Transformation of the Ottoman Empire

350px, The Ottoman Empire in 1590, at the peak of its territorial expansion

The Transformation of the Ottoman Empire, also known as the Era of Transformation, constitutes a period in the history of the Ottoman Empire from to , spanning roughly from the end of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent to the Treaty of Karlowitz at the conclusion of the War of the Holy League. This period was characterized by numerous dramatic political, social, and economic changes, which resulted in the empire shifting from an expansionist, patrimonial state into a bureaucratic empire based on an ideology of upholding justice and acting as the protector of Sunni Islam. These changes were in large part prompted by a series of political and economic crises in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, resulting from inflation, warfare, and political factionalism. Yet despite these crises the empire remained strong both politically and economically, and continued to adapt to the challenges of a changing world. The 17th century was once characterized as a period of decline for the Ottomans, but since the 1980s historians of the Ottoman Empire have increasingly rejected that characterization, identifying it instead as a period of crisis, adaptation, and transformation.
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In the second half of the 16th century, the empire came under increasing economic pressure due to rising inflation, which was then impacting both Europe and the Middle East. Demographic pressure in Anatolia contributed to the formation of bandit gangs, which by the 1590s coalesced under local warlords to launch a series of conflicts known as the Celali rebellions. Ottoman fiscal insolvency and local rebellion together with the need to compete militarily against their imperial rivals the Habsburgs and Safavids created a severe crisis. The Ottomans thus transformed many of the institutions which had previously defined the empire, gradually disestablishing the Timar System in order to raise modern armies of musketeers, and quadrupling the size of the bureaucracy in order to facilitate more efficient collection of revenues. In Istanbul, changes in the nature of dynastic politics led to the abandonment of the Ottoman tradition of royal fratricide, and to a governmental system that relied much less upon the personal authority of the sultan. Other figures came to play larger roles in government, particularly the women of the imperial harem, for which much of this period is often referred to as the Sultanate of Women.

The changing nature of sultanic authority led to several political upheavals during the 17th century, as rulers and political factions struggled for control over the imperial government. In 1622 Sultan Osman II was overthrown in a Janissary uprising. His subsequent regicide was sanctioned by the empire's chief judicial official, demonstrating a reduced importance of the sultan in Ottoman politics. Nevertheless, the primacy of the Ottoman dynasty as a whole was never brought into question. Of seventeenth-century sultans, Mehmed IV was the longest reigning, occupying the throne for 39 years from 1648 to 1687. The empire experienced a long period of stability under his reign, spearheaded by the reform-minded Köprülü family of grand viziers. This coincided with a period of renewed conquest in Europe, conquests which culminated in the disastrous Siege of Vienna in 1683 and the fall from grace of the Köprülü family. Following the battle a coalition of Christian powers was assembled to combat the Ottomans, bringing about the fall of Ottoman Hungary and its annexation by the Habsburgs during the War of the Holy League (1683–99). The war provoked another political crisis and prompted the Ottomans to carry out additional administrative reforms. These reforms ended the problem of financial insolvency and made the transformation from a patrimonial to a bureaucratic state a permanent one.

Territory

In comparison with earlier periods of Ottoman history, the empire's territory remained relatively stable, stretching from Algeria in the west to Iraq in the east, and from Arabia in the south to Hungary in the north. The pace of expansion slowed during the second half of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), as the Ottomans sought to consolidate the vast conquests carried out between 1514 and 1541, but did not come to an end. After making peace with Austria in 1568, the Ottomans launched the 1570–73 Ottoman-Venetian War, conquering Cyprus and most of Dalmatia. A naval campaign led to the capture of Tunis from the Spanish in 1574, and a truce was signed in 1580.

