The Value of History Today: The Ottoman Empire and Divisons in the Middle East
When students think of the Ottoman Empire, the image that often comes to mind is the sick man of Europe; a crumbling empire that finally collapsed over the course of the First World War. Yet, the early modern Ottoman empire was one of the most powerful, wealthy and well-run states of its era. How did the Ottomans successfully govern an empire that stretched from Greece and Bulgaria across to Egypt, Syria and Iraq for so long? Was the empire a prisoner to its geography? How relevant is the empire’s early modern history now?
The Ottomans were ruthlessly pragmatic in their administration of the empire. It was their determination to seize territories and maintain control there that drove policy decisions. Consequently, the machinery of government displayed flexibility and creativity in the way they ruled their subjects. By 1520, the empire was comprised of a majority Muslim population. However, areas with high densities of Jews and Christians remained, for instance in Hungary. Unlike most early modern Christian states, the Ottomans did not mercilessly persecute those who refused to conform to the state religion; instead, they displayed a considerable degree of tolerance.
The Qur’an contained instructions on how to govern ‘People of the Book’ (Jews and Christians) without forcibly converting them: they could be protected, practice their own religion, preserve their own places of worship and, to a large extent, run their own affairs, provided they recognised the superiority of Islam. This was by no means some sort of multicultural society: People of the Book were forbidden from horse-riding, building houses taller than Muslim ones or building new places of worship, and had a tax levied on them called cizya. Nonetheless, it was the very fact that the Ottomans were — in theoretical and practical terms — able to tolerate non-Muslims which allowed them to govern over such a diverse spread of lands so successfully.
Indeed, successive sultans went to considerable lengths to legitimise themselves in the minds of all their subjects. In Slavic areas, which were conventionally ruled by tsars, the sultan was referred to as the Tsar in proclamations and state documents, whereas to Iranians he was their Shah, a title to which the people were accustomed. Thus, the Ottomans tolerated non-Muslims and went to some lengths to ingratiate themselves with their various subject populations.
The Ottomans developed the policy of devsirme — the selection of young non-Muslim children, who were converted to Islam and trained as soldiers, diplomats and imperial administrators — to ensure the empire had sufficient manpower at its command. Undoubtedly this was a harsh policy, but it was neither arbitrary nor entirely unpopular among subjects. In the sixteenth-century, the levy was carried out on fewer than ten occasions when there was a genuine need for more men. Evidence has emerged suggesting that just as many parents bribed officials to smuggle their children into the service as those who bribed them not to do so. Enrolment could greatly improve a child’s prospects. Successful recruits who became Muslim often kept their mother tongue and sometimes even their allegiance; many returned to their region of birth as governors and even provided assistance to family members.
At its height — between the fifteenth- and seventeen-centuries — only five Grand Viziers (the sultan’s chief minister) out of forty-seven were of Turkish origin; the rest were Albanian, Greek or Slavic and had risen up the ranks because of devsirme. There is an infamous example of two Serbian brothers who were separated by devshirme: one became Grand Vizier Mehmed Skull and the other who was not taken became, with the former’s help, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Thus, policies such as devshirme were neither one-dimensional oppressive policies, nor ones that benefited only the Ottomans — they were well-designed and sustainable, as indicated by the empire’s longevity and size.
This raises the question: if the Ottoman bureaucracy was so well oiled, why did the empire eventually decline? One crucial factor relates to the empire’s external circumstances. To the West, lay the Habsburg empire and to the East, the Safavid empire; in other words, the Ottomans were surrounded by powerful imperial rivals. In the case of the Habsburg empire, it was an unstoppable force, the Ottoman military machine, meeting an immovable object. Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, these two empires were engaged in a series of inconclusive wars from which the Ottomans gained little but expended unfathomable amounts of money and manpower.
The Safavid empire, established in 1501, was a newcomer compared to the Ottoman Empire, which emerged in the thirteenth century. Founded by Ismael, the last in a line of hereditary Grand Masters of a Sufi (Muslim mystic) order, it posed a major challenge to the Ottoman monopoly on leadership of the Islamic world. There were few differences between the two state’s respective versions Islam: both lay claim to the same ideological legitimating grounds and the Ottoman sultan and Safavid Shah even used the same religious titulature. They did not go to war because of their religious differences; rather the difference between what came to be known as Sunni and Shia Islam began as a political problem. Since they were competing for the same territories, the two empires had to distinguish themselves from one another to justify war.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2017/08/sunni-vs-shia-roots-islam-s
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By drawing the lines of orthodoxy, defining what it meant to be a heretic and what heresy was, Islam became highly politicised over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the Ottoman empire, to be a heretic was to go against the sultan and by extension God, undermining earthly and divine order. The region witnessed a period of ‘confessionalisation’; in other words a consolidation of two distinctive forms of Islam, Shia and Sunni.
In 1536, early on his reign, Sultan Suleyman went on pilgrimage near the Safavid border. He visited five shrines, two of which were later labelled Shia; yet, at the time, there was no mention of this fact. By 1560, in the last decade of his reign, Suleyman was explicitly hailed as a pious Sunni sultan who served God by crushing Shia heretics.
Such developments were highly significant at the time, and they have continued to shape politics in the Middle East. Indeed, diplomatic relations in the region are still shaped by sectarianism. Iran remains predominantly Shia, whereas most Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Turkey (the heart of the old Ottoman empire) are Sunni, firing underlying tensions between the nations. Saddam Hussein’s removal in 2003 and his replacement by a democratically elected, Shia-led government was a shock to Sunnis and especially to the Gulf monarchies, whose Sunni elites preferred Saddam over the subsequent Shia regime. This was because they saw any improvement in the position of the Shias as a means for Iran to advance its foreign policy objectives. Moreover, Iraqi Sunnis were humiliated by Nouri al-Maliki’s government after his election as prime minister of Iraq in 2006. Many were marginalised because of their ejection from the army and the government. This affront bolstered support for al-Qaeda and a spate of bombings against Shia shrines.
The Ottoman empire may have become a captive to its geography, but the phenomenon of confessionalisation it instigated in the early modern period clearly shaped considerably the divisions we still see today. On reflection, many statesmen like Tony Blair have expressed regret for their lacklustre understanding of the region’s past. History does not provide a solution to the ongoing problems in the Middle East, but its value has been seriously understated. Indeed, in our uncertain times, histories such as this have never been more relevant.
Would you like to hear more from Will? Will graduated with a 1st Class degree in History from the University of Oxford and hosts a number of our online History masterclasses.
