Decline
But it needed more than faith alone to maintain the empire. Only leaders of exceptional vision, ability and integrity could defend such vast territories against threats from within and without.
After the glorious reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-66), a succession of incompetent sultans could no longer sustain Turkish supremacy in the face of a resurgent Europe benefiting from the discovery of the New World, new trade routes and trade patterns, and the development of new industrial and agricultural techniques. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it was clear that the West had outpaced the Turks. In fact, most of the Ottoman religious establishment had for a long time fiercely resisted ‘infidel learning’, as they termed scientific and technical discoveries made in Europe. As early as 1580 the Janissaries, incited by the ulema, had destroyed the observatory in the capital. And because of pressure from religious reactionaries no printing-press was allowed to produce works in Turkish until 1727—nearly three centuries after Gutenberg had invented movable type! The hostility of the ulema towards the rational sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a concentration on law studies which stunted intellectual development and caused a stagnation in Ottoman learning whose woeful consequences are well illustrated in the report by Captain Beaufort, the English hydrographer who conducted a survey in Turkish waters in 1811-12:There is no subject on which the Turks are in general more ignorant than geography. The Mediterranean bounds their ideas of the ocean; and a Pasha of high rank maintained to me with earnestness, that England was an island in the Black Sea, with which there was another channel of communication besides the Dardanelles. They have indeed copies of English and French charts, printed at Constantinople, with the names in Turkish; but their naval officers disdain to understand them, and confide entirely in their Greek pilots.
A sad decline indeed from the days ofPiri Reis (1465-1554), the distinguished Turkish admiral and cartographer whose world map included America!
Short-comings in learning were paralleled by weaknesses in the administration. When the dev$irme system of recruitment fell into disuse and sons of officials and Janissaries were admitted to government service, nepotism as well as corruption seriously blemished Ottoman rule. The previously peerless Janissaries deteriorated into a rebellious rabble more dangerous to the state than to its external enemies. Moreover, the Turkish armed forces generally became increasingly outclassed.
Degeneration went beyond the official institutions; it affected the tarikats too. At some earlier stages of Turkish history these Sufi orders had played a major part in converting inhabitants of occupied territories to Islam. Offering enthusiastic Muslims a popular and colourful alternative to the teaching and example ofthew/emd and sometimes contributing to the education of the common people, they also played a significant social role by providing opportunities for people of different classes and backgrounds to come together in the tekkes where tarikat meetings were held. But the ulema usually resented these rivals for the allegiance of the Muslim community and frequently intrigued against them, thus adding to the instability of the state. In the mid-seventeenth century the Grand Vizier temporarily suppressed several tarikats by force. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II tried to wipe out the Bektashis when he annihilated the Janissaries with whom they had a centuries-long close association. At various times standards in many of the tarikats deteriorated markedly as their leaders began shamefully to exploit the blind obedience of their devotees.
But moral decay was not confined to Muslims in the empire; the Christian millets too became a reproach to religion, riddled with corruption and intrigue. Even after Mahmud II hanged the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Gregorius in 1821, the Christian minorities continued to mix religion with politics, and foreign powers used them as an excuse to interfere in Ottoman internal affairs and to encourage separatist demands. The Jewish millet, however, was less involved in politics, its members preferring to concern themselves with occupations for which few Muslims showed much inclination such as trade and interpreting.