The Apex of Ottoman Territorial Expansion and the Issue of “Imperial Overextension”

With the acquisition of most of Hungary (1521-1552) and most of the Maghreb with Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (1516-1574), the era of spectacular Ottoman conquests came to the end.

The halt of Ottoman territorial expansion, visible from the end of the sixteenth century, caused contemporaries as well as later historians to look for signs of crisis. Typically, many Ottoman as well as Western authors pointed to “moral decay,” blaming the degeneration of dynasty, harem intrigues, the loss of martial spirit, and corruption—the most handy topoi available in the repository of negative charac­teristics. Today we know that it was rather “imperial overextension”—to use the term coined by Paul Kennedy—that prevented the Ottomans from further growth.

Moreover, unlike in the case of Russia, whose eastward territorial expansion remained largely unchecked^[1846] until the Russians encountered Chinese troops on the Amur River, the Ottoman expansion clashed with the Habsburg and Safavid empires. Both of these states were initially weaker than the Ottoman Empire, but the Ottoman danger facilitated their consolidation, accompanied with neces­sary fiscal and military reforms.^[1847] The Habsburg emperors and the Safavid shahs also soon initiated direct contacts, notwithstanding their religious differences. Even though large distance and political calculations prevented a formation of a

Habsburg-Safavid alliance, the very possibility of a war on two fronts constituted a constant nightmare for Ottoman statesmen.^[1848]

The cost of raising large armies, equipped with firearms, constituted a heavy burden to any state in early modern Eurasia, and the Ottomans were no exception. The shortage of bullion necessary to pay the troops was only partly alleviated by foreign export, paid in return with American silver in the form of mainly Spanish and Dutch silver coins. The budgetary crisis was further aggravated by the climatic change associated with the “Little Ice Age,” in whose wake large traits of agricul­tural land in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Middle East were left waste, while their inhabitants turned to banditry in order to survive or migrated to cities.^[1849]

Against these circumstances, one can conclude that the Ottomans fared relatively well through the seventeenth century, escaping large-scale civil wars that devastated Russia, India, China, Germany, and England, to give a few examples. They even consolidated their position in the eastern Mediterranean with the conquest of Crete (1645-1669), and secured their hold over Central Europe by creating a series of new strongholds along the borders with the Habsburg Empire and Poland.