3.1: Gunpowder Empires
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Empire Building
For those who lived during this time, the word empire might conjure images of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or the pre-Muslim Persian Empire—powers that depended variously on military conquest, colonization, occupation, or direct resource exploitation—but empires can take many forms and imperial processes can occur in many contexts. The definition of this term has also evolved with these forms and processes, especially with the creation of these particular civilizations in what is known today in the Middle East.
So, were these regions really empires? This section of this chapter examines these regions and aims to identify their roles in the development of this new world order, in the area that would come to be known as the Dar al Islam, or the Islamic realm. This “realm” would find themselves embroiled in civil and territorial wars, ostensibly over religious differences – Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire versus Shi’ite Islam in Safavid Persia – but also over trade, economy, and expansion. And in expansion, they faced opposition from the Christian west of Europe – including the Mediterranean – Muscovy, Ruthenia (Russia), and the Circassian orthodox territories, as well as India and China, including some of the very regions where they were born. Yet, in spite of all of these conflicts and issues, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the Golden Ages of these particular territories, by many definitions, including in art, architecture, politics, trade, and invention. The madrasas, Islamic schools, were considered the best educational opportunity, as not just the elite were allowed to attend them. Hammams and Turkish baths encouraged more cleanliness than was seen in other parts of the world during the same time. And the mosques, palaces, business centers/bazaars, and holy sites defined the golden age architecture still prevalent today.
Figure 3.1.1: "Map of the Expansion of the Ottoman Empire," André Koehne, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Ottomans
Of the major early-modern land empires, none survived across so many eras and with anything like the sustained success of the Ottoman Empire. Founded by Osman I before the Black Death had even reached Western Eurasia, the empire would endure through the end of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire thus cast a wide shadow on the early-modern world and beyond. The next chapter will delve further into the political history of the Empire so in this section the focus will be on cultural and social developments with special emphasis on diversity and difference. Figure 3.1.1 is a map of the Mediterranean Sea, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Near East. The map shows the areas under Ottoman control between 1481 and 1520. In 1481 the empire encompassed most of southeastern Europe, including present-day Croatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Turkey. Selim I continued to expand and acquired new territories. By 1520, the Ottomans controlled modern-day Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
The Ottoman Empire emerged from a highly competitive world of independent Anatolian beyeliks (bey is a Turkish term meaning chieftain or simply commander). The clan of the Ottoman founder, who is generally referred to as Osman, had fled to Anatolia, like many other Turkic clans, to escape from Mongol expansion. As populations looked for refuge on the frontier between the Byzantine and Mongol Empires the various beys sought to gather the available fighting men and make use of them for their own purposes. Osman Bey, like many of his peers, used the ideology of ghaza as the principle around which he organized his forces. The term ghaza had pre-Islamic roots but came to be understood as something akin to “Holy War” fought by frontier warriors, or ghazis, for the expansion of the Dar-al-Islam (usually translated as the “House of Islam”). Unconverted Turks had once been the focus of such raids, but now it was the Muslim Turk Osman who led his forces against the Christian Byzantine Empire. For all the talk of Holy War, however, the frontier zone was not a place of simple boundaries or religious orthodoxy. Halil Inalcik notes that “frontier society was both tolerant and complex… characterized by heretical religious orders, mysticism, epic literature, and customary law,” that were not connected to any one civilization. Over time, many of the differences between Osman’s ghazis and their Byzantine equivalents gave way to a broader frontier culture shared by both sides. As one example of this, a Byzantine frontier lord converted to Islam, took the name Mihal Gazi, and began fighting for Osman. Also crucial to this story is the fact that the goal of ghaza, both in its traditional sense and specifically for Osman and his successors, was “not to destroy but to subdue the infidel world.”
This is vital to the story of the Ottoman Empire because as terrifying as the ghazi raids could be to those on the other side, the ultimate goal was to integrate conquered regions into an Ottoman state and to convince its new subjects that it was there to be a protector not an exploiter. The success of this project can be seen in the fact that throughout the fourteenth century, as Osman’s successors became the dominant force in Anatolia, the majority of their retainers were from non-Turkic ethnic groups and a similarly large number were not even Muslim. On the one hand, this can be explained simply by people flocking to the winning side, but also reveals the Ottoman Empire’s willingness to take on all comers regardless of ethnic or religious background. Ottoman sultans would always trace their descent from a direct line leading back to Osman and the empire would promote Ottoman Turkish as the administrative language of the state in place of Persian or Arabic, yet in most other ways the Ottoman understood their empire as inherently multicultural, and they saw no reason to diminish this diversity. The title of “Sultan” adopted by the leader was not necessarily one solely given by God, like the Divine Right of Kings in Europe or the Mandate of Heaven in China, but rather denoted a combination of religious and military leadership. In the sixteenth century, sultans would also carry the title Khan as a part of their formal name, again signifying that connection to the Mongols and their leader, Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. They also took their authority from the Sunni Muslim religion that would dominate their empire as they took territories and added to both their geographic and population sizes. Conversion to Islam was not required, making its population one of the most diverse in the world, particularly during its golden age under the rule of Sultan Suleyman.
