instance, the Chinese Empire—that have imposed unity and peace on some previously war-torn region, the Roman Empire showed a remarkable capacity for reviving after breakdowns that had looked as if they were irretrievable. It had one breakdown and revival in the third century of the Christian Era, and, in the N ear East, it had a second in the seventh century, a third in the eleventh century, and a fourth in the thirteenth century. However, though the Roman Empire did revive on each o f these four occasions, it failed, each time, to recover more than a part of its previous territory and power, and its thirteenth-century revival was the feeblest of all. From its breakdown in 1182-1204 to the Ottoman annexation o f the last remnants of it (Istanbul, the Pelopónnesos, Tarabazun) half way through the fifteenth century, the East Roman Empire was impotent, and its former dominions fell to pieces and remained in a state of anarchy till the pieces were put together again by the ’Osmanlis in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two of the three last Byzantine Greek historians—Khalkokondÿlês and Kritópoulos—showed their historical sense by taking, for the main thread of their narrative, not the decline of the East Roman (alias Byzantine) Empire but the rise of the Ottoman Empire. The Greeks

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had been calling themselves 'Rom ans’ (Rhomaioi) since they had been conquered by Rome and had been converted to Christianity. They had appropriated the Roman Empire, and they still call themselves 'Ram aioi,’ and call the M odern Greek language 'Rhom aiká,’ when they are talking colloquially. The Arabs called the remnant of the East Roman Empire *Rum,’ and the ’Osmanlis gave the name ‘Rum-ili* ('Rom eland’) to the territory that they conquered in south-eastern Europe. The Ottoman Pâdishâh was addressed as ‘Qaysar-i-Rum’ ('Caesar of Rome’) by other Muslim sovereigns in diplomatic correspondence. It is illuminating historically to think of the Ottoman Empire as being the fifth revival of the Roman Empire in the N ear and Middle East, and not to date the extinction of the Roman Empire in 1453, the year in which the Emperor Constantine XI lost his life in the forlorn hope of trying to save Istanbul from falling to Mehmet the Ottoman Conqueror. In the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire lived on till 1922, when Vâhid-ed-Din, the last Ottoman Qaysar-i-Rum, got away from Istanbul on board a British warship. This is not just a play on words. The Ottoman Empire was the Roman Empire’s successor in the meaningful sense that it inherited a Roman practice that had enabled the Romans, first to build up their empire, and then to revive it again and again. The Romans were always generous in giving Roman citizenship to foreigners and in opening up opportun­ ities for these naturalised Romans to use their abilities to their own and to the Roman Empire’s advantage. The ’Osmanlis took over this Roman tradition, and it was in virtue of this that they were able to build up an empire which was truly the fifth revival o f the Roman Empire in the N ear and Middle East. ’Osman son o f Ertoghrul’s little band o f refugee Turkish pastoral nomads from Central Asia could not have built up an empire if they had not constantly increased their numbers by enlisting new recruits. Some of the earliest of these were voluntary Greek converts to Islam. As the Empire expanded, many Christian landowners became Muslims and ’Osmanlis in order to keep their lands (like some Roman Catholic Irish landowners, who, under the British occupation, became Protestants, and members of the 'Ascendancy,’ for the same reason). For more than 300 years, ending in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Government conscripted promising children from among their Christian subjects and educated them to staff the Ottoman public service from the lowest to the highest level, according to the individual trainee’s capacity. After the abandonment of this system of conscription

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(called ‘devçirme,’ meaning ‘rotation* as between different sets of provinces in which the levy was made in turn recurrently), a new office was created in 1669 which was reserved for Christian subjects of the Empire without their having to become Muslims. This was the post of dragoman (‘interpreter’) of the Porte (i.e. the Gate o f the Imperial Palace). This new officer was a minister of foreign affairs. Unconverted Christian Ottoman subjects continued, from then on, to be appointed to responsible positions, e.g. as ambassadors or as governors of autonom­ ous Christian provinces. The Ottoman Empire’s success was largely due to its policy of drawing, in these various ways, on the ability of its Christian subjects. Thus some Christian Ottoman subjects rose to the highest offices of state. All the Empire’s Sunni Muslim subjects were first-class citizens, without distinctions between nationalities. An Arabic-speaking Palestin­ ian Sunni was on an equal footing with a Turkish-speaking Anatolian one. The Ottoman Empire was Romanlike in extending its first-class citizenship widely and in enlisting ability, wherever it could find it, for the public service. The founders of the Roman and Persian Empires were sedentary farmers. The founders of the Arab and Ottoman Empires were nomadic pastoralists. The fifteenth-century N orth African (Spanish refugee) Arab philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldun, has noted that pastoral nomads have ’asabiyah (‘social cohesion,* ‘a bond of mutual loyalty*), and that this virtue enables them, so long as they retain it, to conquer and dominate sedentary populations that are more numerous and more sophisticated. Ibn Khaldun had the Arab and Berber nomadic peoples in mind, but his observation applies equally to the Eurasian nomad peoples. These, too, have differed from each other in race and language (they have included Iranians, Magyars, Mongols, and Tungus, as well as Turks). But they have all had a uniform set o f social and cultural characteristics. This social and cultural uniformity answers to the uniformity of the Eurasian steppe as a physical environment for human life. To make a living on the steppe as a pastoralist is a tour de force. The steppe is as inhospitable as the sea. You cannot sit down on it; unless you keep moving, you will perish; and you cannot afford to move at random. You must map out a route and must keep to it. The steppe will provide grazing for domesticated animals only on condition that you keep moving these on from one seasonal pastureground to another. This requires skilled and masterful leadership and disciplined execution

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of the leader’s com m ands. Pastoral nomadism, like navigation, is a dangerous trade. It is a state o f war with a hostile natural environment, and it demands the same habits and the same attitudes of mind as are required for waging war with a human enemy. For pastoral nomads, social cohesion is a necessary condition for survival, and their society that has to cohere includes the domesticated animals which provide the human members of the society with their livelihood so long as the pastoralist sees to it that the animals obtain their own livelihood from the steppe’s meagre and quickly exhausted herbage. Obedience to a leader, loyalty to each other, and solicitude for their animals are the three cardinal virtues that are demanded o f a band of pastoral nomads by the exacting conditions of their life. Breeding and tending livestock is the pastoral nomads* trade, but their master-stroke has been to train some animals to be their assistants —non-commissioned officers, in military terms—in the task of looking after the rank and file of their flocks and herds. The training of their mounts (horses or camels) and o f their dogs is an im portant part of their business. When the nomads erupt from the steppe, or are ejected from it, into regions inhabited by sedentary populations, they have to conquer or die. If they conquer, they treat their human subjects in the mass as if they were human flocks, and they train a hand-picked minority of them to serve as human sheep-dogs. Flocks are valuable live property. Because they are property, they may be regimented like slaves, but because they are valuable they must also be looked after as carefully as human children. For this, the shepherd needs the sheep-dog’s help, but the sheep-dog will not be an effective helper for the shepherd unless he has been trained; and a trained dog’s help is so useful that no pains must be spared in tuning him up to his highest possible pitch of efficiency. The ’Osmanlis’ pastoral nomad past, and the habits and attitudes that were their cultural legacy from it, go far towards explaining the ’Osman­ lis’ success in reviving the Roman Empire in the N ear and Middle East. They revived it by equipping it with new institutions which were a m atter of course for ex-pastoral nomads, though they may seem peculiar to people whose social and cultural background is that of the agricultural or the urban sedentary way of life. The ’Osmanlis’ human watch-dogs were those children of their Christian subjects whom they conscripted in childhood to educate them for the Ottoman public service. The education was spartan, intensive, competitive, and selective, and, for boys who qualified for the higher

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grades, it was comprehensive. In the higher grades, the course included a literary education in Persian and Arabic. On the other hand, the heir to the Ottoman throne had to learn a manual trade besides having to become literate. No pressure was put on the boys to become Muslims, and none was needed. They invariably did become Muslims. Cut off, as they were, from their family background, the influence o f the public institution in which they had been incorporated was irresistible. The least intelligent of the conscript trainees were made into palace gardeners or into seamen for the navy; at the next highest level of intelligence they were drafted into the Janissary corps : a corps d’élite of infantry wearing uniform and armed with muskets; at a higher level still, the young men were drafted into the household cavalry; the most intelligent of all were reserved for staffing the imperial administrative service. In this they could rise to be governors of provinces or to be members of the Pàdishàh’s council of state, or to be the president of the council, the Grand Vezir. Thus the boy-conscripts had widely different careers, ranging from gardener to G rand Vezir, and there were corresponding differences in the scale of their rewards in the shape of rank, power, and money. The keys to success were ability and alacrity; the social status of the conscripts’ families counted for nothing. In being conscripted they had been cut ofT from their families and had been given a uniform juridical status. From Grand Vezir to gardener, all of them alike were the Sultan’s slaves, and, as such, they were required to be zealously obedient. Remissness might cost a Grand Vezir, as well as a gardener, his head. One fundamental rule of the service was that it was not hereditary. When a member o f the Pádisháh’s slave-household died, his property passed, not to his wives and children, but to the Pádisháh, his master. His sons became free Muslims, and thus automatically became ineligible for being conscripted into the imperial service, since this penalty—or privilege—was reserved for Christians. An imperial slave’s son would be given a fief carrying with it a revenue consisting of rents paid by peasants (mostly Christian in the European provinces, mostly Muslims in Asia). In return, the fief-holder had to do military service in the Empire’s feudal cavalry. At his death his fief reverted to the Pádisháh, who might or might not appoint the dead man’s son to succeed him in it. The imperial bureaucracy saw to it that a fief-holder should not exact more than his due from the peasants attached to the fief. These peasants were the Pàdishàh’s human sheep, and a provident shepherd does not allow his sheep to be maltreated.

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The paradox of this régime was that the Sunni Muslim freemen who were juridically the Ottoman Empire’s first-class citizens were under the orders of adm inistrators who were ex-Christians and were life-long slaves. Before the close of the sixteenth century the Muslim freemen compelled the Pàdishàh to admit them into his slave-household and to permit them to bequeath their posts to their sons. This was the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, yet, even during its decline, life was more tolerable for most of its subjects than it has been for their descend­ ants since the Empire’s fall. The only one of the many Ottoman peoples that has unquestionably been a gainer from the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire has been the Turks. The citizens of the present Republic of Turkey have little of the original ‘Osmanlis’ blood in their veins. Physically, they are descended mainly from people who have been living in Anatolia since the Neolithic Age. The original band of ’Osmanlis was small, and they increased their numbers by a rapid and massive recruitment of aliens. However, human habits and attitudes of mind are transm itted, not by physical procreation, but by education, so the spirit that the original ’Osmanlis brought with them into Anatolia from the steppe has been communicated by them to the people of many origins whom the ’Osmanlis assimilated culturally in the course of the six centuries o f the Ottoman Empire’s history. The pastoral nomads’ characteristic virtues of endurance and discipline and cohesion were the Turkish people’s salvation in the years 1919-1922, when, at a supreme crisis in their history, they once again found a great leader and rallied at his call. The Ottoman Imperial regime is now a thing of the past. Has it any relevance for the future? Its basis was a system of education, and this system was governed by a principle that the Spartans had once practised and that Plato had preached. This principle was: sever a child’s links with its family background if your intention is to ’condition’ the child thoroughly. The Spartan and Ottoman systems of education did succeed in producing this effect, but they failed to avert the Ottoman Empire’s and the miniature Spartan Empire’s decline and fall. Both systems o f education were inhuman, but unfortunately it does not follow from this that they are irrelevant to the present age. M odern technology is thrusting us into an environment that is inhuman, though it is man­ made, and, in an inhuman environment, it may be impossible for us to survive except by reconciling ourselves to an inhuman way of life. When human societies have fallen into anarchy, they have usually submitted to a draconian régime as a lesser evil.

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COMMENT JOHN W. BARKER University of Wisconsin, Madison

It is perhaps ironic that the first comment on the place o f the Ottoman Empire in history should come from a specialist in Byzantine history. That vantage-point, however, whatever the bias or partisanship involved, does at least make me sensitive to the legacy o f precedents and examples contributed by the Christian Roman Empire of the Middle Ages to the Islamic Osmanli Empire of the M odern Era. Continuity between the two is, of course, one of the im portant themes in Professor Toynbee’s paper. At several points he discusses the idea o f Osmanli succession to the Byzantine heritage o f Middle-Eastern empire. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the very transition from Byzantine to Ottoman might almost be regarded, hot as a disruption, but as a later revival of the earlier Empire; not extinguishing its life, but actually prolonging it. This stimulating thesis is not one that all Byzantinists are likely to accept literally, but it has much to offer in metaphorical terms, and perhaps in other ways as well. That the Ottoman Empire was heir to the Byzantine Empire is indisputable on one point, that of the tradition of imperial sovereignty. By stages before and after the capture of Constantinople in 1453, Osmanli might conquered all the territories o f the old Byzantine world, giving the Turks the distinctive combination o f rule over the N ear East and over the sub-Danubian Balkans—a combination which had defined the character, had generated the problems, and had given shape to the triumphs of the Byzantine Empire. Viewed thus, 1453 merely marked the assumption by the Turks of that composite realm’s logical capital, Constantinople, which they restored again to the status and imperial splendor that the great city had enjoyed in the earlier, better days o f Byzantine prosperity. The Osmanlis also, o f course, had the opportunity to learn many lessons in running this parallel empire from the Byzantines, who had done it before them. The extent to which the Turkish regime actually imitated Byzantine precedents, or even incorporated Byzantine institutions more or less directly into its own new system in an easy transition, continues to be debated. While no conclusive answers can yet be given on this complex point, the most workable hypothesis at present seems to me to be that recently argued by Speros Viyonis. He de-emphasizes the

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conscious carrying-over o f specific forms and practices from Byzantine to Turkish administration. Since both Empires, Byzantine and Ottoman, had to rule similar realms and had to confront similar problems, it is almost inevitable, Vyronis suggests, that the responses by each regime should have many parallel features, not all o f them necessarily linked directly. In arguing for Byzantine-Ottoman continuity, there are, I think, two qualifications to be considered that do not destroy the assertion’s validity but that must be given due weight. The first is that, if the Ottoman Empire was an heir to Byzantine tradition, it was not the only heir. For there were a t least three other distinct heritages bequeathed to other peoples by Byzantium when its own existence as a political organism ceased. To the Christian Hellenes, the Rhomaloi themselves, those who represented the surviving rump o f its conquered population, Byzantium left its most direct cultural and religious legacy, one that would serve as the basis for the sense o f ethnic identity which would be vindicated with 19th-century independence from Osmanli rule. A more nebulous but nevertheless potent legacy o f ideology and conviction of mission was left by Byzantium to Muscovite Russia : the unstable and much-debated legacy that would be summed up in the concept o f “Third Rome.” To the Latin West Byzantium had, over the centuries, made many gifts, direct or otherwise, only to receive eventual hostility and irreparable harm in return. But, in its expiring years, Byzantium gave to the West one o f its most precious bequests. This was the gift o f the Greek language and the heritage o f surviving Classical Greek literature, transm itted just at the time that the humanists o f Renaissance Europe were becoming ready and willing to receive it. G ranting that the Turks’ claim to a direct Byzantine heritage was limited to the tradition o f imperial sovereignty, we must note that the claim was subject to a second qualification. For, at the very time the Turks assumed and revivified the imperial role of Byzantium, they seemed to infuse it with a reversal of the ideological spirit that Byzantium had itself represented. Where Byzantium had been the self-proclaimed system of Christian imperial polity and sovereignty, the Ottoman Empire appeared to be the epitome of Islamic imperial mission, negating all that Byzantium had stood for over the centuries as the bulwark o f Christian Europe against the ideological and territorial expansionism of the Islamic world. In other words, while succeeding to one form o f the Byzantine heritage in their trium phant progress to empire, the Turks in

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the process also accomplished for Islam the very tasks in which the Arabs had repeatedly so disastrously failed in centuries past : the over­ running of Asia M inor, the conquest of the Christian Empire of Rum, and the deep penetration into the “soft underbelly“ of Eastern Europe. Ironically, it would seem, this renewed Islamic menace against Christendom came at the very time when “ Christendom“ was becoming increasingly an anachronism as a concept and all but meaningless as a reality. Decisively divided into rival national or regional states, passing —to use the conventional labelings—from the early Renaissance to the early Enlightenment, Western Europe had not totally lost its reflex actions of fear and defensive co-operation, and its governments could still share in sentiment, if not always in effective action, a common apprehension of the Turk. From Mehmed II’s raid on O tranto in 1480 until at least the climax of Lepanto in 1571, the central M editerranean became again a theatre of Islamic maritime menace to Christian shipping, recreating the Saracen corsair threat o f the 9th and 10th centuries to Italy itself. And, until the Hapsburgs turned the tables by the early 18th century and were joined by the Russians in rolling back Ottoman power, Turkish armies kept Eastern Europe in turmoil, seemingly turning it into the last great sphere o f conflict between Christian and Islamic ideological and military might. This picture of neo-medieval struggle between Islam and Christendom in a post-medieval world does blur somewhat under critical scrutiny. While M artin Luther reflected on the Turkish menace as God’s scourge sent upon Christendom, and while Emperor Charles V cloaked himself in the anachronistic trappings o f a Christian champion against the Turks, the alliance of King Francis I, his Most Christian Majesty of France, with the Osmanli Padishah demonstrated the secular expediency and opportunism of the real world beneath the ideological imagery. The religious feelings involved with Ottoman power were very real things for those both inside and outside the Turkish Empire, and they cannot be dismissed out of hand simply because of the skeptical secularism of our own time. Nevertheless, simplistic identification of imperial mission with religious mission is inadequate for both the Byzantine and the Ottoman regimes. For their part, the Byzantines may have believed firmly through most of their history that their government truly represented the ultimate Christian polity on earth, and for a few of the early centuries of its existence a case could be made for that belief; but, at least by the central Middle Ages, Byzantium hardly spoke or stood for all of Christendom. By the same token, Ottoman imperialism was

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something more than simple Islamic expansionism; perhaps, instead, it was a highly pragmatic and a complicated policy affected as much by political realism as by ideological commitment. The Ottoman Empire was certainly never accepted uniformly by all Islamic peoples as a fully legitimate or consistent Islamic regime, and the Turks themselves were not above manipulating religious sentiments or postures for their own secular purposes. Present-day Turkey’s ambiguous position in the modern Islamic world reflects an idiosyncratic religious character that is to be found in all Turkish history. In sum, then, the theme of Byzantine-Ottoman continuity must be seen essentially in imperial terms, and as marked by an ambigious reversal of ideological roles. In effect, that reversal turned back the clock to an earlier stage of hostilities between the Islamic and Christian worlds; yet, these two worlds had become very different ones in the interval, and the hostilities now had to be recognized as having more than just religious explanations. Far from answering all o f the questions involved, of course, this perspective still leaves many thorny questions that must yet be worked out in research to come. Three final points deserve comment, two of them quickly. The veteran Ottomanist will doubtless have detected in Professor Toynbee’s discussion of Ottoman imperial government a strong echo of the ideas o f Albert Howe Lybyer on the so-called “slave system’’ of government and on the division of the regime into the so-called “ Ruling Institution’’ and the “ Moslem Institution.” Lybyer's interpretations have undergone much criticism and attack since 1913, when his book on Ottoman government in the age of Suleyman the Magnificent first appeared. Also notable is Professor Toynbee’s loyalty to the traditional picture o f Osmanli society and institutions as deriving from traditions of an essentially nomadic life. The growing comprehension in recent years o f early Osmanli organization, of Seljuk and post-Seljuk antecedents, and of the complicated Asia M inor context have rendered this old and romanticized picture somewhat obsolete. Others more qualified than I may draw their own conclusions about the implications here of such unreconstructed Lybyerism and such adherence to the “ nomad theory,” but I would fail in my function were l not to call at least minimal attention to the presence of these factors. The third point is one Professor Toynbee raises at the end of his paper. It is an im portant one, I think, and I should like to close by augmenting it in my own way. This is his reminder that study of the Ottoman Imperial experience may be far from irrelevant to our own

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times, or to those to come. He points out, o f course, that the same thing can be said about much of the Ottoman Empire’s afterm ath as is often said o f the Habsburg Empire’s liquidation : that is, that the freed subjects were not always better off on their own than they had been under the rule of imperial masters, at least by some (if not all) standards of judgment. Just as some interpreters have argued that the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire was unfortunate on some counts, so, too, the demolition of the Ottoman Empire may come to be viewed as a not unmixed blessing. Certainly the process created at least as many problems as it solved. Peoples held subject by coercive power have legitimate grievances and aspirations; but the fragmenting subdivisions and bickering rivalries let loose by political independence and national sovereignty may not be a fully satisfactory alternative to the imperial rule that held them in check. Those of us who deal in our work with the histories o f great past empires know that we are in some ways out of fashion today. The ideologies o f the common man, representative democracy, and the national state are, despite some challenges to them, still strongly cherished by most segments of our society. Yet, my own experience with Byzantine history has convinced me that even the Byzantine Imperial tradition is not without some relevance for our own age, especially for a nation such as the U.S.A. Like American society, the Byzantine world during most of the Empire’s history was not one of a single, distinct national or ethnic background. It was one that drew, instead, upon many regional and ethnic elements. W hat bound together, however imperfectly, a population o f such diverse and cosmopolitan antecedents was an ideol­ ogical commitment, made to the composite factors of Hellenic culture and language, Roman imperial tradition, and, above all, the Christian religion. The strength of that commitment gave each Bynzantine citizen his sense o f identity as a Rhomaios. Perhaps there is some parallel to this in the creation, out o f very diverse ethnic, regional, and racial heritages that have been incorporated into the American population, of an American sense of identity. While still in the process of being forged and perfected, that identity is based on its own kind of ideology : a sort o f secular ideology identifiable with such concepts as democracy, the “American way of life,” or even “ the American dream”—however trite some might find these phrases at the moment, or however unachieved might be some of the aspirations behind them. W hether or not a further parallel should be drawn here with what the labels “Turk” and “ Osmanli” meant to a citizen of the Ottoman Empire must be left to Ottomanists

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for clarification. But Professor Toynbee reminds us that they could be used as political and ideological labels, rather than ethnic or national ones in the present-day sense. Thus, an empire’s capacity to become a “ melting pot’’ of sorts should be of some interest to Americans, and to other such nations of today with diversely derived and “supra-national” populations. The Byzantine, the Turkish, and the American experiences in this realm all reflect valuably, therefore, upon the problem o f creating a sense of identity and loyalty in bodies politic, a sense that transcends national groupings and binds men together on a more comprehensive scale. This is an im portant theme in an age when the national state may be outliving its viability as the working organism of political life. It is not an eternal or immutable form of government, and Professor Toynbee himself has elsewhere suggested that we may well have to replace or to modify drastically the national-state structure if we are to resolve many of the problems that curse our globe. In such a possible process, the past experience of imperial forms o f government would reward intensified study and re-appraisal. However prescient Professor Toynbee may be in anticipating an increasingly “inhuman” way o f life ahead thanks to technological pressures or other forces, few of us would, I suspect, welcome as an alternative a recreation o f the authoritarian and cruel qualities often involved in an imperial system of the past, including the Ottoman one. But a well-informed understanding o f its problems, and of its responses to them, may yet have much to tell us. It is in this respect, then, that I join Professor Toynbee in believing that the Ottoman specialist—like, I hope, the Byzantine specialist—has a genuine contri­ bution to make to our times in his work.

