Rutledge Sea of Troubles

The European Conquest of the Islamic Mediterranean and the Origins of the First World War
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-0-86356-955-5
Verlag: Saqi Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 576 Seiten

In the mid-eighteenth century, most of the Mediterranean coastline and its hinterlands were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, a vast Islamic power regarded by Christian Europe with awe and fear. By the end of the First World War, however, this great civilisation had been completely subjugated, and its territories occupied by European powers. Sea of Troubles is the definitive account of the European conquest of the Levant and North Africa over three centuries. Ian Rutledge reveals the intense imperial rivalry between six European powers - Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary and Russia - who all jostled for control of the trade, lands and wealth of the Islamic Mediterranean. The competition between these states made their conquest a far more difficult and extended task than they encountered elsewhere in the world. Yet, as new contenders entered the contest, and as rivalries intensified in the early twentieth century, events would spiral out of control as the continent headed towards the First World War.

Ian Rutledge is an economist and historian. He earned his PhD in Economic History from the University of Cambridge and has taught at the Universities of London and Sheffield. An authority on the economic and political history of the Middle East and North Africa, his other publications include Enemy on the Euphrates: The Battle for Iraq, 1914-1921 (also by Saqi Books) and Addicted to Oil: America's Relentless Drive for Energy Security.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rutledge, Ian

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

The Islamic and Christian Worlds of the Eighteenth-Century Mediterranean

In this enlightened century the only things known about the Ottoman Empire are its size, its geographical position, never what is behind this colossus. Political analysis has not penetrated, nor even perceived the motor forces which drive this great machine, only the results, not the causes. For most writers the illusion and error which result from long distance, superficial and brief observations have only presented phantoms.1

The man who wrote these words, Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson,* was an Armenian Catholic, born in Istanbul in 1740, an Ottoman citizen and senior translator at the Swedish embassy.2 As such, he was a protégé (protected person), one of a privileged group of Ottoman citizens who, by virtue of their attachment to a European embassy, enjoyed exemption from taxation and the majority of Ottoman judicial procedures.† Perhaps surprisingly for a Christian, Mouradgea was an admirer of the Ottoman Empire, and his unfavourable comments about certain ‘writers’ were presumably aimed at the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ discourse about the ‘Orient’. The keynote of the Enlightenment, especially in its French version, was its attack on religious obscurantism and the extremes of absolute monarchy; but when French travellers and soldiers spent time in the Ottoman Empire – men like the Comte de Volney (1757–1820) and the Hungarian-born French military officer François Baron de Tott (1733–1793) – they viewed it through the prism of this critique of their own country and its institutions. As we shall see, most of the orientalist tropes found in the ‘degeneration and decline’ literature (‘oriental despotism’, ‘fanaticism’, ‘corruption’, etc.), which were noted in the Introduction, can be traced back to this Enlightenment image of the Islamic world.3

Mouradgea was not a visitor but an Ottoman born and bred, and living in an age when relations between the upper classes of the different religious and ethnic groups within the Empire were relatively harmonious. At the same time he considered himself to be a man of the Enlightenment. But, even as a Christian, he was nevertheless determined to reject those prejudiced accounts of what he considered his own nation. In his great unfinished work, , whose first volumes were published in French in 1788, he presented what is the most reliable description of the religious, legal and institutional structures of the later eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. And although he was not averse to offering criticisms, he not only took an optimistic view as to the Empire’s future progress but he argued that, whatever its faults, these were derived neither from the religion of Islam, nor from its laws, but merely from popular prejudices.4

Mouradgea would have been a teenager, learning his trade at the side of his translator father Ohannes, when, on 30 October 1757, they brought Prince Mustafa from the Cage. As cages go, Istanbul’s , in which Mustafa had been incarcerated for the past twenty-seven years, was less a forbidding prison than a modest place of compulsory confinement – a small, two-storey suite of rooms within the fourth court of the imperial Topkapi Palace. A marble terrace looked out across a small garden to the confluence of the Bosphorus with the waterway of the Golden Horn. The Cage had originally been surrounded by a high wall with no windows; but Mustafa’s predecessor and eldest cousin, Sultan Osman III (r. 1754–57), had somewhat improved conditions in the , to make it more open and less oppressive. Indeed, on occasion, Mustafa and his fellow royal prisoners were allowed excursions to other imperial palaces, albeit they were shut up in a similar fashion once they got there. In the rather understated words of M. Jean-Claude Flachat, a French merchant resident in Istanbul, it was an experience which would ‘make a welcome change for them’.5 Moreover, the old practice of denying the inmates of the the company of women – in case they fathered any children – had now been abolished, although the small number of concubines they were permitted were sterilised to achieve the same objective.