The Ottoman Empire, like many empires of its ilk, saw it as vitally important to understand and manage difference within its territory. That territory was spread throughout three continents and included countless ethnic groups, a diverse array of languages, Sunni, Shi’a, and Sufi Muslims, significant Jewish populations, and multiple denominations of Christians. For later nation-states, the existence of such diversity would have been seen as a potential impediment to the ideal of national unity. Some early modern empires, as we will see, similarly saw certain kinds of diversity and difference as undesirable and as a result sought to eliminate them through aggressive intervention. By contrast, one of the striking things about the Ottoman Empire when it comes to its dealings with subject people is how little they concerned themselves with diversity as a problem to be solved. Aron Rodrigue notes that while the Empire recognized, “‘difference’ [it lacked] any political will to transform the ‘difference’ into ‘sameness’…[N]othing in the political system of the Ottoman Empire called for different groups to merge into one. The difference was a given and accepted as such…This was a world that recognized and accepted that groups did not necessarily have to share similarities to have a place in the overall arrangement.”
One example of this is the “conversion” of what would become the Ottoman’s ruling city. Prior to Istanbul becoming the empire’s capital, it had been a Christian stronghold known as Constantinople, after the Roman ruler Constantine who converted the Roman empire to Christianity. Constantine created the Hagia Sophia, “Font of Wisdom”, a church to mark it as Christian lands. When Mehmed took the city, his religious leaders, the imam, held a Muslim service on the site, proclaiming it a mosque. This did not mean they possessed religious intolerance, however; Wishing to keep trade flowing through the city and, by extension the empire as it grew, the sultans and other government officials recognized the need for temperance, particularly when it came to business. On any given day, Istanbul and Aleppo, two of the major ports of the Ottoman Empire, would bustle with the energy of merchants, holy men, pilgrims, and nobles from all over Eurasia, a cacophony of different voices, viewpoints, and religions.
These port cities, as well as other major cities and regions, show an acceptance of difference within the realm of language too. Modern nations came to see language as one of the most important markers of ethnic identity. This was far from the case in the Ottoman Empire, however. Ethnicity and language, in fact, often failed to match up in the expected ways: “There were Turkish-speaking Greeks, Arabic-speaking Jews, Ladino-speaking Jews, Armenians only fluent in Turkish and not in Armenian… The ability to speak a certain language did not in any shape or form alter their identity.” Even the administrative language known as Ottoman did not serve as a unifying language since it was neither spoken nor understood by regular people and was even different from the Turkish spoken on the streets and bazaars. In this multilingual context people understood that it was useful to have at least basic knowledge of multiple languages, but importantly, “there are no reported cases of people being sanctioned or blamed for not being able to speak the language of the … ruling class.”
The bazaar is a useful lens to make sense of the way that the Ottoman approach to difference created a context for the mixing and spread of culture. These markets were dynamic spaces where a multiplicity of cultures could come together to purchase both luxuries and necessities. In the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, by far the largest of these in the empire and one of the largest in the world, merchants would sit at the front of their stalls with their merchandise behind them. Customers would come and sit with them, drink tea or coffee, and haggle over prices for spices, jewels, textiles, shoes, books, weapons, and armor, or other wares in whatever language or languages they shared. While not intentional or likely even conscious, these sorts of regular interactions were key mechanisms in creating more homogenous tastes, styles, habits, and desires. Women also participated in this realm, although in a separate manner, which will be discussed later in this chapter.