THE OTTOMAN EM PIRE IN WORLD HISTORY WILLIAM H. McNEILL University of Chicago

The Ottoman empire has suffered from a remarkably bad press in western Europe and the United States; and even now, more than fifty years after the empire’s demise, the number o f historians interested in Ottoman history is far smaller than any comparably im portant European state commands. The reasons are easy enough to understand. In the centuries when Ottoman power was expanding, the terrible Turk was cast as bogey man by all of Christian Europe. The specter o f an advancing Moslem tide roused intense fear and religious horror in nearly all Christian minds; and the fact that Moslem victories were explicable as G od’s chosen means for punishing the all-too-evident sins of Christen­ dom did nothing to relieve the terror that Ottoman victories provoked. Echoes and survivals o f this deepseated religious antipathy survive to the present and continue to distort scholarly views of Ottoman reality, even among those who no longer consciously or deliberately espouse a view that makes God personally responsible for international war and diplomacy. Survival of religious antipathies is of course strongest among the Balkan peoples themselves, for their new sprung nationalisms of the 19th century simply gave a new vocabulary to older religious antagonisms. In western Europe and, by adoption, in the United States also, the transmogrification of older religious antipathies took a somewhat different form. For in the 19th century, western scholars worked out a vision of the course of European history that made it revolve around the growth of liberty. This was a t bottom a secularized version of older Christian interpretations o f history; but what matters for our purposes this afternoon is this : The liberal view of history made almost no alteration in the inherited view of the Turk as bogey man. On the contrary, the struggles of Balkan peoples for political independence, which occupied so much of the attention of the Ottoman ruling classes during the 19th and early 20th centuries, seemed to western liberals an unusually clear instance of the struggle between liberty and tyranny. Turkish efforts to oppose the spirit of liberty by preserving the Ottoman empire simply confirmed all the bad things westerners continued to hear about the Turks as enemies of Christianity. Thus it happened that the

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rise o f secularism in western Europe, although it softened dogmatic conflicts within the Christian community, did little or nothing to alter the long standing prejudice against the Turks. European Islamists were a small but expert group from which one might have expected a more sympathetic approach to Ottoman society. But until rather recently the natural human thrust after beginnings directed their curiosity almost exclusively to the early centuries of Islam; and by steeping themselves in Arabic texts and documents, many Islamists took on not merely a markedly sympathetic attitude towards the religion o f Mohammed, but also accepted an Arabist view of Moslem history. This meant, among other things, that the disruption of the caliphal unity of Islam figured as a stupendous disaster. Anything built up after the first five Moslem centuries —even a Moslem state as vast and enduring as the Ottoman empire—was by definition unworthy o f serious attention, since legitimate succession to the Prophet had ended in 1258 if not earlier. Arab prejudice against Turks reinforced this religious interpretation of the course of events, and western students of Islam, by and large, accepted the almost unanimous judgment o f their Arabic sources. Since this concurred in essentials with the unfavorable view of Ottoman existence emerging from the Christian tradition, no very palpable challenge to those biases emerged from the camp of western Islamists. On top of all this, the nation that appeared to have most at stake in rehabilitating the clouded reputation o f the Ottoman empire—the Turks themselves—reacted to the catastrophe of the empire’s final dissolution in 1921 by turning their backs upon the whole thing. Under the impas­ sioned leadership o f M ustapha Kemal A tatürk, the newly sprung Republic sought to discover a purer Turkish past by concentrating attention on ultimate ethnic origins in central Asia and on the early history of the Turks in A natolia. The poly-lingual, poly-ethnic Ottoman past had no appeal for the new Turkish nationalism o f the 1920’s. Quite the contrary : the centuries o f symbiosis with Arab and Balkan peoples had, according to fiery nationalists, badly contaminated the pure fonts of Turkish national culture. Their task was to restore the vanished national integrity by erasing, as thoroughly as possible, lingering traces of the Ottoman period. Obviously, this was an extreme position, associated with the repudi­ ation of Islam and with other republican efforts to break away from bondage to the immediate past. Indeed, as the scars resulting from

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severing imperial connections with the Balkans and with the A rab lands gradually heal, it will be passing strange if the Turks do not lay claim to the Ottoman past as part o f their national heritage, just as the modern Greeks lay claim to the poly-lingual Byzantine empire as theirs. But there are real and obvious drawbacks to treating such complicated social fabrics as either the Byzantine or the Ottoman empires from nationalist points of view. The effort to disentangle Turkish, Greek, Bulgar, Serb, Albanian, Kurdish and Arab histories one from another in order to produce a series of separate, seamless national histories necessarily distorts past reality, even though skilled effort along these lines can add a great deal to the sum of available information about Ottoman (or Byzantine) history. Here it is, I think, that persons who do not themselves inherit any of the relevant national identities can hope to contribute their share to Ottoman studies. It is always difficult for a foreigner to come up to the level of linguistic and local expertise which scholars born in a particular land inherit from childhood. But an outsider has also the advantages of detachment; he does not imbibe from acculturation in childhood the various insensitivities and antagonisms which are built into the local cultural scene. Dialogue and interaction between insiders and outsiders, matching local expertise and linguistic precision against foreigner’s scepticisms and perspectives is the best way to assure a vigorous and intellectually sound scholarly tradition. I presume that Professor K arpat, in organizing this conference, had something o f this kind in view; at least, in his conversations with me he indicated that he hoped for confrontation of large views with detailed expertise; and since I most certainly lack expertise I must perforce fall back on large views in my remarks this afternoon. Thinking, then, in global rather than in strictly Ottoman terms, how is the Ottoman empire to be conceived? Prior to 1402, the Ottoman empire was the most successful o f a number o f ghazi principalities that arose along the Moslem-Christian frontier in Asia M inor. Osman’s heirs were unique in being able to cross into Europe, thereby enormously extending the range o f their conquests. Consequently, the Ottoman sultans soon outstripped all rivals and neighbors among the ghazi rulers of Anatolia, and involved themselves in complex problems o f ruling broad and diverse lands. As a result o f their success in weathering upheavals that followed Beyazid’s capture by Tamerlane (Battle of A nkara, 1402), the rulers o f the Ottoman

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empire became the first to erect a new sort of Moslem imperial structure. It bore interesting resemblances to the two great Moslem empires that subsequently came into existence in Iran and India under Safavid and Mughal governance respectively. By the 1520’s these three great empires divided almost all o f the heartlands o f Islam amongst them. They also shared some im portant characteristics. All three were dominated by a Turkish speaking dique of warriors. Their subjects were diverse in culture and language; and in the case o f both the Ottoman and Mughal empires, also in religion. Rulers and ruled shared common values and outlooks only across a narrow range o f encounter. In the long run this proved a great weakness, but in the 16th century it seems plausible to believe that the limited range of commonalty between the Turkish military and bureaucratic classes on the one hand and the subject populations of the Balkans and o f the Arab lands on the other actually allowed the Ottoman Turks to concentrate larger forces on the frontiers, leaving scanter garrison behind without much fear of revolt just because the points o f contact between conqueror and conquered were so slender. The same may have been true o f the Mughal state—I simply do not know; but clearly the Safavid effort to enforce Shi’a doctrine on all and sundry within their domains opened much wider the range o f contact between ruler and ruled than was the case in Ottoman and Mughal lands. This made for greater friction to begin with, and a somewhat stronger solidarity between ruler and ruled in the long run. Two other points seem im portant to me in seeking to understand the relations between these three Moslem states. First, the Turkish ruling classes of the three empires were removed in greater or less degree from the social discipline and life-style of steppe nomadry. To be sure, their fundamental military ethos and skills derived directly from that steppe background; and in the case of the Safavid empire tribal command structures persisted. (I presume that the Safavid tribes descended more or less directly from erstwhile nomadic groupings that had lived in traditional ways and under traditional disciplines somewhere on the steppe.) Yet even in the case of the Safavid state, where the steppe background was clearly closer to the surface than in either the Ottoman or the Mughal empires, it seems probable that the old and unconsidered principles o f tribal cohesion had undergone severe strain; severe enough to make room for the perfervid religious prosyletism that was the distinguishing characteristic of the Safavid movement Where breakup o f traditional

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Turkish steppe patterns of behavior had gone further, as in both the Ottoman and Mughal empires, no comparably incandescent religious doctrine arose to weld the w arrior class into a coherent whole. But there, too, a religious mission justified and sustained the central power; and when the religious role of the Ottoman sultan was publicly challeng­ ed, as happened when Shah Ismail first burst upon the scene, I suspect that the shock to the entire Ottoman command structure was far more severe than has usually been recognized by scholars who think mainly of the Ottoman collision with Christendom. So at least I argued in my book, The Rise o f the West, though I am painfully aware of how little hard fact or documentary basis I have for such a suggestion. All the same, until linguistically competent experts come along and really search the documents with the question in mind o f how im portant the Safavid religious challenge was for Selim the Grim and Suleiman the Lawgiver, and how those great Sultans set out to meet whatever threat they perceived to their position and authority from Safavid doctrine—until this vast work o f historical inquiry has been carried through, I can only say that I find the idea to be an attractive hypothesis, intrinsically plausible and—I should also confess—especially dear to me because I had to defend it against the scepticism of my late honored colleague, the great Islamist M arshall Hodgson with whom I repeatedly discussed the question. My basic argument is, alas, not grounded on documentary evidence but on a priori reasoning, to wit : How else account for the radical departures from Sunni precedent which Suleiman made in organizing the religious establishment of his empire along lines that seem suspiciously similar to the patterns of Byzantine ecclesiastical organization? Unless he was deeply disturbed by the Safavi challenge to his legitimacy as a ruler, what could explain what was surely a radical departure from any and all Moslem precedent? I must also confess that the seeming similarities between the Shi’aSunni struggle in Islam with Protestant-Catholic controversies within Christendom appeal to my sense of symmetry. No doubt such parallels ought to be examined with an especially sceptical eye; yet once again it seems to me that a priori considerations may be advanced making parallelism of development within Islam and Christendom less implaus­ ible than might seem to be the case at first blush. I have in mind such factors as the intensification of communications accross the entire range of the civilized world, bringing increasingly diverse religious as well as other cultural patterns to the attention of men in the more active centers

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o f human intercourse. Latitudinarianism, scepticism, what in European history we are accustomed to term ‘renaissance’ attitudes naturally flourished under such circumstances—and not least in the court of Mohammed II the Conqueror. It does not seem to me mere accident that flaming revolt against such lax religious attitudes arose towards the margins of the respective cultural fields of force—in remoter Germany for Christendom and in Azerbaijan for Islam. Both these regions were marginal to the network of trade and intellectual commerce centering respectively in Rome and Con­ stantinople; both Luther and Ismail appealed to atavistic, puritantical impulses; both, above all, sought to grasp a single, authoritative truth with power to save. Populations amongst whom traditional and un­ examined ways have been seriously disturbed by new contacts with the outside world are, I think, always liable to support such anguished efforts to return to certainty and purity and simplicity. If so, the resem­ blances between the Safavid and the Protestant movements are not entirely fortuitous; and the responses the two movements generated in Rome and in Constantinople deserve to be studied comparatively, so that each may be more fully understood in the light of the other. These remarks come perhaps perilously close to detail and cry aloud for the empirical test of information which I so grievously lack. Let me therefore hastily retreat again to the loftier and perhaps more vacuous level of world-wide comparisons. For the Ottoman empire, like its two Islamic sister states, the Safavid and Mughal empires, belonged also to a larger class of early modern imperial structures that arose in the wake, and in significant part as a result of, the spread of gunpowder weapons. The states in question are the Manchu empire of China, the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, the Muscovite empire in Russia, the Spanish empire of the Americas, and the Portuguese empire of the southern seas, in addition to the three Moslem empires with which we have been concerned hitherto. The roster makes an impressive list. All the civilized world, except for a small portion of extreme northwestern Europe, reacted to the spread of cannon shortly to be followed by the development of efficient small arms, by uniting into hitherto unaccustomedly large states. The reasons are not far to seek. Cannon were expensive; only relatively wealthy rulers could afford them. But access to cannon meant that a wealthy and powerful ruler could batter down the wall of even the stoutest stronghold within a few hours, once his cannon had been transported to the spot and prepared for fire. This latter process might

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indeed require weeks or months, depending on how far the beseiged stronghold was from the imperial gun park, and what kind o f transport by sea and land allowed the movement o f heavy guns from their place of storage to the scene of battle. But even a few months did not m atter very much in such encounters; the power of cannonade against stone ring walls was crushing. The certainty of being able to breach local defenses sharply reversed age-old power relations between local polities o f every kind and the handful of powerful rulers who succeeded in gaining control o f the new weapons. Each of the new-sprung imperial structures had its own peculiarities, and moved from early, clumsy seige guns to lighter, more mobile field guns with varying degrees of thoroughness and technical virtuosity. The Ottoman empire was for a while in the forefront o f both developments; the Chinese, Muscovite and Spanish empires were particularly agile in the shift to field use of gunpowder weaponry. Empires confronting less formidable foes across land frontiers, like the Japanese and the Mughal states, could afford to lag behind and did so—in each case, in large part because of the charms o f their respective, very highly developed inherited codes of chivalry. I am too ill-informed about the military history o f the Safavid empire to guess where that state falls in the spectrum, though I have the impression that it, too, lagged behind at each stage in the development o f gunpowder weaponry—but I will not even venture to guess why. Two world-shaking results flowed directly from the gunpowder revolution. First, and as we all know very well indeed, the world’s oceans were opened up to European ships within an amazingly short time. America was discovered, Spaniards undertook its subjugation, and the sea coasts of all the earth began to be the scene of a most complex and fateful series of cultural interactions from which no significant portion of humankind was long immune. This did nothing to help the Ottoman empire. By rounding Africa the Portuguese opened an alternative route for the spice trade, by-passing Ottoman lands; but this in itself was of marginal importance, and, as a m atter o f fact, for a while the old spice routes recovered much of their accustomed traffic, since at least in the 16th century the routes across Suez or from the head of the Persian gulf were intrinsically cheaper than the risky long haul around Africa—so long, that is, as middlemen refrained from exacting too heavy a rake-off for permission to pass. The second-world transforming change wrought by the gunpowder revolution was of far greater importance for the Ottoman empire. I

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refer to the taming o f the Eurasian steppe nomads by the armed forces of their civilized neighbors. Guns in the hands of trained, professional soldiers proved capable o f turning back the most furious charge o f steppe cavalry; centralized bureaucratic adm inistration o f gunpowder armies allowed the establishment o f remote garrison posts at spots where nomad raids could be checked before they started; and once this possibility had been grasped, a rapid advance into the grasslands them­ selves, reducing one pasture area after another to the effective adminis­ tration o f a distant imperial capital, became possible. Traditional tribal life withered and collapsed under such pressures throughout the length and breadth o f the Eurasian steppe, from Hungary in the west to Man­ churia in the east. Civilized advance got massively under way about 1650; it was complete, in essentials, a century later. I have argued in my little book, Europe's Steppe Frontier, that all three of the empires adjacent to the western portion of the Eurasian steppe took part in this advance : the Hapsburgs annexing Hungary, the Ot­ tomans incorporating Rumania into their body politic, and the Russians getting the Ukraine as well as a wide belt of lands further east. Such a distribution o f the steppelands obviously favored Russia as against its European rivals. (In the F ar East and central Asia, incidentally, it was the Chinese who won the race into the steppelands, confining the Russians almost entirely to the remoter forested zones of the north.) But in the west, it was the Russians who emerged as principal gainers from the gunpowder revolution. The Ottoman and Safavid empires, together with the lesser Islamic states of central Asia, were left far behind. No such upshot was foreseeable in, say, 1475 when Mohammad II took Caifa and made the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake. Islam had long been established as the dominant faith of the western and central portions o f the steppe; and Turkish-speaking peoples predominated throughout the regions. Yet Ottoman and Safavid forces failed to capitalize on these advantages and allowed the Russians to take over. Here, surely, lies the critical geopolitical failure of these Islamic empires in early modern times; and a careful study of relations between Con­ stantinople and Crim Tartary not to mention the khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, o f Bukhara and Samarcand might uncover some of the reasons for the massive Turkish* setback that this change in world balances involved. Access to gunpowder weaponry and the effectiveness o f centralized bureaucratic control of a professionalized armed establishment were, obviously, the key factors in the race for control of the steppelands.

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Perhaps the Turks’ major disadvantage was that they had been so steeped in the skills of archery, and their way of life was so closely tied to patterns of tribal autonomy, that the new principles o f war and politics met with crippling resistance at every level of Turkish society. O r perhaps the central weakness arose more from disregard o f the artisanal and commercial sources of supply for the new weaponry. If so, such attitudes may also (I suppose) be traced back to values inherited from life on the steppe, where Turkish warriors, horsemen and drawers of the bow, had long enjoyed a traditional formidability which did not depend on any kind of elaborate commercial and artisanal base like that the new gunpowder weapons required. Before I leave this theme 1 might point out that the technological shift to gunpowder and the advance of bureaucratic control of armies went closely hand in hand. Pikemen, bowmen, swordsmen, could be relatively independent of central arsenals and supply depots. N ot so artillerymen and musketeers, whose weapons became useless without a steady supply of powder and shot. And since both powder and shot required materials that were hard to find locally in most landscapes, and could not ordi­ narily be manufactured by the troops themselves, it followed that soldiers equipped with these weapons were far more closely dependent on whoever controlled the supply of ammunition. Here was a magnificent opportunity for representatives of the central power to assert a really effective day-by-day control over troops, even when garrisoned hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital. Local rebellion or defiance o f commands from above could last only as long as powder and shot held out; and it was not difficult to make sure that supplies on hand were al­ ways insufficient to permit local commanders or particular garrisons from rebelling with any prospect of success. The result was the kind o f armies we take for granted today, armies that are by all earlier stan­ dards remarkably obedient to distant, bureaucratic command. Again, I know too little about the facts of Ottoman history to be sure, but from what I have read about the janissaries in their later and degenerate days, I would suppose that the Ottoman government failed to capitalize on this fundamental device for controlling the increasingly formidable professional military class. For if it is true that the janissaries armed themselves by buying their own weapons on the markets o f Constantinople and intermingled with (indeed partially merged into) the artisans of the capital (who presumably manufactured much of the powder and shot, together with other needed army supplies), then of course the bureaucratic control to which European and Chinese armies

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were so effectively subjected must have remained much weaker in the Ottoman context than it was elsewhere. If this is so, then there are reasons other than the personal incapacity of some of the later Sultans for the repeated success of janissary uprisings which so fatefully convulsed Istanbul, whereas, when the Streltsy tried the same thing in Russia, Peter the G reat was able to put them down. If I am right in drawing attention to the globe-girdling character o f the response to the gunpowder revolution, it is worth asking why northwestern Europe did not conform to the norm. Certainly the empire of Charles V offered a promising base from which the unification o f northwestern Europe might have been expected to emerge in much the same fashion in which similar empires were simultaneously emerging in other parts of the earth. Yet for all his personal attention to the tasks of government, Charles never came close to consolidating his hereditary holdings into an administrative whole; much less was he able to unite northwestern Europe. A century later when another Hapsburg, Fer­ dinand II, made a really serious effort to consolidate the Germanies in the name of Catholic reformation—an effort that like the three contemp­ orary Moslem empires drew on a religious cause to inspire obedience among a very miscellaneous soldiery—he too failed, though the upshot became clear only after thirty years of devastating war. W hat went wrong in Europe to foil the growth o f the kind of gun­ powder empire that arose in all the rest of the civilized world? I am not sure I have an answer to my own question, and to explore what tentative ideas I have on the m atter would take me too far from the proper focus of our attention here. But to put the question in the way I have is itself an example of the benefit I think may flow from looking across cultural and linguistic boundaries in hope of seeing what makes one part o f the world unique or unusual in comparison with normal or usual reactions elsewhere. A final remark and I will conclude. It seems to me that perhaps the family of gunpowder empires of early modern times had a sort o f natural life cycle. W hat I have in mind is this : at the beginning, when the technology of gunpowder weapons was new and when the cutting edge of whatever ideology the rising imperial authorities found suitable for justifying their power was also fresh, easy conquest of broad terri­ tories took place. Sooner or later geographical obstacles, social and psychological limitations or shortages of supply called a halt to this early imperial expansion. Sometimes, as in eastern Europe, it was the convergence of advancing imperial frontiers that checked the annexation

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o f new lands. Sometimes, as with the Spaniards in the Americas, it was manpower shortages and a decay of missionary conviction that limited expansion. And sometimes the principal critical factor was the difficulty of delivering supplies to the imperial periphery, as with the Portuguese and (perhaps) the Manchus. Territorial stabilization put extra strain on bureaucratic control, for troops and governors stationed for years on end in remote garrison points tended to develop local ties of all sorts, and these might con­ travene the interests o f the central authorities, or even invite local forces to disobey instructions coming from the capital. Pacification of relatively vast imperial territories had another concomitant : it facilitated a remarkable spurt of population growth that set in in all the civilized lands o f Eurasia during the 17th century. (Japan was an exception, keeping its population nearly stable by widespread resort to the exposure o f unwanted new-born infants.) By the latter, part _fif_the_ 18th century in many parts of Asia and in the Balkans too, uneconomic, subdivision ofpëasânt3fll4ÿyë_Pr°duced critica) problems for im portant segments o f the subject populations of the gunpowder empires. Since these peasants were usually of different speech and culture from the rulers, the possibility that peasant revolt might espouse systematic anti-govern­ mental, i.e., nationalist, ideologies was obvious. The Greek revolt of the 1770’s in the Ottoman empire is an example of how easily such mover meats might be provoked within linguistically, religiously and culturally diverse states such as those which the gunpowder revolution had made normal throughout the civilized world. Peasant revolts in China (from 1774), Pugachev’s revolt in Russia (1773), and a widespread Inca revolt in Peru (1780) all coincide closely with this first overt stirring of the Balkan discontent which was to be so subversive of Ottoman society in the following 130 years. I do not mean to suggest that the circumstances provoking these uprisings were everywhere the same; certainly Pugachev’s revolt, for one, did not gain its strength from overcrowding on the Russian land. All the same, I think I can assert that intensified strains upon bureau­ cratic control of the armed forces, a rising intensity of peasant discontent" (due in some cases to population pressure on the land) and the ready availability of nationalistic, anti-imperial ideologies in all the gunpowder empires brought most of them into parlous condition by the second half of the 18th century. It is probably also true that long established governments allowed the exploitative classes to multiply over time, while failing to correct increasingly flagrant inequities in tax assessment

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and collection. A chronic top-heaviness resulted, dividing privileged from unprivileged classes more and more sharply. To be sure, conditions varied widely. The Portuguese empire, for instance, had been largely supplanted in the Indian Ocean by Dutch and English shipping from the early years o f the 17th century; its demise had nothing to do with peasant revolts, though difficulties of effective control from Lisbon did weaken it seriously. A t the other extreme, the Tokugawa regime in Japan remained at least outwardly secure through­ out the 18th century; and when it crumbled it was not because of peasant pressures or bureaucratic breakdown. Less drastic but still substantial qualifications would have to be made in describing each of the other imperial structures with which I am comparing the Ottoman empire, for such diverse polities did not follow an exactly parallel course. All the same, internal difficulties clearly multiplied so that each o f these power systems found itself in a poor condition to ward off the surging force of renewed European intrusions that resulted from the industrial revolution and the concurrent intellectual, technological and organizational advances that occurred in the northwestern portion o f Europe after, say, 1750. The remarkable ease and speed with which 19th century Europeans—British and French mainly— were able to batter down local resistance to their encroachments becomes more understandable if one reflects on how it came to pass that not only the Ottoman but also the great Asian empires found themselves simultan­ eously in such a weak and decaying condition. My remarks imply that there may well be a typology o f internal developments within what I have here christened the gunpowder empires making most of them particularly vulnerable to west European penetra­ tion by about the middle of the 19th century. Northwestern Europe’s accretions o f power were o f course stupendous, but the remarkable way in which effective local resistance to western pressures collapsed in the Ottoman, Manchu, Mughal and Japanese empires within a single decade, 1850-1860, seems to require explanation from the Asian as well as from the European side. O r so I am prepared to suggest. To explore these possibilities would call for comparative study o f successive phases of the encounters with the west experienced by each o f the gunpowder empires. The Ottoman experience has, I think, real parallels in the Indian, Chinese and Spanish American cases. Widening social-psychological gaps between rulers and ruled in each of these states weakened them drastically in the face o f western aggression. The disruption of traditional artisan life as a result o f competition from

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machine made goods, particularly textiles and metal products, was another common denominator among these three empires. So, as I have argued already, were local population pressures on the land, creating explosive peasant discontent. On the other hand, it is clear that Japan and Russia went a different path in accommodating to the achievements of western Europe. As a result, comparative study of Russian and Ottoman encounters with the west offers a particularly promising line o f inquiry, for not only did the Russians forestall the Turks in the Ukraine and Crimea, they also made good a “modernizing" revolution from above in the age of Peter the G reat, whereas half a century earlier a seemingly similar effort launched by M urat IV, aimed at bringing Ottoman military resources to a par with those o f western European states, failed to achieve lasting success. The personalities of M urat’s heirs have often been used to explain this Ottoman failure. Perhaps that is the only realistic way to account for what happened after M urat’s death in 1640. But the differing roles o f Orthodoxy under Peter the G reat and of Islam under the sultans— particularly in the years of the so-called Köprülü revival after 1656— call, I think, for careful consideration. My hunch—and it is no more than that—is that Peter the G reat, by precipitating the Old Believer schism within Orthodoxy, turned the popular discontent provoked by his costly, radical innovations into politically tolerable channels of millenarial eschatology; whereas the sultans never broke with the Moslem establishment, and at the time o f Mehmet Köprülü’s rise to power allowed something of the antique ghazi spirit, complete with heterodox dervish influences, to pervade the janissaries and other branches of the state administration. If so, this turn of policy wedded the Ottoman government, more firmly than before, to a God-centered theory of man and society—a theory according to which the success or failure o f man’s best efforts depended simply and directly on the inscrut­ able will o f God. Insofar as men believed this vividly and naively, mere human effort at military or any other sort o f reform of course became ridiculous. A far more plausible way to court divine favor was to return as faithfully as might be to customs and traditions of the distant, victorious past. Such an intellectual posture made reform à la russe absurd. Insofar as it did in fact prevail in the Ottoman empire after 1656—and the successes which attended Köprülü’s initial efforts to revive the ancient ghazi spirit may have given this attitude just the filip it needed to become

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dom inant in the highest circles o f the Ottoman government—as I say, insofar as it prevailed, then the decisive difference between Russian and Ottoman 18th century reactions to contacts with the writhing Proteus of western Europe become more fully intelligible. Nineteenth and twentieth century Ottoman and Turkish history also can be illuminated by comparative study I believe; but 1 have no time here today to explore this field. I conclude, therefore, with the observation that Ottoman history is surely one o f the most fertile fields for historians. Anyone properly equipped linguistically and conceptually can be a ground breaker. So much remains to be done, all the way from editing MSS and recovering elementary facts about the structure and practices of government to the exploration of the vast fields of economic, social and intellectual history, all of which ought then be put into the context of comparative and world history ! It is a field in which there is room for everyone whether Turk, Bulgar, Greek or Serb; German, French, English, Russian—and even, as this conference amply demonstrates, for Americans.