Subsequently, the Ottomans resumed warfare with the Safavids in the Ottoman–Safavid War of 1578–90, conquering Georgia, Azerbaijan, and western Iran. The war resulting in the Ottomans reached its greatest territorial expansion under Murad III. In 1593 a frontier incident led to the renewal of warfare with Habsburg Austria in the Long War (1593–1606), in which neither side was able to achieve decisive victory. The Ottomans briefly held Győr (Yanık, 1594–8), but lost control of Novigrad (1594), exposing Buda to attacks from the north. By the end of the war the Ottomans had conquered the strategic fortresses of Eger (Eğri, 1596) and Nagykanizsa (Kanije, 1600). The Safavids took advantage of Ottoman distraction in the west to reverse all of their recent gains in the east in the Ottoman–Safavid War of 1603–18. After the turmoil of Osman II's regicide, the Safavids also seized Baghdad and much of Iraq in 1623, holding it until 1638, after which the border of the 1555 Treaty of Amasya was re-established. While they were occupied with the Safavid wars, an ongoing revolt of the local Zaydi Shi'ites of Yemen finally forced the Ottomans to abandon that province in 1636. The province of Lahsa in eastern Arabia also suffered from perpetual rebellion and tribal resistance to Ottoman rule, and was abandoned in 1670.

From 1645 onward the Ottomans were preoccupied with the difficult conquest of Crete from the Republic of Venice. The island was quickly overrun, but Venetian naval superiority enabled the fortress of Candia (modern Heraklion) to resist for decades. Sustained expansion in Europe was resumed in the second half of the seventeenth century, under the aegis of the famous Köprülü grand viziers. The rebellious vassal principality of Transylvania was subdued with the conquests of Ineu (Yanova, 1658) and Oradea (Varad, 1660). War with the Habsburgs in 1663-4 led to the recovery of Novigrad and the conquest of Nové Zámky (Uyvar, 1663). The conquest of Crete was finally completed in 1669 with the fall of Candia. In that same year, the Ottomans accepted the offer of the Cossack state of Right-Bank Ukraine to become an Ottoman vassal in exchange for protection from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia. This led to war in 1672–76, as the Ottomans conquered Podolia (Kamaniçe) from the Commonwealth, and to war with Russia in 1676–81, in which Russian garrisons were evicted from Cossack lands. Ottoman rule in Europe reached its greatest extent in 1682, when anti-Habsburg Hungarian rebel leader Imre Thököly pledged allegiance to the Ottoman Empire, accepting the title "King of Middle Hungary" ( ota, Orta Macar, script=Latn). Just as the vassalization of Right-Bank Ukraine had led to the Kamaniçe campaign, so too did the vassalization of Imre Thököly lead directly to the 1683 Vienna Campaign.

After the unsuccessful siege of Vienna in 1683, the coalition forces of the Holy League began to push the Ottomans out of Hungary, with most of the country having fallen by 1688. In the Treaty of Karlowitz the Ottomans accepted this loss as well as the return of Podolia to the Commonwealth. While Crete remained in Ottoman hands, Morea was ceded to Venice along with most of Dalmatia. This was the first major instance of Ottoman territorial retreat in Europe, and it prompted the adoption of a defensive military policy along the Danube River during the eighteenth century.

Subject states

In addition to territory under direct imperial administration, the Ottoman Empire also possessed varying degrees of sovereignty over its many vassal states. Each vassal state's relationship with the empire was unique, but typically involved the payment of tribute, military contribution, or both. Such vassals included the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, the Crimean Khanate, the Principality of Transylvania, the Republic of Ragusa, various Georgian and Caucasian principalities, and, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the Cossack state of Right-Bank Ukraine and the territory ruled by Imre Thököly, known as Middle Hungary. The Sharifs of Mecca in western Arabia were also subject to the Ottomans, but neither paid tribute nor offered military forces. At times, the empire also received tribute from Venice, Habsburg Austria, Poland–Lithuania, and Russia, which made them vassals of the Ottoman Empire in theory, if not in practice. The empire's territory also included many smaller and often geographically isolated regions where the state's authority was weak, and local groups could exercise significant degrees of autonomy or even de facto independence. Examples include the highlands of Yemen, the area of Mount Lebanon, mountainous regions of the Balkans such as Montenegro, and much of Kurdistan, where pre-Ottoman dynasties continued to rule under Ottoman authority.