As mentioned earlier in the introduction, we usually approach such issues through norms established in the context of European history. That leads to these sorts of relations between the rulers and ruled or the state and society being discussed in terms of “persecution,” “tolerance,” or “rights.” None of these terms, however, adequately describe the Ottoman model. Where European societies gradually developed the idea of a “majority” that was the basis of norms and a “minority” made up of those who existed in opposition to those norms, within the Ottoman Empire it was difference itself that was the norm. This is significant because in majority/minority societies the legal system either treats that minority as equals under the same universal laws as the majority or subjects them to discrimination through the denial of such legal equality. In the Ottoman Empire, however, nothing about justice was universal since, as we have seen, different communities were subject to their own distinct judicial systems (although there were sultanic laws that transcended religious boundaries). Thus, rather than a society within which the ideal was equality within a universal system, for the Ottoman the ideal was simply fairness. In this case fairness explicitly meant not treating everyone the same. That can be a hard idea for moderns like ourselves to wrap our heads around given how central notions of equal rights are to our sense of social justice. This is not an argument that the contemporary drive for equal rights is wrong or misguided, nor that the Ottoman system of fairness over equality represents a superior model for coping with difference in the current day (after all that model was the product of an early-modern historical context that no longer exists). Instead, it is a reminder that human history cannot be reduced to a simple story of gradual improvement over time where we have now “achieved” progress that makes our societies “better” than our historical predecessors. After all, the territory that the Ottoman Empire once encompassed is today one of the most volatile regions of the globe. Yet, at its height from roughly 1400-1700, a period in which religious differences in Christian Europe spurred continual violence, the Ottoman Empire experienced no large-scale religious conflict.
In the mid-sixteenth century, Sultan Suleyman ascended the throne after his father, Selim II, did away with all other claimants, siblings, and cousins of Suleyman’s, and then died at the age of 36. Suleyman was only in his 20s when he became sultan, but already had a taste of politics, having been a governor of an eastern town from the age of 15. His reign would be considered the “Golden Age” of the Ottoman Empire, as during the time he sat on the throne, the Empire would expand into Eastern Europe and south to Egypt, pushing the boundaries of Safavid Persia and taking over shipping lanes and landward trade routes along the Silk Road.
During the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire would become known for its role as a “middleman” in trade along the land-based side of the Silk Road trading route throughout the Eurasian and African continents, expanding the Sunni Muslim religion as well in the areas where it established “caravanserai” or stopping points for merchant caravans along trade routes as safe places to rest themselves and their animals, for a price. This price also included soldiers along the routes as well, to protect the caravans from attack, a common problem along the Silk Road. Those who couldn’t pay often found themselves unable to trade within Ottoman territory, for fear of attack, either by robbers or by the Ottomans themselves. Merchants who utilized this service, though, found acceptance and assistance from the Ottoman populations within the routes they took and the cities they visited.
Suleyman also broke certain traditions of Ottoman rule by taking a single woman as his wife, a Christian slave by the name of Aleksandra Lisovska (see Figure 3.1.2) who converted to Islam in captivity. Her Turkish name was Hurrem, meaning the "laughing one," and some people also called her Roxalana, probably in reference to her birthplace, translating roughly to the “woman from Ruthenia" (Russia). Figure 3.1.2 is a portrait of Roxalana after her marriage to Suleyman. Her name, Rosa Solymanni, appears in the top left corner of the painting. She is wearing a head dress and an open collar kaftan with large buttons in the front. Not much is known of this woman outside of her time in Suleyman’s harem, but historians know a lot of her as the favorite, and then later wife, of Suleyman, due to her political and economic influence, not only on Suleyman but also on Istanbul and many other Ottoman cities and territories. The roles and capabilities of women during this time is discussed in another section.
The story of the Ottoman Empire is important in its own right, but also reveals something about the way early modern history has traditionally been presented. Eurocentric history encourages students to judge all other societies in comparison with European historical developments and norms. Within this view the trends of Ottoman history are the inverse of European history. Thus, if post-1500 Europe is described with terms associated with progress, like “Renaissance”, “Reformation”, “Scientific Revolution”, or “Enlightenment” the Ottoman, having not experienced those same movements can seem stagnant, traditional, or conservative in comparison. This then fits into a broader notion, expressed either implicitly or explicitly, that the path of progress leads through European history. The irony is that many of the developments that get associated with the “Rise of the West” narratives could be found much earlier in the Ottoman Empire. By 1600 the Ottoman Empire had established such features as:
- a centralized administration run by a merit-based bureaucratic class
- a well-integrated military centered on a large, professional, and disciplined infantry, a sophisticated logistics system, and a dedicated revenue stream
- an acceptance of diversity and difference
- a significant commercial class engaged in long-distance trade of luxury goods and often supported by investments from the ruling elite
While many of these elements would begin showing up in European kingdoms across the seventeenth century, it is notable that prior to the Revolution of 1789, France had arguably only adopted the last of these features.
- Why did Europe feel the need to expand? What role did Portugal’s exploration of the African coast and the Indian Ocean trading network play in this expansion?
- Analyze the outreach and trade taking place between China and the rest of the world during this period. How did it compare with the expansion taking place by other civilizations?
- How did race-based slavery affect the development of civilizations on the African continent? What was its impact on the creation of the European “New World”?