COMMENT ANDREW C. HESS Temple University

Professor McNeill has called attention to some o f the reasons why there is a general reluctance to study one o f history’s great empires : the Ottoman. While I could not agree more with the statement that religious and secular prejudices have impeded our understanding of the Ottoman experience, I believe going beyond the common stereotypes o f the terrible Turk is a more serious problem than examining the influence of various ideologies on Turkish history. As Norman Daniel and other students o f the western image of the Islamic world have shown, the existence of another, radically different society on the borders o f Europe has been used time and time again by Western European leaders as a means o f refreshing the unity of Europe through a negative contrast with the outside evil. It, therefore, follows that any attem pt to overcome centuries of thinking of the Turks as, to borrow the terms o f modern social psychology, a negative reference group involves coming to grips with the whole range of structural differences that threw the great societies of the Islamic and Christian worlds into conflict from time to

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time. Perhaps American scholars are well placed so that they might overcome the consequences of the long war between the two different civilizations. But in order to build bridges across cultural frontiers, American scholars, it seems to me, will have to create their own scholarly tradition for the history of the Islamic community. No m atter how expert the work, so long as the historical experience of the Turks is separated from or made more mysterious than the actions o f other people, the crucial efforts in empathy and communication necessary to overcome inherited divisions of powerful force will not be made. In that light the lack of comfort felt by Professor McNeill may be only a sign to those o f us who have been educated in a tradition borrowed largely from Europe of his creative drive rather than his limited linguistic skills. It is natural, I suppose, for someone who studies Ottoman history from the inside to be astonished at a comparison between the rise o f the Safavid state in Persia and the Protestant revolt in Europe. But if one shifts to a transcultural perspective, the similarity between the two “ religious revolutions" seems less strained. Certainly both central Europe and Azerbaijan were far enough from the centers of Ottoman and Habsburg (Spanish) strength so that a frontier experiment could be tried. Underlying cultural differences—the Persian tradition for the Safavids and the customs of central Europe for the Protestants—then encouraged a resistance which, when given ideological content, led to the sharp definition o f a frontier between the rebels and their imperial opponents. Finally, the striking parallelism involved in both the rise o f Safavid and Protestant strength and the development o f intense warfare between the rebels and their “Orthodox" enemies undoubtedly was related to economic and demographic developments which affected both Islamic and Christian civilizations. Despite these common elements, I believe it is the difference between the two “ revolutions" that is most striking. W ithout going into great detail, the Protestant Reformation emerged out o f an alliance between a rising middle class and a central European aristocracy opposed to the political domination of the Roman Catholic church and the Habsburg empire. The Safavid movement, on the other hand, arose out o f an alliance between tribesmen, villagers, and a Persianized elite interested in reestablishing the political autonomy of Iran. So while central Europe o f the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries coped with the appear­ ance of an entirely new class, the Irano-Islamic community engaged in the reconstruction of Persian independence through the absorption o f

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Turkish tribesmen. W hat is out of phase in the evolution o f the two “revolutions” is what differentiates the post eleventh century history of the Islamic world from Europe : the acculturation of Turkish nomads by Islam and the appropriation of cultural leadership by the new middle class in Europe. One can say that the history o f the Ottoman empire from the end o f the sixteenth century well into the last quarter o f the eighteenth century has usually been explained by analyzing the failures of the military establishment. Yet, somehow during that period the empire managed to defend itself. The inability o f the Ottomans to control the Russian steppes and the failure to maintain sixteenth century military discipline are, nevertheless, weighty charges against the Ottoman army. If, how­ ever, the internal structure of the empire is examined, the actions o f the Janissary corps and the military leaders of the Empire between the death of Süleyman the Lawgiver (1566) and the treaty of Küçük Kaynarci (1774) become somewhat more understandable. The Ottoman empire, among other things, was basically an agricultural state. W ith institutions geared to administer peasants, steppe territories were turned over to border guards—the Crimean Tartars—in order to avoid holding lands that would cost much to garrison and yield little in the way of revenues. Similarly, to expect the eighteenth century Ottoman army to have remained aloof from the social changes affecting the empire since the end of the sixteenth century is to detach, unrealistically, the military establishment from the society of which it was a part. Because all classes of the empire participated in the changes overtaking the state toward the end o f M urat I ll’s reign of 1595, the subsequent “ineptness” o f government officials and the “indiscipline” o f the Janissary corps was clearly part o f a larger event. As modern studies o f the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest, the Ottoman state transformed itself during the two centuries following the death of M urad III from an expansive empire into a conservative polity interested in its self-pre­ servation. During that same period the Janissary corps ceased to be the cutting edge of an expansive Ottoman army and became, instead, the guardian o f the established order. Judgments on the weak and decaying condition o f the Turko-M uslim empire do not take into consideration this history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. M ost students o f Ottoman decline underline the relative superiority of Western military and economic developments in relation to the lack o f progress existing in these two areas within the Turkish state. This viewpoint, however, fails to probe beneath the

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surface o f Ottoman affairs to find out why M urat IV did not restore the empire to its old position or to discover what gave the state its cohesion during the long centuries of decline. Once the blocks to a deeper examination of Ottoman history have been removed, the study of Turko-M uslim society will undoubtedly show us how loyalty to the social institutions of the Ottoman empire is the missing element in the current typology o f decline. Perhaps then we will understand why this empire preferred to undergo a long series of military defeats after the end of the seventeenth century rather than tamper with its internal order. Thus, the comparative study of societies rather than the description of how economic and military forces, which cross cultural boundaries with ease, proceeded will probably yield a better explanation for why the impact o f the West on the Ottomans created a history so uniquely different from that of western Europe. Despite the tendency intercultural history has to attenuate the differ­ ences between civilizations, the investigations of Ottoman history on a wider scale, such as Professor McNeill has proposed for his age of the gunpowder empires, is clearly necessary. N ot only does the study o f the Ottomans have to avoid being regarded as some special mystery, to be excluded from the course of human afTairs, but it also needs to be subjected to the ideas and criticism o f those scholars who work in peripheral fields. The history o f this Turko-M uslim empire represents, after all, a great chunk o f experience. There is no reason why attitudes and practices of the past should prevent any part of that interesting history from telling us more about the ways of man.

THE TURKISH IMPACT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF M ODERN EUROPE HALIL 1NALCIK University of Chicago

Since a Europeo-centric view of history in the West began to be replaced by a true world history concept, the history of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted in a very im portant part of the world for over five centuries, is gaining a new interest. A number of contributions recently made in Europe and America on the problem of the place o f the Ottoman Empire in European history can be considered as a sign o f this growing interest. Although some of these new studies were still not free of certain biases, mainly because they did not make use also o f the Ottoman evidence, they, however, explored new ideas and had new orientations. Under the light of these publications we are now able, for instance, to speak of how the Ottoman state became an im portant factor in the balance o f power of European politics. Even during the first stage of the Italian wars from 1494 to 1S2S the Ottoman state was an im portant part in Italian diplomacy. Fr. Babinger and J. Kissling in their studies based on the Italian archival material, and S. Fisher, PfefTerman, Schwoebel, D. Vaughan in their more general treatm ent of the subject showed how the Italian courts maintained diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Sultan. It is true that the Western archives do not yield much on the subject, for political and military m atters were concealed in such negotiations and never put in writing. But sometimes even if an Ottoman military intervention was not really desired the rum or of a secret alliance was used as an intimidation. Hard-pressed Italian states used as a last measure the threat of calling on the Ottomans. In 1525 the French followed actually this Italian policy when their king was made prisoner by the Emperor. The Ottomans welcomed this oppor­ tunity to invade Hungary in 1526 and open a sea front against the Emperor in the M editerranean in 1532 just as in the past they had exploited the situation in Italy against Venice. From 1480 onwards the Ottomans always thought of an invasion of Italy. Two factors made them hesitate for a decisive move, the possibility of resistance of a Europe united under the Pope and Emperor, and their own naval

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weakness to open an oversea front. In 1537, however, Suleyman thought it was the time for such a move. As early as 1531 the Venetian ambassador was writing to the doge, “ Sultan Suleyman says, T o Rome, to Rome,' and he detests the Emperor for his title of Caesar, he, the Turk, causing himself to be called Caesar.” Ottoman attem pts to capture from the Venetians strongholds along the Adriatic coast and the isle of Corfu in 1537 and 1538 were in fact a preparation for the invasion o f Italy. France was then the ally of the Ottomans. A t the siege o f Corfu they were reinforced by the French navy. But the King and Emperor saw the great danger for the whole of Christendom in Europe. In July 1538 Francis made peace with Charles V at Aigues-Mortes and what is more he promised to take part in a crusade against the Ottomans. Two months later Barbarossa, G rand Admiral of the Sultan, succeeded in routing at Prevesa a powerful crusading fleet. Then, this victory became useless without French alliance. W hat I am trying to emphasize is that the Ottomans became an active part in the second stage of the Italian wars and there was a moment when the Western contenders for Italy saw that the balance of power was lost in favor of the Sultan. It must be added that the Ottomans fully appreciated the value of the French alliance and supported the King financially too. In 1533 the Sultan sent Francis the sum of one hundred thousand gold pieces to enable him to form a coalition with England and German princes against Charles V. Two years later the French King asked the Sultan to send him a subsidy of one million ducats. Later on in 1555 the French King Henri II, pressed for money, floated a loan in France with the interest increased from 12 to 16 percent, and at this time many Turks, pashas among them, found it profitable to invest in this loan. The King borrowed 150,000 scudos from Joseph Nasi, Jewish tax farmer of the Sultan. On his part the French king appreciated well the Ottoman Alliance as the principal power to check the Habsburg supremacy in Europe. In 1532 Francis I admitted to the Venetian ambassador that he saw in the Ottoman Empire the only force guaran­ teeing the continued existence of the states of Europe against Charles V. In brief one can say that the Ottoman Empire played an im portant role in the balance o f power in Europe in the sixteenth century and consequently in the rise of the nation-states in the W est This role can be seen to continue in the Ottoman support and encouragement to the English and Dutch in the period after 1580 when these nations proved to be the champions o f European resistance to the Habsburg attem pts at supremacy.

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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries support for Protestants and Calvinists was one of the fundamental principles of Ottoman policy in Europe. Already in 1552 Suleyman tried to incite the Protestant princes in Germany against the Pope and Emperor. He said in his letter to them that he himself was about to embark on a campaign and promised on oath that they would not be harmed when he entered Germany. Melanchton was directly in touch with the Patriarch of Istanbul, who was in effect an official of the Sultan. Later on in a letter to Lutheran princes in the Low Countries and in other lands subject to Spain, the Sultan offered military help and saw them as standing close to him, since they did not worship idols, believed in one God and fought against the Pope and Emperor. Under Ottoman rule Calvinism was propagated freely in Hungary and Transylvania, which became a Calvinist and U nitarian stronghold in the seventeenth century. It is convincingly argued that Ottom an pressure on the Habsburgs was an im portant factor in the extension of Protestantism in Europe. Also, it should be pointed out that the Ottomans contributed to the rise of Muscovy by supporting, as a great power in the politics o f Eastern Europe, the Muscovy-Crimean alliance against the Jagellons and the Golden Horde, which then tried to establish or restore their hegemony in the region. When the Ottomans saw the danger for their Black Sea and Caucasian interests in the Muscovite supremacy and expansion in the middle o f the sixteenth century it was too late. Now I would like to deal in a more detailed way with the economic relations of the Ottoman Empire with Europe. Speaking of the Ottoman economy one can certainly not ignore the attitude of the Ottoman ruling class towards the productive classes and to the problem o f its economic policy in general. A t the outset it must be emphasized that the Ottoman state was not a nomadic empire the models o f which could be found in the Euroasian steppes. It was a typical Middle East empire with all its age-old adminis­ trative principles and institutions. It was concerned primarily with the protection of the settled populations under its rule and prom otion o f their agricultural and commercial interests. It should be added that this policy was not based on purely economic reasoning but mainly on the financial ends of the state. Even if in the thirteenth century nomadic elements in the Ottoman frontier society played a certain role, the Ottoman state had soon become a typical Islamic sultanate with the basic structure of a Middle East state. Its legislation and actions leave no room for doubt on this point. We know, for instance, that the longest

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internal struggle the Ottoman state had to make in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries stemmed from the basic fact that it endeavoured in the interests of the settled population to take under control the semi­ nomads of the Uzun-Yayla in Inner Anatolia and of the Taurus range from the Euphrates to Western Anatolia. The economic system of the Ottoman empire and its basic economic principles derived from a traditional view of state and society which had prevailed since antiquity in the empires of the Middle East. These principles, since they determined the attitude and policy of the adminis­ trators, were of considerable practical importance. In the Muslim state, as in earlier states in the Middle East, all classes of society and all sources o f wealth were regarded as obliged to preserve and promote the power of the ruler. Hence all political and social institutions and all types o f economic activity were regulated by the state in order to achieve this goal. The populace was regarded as forming two main groups—those who represented the ruler’s authority (the adm inistrators, the troops, the men of religion), and the ordinary subjects, ra'äya. The former were not concerned with production and paid no taxes, while the latter were the producers and tax-payers. A main concern o f the state was to ensure that each individual remained in his own class; this was regarded as the basic requisite for politico-social order and harmony. To increase revenue from taxation the governments of N ear East States appreciated the necessity of developing economic activity and promoting the greatest possible increase in production from all classes o f the ra'âyâ'. It was recommended that cultivated land should be increased by the digging o f canals and that trade between different regions should be promoted by the construction of roads, bridges and caravansaries, and by ensuring the safety of travelers. W ithin the class of the producers, the tillers of the soil and the craftsmen were subject to a code of regulations distinct from that of merchants; the methods o f production and the profit margins of the former were under strict state control, since, in this view of society, they were the classes who produced the essential necessities of life and whose labors therefore were most intimately connected with the pre­ servation of social and political order. That a peasant or a craftsman should freely change the methods o f production was not countenanced; his activities were permitted only within the limits of the ordinances laid down by the state. In N ear East society, it was only the merchants who enjoyed conditions allowing them to become capitalists. “ M erchant,"

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SS

tüjjar, in this context, means the big businessman who engaged in inter­ regional trade or in the sale of goods imported from afar. Craftsmen who in the cities sold goods manufactured by themselves and trades­ people who sold these goods at secondhand fell outside the category of “ merchant.“ The merchant class was not subject to the regulations o f the hisba, that is, rules o f the religious law to ensure fair deal in the market. In an Ottoman M irror for Princes, Sinan Pasha’s McCarifncme written in the second half of the fifteenth century, the ruler is advised : Look with favor on the merchants in the land; always care for them; let no one harass them; let no one order them about, for through their trading the land becomes prosperous, and by their wares cheapness abounds in the world; through them the excellent fame of the Sultan is carried to surrounding lands, and by them the wealth within the land is increased. Going through the state papers issued by the Ottoman Chancery one is struck by the fact that the administration was always most concerned in applying the principles summarized above. The Ottoman government’s concern for promoting the commerce and protecting the interests of the merchants class found its expression in various ways. It was mainly with the purpose o f encouraging tráde that the Sultans granted capitulations to the foreigners. It should be emphasized that a capitulation had never been considered as a contractual bilateral docu­ ment and it maintained its character o f a grant of concession by the Sultans until the eighteenth century when they had to give the same privileges to the Habsburgs and Russia. Before this actual change the Sultan retained the authority to decide unilaterally when the pledge of friendship on the opposite side was broken and the capitulation rendered void. Once its nature as a concession granted by the Sultan is established a capitulation was, however, granted with certain political, financial and economic expectations. The determining factors were usually the oppor­ tunities of acquiring a political ally within Christendom, of obtaining scarce goods such as woolen cloth, tin, steel and paper, and especially bullion and increasing customs revenues, the principal source of hard cash for the imperial treasury. The Ottoman empire was not self-sufficient economically as it is sometimes claimed. It was vitally im portant for its economy and finances

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to im port western silver. Its im port was encouraged by tax exemption and measures were taken to hinder its flow to the Eastern countries where gold was cheaper. The Europeans knew well that the Ottomans were dependent on their commerce in the Levant and when they had to bargain for a special privilege in the capitulations their chief weapon was to use the threat that they were going to boycott the Ottoman ports. A new period in the economic history of the Ottoman Empire started with the annexation of the Arab countries between 1516 and 1550 which actually gave it the control of the trade routes between the M editerranean and Indian Ocean. It is now commonplace knowledge that the N ear East continued to receive spices directly from India and Southeast Asia throughout the sixteenth century. According to the Ottoman records, in 1562 the customs levied on spices transported from Mecca to Damascus alone amounted to 110 thousand gold ducats. W hat is interesting to note is that most of the spices imported there went to Bursa and Istanbul to be shipped further north. To give an interesting example, in 1547 we find a Hungarian merchant in Bursa selling kersey and buying a great quantity of spices. In this period the newly rising nation-states of the West, France, England and the Netherlands, became most anxious to get trade privileges in the Ottoman Empire. The belief was that the Levant was, as in the past, the most promising field for economic growth. It was not solely on religious grounds that the M arrano family of Mendes, then controlling the spice trade in Europe, came to settle in the Ottoman capital in the 1550’s. Against the Venetian dominance in the Levant trade the Ottomans had always favoured the rival nations, first the Genoese, then the Ragusans and Florentines in the fifteenth century. As to the Western nations, the French made their first progress in Syria and Egypt after Selim’s renewal of the Mamluk capitulations in 1517. But they really began to replace the Venetians in the Levant trade only after the Ottoman-Venetian war in 1570-73. Incidentally, the socalled French capitulations o f 1536 had never been concluded. The first official Ottoman capitulation to the French is dated 1569. The other Western nations were then to sail and trade under the French flag. A t the beginning o f the 17th century the volume of the French trade in the Levant rose to thirty million French livres, making up one half of France’s total trade at that time. Later on when the English and Dutch proved to be even stronger rivals of the Habsburg power than the French, the Ottomans did not hesitate to favor these nations too by

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granting them capitulations, to the English in 1580, and the Dutch in 1612. Except during the civil war between 1642 and 1660 the English had the lead in the Levant trade in the seventeenth century. According to a contemporary source the Levant m arket for the English cloth which was the main article for export, expanded by one-third and was one-fourth of all English manufactures exported to the Levant. As W. Sombart put it, without recognizing the significance of the Levant trade for Western economic expansion it is difficult to comprehend the rise of Western capitalism. The capitulary privileges were gradually so much extended that Paul Masson and R. M antran, two French specialists on the Levant trade, could unanimously assert that in the seventeenth century there was no other state in the world practicing a more liberal policy than the Ottoman empire towards the foreign merchants. The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance o f trade, an idea that we find for the first time in a clearly defined form only in the mercantilist England o f the sixteenth century. Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman »mH» pnliry was that the state had to be concerned above all with the volume of goods in intérfiSTmarket-sothat the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently the imports were* always welcomed and encouraged and exports discouraged. Hence sometimes we find higher customs rates for exports and even prohibition of the export of such goods as wheat, cotton, hides and beeswax. As for silver and gold no customs dues were levied to encourage their import­ ation and every step was taken to discourage exportation. The Ottomans were definitely bullionists, a stage preceding true mercantilism in the West. The difference with the mercantilist nations o f the West was that the Ottomans clung to the guild system as the mainstay of the state and society while Europeans saw in the export of manufactured goods a principal means of getting bullion from outside. In order to achieve a favourable balance o f trade they intervened in domestic industries and trade organizations to develop them on capitalistic lines and to export more and more goods and conquer more and more overseas markets. Incidentally, one might speculate that the increasingly unfavourable balance of trade of the West in the fifteenth century pushed them perhaps in this direction and caused a m ercantilists policy to develop, since they had no im portant commodities other than cloths and minerals to export to the East. The capitulations were complementary to this pattern and it is noteworthy that the m ercantilists nations o f the West had been

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concerned in the first place to found their Levant companies and obtain capitulations. Unwittingly the Ottomans became a part of a European economic system which gave rise to modern capitalism.

COMMENT C. M. KORTEPETER New York University

This Conference on Turkish Studies arranged by Professor Kemal K arpat with the support of the University of Wisconsin is an im portant event. Although the Turks have dominated Middle East history for almost a millenium, the study of the Turks has suffered many disabilities. This observation becomes particularly clear when students of East European history attem pt to account for political, economic and social events without an adequate knowledge of Ottoman history and institutions. Today I have been asked to comment briefly on some of the im portant questions of East European history raised by the paper of Professor Halil Inalcik. Professor Inalcik in his well-known studies of the Albanian defters, the era of Stephan Dushan and of the Kanunnames of Mehemmed II has, together with his colleagues, laid the foundations for the scientific study of Ottoman eastern Europe. In the light of my own research on Ottoman eastern Europe during the Reformation era, I should like to comment in detail on some of the general questions raised by the Inalcik paper. 1. Sources : Professor Inalcik has commented upon the central importance of the Ottoman archives for the study of eastern Europe. While this point is not controversial, I would only make two observ­ ations : To date the Ottoman archives are still rather inaccessible to American scholars because of our dependence on relatively scarce funds to travel to and spend time in the archives. There still remains the fundamental task of preparing a Calendar of the most im portant series in the archives in order that archival materials may be exploited effectiv­ ely upon arrival in Istanbul. In this instance the work performed by Prof. Bennigsen and his colleagues in preparing a calendar of OttomanRussian relations is highly commendable. It is also clear that apart from the Ottoman archives a vast store of information about Ottoman eastern Europe awaits the researcher among the State papers of Austria,

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Hungary, Roumania, Poland, Russia, etc. A great deal of this material has been placed in systematic order and is often accessible in printed versions in U.S. libraries. One may in passing note the collections o f Hurmuzaki, Veress, Abrahamowicz and Dorev. 2. Balance o f Power in Europe : As Professor Inalcik has indicated the Ottoman presence and activities in Eastern Europe often contributed decisively to events in European history. For some centuries, it is clear that the Ottoman government possessed what is now called ‘feedback’ capacity. That is, the complaints of a peasant could be heard at the highest echelons of government and redress was often forthcoming. On the domestic level, decline in the empire could probably be dated from the breakdown of such administrative Çikâyetname procedures. The Ottomans for their era, also give evidence of possessing a great deal of flexibility in dealing with eastern Europe. Hungarian territory was ruled either as a province (the Beylerbeylik of Buda) or as a protectorate (the principality of Erdel or Transylvania). Native Princes ruled Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. The Ottomans controlled their foreign affairs, customs collections and matters of war and peace (with some exceptions in Erdel). The Crimean Tatars were given a free hand in steppe and T atar politics as long as they did not disturb Ottoman relations with Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy or Persia. Taking a long view, the Ottomans must be praised for maintaining such politically crippling but morally praiseworthy Islamic practices as the millet system, low tariffs and the concept o f imtiyaz or capitulations, which ultimately prevented the Ottomans from modernizing rapidly or absorbing religious minorities into the Ottoman polity. 3. Economic Relations : Professor Inalcik has also dealt with the main lines of Ottoman economic relations with Europe. For a detailed treat­ ment o f the juridical position of trade and commerce between the Ottomans and Europeans the student is urged to consult the article ‘Im tiyàzàt’ by Professor Inalcik {Encyclopaedia o f Islam III, 1179-1189). Clearly the Ottoman Empire was self-sufficient with regard to foodstuffs but lacked certain strategic raw materials and firearms. Thus, we find the Ottomans seeking lead from the roofs of despoiled monastaries in England, firearms from France and Switzerland, silver from the mines of Transylvania, iron ore, silk and slaves from the Caucasus, furs from Muscovy and saltpetre from Kurdish tribal areas. We also know that while the Ottomans controlled carefully the export of sheep, bullion and grain, they encouraged the export of swine and cattle to Venice, Poland and from the latter country to England. One cannot overlook

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the importance o f critical mineral and manpower shortages when studying patterns of Ottoman conquest. 4. Shi'ism, The Reformation and the Problem o f Ottoman Leadership : It is not sufficient, however, to concentrate one’s attention on eastern Europe or any other specific region of the Ottoman Empire without viewing that region as a part of a political unity. The most capable Ottoman leaders were able to deal with political and economic issues not only in Europe, but also in Asia and N orth Africa. Yet it is clear that the place o f origin of Ottoman leaders in the sixteenth and seven­ teenth centuries, notably Albania, Bosnia, Hungary, i.e. Eastern Europe, appears to have influenced the political style of Ottoman leaders, most o f whom were products o f the devshirme system. Almost invariably Ottoman leaders from Sultan down to army commander lent support to the Protestant Reformation and attempted to protect the peasantry and urban classes o f eastern Europe. This enlightened policy thus ensured the occupation by the Turks of Hungary until the eve of the eighteenth century and utterly destroyed any attempts on the part o f the Habsburgs to re-establish religious and political unity on their southeastern flank. While the Reformation delivered a fundamental and permanent blow to the religious unity of Christendom, the Ottomans in the same era were subjected to analogous civil strife arising from the development of the Safavid Persian State and its definition of a twelver Shi’ite dogma and epistemology diametrically opposed to the Islamic orthodoxy o f the Ottomans. It is interesting to note that while the Ottoman leadership, most of whom were of European origin, appear to have dealt with Chris­ tian heresy with considerable sensitivity, by contrast dealt with those O tto­ man subjects, who were suspected of Shi’ite leanings, with extreme harsh­ ness and brutality. One wonders, is this contrast simply the problem o f conciliation toward an enemy versus the suppression o f apostasy among one’s own flock or did the Ottoman elite in fact deal more judiciously with matters which they better understood? They often could even prepare intrigues or negotiate in their native Balkan languages. Clearly the relationship of the Ottoman Empire to major European political and social developments has not yet received proper attention. It is a tribute to this conference that the fundamental problem o f Ottoman-European relations has been placed on the agenda for future research and discussion.

THE OTTOMAN BACKGROUND OF THE MODERN M IDDLE EA ST1 ALBERT HOURANI S t Antony's College, Oxford

I I want to talk this evening about four hundred years o f history, stretching from the beginning of the sixteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century (or, to be more precise, from 1516 to 1918), when most of the Arab countries were ruled by the Ottom an Turks from their capital a t Istanbul. In older books about the history o f the Arabs, you will not find much said about this period. I once asked the author o f one of the best-known of them why he had virtually left this period out; he replied, it was because there was really no Arab history during these centuries. A priori it is a little difficult to believe that nothing im portant happened for four centuries in a region o f ancient civilization and among peoples who had once created so much, but what he meant, I think, is clear : first, that politically the Arabs played only a m inor part in this period, and therefore the central theme o f history is missing —for, although most of us have given up the old conception o f purely political history for something broader, even social history cannot be understood if we leave out of account the struggle for power in which all social forces express themselves, and the use of power in order to maintain, destroy, change or impose a social order—; and secondly, that the rule of the Ottoman Turks over Arab society prevented Arab and Muslim civilization from developing further, or even killed the life it had. This indeed is a fairly common view o f Islamic history, and one held not only by Arab writers. In a sense it is very much of a nationalist view. Those who wish to replace the old political order o f the Middle East, based on religious adherence, by a new one based on national loyalty, like other revolutionaries at other times, have used the image of some more distant past as a way o f condemning the immediate past : at some time or other the Arabs have appealed against the Ottomans to early 1 1 This article was originally prepared as “Carreras Arab Lecture, 1969. delivered at the University of Essex.*' Printed with the University’s permission.

