Ottoman Decline Thesis

In the Ottoman Empire

The idea of decline first emerged among the Ottomans themselves. Beginning much earlier, but greatly expanding during the seventeenth century, was the literary genre of nasihatname, or "Advice for Kings." This genre had a long history, appearing in earlier Muslim empires such as those of the Seljuks and Abbasids. Nasihatname literature was primarily concerned with order and disorder in state and society; it conceptualized the ruler as the embodiment of justice, whose duty it was to ensure that his subjects would receive that justice. This was often expressed through the concept of the Circle of Justice (Ottoman Turkish: dāʾire-i ʿadlīye‎). In this conception, the provision of justice by the ruler to his subjects would allow those subjects to prosper, strengthening the ruler in turn. Should this break down, society would cease to properly function. Thus many Ottomans writing in this genre, such as Mustafa Âlî, described the reign of Suleiman I as the most perfect manifestation of this system of justice, and put forth the idea that the empire had since declined from that golden standard. These writers viewed the changes which the empire had undergone as an inherently negative corruption of an idealized Suleimanic past. However, it is now recognized that rather than simply describing objective reality, they were often utilizing the genre of decline to voice their own personal complaints. For instance, Mustafa Âli's belief that the empire was declining was in large part motivated by frustration at his own failure to achieve promotions and court patronage. The primary goal of the nasihatname writers, then, may have simply been to protect their own personal or class status in a rapidly changing world.

In Western Europe

The notion of an all-encompassing Ottoman decline did not enter Western historiography until the early nineteenth century, with the works of historians such as Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who knew Ottoman Turkish and adopted the idea directly from Ottoman nasihatname writers. Internal decline was thus thought of as an appropriate means of explaining the Ottomans' external military defeats, and acted also as a justification for European imperialism. The trope of a declining Ottoman Empire was thus used as a foil for Western Civilization, in which the "decadent" Ottomans were contrasted with the "dynamic" West. Such views were perpetuated during the mid-twentieth century by the works of H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, and particularly Bernard Lewis. These views came under increasing criticism as historians began to reexamine their own fundamental assumptions about Ottoman and Islamic history, particularly after the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978. It was from this point that skepticism of the Decline Thesis began to grow.

The thesis' tenets

The most prominent writer on Ottoman Decline is the historian Bernard Lewis, who argued that the Ottoman Empire experienced all-encompassing decline affecting government, society and civilization. He laid out his views in the 1958 article, "Some Reflections on the Decline of the Ottoman Empire," which developed into the mainstream opinion of Orientalist scholars of the mid-twentieth century. However, the article is now highly criticized and no longer considered accurate by modern historians. Lewis' views were as follows:

The first ten sultans of the Ottoman Empire (from Osman I to Suleiman the Magnificent) were of excellent personal quality, while those who came after Suleiman were without exception "incompetents, degenerates, and misfits," a result of the Kafes system of succession, whereby dynastic princes no longer gained experience in provincial government before coming to the throne. Faulty leadership at the top led to decay in all branches of government: the bureaucracy ceased to function effectively, and the quality of their records worsened. The Ottoman military lost its strength and began to experience defeats on the battlefield. They ceased to keep up with the advances of European military science, and consequently suffered territorial losses. As Ottoman state and society was geared towards constant expansion, their sudden failure to achieve new conquests left the empire unable to adapt to its new relationship with Europe.

Economically, the empire was undermined by the discovery of the New World and the subsequent shift in the economic balance between the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe, as well as the voyages of discovery which brought Europeans to India, and led to a decline in the volume of trade passing through Ottoman ports. In addition, the Price Revolution led to the destabilization of Ottoman coinage and a severe fiscal crisis, which proved disastrous when paired with the rapidly rising costs of warfare. As the cavalry army of the Ottomans became obsolete, the Timar System of land tenure which had sustained it fell into obsolescence, while the corrupt bureaucracy was unable to replace it with a functional alternative. Instead, tax-farming was introduced, leading to corruption and oppression of the peasantry, and agricultural decline. Ottoman economic and military backwardness was extenuated by their closed-mindedness and unwillingness to adopt European innovations, as well as an increasing disdain for practical science. Ultimately, the Ottoman Empire "reverted to a medieval state, with a medieval mentality and a medieval economy – but with the added burden of a bureaucracy and a standing army which no medieval state had ever had to bear."

