Were the Ottomans Civilized?
The Ottomans were certainly civilized, and the notion that the Turks were a barbarous people compared with the Christians was biased and false. Their agricultural knowledge and tools were not inferior to those of the West. Land was farmed under tenancy, and crown estates were granted in each generation to feudal captains and commanders who had earned the sultan's favor through civil or military service.
Except in textiles and pottery, and perhaps in armor and weapons, Ottoman industry had not yet developed factory methods like those of Florence or Flanders. Yet Turkish craftsmen were known the world over for the quality of their goods, and the lack of a capitalist system troubled neither rich nor poor. In the Muslim society of the tenth century of the Hijra (the sixteenth century AD) the merchant had not won the political influence and social standing of the merchants of western Europe. Trade between one Turk and another was fairly honest, but trade between a Turk and a Christian carried no guarantee, and foreign trade was mostly handled by foreigners themselves.
Muslim caravans moved patiently along the ancient and medieval roads of Asia and Africa and could even cross the desert from one side to the other. Along their routes stood caravanserais, and Suleiman built a number of them to give merchants and travelers lodging and shelter. Until about 1500 Ottoman ships watched the sea lanes from Constantinople and Alexandria down the Red Sea toward India and the East Indies, exchanging their goods in those distant waters for the cargoes of flat-bottomed Chinese junks. Once the Portuguese opened the route to India through the voyages of Vasco da Gama and the naval victories of Albuquerque, the Muslims lost their mastery of the Indian Ocean, and the trade of Egypt, Syria, Iran and Venice declined together.
Religion, Law and the Scholars
The Turk was a man of land and sea, and he thought about religion less than other Muslims did. Still, he respected holy men, dervishes and saints, took the law of his life from the Quran and was raised in the mosque. Like the Jews, he avoided religious images in worship, and he called Christians idolaters. Religion and state were one. The Quran and the traditions of the Prophet were the basis of the law, and the same body of scholars (the ulema), who interpreted scripture, supplied the country's teachers, jurists and judges. It was this body that, under Mehmed the Conqueror and Suleiman the Lawgiver, compiled the official law code of the Ottoman state.
At the head of the ulema stood the mufti, or Sheikh al-Islam, who ranked after the sultan and the grand vizier as the highest judicial authority in the land. Sultans died and were replaced while the body of scholars endured as a group, so these guardians of religion and law were the real rulers of everyday life. Because their method was to explain and justify present events by the laws of the past, their influence was strongly reactionary, and they bore a large share of the blame for the stagnation of Islamic civilization after Suleiman's death. Belief in fate, which the Turks called qismet, reinforced this outlook. If each person's destiny was fixed by God from eternity, every effort or revolt to change it looked like unbelief and short-sightedness. Everything, death above all, was decreed by God and had to be accepted without complaint.
Now and then a freethinker spoke too freely, and in rare cases such men were condemned to death. Generally, however, the ulema respected freedom of thought, and the Ottoman Muslim state had no inquisition.
Christians and Jews under Ottoman Rule
Under the Ottoman sultans Christians and Jews enjoyed a large measure of religious freedom and, where Muslims were not involved, were allowed to follow their own laws. To weaken the Crusaders, Mehmed the Conqueror deliberately strengthened the Greek Orthodox church and deepened its quarrel with the Catholic church of Rome.
On the whole Christians lived with prosperity and comfort, yet they suffered basic disabilities. Socially they counted among the unfree, but they could escape that status by accepting Islam, and millions did so. Those who refused were excluded from military service, since the wars of the Muslims were chiefly holy wars to bring unbelievers to the faith, and in place of service they paid a special tax. They were usually tenant farmers who gave a tenth of their harvest to the landowner and, in addition, were required to give one child in ten to the state, to be raised as a true Muslim in the sultan's service.
The Cavalry and the Janissaries
The sultan, the army and the ulema made up the state. At the sultan's call each feudal captain appeared with his fighting men, and together they formed the sipahis, the cavalry, whose numbers grew greatly under Suleiman and reached 130,000, according to the book. Ghiselin de Busbecq, Ferdinand's ambassador, envied the splendor of their equipment. Their clothes were of gold-woven cloth or silk in fiery red, bright yellow or deep blue, and the jeweled harness of their finest horses glittered with gold and silver.
The Turkish infantry was picked from captive children and Christian subjects, trained from the start to serve the sultan in his palace, in civil administration and, above all, in war. They were called Janissaries, "the new soldiers." Murad I created the corps (762 AH, 1360 AD), perhaps in part to spare his Christian subjects the dangers of their youth. The corps was not large and under Suleiman reached 20,000. The Janissaries learned the arts of war thoroughly and were steeped in martial pride, zeal and Islamic faith. They could neither marry nor take part in economic activity, and on the whole they were as restless and discontented in peace as they were brave in war. Beyond this elite came a popular army of about 100,000, whose discipline and fighting spirit were entrusted to the cavalry and the Janissaries. The army's weapons were still bow and arrow and lance; firearms had only just entered the field, and clubs and short swords were used in hand-to-hand fighting.
In those years Suleiman's army and its methods had no equal in the world. No other force matched it in the use of artillery, the breaching of fortresses, military engineering, discipline and morale, care for the health of the troops, and the supply of men at great distances. Yet in the Ottoman state the army became an end in itself instead of a means, and sultans deliberately started wars to keep it in order and content. After Suleiman, therefore, the army and especially the Janissaries became the masters of the sultans.
