The Ottoman Mediterranean

Having considered the response of scholars of the Muslim world, let us look at the related, but distinct field of Ottoman history.^[453] Ottomanists have grappled with the question of the Mediterranean mostly from the perspectives of Ottoman mercantile activity and state policy towards naval matters, with the understanding, of course, that both easily shade into questions of cultural difference.

It is clear, then, that Ottoman historians and historians of the medieval Muslim world have had to grapple with similar culturally inflected nar­ratives about Muslims and the sea.

The Ottomans, on the other hand, united the northern and south­ern shores of the eastern Mediterranean for the first time in almost a millennium when they conquered Egypt in 1517. The Mediterranean was at the very centre of their empire and, as the strongest Muslim power in the early modern world, they effectively pulled the weight of the Muslim world further west than it had been since the Umayyads in the seventh century. Reflecting this reality, Ottoman historians have quite energetically contested the assertion that Europeans took hold of the Mediterranean as early as the Crusades and never let go. The eastern Mediterranean was not, in fact, a European lake during the Ottoman period. The Europeans were present, of course (particularly the French), but the vital routes linking Alexandria to Istanbul and Volos to Thessaloniki and the islands to Izmir and so on, were crowded with a wide variety of Ottoman vessels.^[457]

More recently, Ottoman historians have moved from an investiga­tion of merchants to rethinking the relationship between the state and the Mediterranean. This rethinking has focused on the period after the Ottoman defeat at Lepanto because it is then, the argument goes, that the Ottomans turned their back on the sea. Wisely putting to one side the narrow equation of maritime history with naval history, such work has demonstrated an active engagement with the sea, not in the sense of naval affairs, but in terms of effective legal and diplomatic responses to the turbulent conditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when piracy and then the Seven Years’ War created havoc in the sultan’s waters.^[458]

To the vexed question of how, if at all, to define the Ottoman Mediterranean, Joshua White has given a very clear answer: the Ottoman Mediterranean was defined not by the action of its navies or the faith of its inhabitants but by the fact that it was a unified legal space.

As early as 1611 Venetian authorities began soliciting fetvas from the mufti to strengthen their case against the North Africans who were wreaking havoc on their shipping. In 1624 a particularly brazen series of attacks carried out by the North Africans, with the cooperation of local officials, in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas - among other things over 700 Venetian subjects were carried off into slavery - produced outrage in both Istanbul and Venice.^[460] In the meetings that followed and the delega­tions that moved across the Mediterranean - first the Ottomans to Tunis and then the Tunisians to Istanbul - the mufti’s intercession was sought by all sides. By their actions, White argues, it seems that the officials in Istanbul (and the Venetians) knew that it was not enough to say that the Tunisians’ actions contravened the treaties (ahdnames) negotiated between Venice and the sultan’s representatives, based as they were on secular law. Inevitably, the religious question came up. Were the North Africans pirates or were they gazis, fighting the Islamic Holy War?

It took the mufti to tell the Tunisians, in the fetvas that he wrote, that their activities were not a halal gaza, a religiously permissible raid, and that they were contravening not just the sultan’s law, but God’s law as well.^[461] Although the resolution of this particular case is not apparent, unfortunately, in the historical record, the fact that both the Tunisians and the Venetians approached the mufti directly to write a fetva that would be favourable to their side, as well as the fact that the Venetians kept copies of the fetvas that were issued over the course of the seventeenth century, shows that the §eyhulislam was considered an important person in resolving these types of problems.

The Ottomans have not typically figured at all in the story of the Seven Years’ War (1754-63). To the extent that there has been an Ottoman perspective on the war at all, it has come from Greek historians who have underlined the boost given to Greek shipping during the war due to the neutrality of Greek ships.^[463] Now it is clear that the Ottomans moved decisively to limit the damage to themselves and their merchants from British/French hostility in their waters.^[464] Through a series of decrees the sultan extended his sovereignty out to sea, going beyond the consensus held in both Europe and the empire at the time that a state’s sovereignty only extended as far as the reach of a cannon ball shot from port. Their reason for so doing was to establish an expansive zone in the Aegean where the British and the French were not allowed to attack each other’s shipping. Besides the general disruption, the Ottomans were particularly concerned since much of Ottoman internal seaborne trade was carried on French ships.

Because of the existing configuration prior to the war, the new policy tended to be punitive towards the British and protective of the French. This was because the French had a more established presence in the eastern Mediterranean than did the British. The new Ottoman policy meant that Ottoman petitioners, both Christian and Muslim, who had suffered attacks while onboard French ships, were able to get restitution in Istanbul. British diplomats in the capital complained long and loudly about the rules but they complied; during this period, Ottoman mer­chants were paid tens of thousands of gurush (an Ottoman silver coin) in compensation by the British authorities.

These interventions on the part of Ottoman historians are impor­tant, not just for the relationship between the Ottomans and the Mediterranean, but also for the narrative of Mediterranean history itself. In his recent article ‘The medieval Mediterranean’ (2014), Dominique Valerian argues that, in a divided sea, it was in the medieval period that rules were developed for regulating relationships across the religious frontier: ‘From this plurality of normative systems arose the difficult problem of regulating relationships in the Mediterranean (both in times of peace and times of war); the Middle Ages is the period when these rules were invented and progressively accepted and shared, most persist­ing into modern times.’^[465] This interpretation places the Ottoman Empire in a passive role; it simply inherited an international framework that was already in place. New research demonstrates instead that the Ottomans must be given a far more active role in the development of international law in the Mediterranean.^[466]