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Islamic history, the Egyptians to the Pharaohs, the Lebanese Christians to the Phoenicians, the Turks themselves have looked back beyond Ottomans and Arabs to the Hittites, the Persians to their imperial past, the Jews from the Diaspora to an earlier history in Palestine. Like so many other factors in Middle Eastern nationalism, this is a reflection of certain ideas common in nineteenth century Europe : the romantic cult of a distant past, blended with the revolutionary idea that man is free to break and remould his social world; more specifically, the idea that the coming of the Turks ended the brilliance o f early Muslim civilization, and prevented it developing further and along lines similar to those on which modern Europe has progressed. Thus Rousseau deplored the domination of the Arabs by the Turkish barbarians;1 and John Henry Newman, in his Lectures on the History o f the Turks, allowed them only the virtues of the barbarian (valour, truthfulness, sobriety), denied them the civilized virtues of rational discipline, and accused them of having extinguished an earlier Islamic state, the Caliphate, which had been truly civilized.* * So simple and sweeping a view will not stand up to close examination. Anyone who has travelled in the lands which the Turks once ruled—not only what we now call Turkey, but the Balkans, the Arab N ear East and the N orth African coast—must have noticed how deep the Ottoman impress went and how lasting is the unity it has imposed on many different countries and peoples : the buildings, from the domes and graceful slender minarets of mosques in the Ottoman style, to the solid barracks and government houses of a later period; the formal and elaborate manners of the old families of Istanbul and the provincial capitals, so different from the manners—no less good but in a different mode—of mountain villagers or Bedouin; a certain style of government and politics, difficult to describe but which continued almost until our time, not only among Turkish politicians but in the palaces in Baghdad, Amman, Cairo and Tunis, among the older statesmen o f Egypt before the revolution, and the older nationalist leaders of Syria, Iraq and some Balkan countries—patient, cautious, carefully balancing one force against another in order to neutralize them all, giving your enemy time and scope to ruin himself, seeing how far you can go but always leaving a way of escape if you have gone too far. If the traveller finds these relics of the Ottoman past, historians also 1 J. J. Rousseau, Du Contrat social. Book IV, Chapter 8. * (J. H. Newman), Lectures on the History o f the Turks (Dublin, 18S4), p. 10S.

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of the present generation—using the vast Ottomans archives in Istanbul, and being less than their predecessors under the influence of the final disintegration of the Empire into hostile and bad-tempered nation­ states—have given us a new picture of the way in which Turkish tribes­ men came into the Muslim world and what they did for it. They did not come as alien conquerors into a world which tried to resist them or which could protect, rule and develop itself without them; and they themselves contributed something positive to it, something without which it might not have survived, or at least would not have taken the shape it did. They first came into the Muslim world from central Asia by one o f those movements of nomads which occur from time to time, because o f over-population, changes in vegetation or water-supply, tribal wars, or changes in pattern of trade, urban production or govern­ ment in the settled areas surrounding the nomadic world : in this in­ stance, perhaps, something which happened in China, for Bernard Lewis has suggested that it was ‘the consolidation of the Sung regime in China after an interregnum of disorder (which) cut off the route o f expansion into China and forced the central Asian nomads to expand westwards.*1 ou t that is only half the story. As Turkish tribesmen came into the eastern regions of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, they found a role waiting for them : first of all as mercenary soldiers, but then as something else, as defenders and rulers of Islamic society and civilization. Here once more there is an ancient fallacy which stands in our way : that Islam was a religion of the desert, and its society was dominated by the interests and values o f the nomads. The Arabs may have been, to quote a phrase current in their early history, the ‘raw material’ o f Islam, but once Muslim society and the Caliphate were well-established they conformed to the pattern of all N ear Eastern civilizations, at the heart of which have always been the great cities drawing their food supply from a dependent rural hinterland and linked to one another along the trade-routes. It was in such cities that high Islamic culture grew up and the great Muslim governments were rooted, and the main purpose o f the governments was to defend the life, society and civilization of the cities and their hinterland. For settled life was always precarious in the N ear East : if the rural hinterland and the trade routes were to produce the surplus without which large-scale urban life would have been im­ possible, they had to be protected against nomads and mountaineers, against foreign invaders, and against all those forces, natural and human, 1 B. Lewis, The Arabs In History (revised edition, London 1958), p. 147.

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which could cause the irrigation system to decay. (There is a very impor­ tant recent book by Robert Adams, Land behind Baghdad, in which he has used all kinds of methods—those o f the geographer and archaeologist as well as the historian—to study the use of water and land in a certain district of Iraq from the beginning of history until today, and shown how closely it has been connected with the policies and strength o f governm ents.)1 The great Muslim cities needed a political order, and they could not produce it for themselves : as the power of the Abbasid Caliphs declined, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, there did not emerge—as there did in some parts o f mediaeval Europe—some countervailing power in society itself, which could in the end produce its own self-perpetuating order. The answer of Islamic society to this problem was to produce a new kind of autocracy with a military basis. W ithin the framework of the Caliphate there grew up a succession o f states known collectively as Sultanates.’ The sultan ruled within territorial limits and did not claim universal rule over the Muslim world; in general, so long as there was a Caliph in Baghdad he acknowledged his formal authority; his power originated not in divine choice but in the sword, it was maintained and handed on to his successors by the sword, but it was turned into legitim­ ate authority by being exercised within the limits o f the religious law, the shari'a, and by being used for the greater purposes of Islam—to extend the bounds of Islam, to protect it against attacks from outside, to maintain orthodox belief and law, to organise and protect the Pilgrim­ age and the other ritual acts. It is here that the historic role o f the Turks is to be found. By and large it was they, and for a time the Mongols with whom their history is closely linked, who provided the politico-military groups which founded and maintained these sultanates. This was true not only of the western or T urco-Arab’ half of the Muslim world. It was true also o f the eastern or Turco-Iranian’ half : the Safavid Shahs, who virtually created what we now call Persia or Iran, were of Turkish origin, and the language o f their court was Turkish for a century or so; the Mogul emperors o f India also were o f Turco-Mongol origin. That the Turks could play this part they owed partly to their military talents and solidarity, but also to a kind of natural authority and skill as organizers o f governments and adm inistrators (I shall return to this later). This was understood and accepted by the Muslim world o f their time. Thus the 1 R. M. Adams, Land behind Baghdad (Chicago, 1965).

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greatest of A rab historians and thinkers about history, Ibn Khaldun, had no doubt that the Turks deserved well of Islam. To quote Bernard Lewis again, ‘he saw in their coming a proof of G od's continuing concern for the welfare of Islam and the Muslims. A t a time when the Muslim Caliphate had become weak and degenerate, incapable of resisting its enemies, God in His wisdom and benevolence had brought new rulers and defenders, from among the great and numerous tribes of the Turks, to revive the dying breath of Islam and restore the unity o f the M uslim s.'1 But it was not an unconditional acceptance on the part of devout and serious Muslims. For the Muslim city populations and for their leaders, the families o f urban ‘notables’ with an inherited social influence and a tradition of religious culture, the welfare of Islamic society demanded a kind o f balance or alliance : the sword was in the hands of the Turkish sultans, of their households o f high officials and commanders, and o f their armies, but they should use it in alliance with the 'ulama, that is to say, those who were learned in religion and the religious law, who taught, interpreted and administrated it. By and large, the sultans accepted this alliance : they respected the 'ulama, consulted and used them in matters of state, supported the judges who administered the law, the muftis who interpreted it and the schools where it was taught; more generally, they used their power in the interests of urban stability and wealth—to keep trade flowing, to protect the cultivator from the nomad. In return, the notables and 'ulama on the whole supported them : they had common interests, and besides the main tradition of later Islam (or at least of Sunni Islam) is Hobbesian-^any government is better than anarchy. But there was often an underlying tension between men o f the sword, ethnically different from those they ruled, and not far removed from the nomadic life with its tribal solidarity, and the Persian or A rab sedentary populations whom they ruled. The city notables could bring some pressure to bear on their rulers : they held the keys of legitimacy, they could give the rule of a sultan a kind o f Islamic sanction; and they also controlled the machinery of urban politics, they could—within limits—raise or prevent movements of protest and revolt among the craftsmen or proletariat o f the popular quarters. On the whole however the balance was in favour of the men of the sword, not only because they had the sword, but because in most states of this type they'added social to political power : the sultan, his officials and his commanders 1 B. Lewis, T h e Mongols, the Turks and the Muslim polity* in Transactions o f the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, voL 18 (1968), p. 64.

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dominated the land, took the rural surplus, and in this way controlled economic exchanges between countryside and city, the food-supply of the urban masses, and the work of the craftsmen. But this also in another way worked in favour o f urban civilization : it gave the Turkish political and military elite their own interest in keeping the city and its hinterland stable and prosperous.

II It is in this context that we should look at the Ottoman Turks. In its early phases, the Ottoman state was one of a number o f Turkish sultanates, growing up in the disintegrating body o f the first of the great Turkish empires, that of the Seljuqs, and on the frontier with Byzantium. Then came two events which changed its nature. One is well-known : the capture in 1453 of Constantinople, which became the sultan’s new capital, Istanbul. From now onwards his state was one of the greatest in the western part of the Muslim world. It had a large trade with the Italian cities, and became a naval power in the Mediter­ ranean : thus it had close contacts with western Europe and became a factor in the European balance o f power. Its own nature also was changed. With Istanbul it acquired for the first time a great cosmopolitan city; the society it ruled was no longer that of hill-valleys and market towns, it needed a more complex kind of administration. With Istanbul and the Balkans also it acquired a large non-Muslim population, Christian and Jewish, and this too posed new problems of administration. The other event is less well-known but was no less im portant In 1516-17 the Ottomans turned southwards and occupied the territory of the other great state of the western half o f the Muslim world, the Mamluke state of Egypt and Syria. From this there followed the occupation of the province of Hejaz in western Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; the occupation of Iraq, disputed for a time by the Safavids of Iran but confirmed in 1638; and the occupation of N orth Africa as far as Algeria, but not of Morocco, by sea-forces in Ottoman service, in order to prevent the Catholic reconquest of Spain from spilling over into Africa. This expansion into the Arab countries made the Ottomans the greatest rulers in the Muslim world west of Iran, and gave them seapower in the Indian Ocean as well as the M editerranean. W hat was still more im portant, it brought the Ottoman government into contact

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with the most ancient Muslim urban civilization : with the great schools of Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo, with the main stream of Islamic theology and law, and with an urban class which would bring into the new universal Islamic state its own tradition of social leadership and of a balance between government and the forces of society. W hat was perhaps most im portant o f all, from now onwards the Ottomans were rulers of the Holy cities : of Jerusalem; of the Shi'i holy cities in Iraq, Najaf, K arbala and Kadhimain; and of Mecca and Medina, and the main routes of pilgrimage to them. Every year pilgrims from Egypt and Africa gathered in Cairo, pilgrims from Turkey and the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq and Iran in Damascus; they had to be led and defended on the way to Mecca, the holy cities and their inhabitants had to be protected and nourished, the orthodoxy o f the religion in the name of which the pilgrimage was made had to be preserved. From this time until it ended, the Ottoman empire had a distinctive and complex nature. In the first place, it was a family state : one where loyalty focused upon a family, the descendants of Osman, rather than any individual member of it, and where the family as a whole claimed sovereignty. Secondly, it was a Turkish state, in some senses although not in others. The family was Turkish, claiming descent (although with or without much reason) from the Oghuz tribe from which the Seljuqs also had come. It could appeal to the ethnic solidarity of Turkish tribesmen. It used all through its history certain forms and symbols of Turkish tribal origin : for example, the horses* tails which were marks of rank in government service. The language of the court, of command in the army, and of the government offices was Turkish. But it was not Turkish in any exclusive racial sense. Throughout Islamic history there was always a consciousness of the differences between Arabs, Persians and Turks, the three peoples who between them had borne the main burden of Islamic history. But it was never a distinction so deep as to destroy the sense of what they had in common as Muslims; and effectively it was a linguistic and cultural rather than a racial distinction. A servant of the Ottoman sultan who used Turkish would not necessarily have thought of himself as a Turk; a subject of the sultan who did not speak Turkish would not until the very last years of the empire have thought o f himself as being shut out of the political community. Thirdly, it was a Muslim state. That does not mean that the sultan thought of himself as caliph or successor of the caliphs. The Ottomans sometimes used the title of ‘caliph’, but they did so without attaching much weight to it, in the loose later sense in which it could be used of

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any just sultan who maintained the ordinances o f the Faith. They sometimes used it as a term of praise for other Muslim rulers, and sometimes omitted it from their own titles. Here for example is a list of titles given in a collection of Ottoman diplomatic correspondence : ... the Pàdshâh whose glory is high as heaven, King o f Kings who are like stars, crown of the royal head, the shadow o f the Provider, culmination of kingship, quintessence of the book of fortune, equinoctial line of justice, perfection of the spring-tide of majesty, sea of benevolence and humanity, mine of the jewels of generosity, source of the memorials of valo u r... writer of justice on the pages of time, Sultan of two continents and o f the two seas, Khaqan of the two easts and of the two wests, servant of the two holy sanctuaries ...» The title of caliph is missing from this litany, and it was not in fact until the nineteenth century that the sultan began to put forward a serious claim to be caliph of all Islam, as a way of rallying support from Muslims both inside and outside the empire, and o f warning the European powers against pressing too hard on him. Until then, the pattern to which the state conformed was that which I have already sketched : it was a sultanate ruling within the bounds of the shari'a and devoted to the greater purposes of Islam. It was consciously Sunni, with a consciousness sharpened by the long conflict with the Safavids who were Shi’is. W ith the Turkish talent for clarity and order, it formed the 'ulama into a hierarchy with fixed ranks, official appointments and regular salaries. The heads of the hierarchy, the Shaikh al-lslam and the chief justices, were consulted in the highest matters o f state, and the provincial judges, the qadis, were the main channels o f contact between the central government and the Muslim public opinion of the great cities. The government gave patronage and protection to the Islamic schools of the Arab cities, and itself founded new ones in Istanbul to educate those who would fill the highest posts in the religious service. It also subsidized and favoured some of the great Sufi orders, or at least the more orthodox of them : that is to say, the brotherhoods o f those following a path to mystical knowledge o f God laid down by some master o f the spiritual life and under the guidance of his successors. But, fourthly, the Ottoman empire was yet another kind of state : it was a universal empire holding together in a single framework of order and administration, and a single loyalty to a ruling family, many different regions—the Balkans, Asia M inor, the countries of western1 1 T. W. Arnold, The Caliphate (new edition, London, 1965), p. 203.

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Asia, Egypt, the N orth African coast; many different ethnic groups— Greeks, Serbs, Bulgare and Rumanians, Turks and Arabs, Kurds and Armenians; different religious communities—Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, M aronite and other Christians, and Jews of more than one sect; and different social orders—people of the cities, peasants of the plains and river-valleys, villagers of the mountains (Albania, eastern Anatolia, Kurdistan and Lebanon), nomads of the steppe and desert. In its dealings with these groups and communities, we can see it approach­ ing an ideal o f rule common in later Islamic history, derived in some ways from an ancient Persian theory of kingship, in others from the thought of Plato, that is to say, the ideal of the absolute ruler, standing apart from the society he rules, responsible only to God or his own highest self, regulating the different orders of that society in the light o f principles of justice, so as to enable each to act in accordance with its own nature, to live in harmony with others, and to contribute its share to the general good. It was in accordance with this ideal that final and almost unlimited power lay in the hands of the sultan, living secluded in the inner court of his palace (which was more than a palace, an imperial compound or inner city), surrounded by an elaborate household, and with a disciplined army and a carefully organised civil service to carry out his will. In the earlier phases of the empire a t least, a clear distinction was maintained between 'askar and ra'aya, those who wielded power and the subjects; and not only the army, but the officials of the household and many of the high officers of state were drawn not from Turks or other Muslim peoples but from men o f Christian origin, from the Balkans or the Caucasus, recruited or conscripted in their teens, trained in military schools or the Palace, and from there sent into the army, the household or the government : they were ‘slaves,* but in the Islamic sense, which does not carry with it an implication o f human indignity, but means rather bondmen who sink their personality in that of their master, have no loyalty except to him, can therefore build up no dangerous inde­ pendent power, and whose wealth reverts to him by confiscation at their death. It was in accordance with this ideal also that the Ottoman government preserved the customs and laws of various communities and gave them the backing of the state. In their collections of administrative regulations (kanun-name) they formulated and reformed the customs of various regions in regard to taxation, and therefore to land-use and ownership. The local lords of the mountain valleys, like those of Lebanon and

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Kurdistan, were fitted into the administrative system by being recognised as governors, fiefholders, or chief tax-collectors of their districts : so long as they delivered the taxes and refrained from troubling the traderoutes, their local rule was recognised. In the same way, some of the nomadic chiefs—like the chiefs of the Mawali in the Syrian desert— were given investiture and subsidies so long as they kept the desert traderoutes open. The non-Muslims posed a more difficult problem : they formed a large part of the population of the empire and owned much of its wealth. Here once more we see the Ottomans using their talent for order and giving logical and formal expression to practices which had long existed in Muslim states. After the conquest of Constantinople, the Greek Patriarch of the city was formally recognised as head of all the Eastern Orthodox Christians of the empire, an Armenian Patriarch as head of the Armenian Orthodox, and a Grand Rabbi as head of the Jewish community. They were not only religious heads but civil heads : their decisions and orders had the force of the government to back them up; they were responsible to the government for the obedience of their communities, and for collecting the poll-tax which non-Muslims had to pay; in return, they and their communities were given freedom o f worship and a broad tolerance and protection. (This combination of religious and civil authority is still to be found in places where the Ottomans ruled : for example in Cyprus, where the Greek Archbishop was Ethnarch or head of the nation, and by being so became leader o f the nationalist movement and then President of the Republic.) If we look at the Ottoman state in these different ways, as a Turkish, an Islamic and a universal state, we shall find that there were no lines o f exclusion which kept the Arabs out (at least, the great majority of Arabic-speaking peoples who were Muslims). As I have said, the ruling group was 'Turkish’ but not in a racial sense; the highest offices were open to all Muslims. But in fact very few men of Arab origin seem to have filled them. There are some exceptions : for example, a son of the famous prince of Lebanon in the seventeenth century, Fakhr al-Din, drawn into the palace service after his father had revolted and been killed, became a famous official of the household and the ambassador of the sultan to the Mogul emperor in India. We hear also o f a few provincial governors of local origin : for example, the Jailli family, who ruled Mosul throughout most of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, and who belonged to a Christian family of northern Iraq converted to Islam. By and large, however, Arabs did not exercise direct political power in the Ottoman service.

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The religious hierarchy gave them more scope and served as a channel o f social mobility, for the language of theology and law was Arabic, and in principle learning and piety were the only passports needed for religious office. In fact matters were not quite so simple : the highest positions in the religious service tended to be held by graduates o f the imperial schools in Istanbul, and members of families with a tradition o f office. Even the provincial qadis were sent out from Istanbul for a limited period and drawn from this privileged group : here once more we find the Ottoman instinct for preventing any subject obtaining too much power or keeping it too long. But beneath the qadi lay other offices in the provincial capitals : his deputy judges, the muftis of the various schools of law, the naqib al-ashraf, a kind of doyen of the sharifs or descendents o f the Prophet, the only recognized aristocracy of blood. These were local men, and in the Arab cities they were drawn largely from ancient Arab families o f ‘notables' with a tradition of learning and leadership, a kind of noblesse de robe : families some of which went back to a period before the Ottomans, and some o f which have played a leading role until modern times—the Bakris in Cairo, Khalidis and 'Alamis in Jerusalem, Jabiris in Aleppo, Gaylanis in Baghdad. Under the Ottomans as before, these notables acted as inter­ mediaries between the 'men of the sword' and the local Muslim popu­ lation. Basically they were loyal to the sultan, but they were also leaders of their cities and heirs of the urban civilization of Islam. At times they tried to curb Ottoman power or the use of it, and they had the means of doing so : they could mobilise public opinion by making use of preachers, heads of quarters, leaders of popular organisations; and they had some influence through their links with the religious hierarchy throughout the empire, and with its heads in Istanbul. W hat they did in the cities local Arab chieftains could do in the countryside : shaikhs of bedouin tribes, hereditary rulers of mountain communities, lords of castles—like those who took over the Crusaders’ castles in Syria after the Crusaders left, and dominated the surrounding districts from them. Here as with the city notables we find them playing an ambiguous part : recognised by the Ottoman government in one way or another, fitted into the administrative or fiscal system, not usually trying to throw off Ottoman sovereignty, but resisting too much interference in their districts or their rule of it. And here too we find names still familiar : Shihabs and Jumblats in Lebanon; Tuqans in the Nablus district; the Sharifs of Mecca, a family of descendants of the Prophet whose local power in the Hejaz had some recognition from Istanbul, and who were the ancestors o f the Hashimite family.

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m Those o f us who are old enough to remember the Second World W ar perhaps find it easier than scholars of an earlier generation to understand the swift rise and fall of Islamic states : the rush o f armies from one to another of the chain of cities, with their fragile hinterlands spread along the trade routes and divided by steppe or desert. The wonder is not that these mushroom creations for the most part vanished so soon, but that some like the Ottoman state lasted for so long. But sooner or later the impulse which had won and kept an empire weakened, and disintegration began, usually along two lines : first by a fragmentation inside the system o f government«- the ruler ceasing to control his army or government, and the central government losing control over the provinces; secondly, by the forces o f society bursting out of the frame­ work imposed. byJhe-governmentriastruments of order becomingjeaders of discontent or revolt, the lords of the mountains and steppes eating away the hinterland of the cities. Such a process o f disintegration can be seen in the Ottoman Empire at least from the seventeenth century onwards. At the centre, the Sultan’s power weakened, different groups struggled in the Palace and govern­ ment; then there came a certain revival by a shift of power to the Grand Vizier and the higher bureaucracy, but a partial and fragile one. In the provinces, there was a growing decentralization : some provincial rulers, in particular those of the N orth African ’regencies’ o f Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers, became virtually independent, giving little more than nominal obedience to Istanbul; in others, a balance between central and local governments was maintained. Some of these local governments, for example Cairo and Baghdad, were in the hands of groups of Mamlukes, self-perpetuating military elites; others, in those of local families who had made their rule hereditary, like the Jaillis of Mosul or the ’Lords of the Valleys’ in Asia M inor. In the cities, the Janissary army, which had once maintained order, became a popular political organisation, and sometimes a danger to order. In the mountains, the feudal lords of Lebanon extended their control eastwards over the Biqa’ plain lying between them and Damascus, and the lords of Kurdistan moved down towards the Euphrates. In the steppe, pastoral groups crystallized into ’’tribes” or “federations” around new shaikhly families. Large units o f this kind (Anaza, Shammar, Beni Sakhr) threatened established patterns of control over the trade routes in the Syrian desert : in 1757 even the Pilgrimage from Damascus was pillaged by the Beni Sakhr. In central

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Arabia itself, there arose one o f those movements which recur from time to time in Islamic history, products of an alliance between a religious reformer and a dynasty, and aiming at the creation of a virtuous Islamic state : the new state, that of the Wahabis, occupied the holy cities, rejected Ottoman sovereignty, and rejected also the kind of orthodoxy for which the Ottomans stood. In some places, the countryside no longer produced the surplus to maintain large cities and strong governments, either because of a shrinking of the agricultural hinterland or because the cultivators were under the control of tribal shaiks, no longer under that o f urban landlords. In Iraq this process had reached the point by the end of the eighteenth century where urban civilization was threatened, but not yet in Syria and Egypt : eighteenth century Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo were still splendid and well-built cities. This was in a sense a natural process, such as had been repeated again and again in the history of the eastern and southern M editerranean, but with it there was intertwined another and a new process, the growth o f the power and influence of the great European states. First of all, military power : the last great Ottoman conquest was the island of Crete in 1669. There followed a long war with a combination of European states which ended in an unfavourable peace in 1699. Then in the 1760’s another war with Russia showed that the Turks could not stand up to a m ajor European Power : a Russo-Greek fleet sailed the eastern M editerranean and made landings in Greece and at B eirut A generation later, in 1798, Bonaparte occupied Egypt for a brief period. W ith the change in the military balance there went a growth o f European in­ fluence : the Ottoman government had to ally with England and Russia to drive the French out of Egypt, and European ambassadors began to play a part in the politics o f Istanbul. The history of the Ottoman empire in its last phase was woven out of the interaction o f these two processes. To begin with, the growth of European influence helped to stop the disintegration. Fear of Europe, and pressure from Europe, gave the Ottoman government an incentive to reform itself; the new military and aministrative methods gave it the instruments of reform. For roughly fifty years from the 1820’s there was a period o f rapid change, known as the Tanzimat or reorganisation. Brought about by a combination between a reforming sultan and some high officials with a direct knowledge of Europe, its aim was first of all to create a modern army, then to use it to restore the power of the central government over the provinces, and to create a new framework ot centralised administration and secular law. Behind these aims lay to

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some extent a revival of the ancient ideal of kingship : of a ruler govern* ing not by caprice but by natural justice embodied in regulations, and both helped and restrained by a bureaucracy. Mingled with this were certain new ideals : that of citizenship—of all subjects of the sultan having guaranteed rights, and all of them having equal rights and a direct relationship with the government; and the idea of ‘civilization,’ of a rational, active, progressive, self-determining modern way of life brought into existence by western Europe but open to the whole world. We should not under-estimate the success of the reforms. If we compare the empire of 1870 with what it had been in 1820, there is no doubt that methods of adm inistration and justice had changed; the non-Muslims were freer; provinces as far away as the Hejaz and Tripoli of Africa were once more controlled from Istanbul; the provincial administration had been reformed and the area of cultivation was growing; a certain idea of Ottoman ‘nationhood’ was spreading; the amenities of life at least in the larger cities and sea-ports had been improved; the Ottoman com­ munity was dragging itself in a cumbersome, half-reluctant way into the modern world. There were visible signs of this, not so trivial as they might seem : in government offices, the frock-coat and fez had replaced robes and turbans; merchants and notables were moving from houses in the old cities to new Italianate villas on the Bosphorus, in the new quarters stretching from old Cairo to the Nile, in Smyrna and Beirut; the sultan himself had moved from the old Saray to a sm art new Palace on the water-front, all chandeliers, gilt mirrors and plush upholstery; he no longer looked like an oriental despot, but like one of that chain of benevolent autocrats, with epaulettes and decorations and careful beards, stretching from St. Petersburg, Vienna and Paris to Dorn Pedro to Brazil, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, and King Kamehameha of Hawaii. But the process of reform contained in itself weaknesses and contra­ dictions which were to carry the disintegration to its logical end. The reforming combination itself was a fragile one : a sultan who wanted absolute power and a bureaucracy which wanted power restrained by principle and regulation could not in the end agree, and the split came under *Abd al-Hamid at the end of the century; the 'ulama, some of whom had accepted and justified the earlier reform, grew hostile as it went further and threatened the rule of Islamic law; some of the officials put forward the idea of constitutional rule, and an Ottoman constitution was indeed granted for a few years in the 1870’s. In the provinces, some of the stronger local governors were able to carry out their own

