• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If Suleyman could have lived another hundred years, things might have been otherwise. But Suleyman was succeeded by a string of thirteen sultans ranging in talent from incompetence to idiocy, and because of the extraordinarily hierarchical, indeed despotic form of Ottoman government, a poor sultan was a catastrophe. Many factors conspired to weaken the empire beginning in the second half of the 1500s, but the failure of Suleyman's successors to maintain his striking tolerance clearly played a role.9

Perhaps most significantly, the empire after Suleyman was unable to remain above the religious schism that has caused Islam's most fanatic bloodletting from the seventh century to the present day: the split between Sunnis and Shiites. Although the prevailing Ottoman practices were always Sunni, Shiism had been generally respected under Suleyman. After his death, however, the empire's religious arteries began to harden. Officials sought to suppress freedom of thought, including Shiite thought. The printing press was banned. Shiite dissident movements emerged in Iraq and Persia, which were then crushed by fierce and overwhelming imperial force, strengthening the hand of the Shiite kingdom of Safavid Persia and even leading the Safavids to ally themselves with European powers against the Ottomans.10

At the same time, the welcoming embrace of foreigners and non-Muslims that had characterized the empire in its golden age also began to show strain. There had always been a strand of Islamic thought critical of merchants and commerce, particularly commerce with non-Muslims. This aversion to trade may help explain why Jews and other non-Muslims came to dominate so much of the empire's commercial activity. But the fact that most merchants, entrepreneurs, and financiers were “foreigners” created a highly unstable situation. Whether due to resentment or genuine theological scruple, merchants and traders in the late 1500s began to be subject to increasing religious criticism and then to unpredictable taxation and confiscation of property. Exporting goods outside the empire was forbidden. Economic and technological in- novation was suppressed, not only stifling trade but undercutting the Ottoman military, whose weapons and ships grew increasingly outdated.”

While non-Muslims still enjoyed better treatment and prospects under the Ottomans than non-Christians did in most of Europe in the late sixteenth century, fault lines began to appear and eventually to crack open. Throughout the empire, itinerant Jewish merchants and peddlers were attacked, robbed, and murdered. When a Jewish court physician died, the chief physician argued successfully for replacement by a Muslim because there were too many Jews already; over the next fifty years, the number of Jews among the court's physicians would decrease in number from forty-one to four. To be sure, Ottoman Jews still had more to fear from the empire's Christian opponents. In 1594, when Prince Michael “the Brave” of Wallachia rebelled against Ottoman rule, he immediately massacred every Jew (and Turk) in Bucharest to whom any Romanian owed money. But as internal strife worsened, Jews came under Ottoman attack as well. In the 1660s, the leader of a messianic Jewish movement, Shabbetai Tzevi, was forced to choose between death and conversion to Islam. (He chose conversion.) In 1688, in another war with the Austrians, Janissaries burned and plundered the Jewish quarter of Belgrade.12

As with every empire, the reasons for Ottoman decline are multiple and hotly debated. As the centuries wore on, there were military defeats and territorial losses. The western European powers achieved increasing economic and technological superiority, extending their reach to the Americas and Asia in the way the Ottomans never did. Proliferating internal revolts and the rise of nationalism played a critical, debilitating role. At the same time, the Ottomans’ final collapse was a paroxysm of horrific intolerance. The eventual destruction