The was an innovation of the early seventeenth century. It replaced an earlier custom whereby each new sultan had all his remaining brothers and half-brothers strangled with a silken cord.6 The practice had originally been introduced by Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453,* and its rationale, in Mehmed’s own words, was ‘for the order of the World’; in other words to prevent deadly sibling rivalry leading to destructive civil wars. This radical solution reached its apogee at the accession of Mehmed III on 28 January 1595, when a record nineteen male siblings met this fate.7 However, by the early seventeenth century it was realised that, in the event of the reigning sultan having no surviving male offspring, mass fratricide carried the attendant risk of wiping out the whole Ottoman dynasty.

Accordingly, it was decided that a less drastic manner of avoiding conflict over the succession should be introduced. And so in 1622 the was built, into which all the reigning sultan’s younger siblings would be consigned. Accession to the sultanate was henceforth determined by the so-called ‘rule of elderness’, whereby all the males within an older generation were exhausted before the succession of the male of the next generation.8 Consequently, in each of the following twenty-one successions, there were relatively few instances of a son inheriting the throne. One or other of the reigning sultan’s surviving brothers could now theoretically get his turn in the succession, but they might be queuing in the for decades, languishing in a waiting room of potential Ottoman emperors, most of whom would never live long enough to achieve that lofty eminence.

However, for the forty-year-old Mustafa emerging from his place of confinement, his time had finally come. On his release from the , he would have first been met by the green-turbaned (the most senior Muslim cleric) and the current grand vezir Mehmed Ragib Pasa, in his rich, sable-trimmed, full-length white robe and towering, pointed white turban. Present also would have been the , resplendent in his scarlet coat, conical, pointed, scarlet hat and magnificent mustachios, who was charged with carrying the sultan’s sword over his left shoulder, and the sixty or so members of the imperial divan (State Council).

After the customary distribution of gifts to the divan and the minting of new coins, Mustafa was conveyed in the imperial galley up the Golden Horn to the mosque complex of Eyüp (Job), reputed to be the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad’s friend and standard bearer, killed sometime around 677 CE during the first Arab siege of Constantinople. There, in a ceremony equivalent to coronation, Mustafa was girded by the with the sword of Osman Gazi, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty. Henceforth, according to historic practice, he became the Sultan Mustafa III, Padishah of Islam,9 Servitor of the Two Holy Places (Mecca and Medina), the Shadow of God on Earth, and recipient of many other honorific titles.

Incarceration in the for a lengthy period, accompanied only by selected palace eunuchs, mutes and sterile concubines, was hardly conducive to acquiring the knowledge and experience required for the successful governance of a great empire. Indeed, Mustafa’s predecessor had proved a particularly inept ruler in an age when the Empire dearly needed a firm and decisive sultan. Osman III’s ministers must have therefore considered it a blessing when he died from apoplexy on 30 October 1757 on receiving news of a particularly grievous catastrophe to afflict the Empire: a few weeks earlier the annual pilgrimage caravan to Mecca and Medina carrying the sultan’s (banner) had been attacked by Bedouin tribes on its return journey to Damascus and had virtually been annihilated. The thousands of dead, left helpless to die in the desert, included one of Osman’s sisters.10

According to Baron de Tott, later artillery advisor to the Ottoman government, Mustafa III was welcomed to the throne because ‘the great believed him weak and that they could easily govern him’;11 but at least Mustafa was well educated. He had survived his years of incarceration reasonably well: in captivity he had studied mathematics, medicine and literature and had developed some proficiency in writing poetry. And although he lost no time in enjoying the sybaritic life of the court and its entertainments, he took a greater interest in the running of the Empire than many previous sultans, a task in which he received considerable support from his capable grand vezir, Mehmed Ragib Pasa, kinsman and close friend. Indeed, de Tott, who accompanied the French minister plenipotentiary M. Charles de Vergennes to Istanbul in May 1755, while generally prejudiced against all things Ottoman, gives a surprisingly even-handed portrait of the man...