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version of the Tanzimat, and—since the areas they were dealing with were smaller and more compact—with greater success : Tunisia under the Beys and Egypt under Muhammad ‘Ali became virtually independent. Underlying these changes in forms of government were two im portant changes in the social order, each with results which continued after the empire itself had vanished. First, there was an economic change, in some countries at least : the Middle East became attached to the European trading system as a ‘plantation economy,* producing the raw materials of European industry and im portant manufactured goods; in particular, the whole economy of Egypt was geared to the intensive cultivation of high-grade cotton on irrigated land for the mills o f Lancashire. The result was a change in the relative strength and prosper­ ity o f different social groups. The old Muslim merchant class and the craftsmen facing the competition of machine-made goods declined; so did the nomads, whose economy, based on the rearing of camels for transport, was shaken by the coming of new methods of transport. On the other hand, there rose a new group of landowners, through grants of land by the ruler, or the registration of state land in their names, or lending money to the cultivators, or bringing new land into cultivation; and also a new type of merchant living on the import-export trade with Europe—a group largely European in the upper ranks, mainly oriental Christian and Jewish in the lower. Secondly, there was an intellectual change, produced by new schools, the coming of the printing press and newspapers, the translation of books from English or French, travel, and the experience of living in a world dominated by Europe. Among officials, officers, teachers and merchants, there spread new ideas about how society should be organ­ ised : in particular, the idea that it should be organised on a basis o f nationalism, of a sentiment o f national loyalty and unity in which members of different religious or social communities should join; a nationalism explicitly secular but having, like everything in the Middle East, a concealed religious element. It was because of this perhaps that the idea of an ‘Ottoman’ nation proved too fragile to resist more limited and robust national ideas : first Serbs and Greeks, then Rumanians and Bulgarians created their own nation-states, then the idea spread to the Armenians, then to the Turks themselves, and to the other Muslim peoples, Arabs, Albanians and Kurds. In this process of fission too we can see the expansion o f Europe as a complicating factor. In some of the outlying provinces, direct European rule was established : by the French in Algeria in 1830 and in Tunisia

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in 1881, by the British in Egypt in 1882, by the Italians in Libya in 1912. Even in those parts which remained Ottoman until the end, European influence was all—pervading. European banks and merchants controlled the growing sector of the economy, and European concessionary com­ panies built the public utilities/O riental Christian and Jewish merchants mostly had foreign protection, and whole communities had links with one or other Power—the Catholics with France, the Orthodox with Russia. Muslims as well as Christians and Jews sent their sons and daughters to mission schools. N ot only the embassies in Istanbul but the consulates in provincial cities were centres o f social cohesion and political life. In some parts, spheres o f influence had been defined by 1914 : the French in coastal Syria, the British in southern Iraq. When the empire fell to pieces after 1918, it did so partly along lines already marked o u t I do not intend to follow the process of collapse in detail, but let me make one last p o in t Many o f the things Middle Eastern countries have in common can be explained by their having been ruled for so long by the Ottomans; many of the things which differentiate them can be explained by the different ways in which they emerged from the Ottoman empire. In Tunisia and Algeria, the Ottoman connection had grown distant and weak before the French came, and European colonisation changed the social structure so forcibly and deeply that little was left of the Ottoman imprint. In Tripoli, the Italian conquest took place at a moment when improved communications and the revival of the con­ stitution in 1908 were strengthening the links with Istanbul : a certain pro-Ottoman feeling lingered in Tripoli during the first decades of Italian rule. In Egypt, the situation was more complicated. M uham m ad *Ali in a sense was a provincial ruler in the Ottoman tradition, gathering all power into his own hands, forming around him a largely Turkish household of officials and officers, turning political into social power by seizing control of the land. Later, much of the land fell into the hands of a new class of large landowners, many of them ‘Turco-Egyptians.’ Their social power was counterbalanced by that of the European and Levantine merchants and bankers, and the British occupation of 1882 was in some ways a victory for this second group. But not a total victory : the British ruled in uneasy alliance with a Palace and court still largely Turkish; and Egyptian nationalism, directed as it was mainly against the British presence, had undertones of hostility to the Turkish ruler and landowners. Until 1952 the three-cornered struggle of British, Palace

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and nationalists continued in various forms, and the Palace was a focus for the continuing power and influence o f the Turco-Egyptians.* The nation-state o f Turkey itself emerged from the ruins of the empire by conscious rejection o f the Ottoman past : the Turkish people, the nationalists believed, had wasted their strength trying to hold down an empire; the Islamic autocracy of the sultans had prevented progress. But the break with the past was not so deep as it seemed. The new Turkish state was built round the framework o f the Ottoman bureaucracy and army, and this perhaps was why Turkey was able to remain independent o f European tutelage. Many of the early leaders (although not AtatQrk himself) came from the families o f the officers and bureaucrats who had been at the centre of Ottoman government and reform. To have created and maintained the Ottoman empire was the great achievement of the Turks, and the historic imagination o f great things done in common on which nationalist states depend could not for long reject it. The position of the Arabs in Syria, Iraq and the surrounding regions is perhaps the most complex. The natural leaders o f the Arab provinces, the notable families of the great cities, were drawn more closely into the Ottoman system in the later nineteenth century. Their sons went into the imperial civil or military service through the professional schools; after the restoration of the constitution in 1908 they played an im portant part in Ottoman politics—once the Balkan provinces had gone, the empire became mainly a Turco-Arab state. Moreover, they could not be indifferent to the claim o f the sultan to be the last embodiment of the greatness of Islam. But the growth of the Turkish national element in the Ottoman government estranged them from it, and the idea of Arab nationalism gave them a new way of expressing their discontent. It happened that the first World W ar broke out just at the point when relations between Turkish and Arab Ottomans were most strained. Hence the Arab revolt against the Ottoman rule; but most Arabs who joined the revolt did so with misgivings about breaking up the unity of the empire and the Muslim peoples, many of them later regretted having done so, and even after the final separation, the Ottoman legacy remained. In the first generation the Arab nationalist movement was led by members of these same notable families and former officials and officers of the sultan; they brought to the movement a certain style of political action, and a memory of Ottoman unity. A t the meetings which founded the A rab League in 1944-45, many observers must have been struck by the Ottoman as well as the Arab links between those who spoke for the

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various A iab states east of Egypt : they had been at school together in Istanbul, they had been in the same army or served the same government, they had a common way of looking at the world; behind the vision of A rab unity lay memories of a lost imperial grandeur.

THE STAGES OF OTTOMAN HISTORY A Structural Comparative Approach1 KEMAL H. KARPAT University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

Recent work based on archival material, by scholars in Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the United States, has yielded considerable quantitative data which has opened new conceptual vistas, and indirectly underscored the inadequacy o f the nationalist viewpoint which had dominated the Turkish Ottoman studies until recently. These new studies on such topics as land tenure, timars, population and settlement, trade, agrarian and financial legislation, or social groups have stressed the effects of economic and social factors over those o f personalities or culture upon Ottoman history.* * Thus, it may be possible now to replace the old, customary classification of this history into periods of growth or expansion, stagnation, and decline * with a new one which allows for the impact of economic and social forces, and gives cultural factors their proper place in Ottoman social transformation. The purpose o f this study is to divide Ottoman history into periods, stages, or phases of development and evolution according to the changes in the land system and the social groups which gained dominance in the government and society largely through their control o f the land.

1 Part o f this study was prepared under the auspices of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University; the views expressed are the author’s. * A more detailed treatment of the thesis presented in this paper together with references to many of these studies appear in the introduction to my Social Change and Politics In Turkey, published by Brill, 1973. A general historical treatment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appeared in an article “The Transformation of the Ottoman State” in International Journal o f Middle East Studien, 3 (1972). 243*281. * It was Dimitrie Cantemir (1673*1723) Moldavian ruler turned historian who first viewed the Ottoman state as an expanding and decaying entity, as clearly indicated by the title of his classical work : Historia incrementorum atque decrementorum aulae Othomanicae published first in Paris in 1733. Yet, this organic view of society found ready acceptance among many Western and Turkish scholars who seemed to have regarded territorial gains or losses and performance on the battlefield as the chief criteria for evaluating Ottoman history and dividing it into periods of expansion, stagnation, and decay.

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Thus, this periodization o f Ottoman history is based essentially on the organization o f the basic economic resource—the land—and the rise and fall of the elites on the basis o f their role in its ownership and operation. We regard the land system in traditional Ottoman society as the chief economic foundation which affected the rise of the elites and provided them with certain levers in their relations both with the formal govern­ ment institutions and the masses. The land and its ownership and operation provide both the constants and variables involved in key changes of Ottom an history. Economic necessity and the continuous, cultivation o f land may be considered constântsw hiie the forms of land property and modes of operation may be regarded as variables. The need foT agricultural commodities in ¿T raditional society such as the Ottoman, remainedcöniiant. as was clearly expressed in the traditional social theory ascribing to the peasant a rigid, unchangeable duty to cultivate the land continuously. But the production and distribution o f agricultural commodities showed a high degree o f variation which reflected the changes in the social structure, power relations, property rights, and land tenancy. There is an additional reason for undertaking a periodization of Ottoman history based on the land system and the elites associated with it. Many studies concerned with Ottoman history have revolved around cultural and political changes as embodied in nationalism, reformism, westernization, or the modernization of the cultural and political system in general. These studies have ignored the economic and social factors which internally caused the transform ation of the Ottoman system and attitudes. Clearly one cannot deal in an article with all the questions raised by a periodization o f Ottoman history. Still, several points must be men­ tioned briefly before coming to grips with the core of the topic. These points are first, this writer’s view of culture and its relation to social structure, second, the role o f Islam, and third, the place of the bureaucracy in the Ottoman system. We regard the Ottoman cultural system and the values stemming from it as being conditioned largely by the social environment, including the social structure and its economic bases. The source o f ideas and the legitimization of ideas in a traditional system are quite different. In agreement with Karl Mannheim, we accept the view that ideas have a social origin. On the other hand, legitimization o f ideas, particularly those concerned with the social order, may be cloaked in theological

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garb and expressed in accordance with the dogma o f the prevailing religious system. This situation was well illustrated by the role o f Islam in the Ottoman state. Indeed Islam, besides possessing its own normative functions, mostly in the field of ethics, served also as a forum o f legitimization for social movements before and during the Ottoman era. Islamic legitim­ ization was used by the elites to maintain the political and social order, but also by the lower class groups, often led by rising elites, in order to protest the established order. In medieval times, for instance, Mawardi and Dawanni’s Islam-based political theories, used also by the Ottomans, served to legitimize the power of the government elites; while the Ismaili, Sufi, and Alevi-Kizilba? doctrines stemming also from Islam, aimed often at legitimizing the protest of the masses against the ruling elites. Indeed, a large number of Ismaili, Sufi, and Alevi movements were predominantly social movements which accompanied basic structu­ ral changes occurring in their respective periods. Professor Bernard Lewis* work on heresy as an outlet for social protest is too well known to w arrant further discussion. Yet, for the most part scholars regarded the Sufi and Alevi protests as unorthodox religious movements rather than as political and cultural adjustments corresponding to changes in the social structure. For instance, there are in Ottoman history periods of religious reaction, liberalism, and reformism. Actually, all these religious movements and attitudes were conditioned by social changes and the specific action of some social group which had a power interest in the liberal, conservative, or even heretic interpretation of Islam. The key feature in these various interpretations was not the theological substance of Islam but some aspects of the social system. During the formative period of the Ottoman state when institutions were adopted and experienced a period of growth a liberal religious attitude prevailed as epitomized in the term “frontier Islam.“ But after the Ottoman system acquired its basic social and political constitution through the legislation of Mehmed II (1451-81) and the central bureau­ cracy consolidated its power due largely to the Janissaries, the religious system, that is, Islam became conservative, even reactionary during the rule o f Beyazid II (1481-1512). Yet, while stressing the religious un­ orthodoxy o f the Janissaries, often by citing their affiliation with the unorthodox Bektashis in an effort to prove somehow the survival of their Christian culture, acquired before conversion, the culturally oriented scholars ignore the basic fact that the Janissaries were also instrumental in uprooting and destroying the unorthodox religious movement o f the

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Kizlibaf o f East Anatolia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The latter were also partly inspired by Haci Bektaç, the Janissaries’ patron, but had rebelled against state order. The Janissaries were part of the ruling social group; and it was this situation rather than their religion, which conditioned their attitude toward the rebellious Kizilba§. Some students o f Ottoman history have seen the religious reaction which followed Mehmed II’s death as an attem pt by freeborn Muslims to recapture the high state positions usurped by the converts who controlled the central bureaucracy. This theory, despite its cultural appeal, can be easily disposed of by citing another view rooted in a knowledge of the structural change. That is, the so-called struggle of the freeborn Muslims against the converts was actually the provincial elites* effort to maintain some of their old privileges against the rapidly expanding authority of the central bureaucracy. Finally, an example to prove the relation between the social factor and culture, and the sub­ servience of the latter to the first, may be taken from the modern period o f Ottoman history. The beginnings of the so-called reformist and secularist movements in Islam are customarily traced to the cultural influence of the West in the nineteenth century. Religious reformism, whatever its type, is linked to liberalism. Yet, liberalism in the Ottoman state was the ideological instrument used by the newly rising middle classes—the commercial groups, the modern bureaucracy, the intelli­ gentsia—to legitimize their position in society. They engaged in a conflict against the old established groups, such as the ulema, the imperial bureaucracy, and eventually the throne itself. The secular legitimization developed by these groups—actually the very term “secular” denoting the Western usage of it is wrong—was in part due to the inadequacy of the old system in legitimizing the social arrangements stemming from the economic and industrial impact of the West, and thus justifying their power and status. The orthodoxy called them Zindik (heretic) very much as modem social reformers have been called “communist.” Again, the so-called modem Islamic reformist movements revolved basically around social issues and were only superficially related to the theological aspects of Islam. Seen thus the “ reformist” movements in modem Islam acquire a new perspective, and Afghani and Abduh appear as social rather than religious reformers. The Ottoman legal system itself outwardly conformed to what is known as the Islamic law. But this conformity was in family and personal law rather than political and social issues. Suffice it to mention that whenever Islamic law conflicted with social and political reality it was

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the law which was sacrificed. The best example for this is the timar system, since the principle of state land property enforced here was a clear departure from the Islamic notion of private property, which was absolute. (It should not be forgotten that Mehmed II confiscated the vakf lands and turned them into timars, in another violation of Islamic law, which placed the property of pious foundations outside government confiscation.) So, whichever way one looks at it, the Ottoman cultural and legal systems appear to be subordinated to changes in the social structure and not vice-versa. The final explanatory point previously mentioned concerns the bureaucracy. It is generally accepted that the Ottoman state, as E. N. Eisenstadt pointed out in The Political Systems o f Empires, created one of the most complex bureaucratic organizations of medieval time. It is also true that this bureaucracy was instrumental in assuring the state’s stability.1 A few scholars, influenced by recent studies on the modernizing roles of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia in the new nations, have gone so far as to equate the entire Ottoman system with the bureaucracy itself. This view fails to assess properly the essential fact that the Ottoman bureaucracy was often identified with the dominant social group, or tried to harmonize its own administrative functions with the aspirations o f the rising power groups. Several factors were responsible for this situation. Leading historians, the late Fuat Köprülü, Paul W ittek, Halil Inalcik agree that the Ottoman dynasty did not have a tribal origin and was free of obligation toward its kin. This was one of the major reasons which permitted the Ottoman dynasty to assume a functional position within the bureaucratic system 1 The political duration of the Ottoman state is customarily encompassed between the years 1299 and 1918, although both dates can be amended by adding or subtracting a few years, depending upon one's interpretation as to the beginning and the end of this much maligned but little understood state. The actual length of Ottoman rule over portions of the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa varied considerably since some of these areas were brought under or taken away from Ottoman rule at different times. Thus, the lifespan of the Ottoman state corresponds to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Reformation, the Modern Age, the French Revolution, Industrialization, and even the beginning of the Russian Revolution. In terms of European social history, it corresponded to the feudal, petty bourgeois, capitalist, and even the socialist period if one takes into view that the Ottoman state came to an end one year after the Russian'revolution. The Ottoman territory, at the zenith of its power in the sixteenth century, covered all the Balkans and most of Hungary, the Middle East (except Iran) and North Africa (except Morocco).

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and place emphasis on achievement as the criteria for social rank and status. The bureaucracy eventually developed a rational outlook which derived partly from the fact that it was free from serving a tribal aristocracy or a dynastic family which took over m ajor state functions, as had been the case in other Muslim dynasties. It dealt almost from the beginning with concrete situations, such as land organization and the like. Furthermore, the military origin of the early bureaucracy gave it cohesion and discipline. In the nineteenth century the recruitment of the bureaucracy from among civilians caused a m ajor crisis whose repercussions are still felt in contemporary Turkey. Finally, it must be mentioned that the Ottoman state practiced “ bureaucratization” on a wide scale by incorporating into the system, through formal recognition, social organizations and groups formed naturally or voluntarily. This situation resulted in an outward identification of the organized groups with the dynasty, which gave the Ottoman state a monolithic, uniform appearance and thus obscured the differentiation and conflict within the social body. Actually the state institutions and the organization and functions of the bureaucracy changed constantly subject to structural transformations. There were few, if any, administrative institutions which remained static throughout Ottoman history.1 These changes in the bureaucratic order will be shown to correspond to the periods of structural differentiation. And the periodization attempted in this study takes into account the general transform ation of the bureaucracy as the consequence o f both structural change and social integration, which went hand in hand. The division o f Ottoman history into several stages of development based on transform ation of the land system and the elites may provide a useful introduction to a new conceptual and comparative approach to Turco-Ottoman studies in particular and the Middle East in general. It can stimulate a wider use o f quantitative data as well as new methods for studying the history and the social transform ation of the Middle East and the Balkans. It can focus attention on the internal forces of 1 Regarded as a whole, it appears that institutions and soda! groups which played a vital role in one century often continued but only in form, or assumed new and different functions in subsequent ones. There is one basic institution which preserved its continuity—the throne. Situated at the apex of the social and political order, it reflected the interplay and changes among the elites. The philosophy of the Ottoman political system, similar to most traditional structures, was elitist Each contending group wanted to preserve the throne, among other things, as the office legitimizing its own social and political status.

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transform ation while placing in better perspective the impact o f cultural factors, such as Islam and Western civilization, by balancing and supplementing them with a socio-economic view. Finally, it can stimulate further comparative studies, both with respect to the West and the new nations, by focusing attention on tangible and concrete factors o f change common to all societies, and thus relate Ottoman history to that of the West and of mankind. T h e S tages

of

O ttom an H istory

a) The Frontier Marches : Uç beyleri (frontier lords) 1299-1402 The swift establishment and successful rise o f the Ottoman state, amid extremely adverse conditions, has given rise to several theories. Among these the view o f Paul W ittek that the Ottoman state was, from its inception to its end, a fighting ghazi state, held and still holds consider­ able ideological appeal, to the detriment o f socio-economic factors which played a role equal to or even greater than that o f the ghazi spirit, in securing success for the early Ottoman state.1 While it is true that W ittek dealt also with the social problems in early Ottoman history, his dominant view is that social events were a consequence of the cultural outlook rather than economic and structural factors. The early Ottoman state, established in a mountainous area with access to the Sea of M armara in Western Anatolia, was a zone o f relative freedom and had a mobile social organization, which gave it considerable opportunity for growth and power. It was in this relatively inaccessible territory, sandwiched between the Turkish feudal states in the East and decaying Byzantium in the West, that townsmen, merchants, and craftsmen, including the Ahis who opposed tyranny, scholars, nomads, warriors, and a variety o f other marginal elements dissatisfied with or escaping from the surrounding feudal states, found refuge and opportunity. The quality o f the people in this pristine state free o f social and cultural constraints, their pragmatic outlook coupled with the socio-economic and political conditions in the surrounding areas, 1 This obsession with the ghazi spirit and the holy war, that is with Jihad which supposedly stemmed from Islam, leads one to incredible contradictions. The prestigious Cambridge History characterizes the early Turkish states of Anatolia as follows : "In all these Turkish principalities which were the outcome of Holy War there was at first an entirely popular Turkish culture with no trace of Islamic influence," The Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4, Part 1, The Byzantine Empire, p. 736.

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including Byzantium, rather than the Islamic faith, help explain the spectacular rise of the Ottoman state.1 Relative mobility in this open society was preserved for a conside­ rable time in the early Ottoman state. The companions of Osman, the founder of the dynasty, and especially of his successors, Orhan and M urat I, played vital roles in the conquest and maintenance of Ottoman rule in the Balkans. The ruler-sultan was not the semi-deity, the absolute ruler, yet, but rather a rallying point between the central organization and various provincial chiefs or uç beyleri who held de facto power. The social difference between the sultan and his companions seems to have been minimal. The beys ruled the newly conquered territories and had their own armies; but in case of danger they coordinated their activities and submitted to the sultan’s command. Because o f scanty data the relation of the beys to the land and the peasant cannot be fully appraised. Nevertheless, one may say that the Balkan land, on which many Turkish groups settled, had long been the feudal domain of Byzantine lords and at times o f Western Crusaders. The uç beyleri, or lords of the frontier marches, acquired control o f much of this feudal land by replacing scores of local lords. The latter had direct economic control over the peasant. The uç beyleri, on the other hand, first established political control over large areas, and extracted only limited taxes from the peasant who, in addition to various payments, had performed in the past endless personal tasks for his Byzantine and Latin masters. Moreover, the fact that the land was granted formally by the Sultan to the bey, who remained responsible to his ruler, raised land relations from a personal relationship between the peasant and the lord, to an incipient public relation between the peasant and the state (the Sultan). Thus, the bey appeared to act as an intermediary between the two. The beneficiary was the peasant, at least in the beginning, until the Latin lords, the survivors of the Crusades, and others began to re-establish their old privileges through conversion to Islam or support o f the sultan. And this situation had a bearing upon the struggle among the beys after the death of Beyazit I in 1402. W hatever the changes in the relations between the uç beyleri and the land cultivators and the central government, one fact is clear. The power o f the early Ottoman state lay in its frontier domains, most of which 1 The debate between the late Professor Mustafa Akdag and Halil Inalcik on the economic situation of the Marmara basin in the thirteenth century is well known to ail students of Ottoman history.

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were in the Balkans. We know, as Halil Inalcik, Paul W ittek, and others have pointed out, that the families of Malkoçogullari, M ihalogullan, Evrenoszadelen, Turkhanogullan, and many others held vast domains in the Balkans, possessed large armies, and, in a word, were the sustaining foundations of the state. The inevitable conflict of authority between the provincial rulers and the central government, which had caused the downfall of many Muslim states, nearly toppled the Ottoman state as well. The uç beyleri did not join Beyazit’s forces against Timur (Tamer­ lane) at the battle of Ankara in 1402. The sultan lost this crucial battle and the state entered into a long period of almost fatal internal division in which the beys played a major role by backing their own candidates for the Sultanate. This stage of Ottoman history was concluded by a victory of the beys of Anatolia, who sided with the central government and brought Mehmet I (1413-21) to the throne. An analysis of Ottoman history during this period, based on the dominant role played by provin­ cial lords, their families, and the corresponding system of administration, can produce new insights into the nature o f the Ottoman state and its evolution. b) The Centralized Quasi-Feudal Stage, 1421-1596 The conflict between the central government and the beys was solved as mentioned, in favor of the first. The chief characteristic of the Ottoman state in this second stage appeared to be a continuous and gradual effort by the central government to consolidate its power through an economic, social, and political reorganization of the system. The places of the throne and the dynasty in the socio-political structure were properly defined, both by the Law of Succession and by suitable inter­ pretation concerning the origins of the dynasty, which was thus linked to the great Muslim rulers of the past. The central army, notably the Janissaries, became a major unit in the military force, as well as the channel through which the authority of the central government was effectively extended into the provinces. Meanwhile the economy and foreign trade were subjected to rigorous government regulation, that eliminated the Venetians as dominating merchants and allowed the rise of a native commercial group, thus adding new fuel to the economic conflict between Ottomans and Venetians in the Eastern M editerranean. On the land the kul and sipahis attached to the central government replaced the provincial sipahis or countryside elites. Mehmet II (1431-81) introduced the basic political, social, and

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administrative rules which remained the formal foundation o f the Ottoman state nearly until its end. The supremacy o f the central govern* ment, that is, of the political authority, gradually prevailed over all private and voluntary organization, as well as culture and religion. This was, in essence, a statist system built around a central bureaucracy which Mehmet II tried to render immune to all influences from outside by using every means to assure its full loyalty to the state. True, this bureaucracy emerged, in due time, rather as a special social class. But the idea of loyalty to the Sultan-state endured, and was one o f the key factors which assured the continuity o f the Ottoman state. This is also the period during which the kul (servant-slaves of the Sultan who were usually converts) system which consisted essentially o f the central bureaucracy, prevailed, creating considerable reaction among the old established provincial elites.1 The economic and social bases in this period were the timar land system. The system had its roots in the older empires o f the Middle East and notably, the Selçukis. But it was in the Ottoman state that the timars emerged as a well organized and fully developed socio-economic system integrated into the state structure. The timar was based on the principle that the title (rakaba) to the miri lands (usually conquered lands) belonged in perpetuity to the state, while the right to the usufruct (tasarruf), that is, the cultivation and exploitation of the land, belonged to the tenant. The sipahi, often a kul or member of the central army, especially after 1453 when the appointees of the central government began to take priority over the old sipahi in the countryside, received the administration of a timar as a payment for his services, but he could be removed at any time. He derived his income only from special taxes mentioned in his appointment deed. The fact that the sipahi's main responsibility was to safeguard the state’s property rights over the miri land and see to it that the tenant carried out his obligations to cultivate the land continuously placed him in the role of a functionary. In the ultimate instance, the relation between the state through the sipahi and the tenant appeared to be a contractual one, although, a t a later date, under Suleyman the Magnificent (1520-66), when the system began to show signs of disintegration, authoritarian decrees curtailed the land cultivator’s freedom. 1 This problem, as mentioned, was seen by some scholars as a struggle between converts and old-time Muslims. Actually it was a power struggle among elites which was decided by the sultan in favor of the kul who served better the interests of the central government than the older provincial elites.