Conceptual issues

The Decline Thesis has been criticized for a variety of conceptual issues. A common criticism is that it is teleological: that is to say that it presents all of Ottoman history as the story of the rise and fall of the empire, causing earlier historians to over-emphasize the empire's troubles and under-emphasize its strengths. According to Linda Darling, "specialists have become skeptical of this decline paradigm, feeling that it fails to explain Ottoman transformation and change. It is teleological: because we know that eventually the Ottomans became a weaker power and finally disappeared, every earlier difficulty they experienced becomes a "seed of decline," and Ottoman successes and sources of strength vanish from the record." The corollary of decline is the notion that the empire had earlier reached a peak, and this too has been problematized. The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent had been seen as a golden age to which all of the rest of the empire's history was to be compared, yet in the words of Jane Hathaway: "a massive empire that lasted for over six centuries cannot have had an ideal moment and an ideal permutation by which the entire chronological and geographical span of the empire can be judged." Thus rather than selecting a single period as the "ideal" period of Ottoman history, historians seek to explore each period of its history within its own context, and believe that the empire could not have been in decline for over three hundred years. The Decline Thesis begged the question, "if it was declining all that time, why didn't it fall?"

Political

In reexamining the notion of political decline in the Ottoman Empire, historians first examined the nasihatname texts which had formed the backbone of the Decline Thesis. Many scholars, among them most notably Douglas Howard and Rifa'at Ali Abou-El-Haj, pointed out that these Ottoman writers' critiques of contemporary society were not uninfluenced by their own biases, and criticized earlier historians for taking them at face value without any critical analysis. Furthermore, "complaint about the times" was in fact a literary trope in Ottoman society, and also existed during the period of the so-called "golden age" of Suleiman the Magnificent. For Ottoman writers, "decline" was a trope which allowed them to pass judgement on contemporary state and society, rather than a description of objective reality. Thus, these works should not be taken as evidence of actual Ottoman decline.

Other tropes of political decline, such as the notion that the sultans ruling after the time of Suleiman I were less competent rulers, have also been challenged. The reigns of such figures as Ahmed I, Osman II, and Mehmed IV (among others) have been re-examined in the context of the conditions of their own respective eras, rather than by inappropriately comparing them with a mythical Suleimanic ideal. Indeed, the very notion of whether Suleiman's reign constituted a golden age in the first place has come into question. The fact that sultans no longer personally accompanied the army on military campaigns is no longer criticized, but seen as a positive and necessary change resulting from the empire's transformation into a sedentary imperial polity. Leslie Peirce's research on the political role of women in the Ottoman dynasty has demonstrated the inaccuracy of the assumption that the so-called Sultanate of Women, in which female members of the dynasty exercised an unusually high degree of power, was in some way either a cause or a symptom of imperial weakness. On the contrary, Ottoman valide sultans, princesses, and concubines were successfully able to fortify dynastic rule during periods of instability, and played an important role in dynastic legitimization. Furthermore, the importance of the rapidly expanding bureaucracy is now particularly emphasized as a source of stability and strength for the empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing particularly upon the work of Linda Darling. Based on the work of Ariel Salzmann, imperial decentralization in the eighteenth century has been reinterpreted as an effective form of government, rather than a sign of decline.

Military

One of the most enduring claims of the Decline Thesis is that of the weakness of the Ottoman military in the post-Suleimanic period. Supposedly, the once-feared Janissary Corps became corrupted as they increasingly earned privileges for themselves, gaining the right to marry, sire children, and enroll those children into the corps. Rather than maintaining strict military discipline, they began to take up professions as merchants and shopkeepers in order to supplement their income, thus losing their military edge. However, it is now understood that janissary participation in the economy was not limited to the post-Suleimanic period. Janissaries were engaging in commerce as early as the fifteenth century, without any apparent impact on their military discipline. Furthermore, far from becoming militarily ineffective, the Janissaries continued to remain one of the most innovative forces in Europe, introducing the tactic of volley fire alongside and perhaps even earlier than most European armies.

Even greater attention has been given to the changes experienced by the Timar System during this era. The breakdown of the Timar System is now seen not as a result of incompetent administration, but as a conscious policy meant to help the empire adapt to the increasingly monetized economy of the late sixteenth century. Thus, far from being a symptom of decline, this was part of a process of military and fiscal modernization. The army of cavalry which the Timar System had produced was becoming increasingly obsolete by the seventeenth century, and this transformation allowed the Ottomans to instead raise large armies of musket-wielding infantry, thereby maintaining their military competitiveness. By the 1690s, the proportion of infantry in the Ottoman army had increased to 50-60 percent, equivalent to their Habsburg rivals.

In terms of armament production and weapons technology, the Ottomans remained roughly equivalent with their European rivals throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The theory that Ottoman cannon foundries neglected mobile field guns by producing oversized siege cannon at a disproportionate rate has been debunked by the military historian Gábor Ágoston. Despite the Orientalistic claim that an inherent conservatism in Islam prevented the Ottomans from adopting European military innovations, it is now known that the Ottomans were receptive to foreign techniques and inventions, and continued to employ European renegades and technical experts throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In terms of productive capacity, the Ottomans were even able to surpass their European rivals during the seventeenth century. They maintained full self-sufficiency in gunpowder production until the late eighteenth century, and with rare and brief exceptions were continually able to produce enough cannon and muskets to supply their whole armed forces as well as surplus stockpiles. According to Gábor Ágoston and Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman defeats in the 1683–99 and 1768–74 wars with the Habsburgs and Russia are best explained by the strain on logistics and communications caused by multi-front warfare rather than Ottoman inferiority in technology and armaments, as such inferiority, insofar as it existed at all, was far less significant than had formerly been believed. It is now believed that the Ottoman military was able to maintain rough parity with its rivals until the 1760s, falling behind as a consequence of a long period of peace on its western front between 1740 and 1768, when the Ottomans missed out on the advances associated with the Seven Years' War.