Demography

Due to scarcity of records and the tendency to record the number of households rather than individuals in taxation surveys, it is very difficult to determine with accuracy the population level in the Ottoman Empire. Thus rather than definite numbers, historians are more apt to demonstrate trends in population increase and decrease from region to region. It is known that the Balkans and Anatolia, like Europe, experienced a rapid increase in population over the course of the sixteenth century, increasing by roughly 60% in the period 1520–80. This growth led to population pressure in Anatolia, as the land could no longer adequately support the peasant population. Many landless peasants took up banditry as a way to make a living, or were recruited into the armies of roving Celali rebels. Controlling the bandits' activities became a major policy issue for the Ottomans, as bandit raids only worsened the agricultural situation in Anatolia. One method of control involved their recruitment into the Ottoman army as musketeers, known as sekban and sarıca. Other methods were tried as well, such as the dispatch of an inspection team in 1659, which confiscated 80,000 illegally held firearms. Following the dramatic demographic growth of the sixteenth century, the seventeenth century population was mostly stable and in some regions even declined, again relatively consistent with general European trends.

The empire's premier city was '' Kostantiniyye'' (modern day Istanbul), with a population of upwards of 250 thousand in the middle of the sixteenth century. Other estimates place it even higher, between 500 thousand and one million inhabitants. Second in size was Cairo, with approximately 400 thousand inhabitants in the year 1660. Most other major urban centers did not even approach this size. Izmir grew from a small town into a major center of international trade, with 90 thousand inhabitants in the mid-seventeenth century, while the Syrian city of Aleppo also grew from approximately 46 thousand in 1580 to 115 thousand a century later. Bursa, the main city of northwestern Anatolia and a major center for the production of silk textiles, had a population which ranged between 20 and 40 thousand over the course of the seventeenth century. Urban expansion was not universal. In the early seventeenth century, many of the cities and towns of inner Anatolia and the Black Sea coast suffered from the raiding and banditry of the Celali rebellions and Cossack raids, such as Ankara, Tokat, and Sinop.

In Ottoman Europe this period witnessed a major shift in religious demographics. Many of the cities and towns of the Balkans and Hungary became majority Muslim, including Buda, the former capital of the Kingdom of Hungary. In the Balkan countryside the rate of conversion to Islam gradually increased until reaching a peak in the late seventeenth century, particularly affecting regions such as Albania and eastern Bulgaria.

Economy

Perhaps the most significant economic transformation of this period was the monetization of the economy and subsequent transformation of the feudal Timar System. Over the course of the sixteenth century, coinage came to play a much larger role in the Ottoman rural economy, with tax payments in cash coming to replace payments in kind. As the Ottoman population expanded, the volume of trade grew and new regional markets appeared across the empire. The Timar System, which had been designed to take advantage of the smaller scale of the economy in previous centuries, was thus rendered obsolete. Timar fiefs, which were once used to support provincial cavalry forces, were increasingly confiscated by the central government to serve other purposes, a process which has been described as "modernization."

Budget

At the end of each year the Ottoman government produced a comprehensive balance-sheet depicting its revenues and expenses, giving historians a window through which to view their finances. Ottoman government income grew from 183 million akçe in 1560 to 581 million in 1660, an increase of 217%. However, this growth did not keep pace with inflation, and consequently the Ottomans experienced budgetary deficits throughout most of the seventeenth century, by an average of 14% but with much wider margins during wartime. The province of Egypt played a major role in making up the difference. Each year, after covering local expenses, that province submitted its surplus revenue directly to Istanbul. Egypt was particularly rich, and it provided approximately 72 million akçe annually, allowing the central government to meet its financial obligations. By the end of the seventeenth century, and largely a result of reforms carried out during the War of the Holy League, the central government's income had grown to 1 billion akçe, and continued to grow at an even more dramatic pace during the following period, now far outstripping inflation.

Coinage

Monetization of the economy coincided with the Price Revolution, a period of inflation affecting both Europe and the Middle East during the sixteenth century. As a result, the value of the main Ottoman silver coin (akçe) became unstable, particularly after a severe debasement in 1585. The currency's instability lasted until the middle of the seventeenth century and led some regions of the empire to import counterfeit European coins for everyday use. This situation was brought under control in the 1690s when the empire carried out far-reaching monetary reforms and issued a new silver and copper currency.