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The military purpose of the timar was to provide, in case o f war, men and supplies, according to its revenue. Although this military function had priority over other responsibilities, the timar provided the govern­ ment with a crucial means o f maintaining some control over the most im portant economic resource, namely the land, and also over the largest segment of the population, the peasantry. Indeed, the timar system, though applied in the form described above mostly in Anatolia and the Balkans, nevertheless, proved the most effective means of establishing and maintaining a social order in accordance with the classical theory o f social estates and the realities of the Ottomans system. It was also instrumental in maintaining a steady base for revenue. But the system, while controlling production, was unable to expand indefinitely the area of cultivable land or introduce new agricultural methods, as could the private landowner, who, through the improvement of marginal or poor land to the point of making it productive (ihya), became its owner, without disrupting the socio-legal basis o f the system. In fact, this orderly cultivation of state land through the timar indirectly stimulated the growth of population without being able to absorb it. Thus, in the sixteenth century the Ottoman state had a surplus population, mostly younger people, some of whom wandered around Anatolia seeking employment, and not finding it appeared ready to engage in any occu­ pation, even mercenary warfare. This demographic growth, coupled with the rigidity of the economic system, caused social dislocation and unrest The disintegration of the timar system has often been cited as one of the chief causes o f weakness in the Ottoman state, although, in our view this disintegration was an inevitable step toward the evolution of other forms of social and political organization. It is interesting to note that even early Ottoman thinkers, such as Hasan KM and M ustafa Koçu bey, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, notwithstanding their allusion to the nonobservance of “ Muhammadan Law,” traced the root of Ottoman weakness to the disorganization o f the timars. The timar lost its military importance, as Professor B. Lewis has pointed out, because the introduction of small firearms rendered the cavalry (sipahis) rather useless. Subsequently, the role of the foot soldier was enhanced and new weapons, especially firearms, were required. All this increased state expenditure, as well as the need for revenue. Somehow, it was absolutely necessary to increase the volume of agri­ cultural production, the chief tax base. One may presume that these developments made the government less averse to changes in the

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operation of state lands, provided those changes resulted in greater state revenue, especially since the timar system seemed to have outlived its military usefulness. We know that the mass dismissal o f some 30,000 sipahis from their holdings in Anatolia because they had abandoned the battlefield at Haçova (Mezö-Keresztes) in 1596, was the turning point in the history of the timars. The question which arises here is : how could the government summarily dismiss such a large number o f people holding key positions in the adm inistration of the timars unless the system had outlived its usefulness and the government chose to rid itself of a rather troublesome group? The next stage in the social history of the Ottoman state tends to support the above hypothesis. c) Provincial Autonomy, and the Ayons, 1603-1789 This is probably the most im portant and possibly the most neglected period in Ottoman history during its transition to the modern age. It is im portant because many of the nineteenth century reforms, as well as the rise of national states in the Balkans, are rooted in the socio-economic developments which occurred a t this stage. It is im portant also because o f a drastic change in the criteria for the selection of elites; instead of an elite status decided by the ruling authority, there was a self-status­ seeking effort by lower class people based on their economic power. This period supposedly corresponds also to swift Ottoman decline. But contrary to this opinion, for almost fifty years in the eighteenth century the state enjoyed peace and prosperity and was able to regain some of the territories lost after the debacle of Vienna in 1683.'Possibly another cause for the neglect of this crucial stage was the relatively complex nature of the developments and the lack of appropriate conceptual tools to study them. The emergence of the ayons as the most im portant social group outside the government is the outstanding mark of this period. Functionally speaking, they were a new group, but used some of the ancient titles common in the Middle East, such as ayan-efraf given to communal leaders or notables; hence the mistaken idea of social continuity defended by some scholars. The ayons were neither the heirs of the sipahis, as far as land ownership was concerned, nor were they former sipahis who usurped the state lands and thus emerged as a new proprietary group. (O f course, there were exceptional cases in which the sipahis became land owners. But more frequent were cases in which the Sultan gave timars to state dignitaries as estates or malikhanes. Many of the

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malikhanes were leased for life, often by local ayons or notables. Actually this development is an im portant phase in the socio-economic evolution of the Ottoman state, for it points to a new form of relationship between the bureaucracy and the land resources.) The specific ayons we are referring to rose primarily in the eighteenth century because of a scarcity of personnel necessary to administer the state lands and to collect taxes for the government. It seems that there were two sources for the rise of the ayons. First, there were the old communal leaders known as ayons or e§raf among Muslims, and çorbaci among the non-Muslims, or multezims in Egypt. These it was claimed, were elected (this election has not been fully ascertained) by the popul­ ation in their respective districts and town quarters, and were responsible for local administration, order, and security. Second, there were enterpris­ ing individuals rising from every social stratum , including peasants and rank-and-file soldiers who achieved social preeminence by taking advantage of the opportunities in land administration and the tax collection. The function of the ayons expanded. On behalf of the state they assumed administrative roles in leasing state lands to villages and peasants, and signed the tapu, the lease deed which later acquired the meaning of property title. (In the massive land registration of 1845 the government accepted as proof of ownership the deeds issued by the ayons.) The same ayons also assumed im portant roles as assessors o f taxes on individual villagers as well as tax collectors. Eventually they auctioned the tax and became tax farmers. Moreover, as the ayons’ local influence increased, they emerged as key elements in the admini­ stration of towns and even small regions. Consequently, the government saw it as practical to bureaucratize this natural social growth by recognizing it as an institution, the ayanhk. It began issuing berat, title deeds to those whom it recognized as such. Many of the ayons, however, functioned without the government’s berat in open defiance of the established traditions of authority. It is interesting to note that the ayons assumed many of the functions performed previously by the sipahis with regard to land administration and tax collection. But unlike the sipahi of the past who was appointed by the government, the ayan rose from society at large, often by relying upon his own initiative, and established a leadership position based upon his own wealth and influence in the community. The berat recognition accorded by the government to the ayan merely legalized ex-post facto a status which emerged as the consequence o f a social development occurring beyond government control. The government appointment of

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the sipahi to administer a tim ar in the past was a constitutive act, that is, it was the sole factor which created a status and a position. The ayan had assumed largely on his own an indispensable function because of his key role in the cultivation of land and the collection of taxes. The ayan's position was assured as long as he functioned under the supervision of the central government officials in the region, usually the sanjak bey, and did not exceed the authority recognized as his. Yet, this relationship between the ayan and the central authority carried the seeds o f a dangerous conflict. The ayan had de facto control over the economic resources in the countryside and enjoyed considerable influence in the community, often as the protector of the local population against the abuses of the petty central government officials. He respected the government and the throne as long as these did not threaten his position. Actually, he had a vital interest in incorporating himself de jure into the existing socio-political setup, provided his socio-economic status and relative autonomy in local affairs were safeguarded. This incipient tendency toward local autonomy conflicted with the absolute authority exercised by the central government and its vital interest in controlling fiscal resources. Actually the emergence of the ayons as a semi-autonom­ ous group, and especially their de jure incorporation into the system, called for a drastic revision of the traditional political philosophy and the social organization on which the classical Ottoman state stood. The latent unavoidable conflict was brought into the open by the rapid weakening o f the central authority as a consequence of the wars o f 1768-74. The ayons’ power increased rapidly. Chief ayons, referred to also as derebeys, or lords of the valley, who were backed by lesser ayons, assumed extensive power. They became the rulers of extensive territories and successfully defied the central government. The reign of Selim III (1789-1807) consisted of an incessant struggle against the ayons of Anatolia and the Balkans. The institution of ayanltk was formally abolished in 1786, but the government became unable to gather taxes or even to draft soldiers and reestablished it in 1790. Thus, it became apparent to the ayons that their social position, if not legalized, was in danger, while the sultan and the upper bureaucracy realized that the ayons, who had economic power and exercised influence in the local communities, threatened their own authority. The conflict was solved first in favor o f the ayons, who under the leadership of M ustafa Pa$a, the ayan of Rusçuk, were instrumental in bringing Mahmud II to the throne in 1808. The same year they secured from the new sultan the Sened-i Ittifak, or the Pact of Alliance. This pact, signed by the Porte

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and the chief ayons, legalized the ayons' property rights, accorded in* * heritance rights to their sons, and freed them from official government interference in local administration. The period under discussion, as well as the rise o f the ayons, cannot be understood without taking into account the gradual liberalization and intensification of trade,'(ne changes in the modes o f production, the expansion of m arket economy, the accumulation o f capital in private hands, and the search for investment outlets in agriculture, as clearly demonstrated by the frantic efforts by Turkish businessmen inhabiting the Danube towns to invest in the Wallachian lands.1 Thus, the rise of the ayons and of their future allies, the commercial groups in towns, their defense of individual property, freedome of trade, and even of a primitive form of capitalism, and eventually their opposition to absolutism (Ziya Gökalp, the ideologue o f Turkish nationalism pointed out this fact), heralded probably the most funda­ mental stage of transform ation in Ottoman history. This is, in fact, the period in which the economic and social seeds of modern nationalism were sown. d) The stage o f National Statehood : The Modern Bureaucracy and Intelligentsia, 1808-1918 The reformist attempts of Selim III, the widespread changes carried out by Mahmud II (1808-39), had one fundamental purpose, namely, to strengthen the authority of the central government, first, through the establishment of a modern army.1 The sultan developed a new army and a central bureaucratic organization and together with it a new

1 A study, based on the documents from the Phanariote period in the Bucharest archives, shatters the theory that Turks and Muslims were not interested in business. The study shows that in the period ca. 1740-74 scores of Turks used every device to circumvent the ban secured by the Phanariote rulers of Wallachia from the Ottoman government. The ban prohibited Turks from engaging in economic occupations and in investing in the agriculture of that region. M. Alexandrescu-Dreasca, “Despre Regimul Supujilor Otomani in Ja i* Romlneascft In veacul al xviii lea,” Studii, Vol. 14 (Bucharest, 1961), pp. 88-113. * Nineteenth century Ottoman history has been studied intensively in the framework of diplomatic relations with the West as a period of change and transition to modernism and national statehood. However, this last phase has been seen almost exclusively within the context of the Western military and cultural impact on the Ottomans rather than within the framework of economic and social factors operating within society itself.

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ruling social stratum , that is the bureaucracy-intelligentsia, and a corresponding ideology. The government assumed a series of new responsibilities in such fields as education, agriculture, and trade, most o f which had been performed by voluntary or religious institutions, or were unknown, in the past. The immediate political goal of this central­ ization which led to a concentration of power in government hands, was to subdue the ayons and oppose foreign encroachments. The mobilization and more efficient use of existing resources, a more equit­ able distribution of services, and the desire to prevent certain groups in society from taking control of the government were some of the secondary goals of centralization, which emerged gradually later. The ayons sensed the danger lying in the establishment of a modern army loyal to the central government. Some supported its establishment in the belief that a modern army was necessary to defend the state and their own position, and that it would not be used against them. Other ayons opposed the idea of a new army. It is a well-known fact that the ayons were instrumental in turning back a t Çorlu in 1806 the modern army of Selim III, which was on its way to put down the Serbian revolt. Selim III himself was ousted by Janissaries because of his efforts to establish a modern army. The ayons’ fear proved to be right indeed, since Mahmud II, who took advantage of the Russian war of 1812, to reestablish and strengthen the modern army, used it to destroy the leading ayons in 1815. Only later in 1826 he abolished the Janissaries. The physical annihilation of the top ayons and the confiscation of their properties removed at this stage an upper social stratum which though opposed somewhat to royal absolutism, was yet an impediment to the development of a modern middle class. Eventually this class came to be composed of a commercial wing in which the non-Muslims prevailed, and an agrarian wing in which the Muslims had control. Serious political consequences derived from this duality, including the emergence of Turco-Muslim nationalism. The land continued to play a vital role underneath these political and social changes. The timar was officially abolished in 1831, although, as we have made it abundantly clear, it had ceased long before to be the backbone of the Ottoman state. Nevertheless, the idea of state ownership of land inherent in the timar had helped the government maintain in principle its property rights over extensive areas of cultivable lands. This proved to be a blessing for it prevented the rise of a landed aristocracy in central and western Anatolia, but not the Arab lands, well into the nineteenth century. But it was also a liability because the Ottoman state

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found itself at the beginning of the nineteenth century without a Turco* Muslim elite and a suitable ideology capable of countering the nationalistminded, independence-seeking commercial and agricultural elites among the Balkan Christians. It took the government almost one century to develop such a group. Meanwhile large tracts of land remained uncultivated, partly because of political insecurity and partly because of the government’s fear that the tenants might usurp the miri lands left without proper protection. The need for revenue was pressing, while upper bureaucrats who had visited Europe found appealing the idea that the citizen’s right to own property, to use it in freedom, and to benefit from its usufruct were essential conditions for material progress. Once more the bureaucracy assumed the chief responsibility for assuring the citizen that his property rights and his life were to be fully respected. This occurred in 1839, when Re§it Pa$a on behalf of the new sultan Abdulmecid (1839-61), read the edict of Tanzimat, which has been regarded wrongly as the beginning of modernization in the Ottoman state. The Tanzimat was the legal and political recognition of the structural and institutional changes which had occurred since Selim III. The Tanzimat has also been seen as an effort by the sultan and the bureaucracy to marshal the support of the masses, notably the Balkan peasants, against the usurpation of their lands by the ayons. Later iñ 1858, after intensive preparations which lasted fifteen years, the govern­ ment issued a Land Code. One year earlier in 1857, the government had also issued a liberal migration decree inviting, with promises of land, people from all over Europe to settle on Ottoman lands and become farmers.1 The Land Code marks a turning point in the social history of the Middle East. It was in effect a reassertion of the state title to the miri land. It also tried to institute a modern regime of tenancy whereby the peasant would in fact rent the land from the state while the govern­ ment, through its bureaucracy, would act both as a sort of landlord and impartial law enforcer. The system proved unworkable from the very start and, consequently, the Land Code was repeatedly amended until, by the end of the century and the Young Turks’ rule in 1908-18, the transfer of land from one individual to another was so liberalized as to make land tenancy indistinguishable from private ownership. One may say 1 On migration see my papers presented to the American Historical Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies meeting held in Dallas, Texas, March, 1972, and to the Conference on the Economic History of the Near East, Princeton Univer­ sity, 1974.

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that most of the privately owned land estates in the Middle East, notably in Iraq and Syria, originated largely in the nineteenth century, thanks to the opportunities created by the Land Code. In Turkey proper, the land accumulation in private hands intensified after 1911. After the intro­ duction of the Code Civil in 1926 the land was regarded as ordinary property and not subject to a special regime as had been the case through­ out Ottoman history. Meanwhile, the Christian groups in the Balkans, which had developed their commercial, intellectual and agrarian elites—for instance, the celeps (cattle merchants) and çorbacis (village heads) among Bulgarians in the case of the latter—through the church and the community schools, and had established communications with the West, gradually fought and .achieved national independence. The Ottoman government, forced to align itself more and more with the Muslim population, also established modern schools, only not to educate the population at large but to train government officials to meet the growing need for specialized personnel. Consequently, the school system led to further growth o f the dominating social stratum , the bureaucracy-intelligentsia, and intensified acutely the problem of assuring this group a living standard comparable with that of its Western counterpart, which if often took as a model. In addition to the control of economic resources this group monopolized the means o f communication (press) and education (modern schools) and tried to develop a society as well as an ideology according to its own image of the world and the human being. The bureaucracy’s eventual conflict with the dynasty on one hand and the masses on the other was latent in this complex socio-cultural situation. It was waged as a struggle for constitutionalism, science, and secularism, all of which were part of the intelligentsia’s modernist ideology. The intelligentsia, which came to differentiate itself from the profes­ sional bureaucracy toward the end of the century, formulated also the ideology of nationalism, first Ottomanism and later Turkish nationalism, and set the future goals for the society at large. It further tried to shape the destiny of Ottoman society in the latter part of the nineteenth century, not only according to the Western ideas which became a source of inspiration for them, but also according to the traditions o f authority and social organization inherent in the long history of their own society. The role played by the latter-day Ottoman bureaucracy and the intelligentsia in the transform ation of the Ottoman state is a unique social phenomenon. They engendered new social conflicts but were also instrumental in establishing the rudiments o f modern functional govern-

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ment, as well as the bases for an economic middle class. The bureau­ cracy, often against its best wishes, provided the legal and political framework in which the rising middle class performed its economic functions, and trained it in the rudiments of modern capitalism and free enterprise. The bureaucracy did so, not because of an ideological commitment to capitalism, but because o f a practical realization that its own economic welfare and security depended on increased production and economic efficiency. The prevailing conditions induced the bureau­ cracy and the intelligentsia to believe that material progress was achiev­ able only through a middle class dedicated to economic pursuits, an idea which guided the socio-economic thinking in the early days o f the Turkish Republic. The situation was bound to change after this economic middle class developed political ambitions of its own and moved to take over the government, or when the bureaucracy realized that it could manage economic development through national planning and govern­ ment investment. The fourth stage of Ottoman history ended roughly in 1908, in the revolution of the young officers in Salónica and the coming to power o f the Union and Progress Committee. The end o f the monarchy and the social system it represented was in sight, as actually happened in 1922, just prior to the declaration of the Republic, although the sultan lost his influence as early as 1908. These latter developments are outside the scope of this study. It is also essential to note that the basic conditioning role played by land also began to diminish somewhat in this period as trade and then manufacturing and the rise of a new type of city began to give new direction and complexity to the process of social and political differentiation. C on clu sion

The existence of stages or phases of development and change in Ottoman history may be proven also in the light o f that theory o f social change which holds that the transition o f a society from one stage to the next is accompanied by violence or massive social dislocation. This theory applies also to Ottoman history. One may notice that we have left unaccounted for in this study the following periods : 1402-21, 1596-1603, 1789-1808 (and if we were to follow the analysis further, 1908-23). These were periods of violence and unrest in the Ottom an state which corresponded to the transition from an old to a new stage. They were also the watersheds for the rise or fall o f the leading social

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groups. Thus, the first period coincided with the struggle o f the Anatolian elites, the Latin and other lords of the Balkans, backed at times by their Muslim and Christian peasant allies, to acquire control o f the throne. Each elite group sided with and supported the claim to the throne of one of Beyazit I’s chief contending sons, Mehmet, Suleyman, and Musa. The second period coincided with the Celali rebellions caused originally by the sipafiis dimissed at Haçova in 1596, and later led by provincial heads and local elites who were clearly reacting to the power of the central government and their representatives the kul in the provincial centers, e.g., Abaza pa$a (d. 1634) who massacred the Janissaries Erzurum. The unemployed groups roaming through Anatolia played their part too in these revolts which acquired widespread destructive character and involved practically all of Anatolia and northern Syria. The third period coincided with the upheavals of the ayons, such as Pasvanoglu, Çapanogullan, Canipogullan, Alipa^a of Yanina, and many others in the Balkans and Anatolia. Finally, the fourth period of unrest covered the Young Turks’ revolt in Salónica, their nationalist, reformist attem pt which culminated in the downfall of the Ottoman state and the eventual rise of Republican Turkey and a series o f Arab states, as well as an independent Albania. It is interesting to note that while the upheavals in the first three stages had a conservative character, that is, they aimed at preserving the status quo of the dominant group, the last one expressed the claim to power of new groups and envisaged a total transform ation of the country. The first three failed to maintain the status quo while the last succeeded in triggering vast changes, not only because it anticipated change and accepted it as the inevitable law of human society, but also because the elite order of the traditional era was being replaced by a new system of elite selection, a secular understanding of authority, and new political principles governing relations between the ruler and the ruled. The implications of this periodization are so obvious as not to require further elaboration. Nevertheless, one may say that it provides a factual foundation for explaining each period on the basis of some tangible factors, for comparing the social and economic developments in the Ottoman state to developments in other systems, for giving cultural and political developments a new interpretation, and for placing change and continuity in proper perspective. But above everything else it permits the scholar to see new aspects and new dimensions in the hitherto uniform Ottoman history.

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COMMENT C .A .O .

van

NIEUWENHUIJZE

Institute of Social Studies—The Hague

In his paper “The Stages of Ottoman History” Dr. Kemal H. K arpat has selected a topic, and an approach to it, providing one o f those often sought but seldom found opportunities for interdisciplinary exercise. It appears as if, for once, history and sociology may be matched and perhaps improve their results by consequence. Professor K arpat’s premise is as dramatic as it is simple. He considers it obvious that students of Ottoman and Turkish affairs do not have a general theory which would not just encompass the entire course of Ottoman history but then divide it into stages or phases of evolution or transformation. Equally im portant is his underscoring of the fact that “ Ottoman history is the history o f a continuous social, economic, cultural and political change.” Insofar as they concern him, the sociolo­ gist will readily subscribe to these ideas of the historian : it takes no real effort at co-operation for them to achieve unanimity on this score. More significant for present purposes are the periodization scheme proposed and the criterion used to establish it. Briefly, the scheme includes four phases : (1) the frontier state (1299-1402), (2) the central­ ized feudal system : sipahis (1421-1596), (3) the emergence of provincial autonomy : ayans (1603-1789), (4) the emergence of national states (1808-1918); there are brief interludes of upheaval between the phases. Upon the consideration that there are few institutions whose structure and function remained intact for the duration o f the Ottoman history, a criterion for the determination of stages is proposed, namely according to the prevailing land system and its forms of operation, and the social groups which played a dominant role in the sociopolitical transformation of the Ottoman state in each phase. In other words, K arpat looks upon the land as the main economic basis, and the social and political groups acting on this basis as forming the dynamics of change in each stage. The present note is meant to serve as one sociologist’s response to the historian’s thesis. It will consist of three elements. First, agreement with, and tentative elaboration of the proposed periodization scheme, not­ withstanding minor disagreement as to the interpretation of the short intervening periods. Secondly, introduction of an alternative criterion for periodization, corroborating the periodization proposed. Thirdly, the thesis that land tenure is merely symptomatic for that which is here

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to be proposed as the alternative criterion, with the consequence that it remains a significant and useful consideration if perhaps not the best possible one. The order in which it is proposed to proceed will differ from the one now used. We shall start with the second point, move on the third, and then return to the first. Periodization is an exercise in identifying significant discontinuity within a framework of unbroken continuity. The continuity is the primary consideration. Often it is presupposed, whether explicitly or even tacitly. The discontinuity is basically a secondary m atter, but because it is recognized tentatively and needs to be identified, it tends to catch the lim elight Thus, what is needed for a periodization is that which will determine a number of distinct variants of the ongoing entity, in such a manner that the former are o f shorter duration than the latter and furthermore that the subsequent time spans of a series of variants constitute something like a temporal sequence. The ongoing entity we are dealing with in this particular case is, no doubt, the Ottoman empire. W hat we need to determine is what makes for variations upon the theme. It would appear that a first effort to meet this need should set out from that which is denoted by the formula “ the Ottoman empire.“ W hat kind o f sociocultural entity is meant? Once the answer to this question is provided, clues towards the identi­ fication o f variants may be found implied right within it. It stands to reason that the sociologist’s answer or answers to the question just raised will not be the same as that or those of the historian. To the sociologist, the Ottoman imperial formula is perhaps primarily an effort to match two fully distinct, not to say mutually exclusive, notions of unity. One is the more or less formal unity of the optimally large socio-political, cultural and perhaps also economic unit : the empire as a whole, considered so to speak “from outside.” The other is the unity o f experienced togetherness (Ibn Khaldun’s ’asablya, Popper’s closed community, Redfield’s little community) : the unity o f the ever so many distinct and different components of the empire. Secondary vis-à-vis primary unity; complexity vis-à-vis component. Social theorists have struggled with the apparently inevitable yet hard-to-conceive linkages between the two kinds of unity for a long time already. Typically, some of them have tried to link and to separate the two all at once by interpolating a time sequence. In consequence they'have come up with crude and indeed primitive theories of develop­ ment. Examples that come to mind readily include Tonnies’s Gemein­ schaft and Gesellschaft and Durkheim’s two kinds of society, mécanique

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and organique. Reference, at this point, to this kind o f model building has no other purpose than to suggest that this need not be the only way in which to match the two notions of unity. Other ways are con* ceivable, one of them usable for present purposes. The togetherness of the two can be conceived as a mix, a combination of the two opposites in one amalgam. Variable amalgam, no doubt, inasmuch as it can vary according to relative importance of each in a given mix : more o f this, less of that. The variability in its turn can be envisaged as a range o f possible mixes, running between two extreme positions where the one has virtually complete predominance at the expense o f the other, and vice versa. Illustrations for the two extremes come to mind without difficulty. For the one extreme, think o f Clark Kerr’s ill-fated concept o f the multiversity : complexity as completely predominant over homo­ geneity. For the other extreme, remember the pure utopianism of Rochdale or, for that m atter, the “seid einig, einig, einig!” slogan that marked a somewhat peculiar phase of romantic European nationalism. W ith reference to a range like this, the extremes provide the dram a but the more significant phenomena occur closer to the middle, where the mix would be more in the proximity of a 50/50 ratio. The point, in all this, is that the Ottoman empire can be seen as one instance on the range, perhaps not too far from the middle, where both homogeneity and complexity are quite significant. Crucial, to this kind of variant, is how the two discrepant notions o f unity are brought and then kept together. We shall discuss this presently, but first it is appro­ priate to note a point that follows immediately from this crucial m atter. It is this. Given the nature of the variant (i.e., the instance on the given range), one readily envisages the possibility to distinguish, upon second reading, sub-variants, each of which, moreover, would prove susceptible to being assigned heuristic value for a particular historical period, of shorter duration than and occurring within the total duration of the Ottoman empire. Returning to the main point, we may start out from the thesis that the Ottoman empire is basically an expansive w arrior em­ pire.1 It bridges the gap between unity as homogeneity and unity as com­ plexity. As an exercise in bridge-building it is quite distinctive a formula of impressive longevity. The chart on p. 103 provides schematic presentation. 1 A double foot note here. First, this kind of empire is one of a number of kinds or variants. Secondly, much debate is possible on whether it is a nomad empire or n o t On both points I have an axe to grind, but this is not the occasion. Please refer to my Sociology o f the Middle East (Leiden, Brill, 1971), p. 455-462.

