The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

56 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
Ottomans held Tabrīz until 1729/1141–2, when they were driven out by Nādir
Shah. By this time their administration had produced an impressive number of
archival records, which still constitute one of our major stocks of primary
sources concerning pre-nineteenth-century Tabrīz. Ottoman reconquests during
the 1730s/1142–52 proved ephemeral and in 1736/1148–9 the border decided
upon a century earlier, in the treaty of a r-i Shīrīn, was reestablished. 115
K. s.
The confusion engendered by the disintegration of the Safavid state also
encouraged Peter the Great of Russia (1675–1728/1085–1141) to attempt an
incursion into the Caucasus. In 1722/1134–5 an army, some of the time commanded
by Tsar Peter in person, conquered Derbend, Baku and, in a naval
expedition across the Caspian, Reshd in Gilān. In a peace treaty concluded a year
later, the tsar was able to hold on to these conquests. Moreover he tried to ensure
that, in the troubled situation obtaining in Iran at that time, the Ottoman sultan
did not place his own candidate on the throne in I fahān. 116 s.
Thus the Russian
state, with its newly revamped military machine, had begun to make claims for
territory in a region where the Ottoman Empire previously had been the only
competitor of the shahs. Even if the conquests of 1722–3/1134–6 did not remain
in the hands of the tsars for very long, the fact that they had taken place at all
indicated a major change in the balance of power in the Caucasus and Caspian
regions. 117
At an earlier point in Tsar Peter’s reign, in 1711/1122–3, there had been direct
conflict between the Ottoman and Russian empires to the north of the Black Sea,
which had ended very badly for Peter I’s army. Only the hesitations of the Ottoman
commander Baltacı Mehmed Paşa prevented a total defeat by the river Prut.
This success may well have induced Ottoman sultans and viziers to take the
emerging power to the north less seriously than they might otherwise have done.
However, indications of future Ottoman difficulties are visible at least to historians
with the benefit of hindsight. Thus the power of attraction that the Russian
state had developed with respect to the Empire’s Orthodox subjects became visible
when the Moldavian hospodar Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723/1083–1136),
one of the more important southeastern European intellectuals of his time, threw
in his lot with Tsar Peter. After all, Cantemir had lived in Istanbul for decades,
spoke and read Ottoman and had been in contact with many educated Istanbullus.
Cantemir, whose history of the Ottoman Empire, while conventional in itself,
was enriched by copious notes reflecting the Istanbul folklore of his time, ultimately
followed Tsar Peter’s armies into Russian territory (1711/1122–3). In so
doing, he was to precede a long line of Ottoman-born Orthodox merchants, intellectuals
and even military men who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
gave up their allegiance to the sultans for careers in the Russian state. 118
On the western border, 1718/1130–1 marked the date of the treaty of Passarowitz/Pasarofça,
which closed a series of wars that had gone badly for the
Ottoman Empire. In a sense military difficulties on the western front had first
become obvious during the short war of 1663–4/1073–5. However, the
Habsburgs had been so preoccupied on their own western borders that they were