The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ ON SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTS ~ 73
~ In conclusion: the Ottoman rulers within a set of alliances
As this brief survey will have shown, the Ottoman Empire from the midsixteenth
century onwards, and arguably even earlier, formed part of a network
of European alliances, and these political connections were considerably intensified
around 1700/1111–12. Such an imbrication in the European political system
did not contradict the intention of the sultans, and of the Ottoman political class
as a whole, to expand and protect the realm of Islam against the unbelievers. For
as Islamic religious law prescribed, in the Ottoman perspective such alliances
were always viewed as temporary. 179 As we have seen, in these matters the governing
class in Istanbul thought no differently from the rulers of European states
during the early modern period. When in a time of Ottoman strength, the French
kings did form alliances with the sultans, they did not consider these ties as permanent
either, but rather as a necessary – and indeed temporary – evil in the face
of Habsburg power.
However, alliances originally concluded for short periods of time might well
develop a dynamic of their own; for the kingdoms and empires involved, be they
Ottoman, French, Russian or Austrian Habsburg, were highly structured polities
that existed over many centuries, in spite of sometimes significant modifications
along their frontiers. Given the length of the common borders and ‘ideological’
conceptions of what it meant to be an Islamic sultan or a Catholic emperor, hostilities
between Ottomans and Austrian Habsburgs were very much a
phenomenon of the longue durée. As a result, after more or less lengthy periods
of abeyance, the Franco-Ottoman alliance was revived several times in the
course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the mid-1500s, its raison
d’être from the French point of view had been the ‘encirclement’ of Valois
France by Habsburg possessions, and to facilitate the expansionist policies of
Louis XIV, the alliance was resuscitated in the late seventeenth century. And
after 1750/1163–4, when Russian expansion had come to threaten Austrian concerns
in Walachia and elsewhere, Ottoman–Habsburg alliances might even be
formed, although such a community of interests would have been unthinkable as
late as beginning of the 1700s. 180
In the area of inter-state relations, no matter whether we adopt the Ottoman,
French or Habsburg viewpoint, the discrepancy between ideology and practice
was often considerable. Certainly the Ottoman ruling group, as well as the majority
of its Muslim subjects, regarded the sultan as the ever-victorious champion of
Islam against the unbelievers, and as the power that alone could expand Muslim
rule. But in practice the defeats of 1683–99/1094–1111, and a fortiori those of
the later eighteenth century, made it necessary for Ottoman goverments to
develop a defensive strategy. Moreover even before that period, the need to
secure the frontiers once obtained and the impossibility of dealing with all ‘infidel’
states at one and the same time, had induced the ever-pragmatic Ottoman
administration to establish alliances and ‘understandings’ with individual European
rulers. As to the perspective of the latter, eighteenth-century balance-of-