Trade

Cairo, as a major entrepôt for the Red Sea trade, benefited from the emergence of Yemeni coffee as a major trading good. By the end of the sixteenth century coffeehouses had emerged in cities and towns across the empire, and the drink became a major item of public consumption. By the end of the seventeenth century approximately 4–5,000 tons of coffee was being imported into Cairo annually, much of it exported to the rest of the empire.

Trade along the maritime routes of the Black Sea was severely disrupted from the late sixteenth century by the extensive raiding activity of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who attacked towns along the Anatolian and Bulgarian coasts, and even established bases in the mouth of the Danube in order to plunder its shipping. Likewise, merchant vessels at sea frequently became targets for the Cossacks. After the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky Rebellion in 1648 Cossack activity reduced in intensity, but remained an issue of critical importance for the Ottoman government.

European merchants

European merchants active in the Ottoman Empire are by far the most highly studied aspect of Ottoman commerce, a fact which has frequently caused their importance to be exaggerated. European merchants were by no means dominant in the empire during this period, and far from imposing their will upon the Ottomans, they were required to accommodate themselves to the terms which the Ottomans set for them. These terms were defined in a series of trade agreements known as the "capitulations" ( ota, ʿahdnāme, script=Latn), which granted Europeans the right to establish mercantile communities in specified Ottoman ports and to pay a lower rate of tariff on their goods. European communities were exempt from regular taxation and were given judicial autonomy with regard to personal and family issues. All commercial disputes were to be settled in the empire's Sharia courts, until the 1670s when they were granted the right to appeal major cases directly to Istanbul, where they could be argued by their resident ambassadors. Capitulations were granted first to the French (1569), then the English (1580), and finally to the Dutch (1612). The arrival of Western European traders in the Levant, dubbed the "Northern Invasion", did not result in their takeover or domination of Mediterranean commerce, but it did usher in certain changes. Venice in particular suffered from heavy competition, and its commercial presence declined significantly, particularly after 1645, when the Ottomans and Venetians went to war over Crete. The English were by far the most successful European merchants in the empire during the seventeenth century, and they benefited from friendly relations between the two states. The Ottomans exported raw silk and imported cheap woolen cloth, as well as tin necessary for the production of military armaments.

Government

While in 1550 the Ottoman Empire was a patrimonial state in which all power was held exclusively by the sultan, by 1700 it had experienced a political transformation whereby the sultan's monopoly on power was replaced with a multi-polar system in which political power was informally shared among many different individuals and factions. This process came about gradually, and was not unopposed. Certain rulers, such as Osman II and Murad IV, sought to reverse this trend and reestablish absolute power for themselves. For his efforts, Osman II became the victim of regicide in 1622, the significance of which one historian has compared to the 1649 regicide of Charles I of England.

Significant in this process of transformation were several changes in the nature of succession to the throne. At the outset of this period, Ottoman princes took up posts in the Anatolian provincial government upon reaching the age of maturity. However, Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) died before any of his sons came of age. Ahmed I was thus enthroned as a minor, and subsequently princes were no longer sent to the provinces to govern. While the motivation behind this change cannot be known for certain, it may have been a method of preventing the type of fratricidal civil war experienced in the last years of the reign of Suleiman I. Just as princely government was abandoned, so too did the practice of royal fratricide, which had been enforced since the time of Mehmed II, fall out of use. This seems to have been a reaction to the unusually gruesome fratricides occasioned by the enthronements of Murad III and Mehmed III, in which dozens of infants and young boys were killed. The result was that the whole imperial family collectively remained in Istanbul, and sultans allowed their brothers to live in the harem undisturbed. The ultimate consequence of this was a change in the order of succession; upon his death in 1617 Ahmed I was succeeded not by one of his sons, but by his brother Mustafa I. Henceforth the general principle of Ottoman succession would be that of seniority rather than patrilineality. However, in practice this meant that sovereignty came to be viewed as something vested in the Ottoman dynasty as a whole rather than in a particular member, making the individual sultan replaceable.

The existence of multiple adult males of the Ottoman dynasty facilitated the emergence of other centers of power within the government. Two figures of particular importance were the Şeyhülislâm, or chief of the Islamic religious hierarchy, and the Valide Sultan

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