Shrinkage And Retreat

The fringes of this vast empire, however, none too surely held, were

already involving it in insoluble difficulties and imminent dangers. On

the one hand, in Asia, it had been found impossible to establish military

fiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, or anywhere east of it, on the system which

had secured the Osmanli tenure elsewhere. On the other hand, in Europe, as

we have seen, the empire had a very unsatisfactory frontier, beyond which br />
a strong people not only set limits to further progress but was prepared

to dispute the ground already gained. In a treaty signed at Sitvatorok, in

1606, the Osmanli sultan was forced to acknowledge definitely the absolute

and equal sovereignty of his northern neighbour, Austria; and although,

less than a century later, Vienna would be attacked once more, there was

never again to be serious prospect of an extension of the empire in the

direction of central Europe.



Moreover, however appearances might be maintained on the frontiers, the

heart of the empire had begun patently to fail. The history of the next

two centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, is one long record of

praetorian tumults at home; and ever more rarely will these be compensated

by military successes abroad. The first of these centuries had not half

elapsed ere the Janissaries had taken the lives of two sultans, and

brought the Grand Vizierate to such a perilous pass that no ordinary

holder of it, unless backed by some very powerful Albanian or other tribal

influence, could hope to save his credit or even his life. During this

period indeed no Osmanli of the older stocks ever exercised real control

of affairs. It was only among the more recently assimilated elements, such

as the Albanian, the Slavonic, or the Greek, that men of the requisite

character and vigour could be found. The rally which marked the latter

half of the seventeenth century was entirely the work of Albanians or of

other generals and admirals, none of whom had had a Moslem grandfather.

Marked by the last Osmanli conquest made at the expense of Europe--that

of Krete; by the definite subjugation of Wallachia; by the second siege of

Vienna; by the recovery of the Morea from Venice; and finally by an

honourable arrangement with Austria about the Danube frontier--it is all

to be credited to the Kuprili 'dynasty' of Albanian viziers, which

conspicuously outshone the contemporary sovereigns of the dynasty of

Osman, the best of them, Mohammed IV, not excepted. It was, however, no

more than a rally; for greater danger already threatened from another

quarter. Agreement had not been reached with Austria at Carlowitz, in

1699, before a new and baleful planet swam into the Osmanli sky.



It was, this time, no central European power, to which, at the worst, all

that lay north of the proper Byzantine sphere might be abandoned; but a

claimant for part of that sphere itself, perhaps even for the very heart

of it. Russia, seeking an economic outlet, had sapped her way south to the

Euxine shore, and was on the point of challenging the Osmanli right to

that sea. The contest would involve a vital issue; and if the Porte did

not yet grasp this fact, others had grasped it. The famous 'Testament of

Peter the Great' may or may not be a genuine document; but, in either

case, it proves that certain views about the necessary policy of Russia in

the Byzantine area, which became commonplaces of western political

thinkers as the eighteenth century advanced, were already familiar to east

European minds in the earlier part of that century.



Battle was not long in being joined. In the event, it would cost Russia

about sixty years of strenuous effort to reduce the Byzantine power of the

Osmanlis to a condition little better than that in which Osman had found

the Byzantine power of the Greeks four centuries before. During the first

two-thirds of this period the contest was waged not unequally. By the

Treaty of Belgrade, in 1739, Sultan Mahmud I appeared for a moment even to

have gained the whole issue, Russia agreeing to her own exclusion from the

Black Sea, and from interference in the Danubian principalities. But the

success could not be sustained. Repeated effort was rapidly exhausting

Osmanli strength, sapped as it was by increasing internal disease: and

when a crisis arrived with the accession of the Empress Catherine, it

proved too weak to meet it. During the ten years following 1764 Osmanli

hold on the Black Sea was lost irretrievably. After the destruction of the

fleet at Chesme the Crimea became untenable and was abandoned to the brief

mercies of Russia: and with a veiled Russian protectorate established in

the Danubian principalities, and an open Russian occupation in Morean

ports, Constantinople had lost once more her own seas. When Selim III was

set on a tottering throne, in 1787, the wheel of Byzantine destiny seemed

to have come again almost full circle: and the world was expecting a

Muscovite succession to that empire which had acknowledged already the

Roman, the Greek, and the Osmanli.



Certainly history looked like repeating itself. As in the fourteenth

century, so in the eighteenth, the imperial provinces, having shaken off

almost all control of the capital, were administering themselves, and

happier for doing so. Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Trebizond

acknowledged adventurers as virtually independent lords. Asia Minor, in

general, was being controlled, in like disregard of imperial majesty, by a

group of 'Dere Beys', descended, in different districts, from tribal

chieftains or privileged tax-farmers, or, often, from both. The latter

part of the eighteenth century was the heyday of the Anatolian feudal

families--of such as the Chapanoghlus of Yuzgad, whose sway stretched from

Pontus to Cilicia, right across the base of the peninsula, or the

Karamanoghlus of Magnesia, Bergama, and Aidin, who ruled as much territory

as the former emirs of Karasi and Sarukhan, and were recognized by the

representatives of the great trading companies as wielding the only

effective authority in Smyrna. The wide and rich regions controlled by

such families usually contributed neither an asper to the sultan's

treasury nor a man to the imperial armies.



On no mountain of either Europe or Asia--and mountains formed a large part

of the Ottoman empire in both--did the imperial writ run. Macedonia and

Albania were obedient only to their local beys, and so far had gone the

devolution of Serbia and Bosnia to Janissary aghas, feudal beys, and the

Beylerbey of Rumili, that these provinces hardly concerned themselves more

with the capital. The late sultan, Mustapha III, had lost almost the last

remnant of his subjects' respect, not so much by the ill success of his

mutinous armies as by his depreciation of the imperial coinage. He had

died bankrupt of prestige, leaving no visible assets to his successor.

What might become of the latter no one in the empire appeared to care. As

in 1453, it waited other lords.