The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF OTTOMAN WARFARE ~ 115
border warfare permitted the political integration of a poor and remote province
into the Ottoman imperial structure, secured employment of sorts for a number
of its young men and even gave it prestige in the eyes of sophisticated Istanbul
literati. 88
By contrast, once warfare could no longer be carried into the lands controlled
by the sultan’s enemies, trouble was in store for the inhabitants of the Empire’s
more central regions. With some justification, historical scholarship has dwelt on
the privilege of strong states, situated at the core of a given world economy, to
wage war on the territories of their opponents without ever allowing the
attendant destruction to approach their own lands. 89 After all, in the pre-modern
context it was always difficult to control the behaviour of troops on the march,
and they might wreak as much damage on the subjects of their own rulers as on
those of the enemy. Strategically speaking, it thus made sense to get all military
men onto foreign territory as speedily as possible. But a receding frontier could
also have a de-legitimizing effect because irregular troops, no longer needed to
harass the opponent, usually cut loose and terrorized the local population instead.
The entire phenomenon of Balkan banditry, an endemic disaster during much of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has even been explained as a consequence
of the dislodging of former border warriors from their previous habitats
on the frontier. 90 Moreover, during the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74/1181–8,
soldier-bandits, deserters and other robbers created such havoc in the Bulgarian
provinces that previously loyal subjects reacted to this failure of sultanic protection
by throwing in their lot with the Russian tsarina. Thus while the Ottomans in
their conflicts with the Habsburgs had often been able to carry the war into
enemy territory, or at least limit the fighting to the unfortunate Hungarian provinces,
they failed to do the same in their 1768–74/1181–8 conflict with
Catherine II. The result was a catastrophic de-legitimization of the sultan’s rule.
Another case in which prolonged warfare on the territory of a border province
undermined the Ottoman position concerns the eighteenth-century Morea (Peloponnese).
This province had been marginal in some ways even during the
seventeenth century, when we encounter the otherwise unprecedented case of an
Englishman taking up a local tax farm. 91 In the war of the Holy League
(1683–99/1094–1111), the province was conquered by the Venetians, who hoped
to find here a substitute for their recently lost colony of Crete. 92 As a result, the
Signoria so badly overtaxed the inhabitants that the latter received the Ottoman
re-conquest of 1714–15/1126–8 with some relief. 93
However, the reestablishment of sultanic power produced problems of its
own. As we have seen, the authorities decided to consider the Morea as a newly
acquired province (see Chapter 2). This policy allowed them to reassign taxation
rights and even the holdings of pious foundations. But it must have created a
degree of discontent among those people who had held these rights in the past,
and probably had counted on reestablishing themselves in the manner to which
they had become accustomed. On the other hand, the Ottoman government
permitted local notables, Christians included, a considerable share in the