Economic and fiscal

Historians such as the above-mentioned Bernard Lewis once referred to the supposed fall in the quality of the empire's bureaucratic records as an indication of stagnation in the Ottoman administrative apparatus. Historians now recognize that no such decline ever occurred. This change in record-keeping was attributable not to loss in quality, but to a change in the nature of land assessment, as the empire adjusted to the increasingly monetized economy characteristic of the seventeenth century. The assessment methods in use under Sultan Suleiman were well-suited to ensuring proper distribution of revenues to the army of feudal cavalry that then made up the bulk of Ottoman forces. However, by the turn of the century, the need for cash to raise armies of musket-wielding infantry led the central government to reform its system of land tenure, and to expand the practice of tax farming, which was also a common method of revenue-raising in contemporary Europe. In fact, the seventeenth century was a period of significant expansion in the Ottoman bureaucracy, not contraction or decline. These changes, contrary to the claims of earlier historians, do not seem to have led to widespread corruption or oppression to a degree greater than that observable among the Ottoman Empire's European contemporaries. The Ottomans, like other European states, struggled throughout the seventeenth century to meet rapidly rising expenses, but by its end were able to institute reforms which allowed them to enter the eighteenth century with a budget surplus. In the words of Linda Darling, "Ascribing seventeenth-century Ottoman budgetary deficits to the decline of the empire leaves unexplained the cessation of these deficits in the eighteenth century."

Other supposed manifestations of Ottoman economic "decline" have also been challenged. The European circumnavigation of Africa and the opening of direct trade routes with India had a far less severe impact on the Ottoman economy than had once been argued. Ottoman revenue from the trade in Indian goods, such as spices, did not decrease to the degree that had been commonly assumed. The loss of revenue which did occur was made up for by the rise in the coffee trade from Yemen during the seventeenth century. While unable to eject the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean, the Ottomans were successfully able to prevent them from monopolizing its trade. The idea that Ottoman trade was in the process of falling under European control during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now considered Eurocentric and inaccurate. The European mercantile presence was significant, particularly in rapidly expanding port cities such as Izmir, but by no means dominant. Ottoman industries, such as the production of cotton and silk textiles, also were able to recover from the economic downturn associated with the early seventeenth century. The empire's currency was destabilized after the debasements of the 1580s and this instability continued into the seventeenth century. However, the eighteenth century "was in fact a period of recovery for the Ottoman monetary system," indicating that "the old thesis of continuous decline cannot be sustained." Far from declining, during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century the Ottoman economy experienced a major upswing, with significant expansion and growth. Ottoman manufacturing, long assumed to have collapsed in the face of European competition, is now understood to have grown and even flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, benefiting from a strong domestic market.

Modern scholarly consensus

Having dispensed with the notion of decline, modern historians of the Ottoman Empire most commonly refer to the post-Suleimanic Period, or more widely the period from 1550 to 1700, as one of transformation. The role of economic and political crises in defining this period is crucial, but so too is their temporary nature, as the Ottoman state was ultimately able to survive and adapt to a changing world. Also of increasing emphasis is the place of the Ottoman Empire in comparative perspective, particularly with the states of Europe. While the Ottomans struggled with severe economic and fiscal downturn, so too did their European contemporaries. This period is frequently referred to as that of The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, and thus the difficulties faced by the Ottoman Empire have been reframed not as unique to them, but as part of a general trend impacting the entire European and Mediterranean region.

Politically, this era of transformation was characterized by a number of developments. Most significant was the proliferation of elite households (kapı) modeled on the imperial household in Istanbul. Whereas during the sixteenth century all political power had been centralized in the person of the Sultan, now interlocking household relationships and the networks of patronage established by them became the focal point of political life. The factionalism that characterized this period has even been reinterpreted by one historian in terms of "the expansion of the political nation and the limitation of royal authority."

The modern scholarly consensus on the post-Suleimanic period can thus be summarized as follows:

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favor of one of crisis and adaptation: after weathering a wretched economic and demographic crisis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire adjusted its character from that of a military conquest state to that of a territorially more stable, bureaucratic state whose chief concern was no longer conquering new territories but extracting revenue from the territories it already controlled while shoring up its image as the bastion of Sunni Islam.