“Why did the Ottoman Empire Decline?”

An Exploration of Ottoman Reforms in the Long Nineteenth Century- Part I

This is the first of a series of posts I plan to write on the reforms that the Ottoman Empire implemented during “the long nineteenth century” and the transformations these reforms brought about.

I briefly touched on this process in my first posts on Kadriye Huseyin and Fatma Aliye as it provided the context from which these two pioneering female intellectuals could emerge. As a historian, I don’t particularly enjoy counterfactual arguments, but it may be safe to say that if the late Ottoman society had not transformed the way it did between roughly the beginning of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it would have been highly unlikely for figures like Fatma Aliye and Kadriye Huseyin to become the pioneering intellectuals that they eventually did.

But why did the Ottomans feel the need to go down this path of reforms in the first place? What led them to adopt new ways of doing things? That, I think, is the point we need to start our exploration of the period of Ottoman reforms.

A miniature of Sultan Suleyman I from Suleymanname. Photo Credit: Wikimedia

“Why did the Ottoman Empire decline?”

This is one of the most common questions I get from people when I tell them that I’m a historian of the Ottoman Empire. It is also a question that makes me grimace with displeasure (as I am sure it would for any of my fellow Ottoman historians who come across this article and see its title) since it reflects a simplistic and completely flawed understanding of Ottoman history between the 17^th and 19^th centuries.

The rough framework that people have in their mind when they ask this question goes something like this: the Ottoman Empire was established in the late 13^th century, became this huge power that dominated Eastern Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East in the 15^th and 16th centuries, reached its peak politically, economically, and culturally around the early 17^th century, and then gradually declined and collapsed by the end of the First World War.

Not only does this view continue to reign supreme in the popular imagination (tune in to any news channel in Turkey, for instance, and chances are good that you’ll come across this narrative at one point or another), but it was once the dominant framework among Ottoman historians, as well.

Bernard Lewis, one of the most prominent Ottoman historians of his generation, for instance, devoted a whole chapter to the issue in his highly influential The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), with the not very surprising title of “The Decline of the Ottoman Empire.” In it, Lewis argued that the Ottoman Empire lost its power due to a combination of various factors, including incompetent rulers, economic problems, and failure to keep up with military, intellectual, and scientific developments that were taking place in Europe at the time.

Since the 1980s, Ottoman historians have worked hard to go beyond this paradigm, and it is not accepted as a viable theory anymore. (hence my grimace when I still hear the lingering effects of it.) In fact, calling someone a “declinist” is considered pretty much an insult at this point among Ottoman historians. Having said that, however, I think it is still worthwhile to take a moment and look at why and how this “decline paradigm,” as it later came to be called, emerged in the first place.

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Although we obviously cannot rely on one single element in explaining how the decline theory came about, we can argue that a key factor in this process was the source base the scholars used while constructing their arguments. When analyzed closely, we can see that historians who propagated an “Ottoman decline” at least partly based their theories on Ottoman literary works, especially a type of “mirrors for princes” literature called nasihatnames. Cemal Kafadar, a prominent historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire, captures this beautifully, arguing that the concept of the Ottoman decline has been “the legacy of Ottoman historical consciousness.”¹ What Kafadar means here is that the advocates of the decline theory took Ottoman literary forms such as nasihatnames, well, a little too literally, in constructing the idea of a decline.

So, what were these nasihatnames and what did they talk about? Simply put, nasihatnames were a literary genre that provided counsel or advice for rulers. Their roots in the Muslim world went back to Arabic and Persian literature, from which the Ottomans adopted them. They were written to provide rulers and statesmen with the necessary guidance on a variety of subjects, including statecraft, military issues, and diplomacy. They could also have a more didactic purpose in directing the rulers in their daily lives.

Not surprisingly, the production of nasihatnames increased during times of political or socio-economic turmoil, as was the case for the 17^th and 18^th-century Ottoman Empire. One key trope that these literary works mostly shared was the idea of a “golden age,” where the Ottoman Empire was thought to have reached its zenith militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. If only the rulers could return to that time, the authors of these nasihatnames argued, everything would be in perfect order once again.

