The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ INTRODUCTION ~ 5
twentieth centuries, members of these elites may act in response to what they perceive
as public opinion – and in the Ottoman realm, a comparable tendency went
back very far, as high-level officials ignored the wishes and expectations of Istanbul’s
rank-and-file janissaries and even ordinary craftsmen at their own peril. 7
It is unnecessary to be dogmatic about these matters and assert that all major
foreign policy decisions are taken for domestic reasons. But the phenomenon is
certainly common enough to be taken seriously, for the early modern period as
well as for the twentieth century. Thus we may assume that Ottoman decisions
concerning war and peace were often made after struggles between different factions
within the elite, struggles which are, in fact, well documented from the
second half of the sixteenth century onwards. 8 A certain faction might assume
that its interests were best served by war with Iran rather than by another campaign
against the Habsburgs, and vice versa. In the case of serious reverses, a
different faction might gain the day and initiate a change of policy. Once again,
this is a widespread phenomenon in all manner of states, which can be observed
in the Ottoman polity. 9
At the same time, an emphasis upon domestic divisions also serves to place
‘geopolitical’ claims into perspective; to take but one example, it has sometimes
been asserted that the Ottoman Empire was obliged to conquer Crete because the
island’s geographic situation allowed its possessor to impede communications
between Istanbul and Egypt. 10 A glance at the map shows that Crete did, and
does, in fact occupy a strategic position. But if holding the island had been as
vital to Ottoman state interests as some defendants of geopolitics may claim,
then it is hard to understand why neither Süleyman the Magnificent nor his
immediate successors made any attempt to conquer it. I would therefore assume
that the undoubted strategic value of the island became an issue over which an
Ottoman government decided to go to war only during a very specific conjuncture.
Once again, factional struggles within the elite during the reign of the
mentally unbalanced Sultan Ibrahim surely played a part. But, in addition, a
major factor was doubtless the weakness of Venice. For centuries, the Signoria
had governed the island, but during the years following 1600/1008–9, Venetian
commerce had contracted and its traditional hinterland in central Europe had
been lost, due to the devastation caused by the Thirty Years War. 11 Thus the time
seemed propitious for annexing yet a further piece of the erstwhile colonial
empire of the Signoria. Throughout the present book, we will encounter cases in
which momentary expediency of the kind alluded to here inflected long-term
policies, and we will have occasion to argue the case of contingency versus
system-based constraints. Similar struggles among the governing elite are well
attested for other major campaigns as well, including the re-conquest of Yemen
in the 1560s/967–77 and the war over Cyprus during the early 1570s/978–81. 12
In the present study ‘imperatives’ of all kinds, religio-legal as well as geopolitical,
will be played down; and this means that intra-elite conflicts will be given
their due weight, particularly in matters of what we today would call ‘foreign
policy’.