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KEMAL H . KARPAT

According to this formula, unity as complexity results from institution­ alizing the togetherness of plural instances of unity as homogeneity. This is achieved through a two-step operation. Step one is recognizing the primacy of the plural basic entities each in its own right. Step two is making them converge upon a more or less common culture norm as upheld by, not to say embodied in, the ruling institution. Clearly, that which links the two steps together is crucial. This is the elite function. The elite conveys the amenability of the masses, i.e., the homogenous entities featuring as basic components, to the ruler who in ruling them—and the elite—constitutes and upholds the realm, the empire. It is crucial for present purposes to realize that the incumbent of this elite role, i.e., of the function of allegiance-mediation, is a variable. W hat is more, in most cases it is a variable constellation. Various sociocultural categories will be involved at the same time, with variable significance and in a variable manner each. A listing, illustrative but not exhaustive, would include the *ulamä’, the tribal chiefs, the landlords, then, somewhat differently, the bureaucracy and the military and, quite differently again, the merchants. Neither the listing as such nor the items listed are as im portant, at this point, as the fact that clearly a shift in incumbent can occur without the formula as such being disrupted or altered to the slightest extent. Now this is what we were looking for. If in the course of time changeovers occur in who performs the function of allegiance-mediation, and if a particular category doing the job can be assigned to a particular length of time in such a manner that a sequence of incumbent/periods results, all the makings of a periodization are available. Here, the sociological reasoning developed thus far ties in with the historical exercise undertaken by Professor K arpat, and the two tally marvellously. His four periods can be rephrased, in terms of what has been said thus far, without really altering them. The first phase, of the frontier state, is the period of the imposition of unifying rule upon numerous distinct sociocultural entities, forcing them into the role and position of being the components of an empire. The second phase is that of institutionalizing and routinizing the imposition, using plural agents for the purpose. (Note that we are disregarding the bureaucracy). The third phase follows logically upon the successful completion o f the second : the institutionalization proves integrated with the entities concerned, to the point that the imposition meets a feed-back that, on the whole, confirms the general formula. This in its turn will almost neces­ sarily result in an increasing specificity and self-identification of those

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Chart : the Ottoman-imperialformula

RULING INSTITUTION (pole of convergence) A

y ELITE (medium of convergence)

A

&

y I COMPONENT UNITS

i

I (internally homogenous but in their I togetherness a plural, diffracted I welter of components of complexity)

j j i

!

!

I_____________________________

I

plural instances of unity-as-homogeneity (together in such a man­ ner as to constitute one instance of unity-as-complexity)

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KEMAL H . KARPAT

in the allegiance-mediating role, who can henceforth play off legitima­ tion from above against legitimation from below. The consequence is that they turn out to be a virtual factor of disintegration in addition to being, or should we say after having been, the factor of convergence. (It being understood that convergence is the prevailing mode o f in­ tegration under the formula.) The backlash against this characterizes the fourth period, during which the match between unity as complexity and unity as homogeneity is forced in the manner of short-circuiting the two. This has culminated, on a dramatically different scale, in the creation o f the Turkish Republic (and, lest we forget, in that o f the mandates and subsequent states in the Arab world). The state-nation dispenses with the intermediary o f any elite category by placing the ruling institution in the very midst o f the components of the unity of the state, these having been reconceptualized in their turn, namely as individual citizens. It is this latter shift that really affects the formula as such. In failing to account for the manner in which the unity at the level of the statenation will tie in with units o f lesser magnitude which yet are not the individual citizen, it reopens the issue for which the Ottoman imperial formula was one possible, but by now outlived, answer. Thus, the nineteen-fifties and ’sixties could be presented as phase five of K arpat’s periodization : the phase o f zero point which in a sense must be assumed also to have preceded the emergence o f the Ottoman imperial formula. Only now the conditions are quite different, so that any emerging formula will have to be different in its turn. N or is Turkey alone in this regard. Both in the Middle East and outside, many are the statenations that find themselves in basically the same situation. Yet in searching for responses to the challenge, each will have to start out from its own specific conditions. In retrospect, it seems probable that phase four is not really on a par with phases one, two and three (and likewise, phase five may turn out to be phase one o f a new cycle consisting of an unforeseeable number of phases). Phase four, considered more closely, resembles the interludes that Professor K arpat has pointed out as occurring between his other phases. He presents them as dramatic divides or watersheds. The sociologist would probably be more inclined to present them as interludes of marginality : already far away from one neatly distinguishable type and as yet too remote from a type that is merely emerging and remains to be identified. The suggestion to relegate phase four to the status of an interlude

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flies into the face of the current Turkish self-identification, and this in an awkwardly dramatic manner. It could be interpreted a sa slighting way o f describing, if not dismissing, that which is vital to die current Turkish self-view. Nothing of the sort is intended. W hat is in fact meant is by no means a denial of all the good that the state-nation has done in providing immediate answers to urgent vital needs. W ith the far-sightedness that results from being geared to that which lies beyond, it merely suggests that in the longer run, the state-nation as a formula is likely to raise more, and more difficult, questions than it seems capable o f answering adequately. There is nothing uniquely Turkish in this; the problem occurs, or will occur soon, in many countries. From speculation of a somewhat Olympian kind we must now return to the m atter that concerns us here, periodization. As shown, the periodization criterion here suggested confirms Professor K arpat’s periodization and even allows a sequel to it. This however should not and could not hide the fact that the two are not the same. The question is how different they are. If their leading to the same periodization is no sheer coincidence (which would seem unlikely), they could hardly be as different as they appear at a first blush. Indeed they are not fully unrelated. In order to see this it helps to remember, first o f all, that control over land, as referred to by Professor K arpat, is not just formal ownership. In the last resort, formal rights are no more than an indicator of something much more vital and indeed much more complex, namely the man-land relationship. In a predomi­ nantly agricultural-nomadic setting, this is a crucial determinant of the overall process. Karl Wittfogel, for one, has seen this very clearly; but being preoccupied elsewhere (namely in the disputes about modes o f production and the like that have kept Marxists divided) he was not in the best possible position to demonstrate the Middle Eastern implications for what they really are. Professor K arpat broaches the same vital subject m atter in his turn and in his specific manner, but like Wittfogel, he may have been somewhat preoccupied with the visible part o f the iceberg, not (yet) bothering to ask whether formal control over land could be a mere symptom o f something broader and more penetrating. One can see what may be the typical historian’s difficulty in this con­ nection : broadening the scope may appear as entailing enumeration of an in principle unlimited number of factors whose mutual relationships could not always be easy to ascertain. It is in regard to this difficulty that the sociologist’s approach may come handy. W hat it does is to provide the possibility to envisage a number of factors or considerations

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as one cluster. All that is needed for the purpose, when starting out from Professor K arpat’s identification o f control over land, is to realize that control over land is a mere symptom of that which really matters, namely control over the man-land relationship, in other words control over a, not to say the, most critical moment o f overall societal process. This is where once again the historical approach of Professor K arpat and the sociological approach advocated here find themselves together and, what is more, in agreement. They are both aiming at that which is central in the specific societal process here defined, historically, as the Ottoman empire; in so doing, they are both out to identify variants. I will submit, in addition, that this realization could prove helpful in order to refute an allegation, relating to Professor K arpat’s approach, that could conceivably emerge, namely that it is a monofactor explanation and as such not to be trusted. The point is that what, in his presentation, appears as a single factor should, upon further probing, turn out to be a cluster o f somehow related factors or considerations, all having to do with the man-land relationship as a signal and crucial element of overall societal process. The man-land relationship, to be sure, not merely involves land in all its varieties and people in all their groupings and specific living patterns, but in addition also the manners in which people will “engage upon” or deal with land both in order to make a living off it and otherwise.

THE OTTOMAN EM PIRE IN THE EUROPEAN ECONOMY 1600-1914 Some Observations and Many Questions CHARLES ISSAWI Columbia University

In this paper, I have attempted to indicate some of the economic dimensions of the Ottoman Empire, and the place it occupied in the European economy, and to point out some of the questions this raises. Four topics have been chosen : population, trade routes, foreign trade and foreign investment. P o pu la tio n

The relative size of the population of the Ottoman Empire is of interest not only to political and military historians but also to economic historians. Indeed, it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that, until the 19th century, labor was by far the most im portant factor of production. For land was abundant, both in the Ottoman Empire and in most other parts of Europe. And capital played a relatively minor part, and took mainly the form of residential buildings, shipsSmd inventories. The starting point o f any estimates of the population of the Ottoman Empire must be the figures provided by Professor Omer Barkan.1 Although some of the details are subject to criticism,1 the orders of magnitude seem correct. For the period 1520-1535, he puts the population of Anatolia at 5,700,000, and that of Rumelia at 5,300,000; adding 400,000 for Istanbul and 250,000 for non-enumerated military classes, gives a total of about 12 million. Professor Barkan gives reasons for believing that this figure is somewhat too low and also provides some series showing a distinct increase in the following fifty years. On this basis one can make an estimate of about 20 million for European and Asian Turkey at the end of the 16th century.8* 1 JESHO, 1, 1, August 19S7; see also his article in Türkiyat Afecmuasi, vol. X, 1951-52. 8 See a comment by the present writer on the figures for Syria, JESHO, 1, 3.

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Around 1600, the population of Europe, including Russia west o f the Urals, was somewhat under 100 million.1 In other words, the Ottoman Empire must have equalled about a fifth o f the total population of Europe, a ratio matched only by France. If one were to add Egypt and the other African provinces o f the Ottoman Empire its share would rise to nearly a quarter. Thereafter the Ottoman Empire’s relative importance shrank steadily and rapidly. First, because of territorial losses in Europe. Secondly, because the Ottoman population seems to have grown rather slowly, though such a judgement is highly tentative. And thirdly, and most im portant, because of the rapid increase in Europe’s population—to a total o f about 190 million in 1800, 270 million in 1850 and 400 million in 1900. Estimates for the Ottoman Empire in the early part of the 19th century are abundant, but hardly reliable. The following table shows some of the figures for the three parts of the Ottoman Empire quoted by Mikhov in his massive compilation.* * (Millions) Date 1785 1788 1804 1807 1807 1822

Author ‘Tabellen" Meyer Mentelle Lichtenstem Galletti ‘‘Almanachs"

Europe

Asta

Africa

9 8 18 11.3 11 9.5

19 36 9 12.3 11.1 11.1

4 5 2.5 3.2 3.2 3.5

Istanbul • ••

1 ... ... ... ...

Total 32 50 29.5 26.8 25.3 24.1

To this may be added the judgment o f an American compiler regarding European Turkey : “The different statistical writers vary in their estim­ ates from five to nine millions;’’ as for Asiatic Turkey he puts it at 10,000,000, including “Asia M inor, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Chaldea and Syria.’’ * And U rquhart put “in round numbers, the population

1 A figure of 100 million for 1650 was given by both Wilkox and Carr-Saunders; see United Nations, The Determinants and Consequences o f Population Trends (New York, 1953), p. 11. * Nikola Mikhov, Naselenieto na Turtsiya I B'lgarlya (Sofia, 1915-1935,4 volumes). * Henry A. Dearborn, Memoir on the Commerce and Navigation o f the Black Sea (Boston, 1819,2 vols.), vol. I, pp. 132-135.

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o f European Turkey and Greece, at twelve million," pointing out that guesses on this subject varied from 7 to 22 million.1* There is, however, one more reliable estimate, based on the results o f the 1831 Census. Professor K aral’s painstaking study * of the returns o f that census concludes that the total number of men {erkek) in Rumelia was 1,370,000 and in Anatolia 2,384,000, giving a grand total o f 3.754.000. Now it is clear that the figures are far from reliable as regards both territorial coverage and completeness o f returns.* However, one can use them as a basis, starting with the assumption (justified by a remark by Lütfi, quoted by Karal on page 21) that the word erkek covers all males, including children, and not only heads of households or adult males. This would suggest a total of 2.8 million for Rumelia and 4.8 for Anatolia, or a grand total of 8.2 million, including Istanbul. To this may be added about 1,000,000 to cover the districts of Mara$, Diyarbekir, Erzurum and Van, which were omitted in the census, another 1.000. 000 for Iraq and about 1.3 million for Syria. These figures are inconsistent with the returns o f the 1844 "census" but, making the necessary territorial adjustments and assuming that the 0.8 per cent annual growth rate that prevailed between 1884 and 1913 also held for the period 1831-1884, are consistent with the distinctly more reliable estimates for 1884 and 1897.4 All o f this would suggest that, in 1800, the Ottoman Empire (excluding Egypt) had a population distinctly under 20 million, or say one-tenth of that of Europe. , There are various estimates for the third quarter of the century, which seem to be mostly based on the "censuses" and partial enumerations carried out by the Ottoman government, as well as on tax returns, and on the resulting figures given in the Salnameh. The principal ones may be tabulated as follows, after excluding the “Tributary States," i.e. Rumania, Serbia and Montenegro in Europe and Egypt and Tunisia in Africa. But here again a closer look at more reliable figures raises serious doubts. The 1884 figure for European Turkey (Edirne, Salónica, M onastir, Kosova, Scutari, Yannina and the Islands) was 3,924,000, for Istanbul 895,000 and for Asia M inor (stretching to the present border of Syria and Iraq) 9,826,000, a total o f 14,645,000. The addition of 1 David Urquhart, Turkey audits Resources (London, 1833), p. 270. * Enver Ziya Karal, ¡Ik Nüfüs Sayimt, 1831 (Ankara, 1943). • For a fuller discussion, see a paper by C. Issawi in a volume edited by T. Naff and E. R. J. Owen, to be published in 1975. 4 See Issawi in Naff and Owen, op. cit.

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Syria and Iraq brings the total to 17,135,000 and allowing another 1,000,000 for Libya and about 5,000,000 for those parts of Arabia under Ottoman rule, would suggest a grand total of some 23 million.1 This would mean that, around 1880, the Ottoman Empire’s population was only about 7 per cent of that of Europe. (Millions) Year 1867 1872 1876 1877 » b c d

Author Salaheddin * Behm b Ubicini c Ravenstein d

Europe

Asia

Africa

13.5 10.5 11 9

16.5 16.5 16.5 16.3

0.8 0.8 0.8 1.1

Istanbul

Total

...

30.7 27.8 28.5 27.1

... ...

0.7

Salaheddin Bey. La Turquie à Vexposition universeiie de 1867 (París, 1867). E. Behm, Die Bevölkerung der Erde (Gotha, 1872). A. Ubicini and Pavet de Courteille, État présent de PEmpire Ottoman (París, 1876). E. G. Ravenstein, “The Populations of Russia and Turkey,“ Journal o f the Statistical Society, XL, 1877.

Lastly, we may examine the figures for 1913, which are much more reliable than any of the previous ones.1 Istanbul had a population of 1.160.000 and Edirne and Çatalca 642,000. The Asian provinces had 13.522.000 inhabitants and the Kars region 496,000, giving a total population of 15,821,000 within the present limits of the Republic.* The addition of Syria, Iraq and Arabia put the grand total (excluding Kars) at about 26.5 million, or some 5 per cent of Europe’s population. The general trend indicated by these figures—the decline in the Ottoman Empire’s share of population—is undoubtedly correct. But, needless to say, the tentative estimates given here raise as many questions as they answer, and research in this field has hardly begun. Another question that deserves attention is the much sharper relative decline in the Ottoman Empire’s share of skills. Population is a question of quality as well as of quantity. Naturally no figures are available, but one can surmise that in the 16th century the Ottoman Empire contained a far higher proportion of the skilled personnel of Europe—physicians, architects, craftsmen—than in 1800, and that the gap continued to widen at least until the foundation of the Republic. 1 Vedat Eldem, Osmanh Imparatorlugunun, Iktisadi partían Hakkmda Bir Tetkik (Ankara, 1970), Chap. IV. * Ibid.

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T rade R outes

Looked at from Europe, the Ottoman Empire stood as a huge obstacle blocking the trade routes. First there was the Black Sea, in the 12th-15th centuries a very im portant area of activity for the Italians; indeed, in the 13th century the Genoese even used the Black Sea and Caspian as a means of access to the silk of northern Iran.1 The fall of Constantinople and the conquest of the Crimea transformed the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake and although the Venetians were allowed to enter itvuntil 1540, after that date it was closed to foreigners. In the course of the 17th century the British and Dutch were permitted to trade in the Black Sea, but only on Ottoman ships.* Presumably, the merchandise was trans­ shipped in Istanbul onto European vessels. Similar developments took place in the Red Sea. The Portuguese attem pt to force a way in and capture Aden was frustrated by Ottoman seapower, and thenceforth Christian ships were forbidden to sail beyond Mocha. That left the land routes, all of which were under Ottoman control after the conquest of Egypt in 1517. The sultans were well aware of the importance of the transit trade in Persian silk, Chinese porcelain, spices and other Oriental goods, and in the return flow of European woolens and other wares, and took various steps to encourage it. But Europeans seldom went further than Bursa and Aleppo, the two termini of the silk trade, and “this caravan trade was totally in the hands of Muslim merchants, among whom were men who had invested a good deal of capital—for example, Ebu Bekr, a substantial merchant, who in 1500 had once sold in Bursa a shipment o f spices worth 4,000 gold ducats.” * By the 18th century, all that was changing. The Treaty of Passarowitz (1718) authorized the Austrians to navigate the Danube down to, but not beyond, its mouth. In 1774, under the terms of Kuchuk Kainarji, the Russians were allowed to sail on the Black Sea and in 1784 Catherine 1 Marco Polo, Travels. * P. H. Mischev, La Mer Noire et les Détroits de Constantinople; but Sarah Searight, The British in the Middle East (New York, 1970) illustration after p. 24, states : “Although few Christian ships were allowed into the Black Sea, in 1609 Thomas Clover received permission for 'The First English ships that ever swomme into those sease.' ” * Halil Inalcik, “ International Trade Routes and the Ottoman Empire,” Fifth International Congress of Economic History, Leningrad, 1970; see also idem “ Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal o f Economic History, March 1969; idem %v Bursa, Encyclopedia o f Islam, New Edition.

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opened her Black Sea ports to foreigners. The same year the Austrians were allowed to sail on the Black Sea and pass through the Straits and in 1799 and 1803 the same privileges were extended to the British and French respectively. It remains to add that steam navigation reached Istanbul in the late 1820’s, that by 1838 a British consular report (FO 78/333) listed six steamships based on that port, and that, starting in 1836, regular steam connections were established between Istanbul and Trabzon.* 1 By then, the bulk of the Black Sea trade had passed into British, Austrian, Russian, French and other hands, and one can only surmise that Europe’s great gain must have been accompanied by some Ottoman loss—how much, and by whom exactly, are matters that deserve investigation. A similar process took place in the Red Sea area. By the end o f the 17th century, British East India ships were pushing as far as Jidda, with the connivance of the sharifs of Mecca, who wanted the customs revenues. At that port goods were trans-shipped to Arab ships, which carried them either to Qusair or, more frequently, to Suez. In the course of the 18th century, British ’’free merchants” in India became increasingly eager to reach Suez directly, partly in order to escape the tightening clutches of the sharifs of Mecca. And in the 1760*s Ali Bey of Egypt, wanting to consolidate his independence from the Porte and develop new sources of revenue, tried to encourage European trade with Suez. His successor, Muhammad Abul Dahab, and W arren Hastings concluded a treaty providing for free navigation and payment of duties of 6$-8 per cent. But the combined opposition of the East India and Levant Compa­ nies, of the Porte and of France, as well as the growing anarchy in Egypt after the death of Abul D ahab in 1773, frustrated this development. In 1778 the Porte prohibited European trade with Suez and in 1780 an Act o f Parliament forbade British subjects to trade by way o f Suez. Various French and British attempts in the two following decades came to nothing, and it was left to Muhammad Ali to open up the overland route to trade.* This was greatly expanded following the establishment o f regular steam services between Bombay and Suez, in 1834. And the opening o f the Suez Canal in 1869 was a landmark in the history o f navigation and commerce. 1 On the latter, see Charles Issawi, “The Tabriz-Trabzon Trade,” UMES, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1970. 1 See Mohammad Anis, England and the Suez Route in the Eighteenth Century (Cairo, 1957).

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The impact o f the opening o f these routes on the local economies has yet to be studied. The overland trade certainly stimulated the Egyptian economy, but the Canal enabled the great flow to bypass the country and resulted in the loss of much income. And the development o f steam navigation inflicted a twofold damage on Jidda and other Arabian ports : first, their trade was diverted to Suez and Aden; and secondly their sailing ships were gradually eliminated by the more efficient European—and for a while Egyptian—steamers.1 The Canal also seems to have had a doubly harmful effect on the trade o f Aleppo and Damascus, by drawing away traffic both directly and through the Persian Gulf. Thanks to Portuguese—and later Dutch and British—naval power, the latter had remained open to European com­ merce. But, except briefly in the 17th century, it carried only a small part o f Iranian trade, which continued to use the land routes to the M editerranean or Aegean. However, the opening o f the Suez Canal halved the sea distance between Western Europe and the Gulf, brought it within reach of steamers, and thus made that route increasingly attractive. And starting in 1841 regular steam navigation was established on the Tigris and Euphrates. One can presume that this diverted a sizeable portion of the trade of Iraq and Iran from the M editerranean to the Gulf, but no systematic work has been done on this subject* *

T rade

Two general statements may be made on this subject with some assurance. F irst the volume of Ottoman trade seems to have expanded, very slowly and with setbacks caused by wars and disturbances between 1600 and 1800, and rapidly thereafter. And secondly, the Ottoman Empire’s share of world trade fell sharply during the first period and much more slowly after 1800. As regards the period 1600-1789, one can begin with the figures provided by Masson, since they refer to the Ottoman Empire’s leading

1 See a British Consular Report of 1898, reproduced in Issawi, Economic History o f the Middle East (Chicago, 1966), pp. 319-22, and D. A. Farnie, East and West o f Suez (Oxford, 1969). * The only attempts I know of are those of Muhammad Salman Hasan, attatawwur al-iqtisadi f l al Iraq (Beirut, n.d.). and C. Issawi, Economic History o f Iran (Chicago, 1971), chapter 3.

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trading partner, France.1 In the 17th century, France’s total imports from the Levant exceeded 10 million livres in only three years. But by 1715-20, annual imports were averaging some 15 million livres, a level that was maintained in peace time until the middle of the century. After the Seven Years’ W ar the upward trend was resumed, and annual imports rose to over 30 million in the 1780*s. Exports increased rather faster, falling short of imports in the earlier perod but catching u p with them in the end. Judging from available information on prices, this increase represents a rise in real terms.* On the eve of the Revolution, France accounted for 50 to 60 ner cent of Ottoman trade, but ■hefor** th«> latter had increased we must examine to what extent the growth of French trade had been achievedat the expense of that of its main rivals, Britain and Holland. Dutch trade, which had been im portant in the fin í hnlf irf the 17f|i century, “declined rapidly after 1660.” * but still accounted for 20 to 25 peTceHToFthe total in the 1780’s. As ior Britain, ils iradc showed an upwárd trend, Trom an average annual im pon of about L2$0,0uu in the 1620’s-30’s to L350,000 in 1722-24.4 But the average dropped to L150.000 in 1752-54 and remained more or less at that level until the 1790’s.s However, since a decline of L100.000 is equivalent to only 2.5 million livres, it may be taken that most of the increase in French trade represents a growth in the overall Ottoman total. But in these two centuries Europe’s trade had multiplied severalfold, and as a result the Ottoman Empire’s share had shrunk enormously In the late 16th century the Levant had accounted for half the trade of France, but in the 1780’s for only one-twentieth. For England, after reaching a peak of one-tenth in the middle of the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire’s share fell to 1 per cent at the end of the 18th.* And

1 Paul Masson, Histoire du Commerce français dans le Levant au XVIII• siècle (Paris, 1911), chapter XII; idem Histoire du Commerce français dans le Levant au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1896); see also Robert Paris, Histoire du Commerce de Marseille de 1660 à 1789, vol. V (Paris, 1936). * See Henri Hauser, Recherches et documents sur Fhistoire des prix en France (Paris, 1936). * See Ralph Davies, “ English Imports from the Middle east" in M. A. Cook (cd.). Studies in the Economic History o f the Middle East (London, 1970), p. 203. * Ibid,, p. 202. * See the figures for 1760*1800 in John MacGregor, Commercial Statistics (London. 1847), vol. II, pp. 66-67. * Davies, loc. cit.; see also Masson and MacGregor.