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In a sense, the “golden age” narrative was an idealized representation of the Ottoman state. One of the most important features of this ideal was the absolute and personal rule of the Sultan. It was of utmost importance for the perfect working of the Empire for the Sultan to personally attend to the state business without any interference from anyone and rule with absolute authority. The model that the authors of these works usually had in mind when they elucidated this argument was Suleyman I (also known as Suleyman the Magnificent), during whose long reign (1520-1566), the nasihatname authors argued, the Ottoman state was working in perfect harmony and efficiency.

Keeping a strict division between different social classes was also seen as another hallmark of the ideal Ottoman state. This was particularly true for the separation between the “ruling classes,” which did not pay tax, and the reaya, which can be translated as the tax-paying subjects of the Empire. A key part of the ruling classes was the military, the core of which was the Janissaries, who had their own strict way of recruitment and training and who lived a rather monastic life, focusing mostly on martial discipline.

The Ottoman nasihatname authors, writing in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, strongly believed that the Ottoman state had deviated from all these principles that made the Empire so powerful. The Sultans, they argued, were not as active as they should have been in their efforts to rule, letting themselves be swayed by their viziers, or even worse, by the women in their harems. The reaya was infiltrating the ruling class through a number of dubious means, as a result of which the social order was breaking down. Meanwhile, the Janissaries, once the epitome of discipline and fierceness, were taking up trades and forming families (two things they were strictly forbidden before) and, as a result, were losing their edge on the battlefield. No wonder, these authors suggested, that the Ottoman Empire was wrestling with all kinds of problems, both externally (military defeats against European powers) and internally (rebellions, a gradual loss of central control in certain areas, economic crises, etc.).

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This ideal portrayal of the Ottoman state propagated by the members of the Ottoman intelligentsia greatly influenced modern historians of the Ottoman Empire until the 1980s. Taking it more or less at face value, these Ottoman historians argued that from the 17^th century onwards, the “classical” structure that made the Ottomans one of the most powerful empires in Europe started to come apart at the seams, as a result of which they went into a slow and tortuous period of “decline” that lasted almost 300 years and resulted with the Empire’s collapse in the early 20^th century. The reform period that the Ottomans went through in the 19^th century was mostly given short shrift and seen only as the hopeless efforts of a dying Empire to delay an already foregone conclusion.

This paradigm has come under scrutiny and challenge by a new generation of Ottoman scholars, writing in the 80s and 90s. They showed that there has never been a “golden age” where the Ottoman institutions operated in perfect order. In fact, they argued that most of the problems cited by Ottoman writers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries were already present much earlier, even in the reign of Suleyman I, who, as I’ve mentioned before, was portrayed as the ideal ruler.

Instead, this new generation of Ottoman historians came to see the 17^th and 18^th centuries not as a period of “decline” or a deviation from an imaginary ideal state, but more of a crisis and transformation at the end of which the Ottoman Empire managed to adopt new practices and transform itself in line with the demands of time. Focusing on different aspects of the Empire, scholars such as Cemal Kafadar, Surayia Farouqhi, Leslie Peirce, Baki Tezcan, and Jane Hathaway (among many, many others) demonstrated how the Ottomans transitioned into new institutional frameworks, reorganized their military and economic structure, and came up with new and innovative solutions to the problems that they faced. Seen through this perspective, it was obvious that not only did the Ottomans not “decline” in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, but they had an inner vitality that allowed them to continue to thrive amidst challenging circumstances.

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The end of the 18^th century was one such difficult period for the Ottomans, where the Empire was facing multi-thronged issues, including a humiliating defeat against Russia in 1774 and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, as well as serious challenges to the Sultan’s authority coming from local notables all corners of the Empire. There was (yet again) a sense of shock and existential crisis among the political and intellectual elites, as a result of which the Empire embarked on a journey that led it to undertake some of the most radical reforms in its long history.

This is where I will pick up the narrative next week. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

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1. Cemal Kafadar, “The Question of Ottoman Decline”, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, Vol 4, No:1-2, (1998). I strongly recommend this article to anyone who wants to learn more about this topic.