Bureaucracy, Courts and the Sublime Porte
The children of Christians who had converted to Islam or entered military service made up most of the officials of the central government. To us it seems that a Muslim sultan should have feared having a circle of men of another faith, who might one day, like Skanderbeg, return to the faith of their fathers. Suleiman did the opposite, because it was easy to train such men from childhood for any particular government post. In the first half of the tenth century of the Hijra (the sixteenth AD) the Ottoman bureaucracy was probably the most effective system of government in existence, although bribery was widespread in it.
The divan, or council of ministers, consisted of the heads of government departments working under the grand vizier. Its power was more advisory than legislative, though its proposals usually became law once the sultan approved and signed them.
The judiciary was in the hands of the qadis and the great judges, chosen from among the ulema. A French witness praised the diligence of the Ottoman courts, the speed with which they convened, and the promptness of their final rulings. A great English historian held that under the first Ottoman rulers the administration of justice in Turkey was better than in any European country, that the sultan's Muslim followers were more obedient and orderly than most Christian communities, and that crime was rarer among them. The streets of Constantinople were policed by Janissaries, and murder there was probably less common than in other European capitals. Lands that came under Islamic rule, such as Rhodes, Greece and the Balkans, preferred their new condition to their earlier one under the knights, the Byzantine emperors or the Venetians, and even Hungary found its situation under Suleiman better than it later was under the Habsburgs.
Most offices of the central government lay inside the royal precinct, the serai. It was a complex of buildings, gardens and courtyards that housed the sultan and his harem, his servants and special attendants, and 80,000 administrative staff, according to the book. Its perimeter reached five kilometers, and it opened to the outside through a single grand, ornate gate. The French called this gate the "Sublime Porte," a phrase that later, as a play on words, came to mean the Ottoman government itself.
The Grand Vizier
In this centralized system the grand vizier was the second man of the state. The word vizier is Arabic and means one who bears a burden. He did carry heavy responsibilities: he presided over the divan, the administration, the courts, the army and the diplomatic missions. He directed foreign relations, made the important appointments and dismissals, and played the most ceremonial role in the most ceremonial of European courts. His heaviest duty was to keep his service pleasing to the sultan at all times. The grand vizier was often chosen from among converted Christians and in practice stood in the position of a slave, so that a single angry word from his master could send him to the gallows without a trial.
Suleiman showed his judgment in choosing grand viziers who greatly helped his success. Ibrahim Pasha was a Greek by birth, captured by Muslim corsairs and presented to the sultan as a capable slave worth training. Suleiman found him so able in so many respects that he gradually gave him more and more authority, raised his annual salary to 60,000 ducats according to the book, and married one of his sisters to him. The sultan always ate at the same table with him and took great pleasure in his company, his skill at music, his command of languages and literature and his knowledge of the affairs of the world. Suleiman declared, in the ornate manner of the East: "Whatever Ibrahim Pasha says is to be taken as words spoken from my own jewel-bearing mouth." The friendship of Suleiman and Ibrahim was one of the great friendships of history, perhaps in the spirit of ancient Greece.
Ibrahim, however, lacked a prudent skill: he could not hide his inner pride behind outward humility. He had many reasons to be proud. It was he who raised Ottoman power and influence to its height; through his shrewd policy France was allied with the Ottomans and the states of western Europe were divided; and while Suleiman campaigned in Hungary he quenched the fires of unrest in Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt by treating everyone with fairness and mildness and by restraining injustice. But he also had many reasons for caution, because he was still a slave, and the higher he rose the thinner grew the thread that held the royal sword above his head.
By holding the Turkish troops back from plundering Tabriz and Baghdad, and by insisting that they not sack Buda in Hungary, he drew their anger on himself. At Buda he managed to save part of the library of Matthias Corvinus and three bronze statues of Hermes, Apollo and Artemis. When he set them up before his palace in Constantinople, even his indulgent master was upset by this affront to the clear command of Islam against statues and images, and it was widely rumored that Ibrahim despised the Quran. He sometimes gave banquets more costly and splendid than the sultan's own. Members of the divan accused him of speaking like an absolute master who led the sultan along like a tamed lion. Roxelana, the favorite of the harem, resented his power and influence and for days and nights filled the sultan's ear with her suspicions of him. At last the sultan came to trust her words. In 943 AH (31 March 1536), Ibrahim Pasha was found dead on his bed, probably by the sultan's order. In brutality the act was no less than the burning of Servetus or of Louis de Berquin.
The Law of Fratricide and the Limits of Autocracy
Harsher still was the law of fratricide among the Ottoman rulers. Mehmed the Conqueror stated it plainly in his law code: "Most jurists have declared that whichever of my illustrious sons attains the throne shall be entitled to put his brothers to death, in order to preserve the peace of the world. Let them act according to this rule." In this way the Conqueror coldly condemned all his sons except the eldest.
Another flaw, a stain on Ottoman statecraft, was that the property of those condemned to death passed to the sultan's treasury. Sultans were therefore constantly tempted to close their hearts and minds to the pleas of the accused and the wronged for the sake of their finances, though it must be admitted that Suleiman kept himself free of this temptation.
Against the faults of this autocracy we must acknowledge that the Ottoman government contained, indirectly, a kind of modern democracy, in that the road to every office and rank except the throne was open to all Muslims and even to every Christian who accepted Islam. We must also add that the success of the first Ottoman sultans can be taken as strong evidence for the inheritance of aristocratic qualities, since no other state of that age, like Ottoman Turkey, showed such ability in governance over so long a period.