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whereas in the early part of the 18th century the European textile industry had been heavily dependent on Middle Eastern raw cotton, by the end far richer sources were available in America; similarly, whereas the Levant had been an im portant market for British cotton and woolen textiles, in the 19th century far more im portant outlets were opened. World trade (exports plus imports) is estimated to have risen, in current prices, from L320 million in 1800 to L I,450 million in 1860 and L8,360 million in 1913, or about 25 times; in real terms the increase was some­ what greater.* 1*Available figures, though tentative, seem to indicate that, between the 1780’s and 1913, the rate of growth of the Ottoman Empire was somewhat lower and therefore that its share of world trade diminished slightly—to under 1 per cent of the total. But this decrease is probably more than accounted for by territorial losses : if to the 1913 figures be added those of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania the total would more than double, while Egypt alone carried on as much trade as the whole Ottoman Empire.1 It is possible to trace with some precision the growth of British trade with Turkey. The highest point reached before the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars sharply reduced the flow of traffic was in 1792, with imports of L291,000 and exports of L274,000—a total of L565,000 at official values, and somewhat more in real values. Some increase seems to have taken place after 1808, but no breakdowns are available. A t any rate, according to a French statistician, M oreau, who worked on the British customs returns, British imports from Turkey in 1816-22 averaged L307,000 and exports L764,000, a total of LI,071,000.* The war of Greek Independence affected trade, but in 1829 British exports to Turkey were L I,395,000 and imports L431,000, a total of L I,826,000 and 1830 L2,746,000 and L726.000 respectively, or a total of L3,472,000.4 By 1840, exports had risen to L3,674,000 and imports to L I,241,000, or a total of L4,915,000, and in the 1840’s and 1850 the growth was very rapid.* 1 Albert H. Imlah, Economic Elements in the Pax Britannica, (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 189, 94-98. 1 The League o f Nations International Statistical Yearbook, ¡928 gives the following figures for 1913 : Turkey $273 million, Greece $57 million, Serbia $36 million, Bul­ garia $52 million, Rumania $244 million, Egypt $291 million. * MacGregor, op. cit.9 vol. II, pp. 66-73. 4 Frank E. Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 74. 4 The export figures are over twice as high as those given in MacGregor and

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France’s trade suffered greatly during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and recovered rather slowly. In 1829 exports to Turkey and Greece amounted to 5.5 million francs and imports to 15 million, a total of 20.5 million or L800.000.1 By 1840 imports from Turkey and the Turkish archipelago had risen to L I,048,000 and exports to L530,000, a total of L I,578,000.* * Thus the combined totals of Britain and France were L2.6 million in 1829 and L6.5 million in 1840. On the bold assumption that these two countries accounted for a half to two-thirds o f Ottoman trade, the total for the 1830’s may have been around L10 million. In 1860, Farley put the total trade of the Empire at L48 million, but this figure seems too high. For 1876, an estimate by the United States Department of Commerce and Labor of $270 million, or L55 million,' is available, and this too may be exaggerated.1 A t any rate, there is general agreement that on the eve of the First W orld W ar the total trade of the Ottoman Empire was around L60 million, with imports running ahead of exports. It is clear that this sketchy account raises a host of questions. W hat was the value of total trade at different times? W hat was its distribution between the main Ottoman ports? I hope eventually to give some information on this subject, based on the British, French and Austrian consular reports from Istanbul, Izmir, Trabzon and Salónica. W hat groups in Turkey were most active in foreign trade? W hat was the share of the main partners? W hat was the composition o f trade? And, above all, what was the effect of this increase in trade on the Ottoman economy? These and many other problems can provide topics for dozens o f researche for scores of years.

Accounts and Papers, 1837-1938, LXVII; the discrepancy may be due to the fact that the latter cover only exports of British and Irish goods, omitting the large reexport trade in colonial and other goods; no import figures are given in the latter sources. For later figures, see Accounts and Papers, 1859, XXVIII. 1 E. Levasseur, Histoire du commerce de la France (Paris, 1912), vol. Il, p. 131. * Accounts and Papers, 1844, XLVI. • J. L. Farley, The Resources o f Turkey (London, 1862), p. 67; Leland James Gordon, American Relations with Turkey (Philadelphia, 1932), p. 32. However, A. D. Novichev, Ocherkl ekonomiki Turtsll (Moscow, 1937), pp. 172-73, gives the following official figures, which he says cannot be taken as exact : early 1830’s exports £T 10,640,000 and imports £T 11,820,000, 1880’s exports £T 8,497,000 and imports £T 12.837,000 and £T 22,914,000.

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F o reign I nvestment

N ot much can be said on this subject, but many questions can be raised. Until the 1850’s foreign investment in the Ottoman Empire was negligible, but after that it increased rapidly, in the form of both loans to the government and private investment in railways, utilities, mines and other enterprises. By 1914, the Public Debt was around L150 million and another L66 million had been invested in the private sector—this compares with a total long-term foreign investment in the whole world of $44,000 million, or L9.000 million. The Ottoman Public Debt has been adequately studied by such authors as Morawitz, DuVelay, Blaisdell. Roumani, Suvla, Yeniay and others.1 The private sector has received much less attention and deserves further research. W hat was the exact breakdown of investment? W hat were the rates of return in the different branches? How did the various investing countries—Britain, France, Germany, etc.—fare? These are among the many questions in this field still awaiting answers. In conclusion I can only repeat that a huge amount of work remains to be done on the economic history of the Ottoman Empire, a field that has hardly been scratched. This work will have to be based on archival sources, both Ottoman and European. For although the published literature on Turkey is voluminous, the amount of economic information it provides is minimal. 1 For further information and sources see Issawi, Economic History o f the Middle East, pp. 94-106 and Eldem, op. cit.9 Chapter XII.

OTTOMAN AND TURKISH STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES STANFORD J. SHAW University of California, Los Angeles

The tradition of Turkish studies in Europe is very old. One can trace its beginnings to the Byzantine writings and then to a series o f West Europeans as early as the fifteenth and especially the sixteenth centuries. The number of Europeans writing about Turks is so great and their approach so varied as to make even a cursory evaluation of the Turkish studies in Europe a rather difficult task. In contrast the Turkish studies in the United States began to develop fully only after the 1940’s. While the flowering of Ottoman and Turkish studies in the United States since the close of World W ar II has accompanied, and been an integral part of, the development of Middle Eastern studies in general during that time, the fate of the two was quite distinct during the years which preceded the war. While Arabic and Islamic studies were, for over a century, very closely associated with the well-established and well-based disciplines of Semitic philology and Biblical criticism, study of the Ottoman Empire arose as an adjunct of European history, particularly in relation to European diplomacy and Southeastern Europe, with no relationship whatsoever to the language and culture of the Ottomans or, for that matter, to Arabic and Islamic studies. While the study of Islam and of the Arabic language goes back to colonial times, at least in an elementary way, that of Ottoman history developed only in the late nineteenth century as part of the process by which American teachers and scholars began to understand the fact that knowledge of Western Europe and America alone was not sufficient for an understanding even of Western Civilization, let alone the world of which the United States is a part. The first major step in this direction came at Harvard University in the academic year 1894-1895 when a young Assistant Professor, Archibald Cary Coolidge, first taught a course entitled “ History of N orthern and Eastern Europe (Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Turkey) from 1453 to 1795.” Two years later, the Ottoman Empire was given a separate course called “The Eastern Question,” thus beginning a tradition at Harvard which has lasted, with only a few interruptions, to the present time. But the nature of the

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tradition and the course inevitably was determined by popular American opinion regarding the Turks at that time. These were the years when the Ottoman Empire was being accused of the so-called “ Armenian Massacres” and “ Bulgarian Horrors.” Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II (18761909) was being described as the “ Red Sultan.” The Ottoman Empire was believed to be on the brink of final collapse, and the diplomatic and military struggles over division of the spoils, called the “ Eastern Question,” was a major interest of the day. America and Europe still persisted in a steadfast belief in the superiority of Western Culture over anything which the ‘backward’ lands of the East could develop. The missionary spirit of bringing enlightenment to the ‘infidel’ was strong and, as a m atter of fact, led to the strengthening of a number of American educational establishments in the Ottoman Empire, most im portant among which were Robert College in Istanbul, the American University of Beirut and the American University at Cairo. Non-Muslim immigrants to the West were accepted as authorities on all things Ottoman, and their opinions and statements were allowed to prevail without any sort of critical analysis. So it was that Coolidge’s course, and others which followed elsewhere in the United States for the next three decades, tended to develop an image of an Ottoman Empire without Turks, without Muslims, or if there, solely as ignorant and backward oppressors. To Coolidge, the “ Eastern Question” began with Helen of Troy. Emphasis was laid on the supposition that the success of the Ottoman Empire had been due mainly to the influence upon it of Western Civilization, as transmitted through Byzantium, and to the leadership and direction supplied the Ottomans by Christian youths, converted and trained through the Devshirme system. To Coolidge and his students and disciples, Ottoman decline following the sixteenth century had been due to the gradual assumption of control over the Empire by Muslims and Turks in place of the Christians, it had been Muslim mismanagement which had caused the weakness of the Empire, and Muslim 'ignorance and fanatic­ ism’ had led to centuries c f misrule and oppression of the non-Muslim subjects, culminating in the so-called “ massacres” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Islam itself was examined largely from the point of view of attempting to discover how it could keep its believers in such a persistant state of error, combined with ignorance, for such a long period of time. The diplomacy of the Eastern Question was approached from the standpoint o f the European powers involved, with scant notice to the Ottomans, who were believed to be no more

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than an inert mass, subject to the whims and policies of their European neighbors, ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ alike. On the basis o f such a mentality, it was inevitable that the efforts which were made to examine, at least in outline form, Ottoman history and institutions should depend entirely on reports and descriptions o f European ambassadors, consuls, travellers, and the like, whose observ­ ations were assumed to be far more accurate and trustworthy than anything which Ottomans and Muslims could possibly provide, if, indeed, anything of the sort were in existence. A t this time, no one took the trouble to find out. Only the works of Joseph von HammerPurgstall, at least available in German, and of a few other pioneer European Ottomanists, provided American scholars with some idea o f the makeup of the Ottoman Empire, but it is questionable how much influence these works had when they conflicted with preconceived idea and prejudices. While extensive efforts were made to collect printed books and manuscripts o f western reports concerning the Ottomans, particularly under Coolidge’s stimulus at Harvard, and at the New York Public Library, no serious effort was made to gather Ottoman* language materials. Even when some printed Ottoman texts were donated to the Library of Congress and to the New York University by the Ottoman Ambassador of the time, they were tucked away in crates and left unused for almost a century. While the primary research emphasis of this period was on the study of the Eastern Question, where European source materials were of prime value, and where the contribution of Ottoman sources could, in any case, have been only marginal, success in this area led a few scholars to attem pt to study internal Ottoman institutions on the basis of the same sort of information. In this respect, it was felt sufficient to combine what could be learned from the secondary works of von Hammer and Zinkeisen with the observations of the westerners who lived in the Ottoman Empire. The epitome of this sort of research was the Harvard Ph. D. thesis of Albert Howe Lybyer, The Government o f the Ottoman Empire in the Time o f Suleiman the Magnificent (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1913), whose inaccurate concept of the Ottoman “ Ruling Institution’’ run by Christians and “ Muslim Institution’’ run by born Muslims was accepted as gospel for many years, and still has its adherents, although it has long since been seen to be seriously in error, on the basis of even the most cursory examination of the Turkish sources. Coolidge’s own study of Suleyman the Magnificent, published after his death from his notes by Robert

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B. Merriman, Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520-1566 (Cambridge, Mass­ achusetts, Harvard University Press, 1944), falls into the same category. It is difficult to understand how reputable and skilled historians who would reject as absurd the idea that the society and government of France could be studied entirely on the basis of English-language descriptions, or vice versa, were willing to accept studies of Ottoman institutions based on the same sort of flimsy evidence. Perhaps one should not be too hard on Coolidge and Lybyer and others o f their generation. They were pioneers. They were developing an interest in the East despite serious drawbacks in their own training, religious prejudice, and the almost complete absence of accessible Ottoman source materials in this country. While the results o f their research were primitive, and have long since been out-dated, the stimulus which they gave laid the foundation for much o f what has been accom­ plished since their day. At Harvard, for many years the leader in this field, Coolidge’s work was taken up once again starting in 1929 by the distinguished European diplomatic historian William L. Langer. While his interests, like those of Coolidge, were largely diplomatic, he soon understood the incongruity of studying Ottoman society and institutions on the basis of western sources, and with the help of the well-known Harvard Byzantinist, R. P. Blake, began to encourage the development of Arabic and Turkish studies at Harvard as well as elsewhere in the United States. While their efforts were delayed by the outbreak o f World W ar II, they did lay an im portant foundation for what was to follow. Another impetus for the development of Ottoman studies in the inter-war years came from the study of Southeastern Europe, the Balkans, or the N ear East, as the area sometimes was called. American universities following World W ar I, did, in fact, develop interests outside Western Europe, and one of the areas to first benefit from this wider viewpoint was Southeastern Europe, whose history came to be covered by many reputable history departments. Since its history was intimately associated with that of the Ottoman Empire, and since Republican Turkey often was closely connected with the Balkan states, most of these courses included a good deal of information on the Ottomans and the Turks. Inevitably, however, the information imparted was based largely on the same sources which limited the work of Coolidge and Lybyer. But like Langer, the Balkan historians, being professionals, realized this shortcoming, and pushed for the development of Ottoman and Turkish studies which could give them the kind of accurate information

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which they needed to supplement their own work. If Archibald Cary Coolidge therefore supplied the first impetus, it was the Diplomatic Historians and Balkan historians who, in the interwar years, realized that the only way the study of Ottoman history could reach the same high level that their fields had reached was for the Ottoman Turkish language and Ottoman Turkish sources to be made its basis. A complex of factors led to a radical change in the American approach to Turkey and the rest of the Middle East following World W ar II. The involvement of the Middle East (or, in the case of Turkey, its unique lack of involvement) in the war stimulated American interest in its peoples. This interest was further stimulated by Americans who had served in the area during the war and by the development of American oil and other business interests which not only increased the need for knowledge, but also provided the funds which made possible the develop­ ment of scientific study to secure that knowledge following the war. In addition, not to be overlooked, was the impact of Robert College, which was developing from a largely missionary-oriented secondary school, into a center of learning about Turkey, where a number of young American scholars on short-term appointments secured knowledge of the language and interest in the area which they later were to im part on their return to the United States. So it was that following the con­ clusion of peace, Middle Eastern study programs, including Ottoman and Turkish studies, were established, first at Princeton and Columbia universities, and later at Harvard, Michigan, Chicago, and the University of California, in Los Angeles. In the Turkish area, there were very few specialists who could be called upon to inaugurate these programs. These were young American and European scholars who had gained experience by residence in Turkey as missionaries, as teachers, as diplomats, and in other capacities, some who had gained academic training in Ottoman studies from leading European historians, particul­ arly Paul W ittek and Bernard Lewis of the University of London, Franz Babinger of the University of Munich, and Jean Deny of the University of Paris. W alter Livingston W right and his successor, Lewis V. Thomas at Princeton led the way. It was they who insisted that students learn Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish, and who provided the means for this to be accomplished. It has been their students who have spread throughout the country establishing Turkish studies on firm foundations wherever they have gone. Moreover, European and Turkish scholars such as Andreas Tietze (University of California, Los Angeles), Halil inalcik and Fahir lz (University of Chicago), Kemal

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K arpat (University of Wisconsin), and Omeljan Pritsak (Harvard University), have further enriched and deepened the foundations of Turkish studies in the United States. All of this has been given added impetus by the example and the encouragement of many Turkish scholars in the different fields. In consequence, American scholars, and their students, now have taken the lead in exploiting the vast am ount of materials available in Turkey for all the disciplines. Thus we now know that there was no such thing as the Ruling Institution; that while the Devshirme converts made im portant contributions to the rise and expansion of the Ottoman Empire, even more im portant were born Muslims and Turks; that far from oppressing the subject peoples, the Ottomans gave them almost complete autonomy under their own laws and leaders through the millet system; that while Byzantine institutions and western practices found their way into the Ottoman system, even more im portant were the institutions and practices inherited from the old Turkish empires o f Céntral Asia as well as the classical Islamic empires of the Middle East; that Ottoman decline was caused by a complex of internal and external factors, none of which was in any way connected with a mythical triumph of born Muslims over converts. We have learned in detail of the efforts of many nineteenth century Ottoman statesmen to reform and save the Empire. We have begun to find that Abd ul-Hamid II was one of the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, and a leading reformer. We have learned of the intellectual and political movements coalesced into the Young Ottoman and Young Turk societies. We have followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic under the leadership of the remarkable M ustafa Kemal A tatürk. We have learned of the achievements and difficulties of that Republic, as analyzed by political scientists, economists, sociologists and anthro­ pologists—all trained in the emerging centers of Turkish studies in this country. Studies of the Balkan and Arab provinces in Ottoman times have considerably enlightened our knowledge of their areas and have shown very clearly that their history cannot be studied without regular reference to and use o f Ottoman source materials. W ith the flowering of the second generation o f American Ottomanists and Turcologists, means have been provided at a number of universities for young Americans to secure basic training in the Turkish language from the elementary to the most advanced levels. M ajor research collections have been built up, and means provided for the acquisition of new Turkish publications as they became available. A t the same time,

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the strictly Orientalist approach by which Islam was looked upon as a total culture has been supplemented by the new approaches and methods provided by the disciplines of the social sciences : history, political science, sociology, anthropology, and economics in particular. W ith sufficient linguistic and area programs, and with adequate library collections, Turkish study programs can be said to exist a t the following American universities : University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University, Princeton University, Harvard University, the University o f Michigan, the University o f Chicago, and University o f Wisconsin, Madison. Many other universities have elements o f such programs. So it can be said with considerable satisfaction that the situation has improved immeasurably from that which existed in 1939, although the recent decision o f the federal government to abandon the National Defense Education Act, which provided major support for language instruction and for graduate students, threatens to seriously im pair the effective operation of Turkish, as well as other language and area studies, through the United States. There are great problems, however, which must be overcome before Ottoman and Turkish studies can make their full contribution. While freed from a dependence on European studies, Ottoman and Turkish studies now must struggle against the tendency to subordinate them to Arabic studies within the Middle Eastern field. In many of the Middle Eastern programs, primacy is given to Arabic language training, even for students wishing to emphasize Turkish studies and for whom Turkish language training is available. M ost of the Middle Eastern library specialists are trained in Arabic, and very few of them have the linguistic capacity to fully exploit the book-acquisition facilities available in Turkey. Government programs intended to assist Middle Eastern studies as a whole often have been diverted to develop the study only of Arabic. This situation certainly is not the fault of the Arabists, who have had to struggle persistently against the blinders imposed by the Semitic philologists and Biblical scholars in order to develop their field in such a way as will meet the needs of scholarship in the modem world. Rather, it is the fault of those interested in Turkish studies, who them* selves have been lulled into the belief that ‘if only one language is to be studied, that language must be Arabic.* Another danger which has arisen in recent years, in relation not only to Turkish but to the other Middle Eastern languages, is the belief by some in the social sciences that knowledge of their disciplines is im portant above all else, even to the exclusion of language, since interpreters and

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assistants can secure needed native-language data. As a result, a number of intelligent and well-trained young social scientists have emerged with their Ph.D.’s and with a sincere interest in Turkey, but their published works have failed to evidence the kind o f an understanding o f Turkish culture and Turkish ways which only knowledge of the language can bring. In addition, while great attention has been paid to the acquisition of needed Turkish-language source materials of all sorts—books, magazines, newspapers, manuscripts and the like—the individual libraries and programs have gone ahead on their own, without any effort to coordi­ nate, or even learn about, each other’s activities. The result, inevitably has been that while several libraries have the same things, none o f them have certain materials which are equally im portant, and many researchers have gone without needed materials, or have gone all the way to Turkey to get them, simply because of ignorance of their location in this country. In addition, little effort has been made to provide systematic guides to available source materials in Turkey so that researchers who have gone have been compelled to spend a great deal of time simply finding out what is there, and going through the catalogues which could better have been consulted at home if they had been available. Finally, students of Balkan and A rab history have often attempted to study these areas during the Ottoman period entirely on the basis of native sources in the various Balkan languages and in Arabic. The result has been serious falsehood and distortion, for the bulk o f source materials concerning these areas at that time are in the language of the Empire of which they were a part, Ottoman Turkish, and native-language sources often show a remarkable lack of understanding of the institutions which they mention. In view of these problems, what is needed to build the work of the last two decades into something permanent and long lasting? 1. First of all, there should be an insistence that no studies can be made o f internal conditions in any part of the Ottoman empire or modern Turkey without the use of Turkish-language sources on the part o f the researcher himself; that however skilled he may be in his discipline, he cannot fully apply it to the Turkish area without a basic knowledge and understanding of the Turkish language and culture. 2. Arrangements should be made to inventory Turkish-language source materials in this country, and to make them available to researchers. 3. Efforts should'be’made to train'M iddle Eastern library specialists with a command of Turkish (not necessarily to the exclusion of Arabic)

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and for such specialists to be sent on regular buying expeditions to Turkey, perhaps on a cooperative basis among the interested American libraries. 4. Inventories and catalogues of the principal source materials in Turkey should be made available for consultation in the major libraries in this country. 5. Scholarships and fellowships should be made available to enable undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members to spend time in Turkey, not just to do research, but also to deepen their know­ ledge of the country, its language, people, and culture. 6. Arrangements should be made for the regular exchange of inform­ ation about what is being done in the Turkish field in this country, by the publication of a newsletter, and by convoking periodic conferences on Turkish studies, to be held not only in the United States, but also in Turkey during the summer months, in order to provide added encouragement and facilities for regular trips there. 7. Efforts should be made to replace the support provided through the N ational Defense Education Act with new federal funds based on newly formulated programs, and with funds secured from foundations and other private sources. In sum, Turkish and Ottoman studies have advanced impressively in the past quarter century. The stimulus provided long ago by Coolidge and Lybyer has led to the rise of both interest and discipline, and with the use o f the Turkish language as an essential base, there is nothing which should prevent Turkish studies from reaching the same high pinnacle which other fields of European and Asian studies have achieved, if only the bases of this discipline are not forgotten. It remains only for those working in the Turkish field to endeavor to convince their colleagues by deed as well as word that studies related to Turkey and the Turks are an integral part of the basic knowledge which all disciplines must strive to develop, and not merely a short-range interest stimulated by the contemporary international scene. COMMENT RICHARD L. CHAMBERS University of Chicago

Professor Shaw refers to “The Flowering'* o f Turkish and Ottoman Studies in the 1945-1970 period. This is in some respects, at least, an

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overstatement. While a great deal of development and improvement has indeed occurred, today we still are facing problems, some of which are ones left unresolved, or only partially solved in this post-W orld W ar II era, and some which are actually the product of that period. Since Mr. Shaw devoted the last pages of his paper to some of these current problems and future needs, and since I find myself in basic sympathy with them, I shall restrict myself to raising a few supplement­ ary points with which, I suggest, we might legitimately concern ourselves. I. New professional organizations, institutions, workshops, conferen­ ces, and journals have been a product of this past decade. The Middle East Studies Association has given a considerable boost to Middle East studies in general and Turkish and Ottoman studies in particular. In the programs of its annual meetings, in its bulletin and journal, our field has been represented to a degree beyond our actual numbers within the MESA membership. Perhaps you have heard, as I have, occasional critical—even envious—comments from some of our Arabic and Persian colleagues. And now we have created the Turkish Studies Association. You will perhaps allow me for a moment to wear my hat as an officer of the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), and call attention to the role it has played and continues to play in supporting, through its fellowship programs, research in Turkey—here I refer to Mr. Shaw’s fifth point. I recall with satisfaction the Turkish W orkshop of 1966. Although the hope was unanimously expressed by the participants, that this would become a regular, annual event, unfortunately, there has been no repeat to date. In regard to MESA, I alluded to the International Journal o f M.ddle Eastern Studies (which Mr. Shaw, perhaps out of modesty, as its editor, does not mention in his paper) in which articles on Turkish and Ottoman studies have been prominent. Now we are looking forward to the first volume of another professional journal, even more specifically designed to serve the interests and needs of our field—that is, Archivum Ottomanicum. II. A second point, which I shall only touch upon in a few words, is the significant effect upon our graduate programs of study of students with Peace Corps experience in Turkey. The language competence (varying considerably, it is true) and the first-hand acquaintance with Turkey which these young people brought to their graduate studies has,

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in my personal experience, raised the genera] level of performance, not only of these students but of their fellow students. It is to be feared that the drying up o f this source of unusually motivated and informed graduate students can not easily be compensated for. III. Let me propose as a third point for our consideration, the various beginnings which have been made in the regional pooling of resources. Inter-university summer language programs in the East and West coast centers, traveling scholar programs for graduate students such as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) of the Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago, and others are examples o f what I mean. But beyond this, I often think of what we in Chicago, for example, might do if we could simply mobilize in some more comprehensive and coherent way the human and material resources in the field of Turkish and O tto­ man studies presently existing at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and Northwestern University. It occurs to me that the financial problems facing today’s universities suggest the need for a greater degree o f inter-university cooperation and regional pooling o f resources. TV. Finally, and I have purposely saved this for my final comments, there is to me one problem to which we must address ourselves—that is, the job crisis—the problems and prospects of employment for our students. We considered this subject at the 1966 W orkshop, although at that time the situation was not so critical as now. May I suggest a few questions which must be raised in this regard : Are our graduate program!» too specialized? O r the converse, are they too general and lacking in disciplinary focus? Is there a place for M.A. programs in Turkish and Ottoman Studies, and, if so, how should these be oriented and how should they be related to our Ph.D. programs? Are we sometimes guilty of intellectual snobbery by viewing our teaching function as aimed at producing only Ph.D .’s who would follow our own path into the academic profession? Do we look down our collective nose at students who propose to enter government service, international agencies, business, or the communications media? A t my own university—and I am assured by a number of you that it is the same at your institution—there is in this time of penny-pinching and tightening of the belt a tendency to count noses, and if students noses appear in a disproportionately small ratio to faculty noses, questions begin to be raised and the danger of some radical plastic surgery is all

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too real. W hat I want to say is : we would be well advised to think seriously about attracting more students to our field while at the same time keeping in mind the limited capacity of our universities to absorb new Ph.D .’s in our field. This is a plea for thoughtful planning in the structuring of graduate studies and the recognition that we must not and cannot afford to limit ourselves to perpetuating an Ottoman-Turkish academic “elite.”