Changes in the Power Hierarchy: The Koprulu Renaissance and the War of 1683-1699
After a series of incompetent, mentally unstable, or minor sultans had occupied the Ottoman throne in the first half of the seventeenth century, the center of actual political power moved definitely from the sultan's palace to the seat of the grand vizier, even though the latter was still appointed and deposed (and sometimes executed) at the sultan's will, at least in theory.
The Ottoman ruling class members, divided into powerful households, sharply competed for political power but at the same time were able to display group solidarity.[1850] As the fratricide practice had been discontinued since the early seventeenth century, the reigning sultan was acutely aware that his brothers or cousins, held in custody in a separate section of the Topkapi Palace, eagerly waited for their chance to replace him, so it was up to a coalition of the Ottoman viziers, Istanbul ulema, janissary commanders, and—last but not least—the harem women and eunuchs, to decide who from among the dynasty members would be raised to the throne or—if necessary—deposed.[1851]As by the seventeenth century the timar cavalry had become an obsolete formation, not much useful in modern siege warfare, Ottoman administrators and provincial governors preferred to incorporate timar lands into the royal domain (hass) controlled directly by the state, and use the collected incomes for hiring salaried infantry formations known as sekbans and “local janissaries.”[1852] Domestic credit, indispensable for financing almost constant warfare, was made accessible through the system of auctioning state incomes (mukataa), since the highest bidder was required to pay in advance the lump sum equivalent of future profits that he expected to collect in the years to come. Initially state incomes were auctioned for three-year periods, but during the long war against the Holy League (1683-1699) the Ottoman treasury was constrained to introduce tax-farms for life (malikane) and thus paved the road to the formation of a new class of provincial notables (ayans) and the decentralization of the empire in the eighteenth century.[1853]
The second half of the seventeenth century is sometimes labeled as “the Koprülü Renaissance” due to the new aggressive policy of the viziers from this Albanian family, invigorated by the spirit of Islamic orthodoxy associated with the so-called Kadizadeli movement.[1854] In 1683, the former Koprülü client, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, besieged Vienna in the hope of outdoing Sultan Süleyman, who had failed to conquer the Habsburg capital in 1529.
Yet, instead of the expected triumph, the move alarmed Christian Europe and prompted the otherwise unlikely coalition of the Habsburgs, Poland-Lithuania, Venice, and Russia. Until the peace in 1699 the Ottomans were forced to fight on four fronts and were in fact lucky to get out only suffering the loss of relatively few territories, the most important being Hungary with Transylvania. The evil had been done, however, as the Europeans at last got rid of their inferiority complex and learned that it was possible to “beat the Turk.” Still worse, the sultan's inability to protect his subjects against enemy raids into the Balkan provinces compromised his legitimacy and encouraged resistance. In the years 1686-1689, a series of uprisings broke out in Bulgaria and Macedonia, and in 1690, the Serbian patriarch of Pec moved his see to Sremski Karlovci and accepted Habsburg protection.