Close in proximity, the Ottomans and the Europeans were separated by a wide cultural gulf. Religion, however, was perhaps the least important dividing line. The Ottomans were ruled by a Turkish family, whose origins were, as many scholars have noted, shrouded in obscurity. There is as little known about Osman, the dynasty’s founder, as there is about Romulus and Remus, the mythic progenitors of Rome. There are almost no written records about the Ottomans for the first century of their existence, and their primary adversaries—Serbs, Hungarians, Byzantines, and the Turkish emirs in Anatolia, did not leave many accounts of the defeats that they suffered at Ottoman hands.
In time, Europe became familiar with the Ottoman state, but well until the nineteenth century, its inner workings remained opaque. The sultan and his harem became legendary, but few Westerners understood
how the Ottomans governed, fought, or lived. Western ambassadors in Istanbul wrote accounts of the imperial capital, but they had limited contact with the elite and were shown only those aspects of courtly life they were allowed to see. Not until the nineteenth century, when the Ottomans were forced to open up more of their society to foreign scrutiny, was the veil pulled aside, and even then, only partway.
One result of ignorance was imagination. In fanciful, often salacious accounts, Westerners conjured a picture of a sultan serviced by a harem of willing women guarded by eunuchs from sub-Saharan Africa and defended by a slave army of men taken as captives while still young boys and trained to a hard life as warriors who would just as soon die at the sultan’s command as breathe. In his throne room, surrounded by viziers plotting the next campaign against the West, the Ottoman sultan sat, shrouded in mystery. Like the Eastern potentates that he emulated, he seldom allowed visitors to gaze upon him, which only enhanced the aura of mystery. Westerners filled the gaps in their knowledge with fears and transformed the sultan into a holy warrior bent on extinguishing Christian power in order to fulfill what Muhammad had started and to avenge the Muslim world for the loss of Spain.
This mixture of half-truths and legends fed Western anxiety. Feared, loathed, and grudgingly admired, the sultan ruled a formidable empire on the borders of Europe. Though the Turks were only one of many different groups in the empire, the word “Turk” became a proxy for all things Ottoman, and not a positive one. For the English, as for most Europeans, “Turk” meant barbarism and savagery
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In the absence of evidence to the contrary, caricature was taken as fact. Even after the Ottoman Empire was exposed as a state like any other, with its own strengths and more than its share of weaknesses, the image never fully faded. In fact, it outlasted the empire itself. The memory of Turkish warriors fighting in the name of a Muslim God against the armies of Christendom survived the fall of the Ottomans and lodged itself in Western culture. When Turkey applied for membership in the European Union at the start of the twenty-first century, French, German, and Dutch voices murmured uncomfortably that Turkey was still too alien, too other, and perhaps too Muslim. Laced through these concerns were hints that having fought the Ottomans for centuries and finally triumphed, Europe was not about to allow the Turks to enjoy the fruits ofthat hard-won victory.
The reputation of the Ottomans also suffered from the nationalist movements that swept the Balkans and the Near East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First the Greeks in the 1820s and then the Hungarians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and, finally, the Arabs of the Near East defined themselves as nations that had been conquered, brutalized, and silenced by Ottoman autocrats. For the Greeks and other Balkan peoples, there was an added religious element: the Muslim Ottomans, they claimed, had oppressed Christian peoples. Even the Arabs, who caught the infectious bug of nationalism just before World War I, distanced themselves from the Ottomans, though their main bone of contention was more ethnic than religious.
Here as elsewhere, conflict has received the most attention, and in the West the religious undertones have been emphasized. Without question, the early Ottoman rulers considered themselves Muslim warriors. They called themselves
ghazis
, which in Arabic meant “holy raiders,” in order to link themselves to the companions of Muhammad and to the Arab dynasties that had ruled after his death. In their relations with the Christian West, the Ottomans were anything but peaceful. Once they had defeated Christian Byzantium and taken control of the Balkans, they turned to the last fortresses of the Frankish Crusaders on the islands of Rhodes, Crete, and Malta, and to the cities along the Danube, including Buda, Pest, and above all, Vienna.
But what is usually overlooked and forgotten is that the title of
ghazi
was only one of a long line of titles, which included not only Lord of Two Lands, but also Lord of Two Seas; Sultan of the Arabs, Persians, and Romans; Distributor of Crowns to the Rulers of the Surface of the Earth; Sovereign of the White Sea, Black Sea, Rumelia, Anatolia; Overlord of Rum and Karama, of Dulkadir and Diyarbakir, Azerbaijan, Syria, Aleppo, Egypt, Noble Jerusalem, Venerated Mecca and Sacred Medina, Jidda, Yemen, and Many Other Lands; and Thunderbolt of War, the World Conqueror. The Ottomans were proud of their victories, proud to style themselves as the heirs not just to the early caliphs but to Caesar and Rome and to the Persian monarchs of antiquity, proud to rule both Europe and Asia, both Jerusalem and the holy cities of Arabia, and proud that the monarchs of Europe feared and reviled them. The fact that the Ottomans were also Muslims who had won victories rivaled only by the caliphs of the seventh and eighth centuries was one laurel, but hardly the only one.
What is also forgotten is that for most of those five hundred years, the Ottomans were indifferent to the religion of their subjects. The empire was ruled by a small number of governors and judges and a formidable army barracked in the capitals of each major province. Except for the sultan and his family, membership in the ruling class was not based on race or religion. It was based on a system of organized enslavement of young boys. Taken from their villages, they were sent to schools in Istanbul, and in the imperial capital of Adrianople, and trained as soldiers or as bureaucrats. The soldiers were known as Janissaries, and many of them began life as Christian peasants, who then converted to Islam. Theirs was not, however, an orthodox Islam, but one suffused with the mysticism of a Sufi order known as the Bektashis that seems to have preserved many Christian rites.
Every year, Janissary corps would sweep through the villages of the Balkans and the Caucasus and collect a quota of children. Few aspects of Ottoman rule have generated as much controversy and ill will. By the nineteenth century, the practice had largely come to an end, but the memory was enough to rouse the Balkan peoples against their overlords. The Janissaries were slaves in the sense that their rights and their wealth, property, and status were at the whim of the sultan. But in many other respects, they were a privileged elite. Unlike the Africans enslaved in the Americas, the Janissaries were the ruling class of an empire and enjoyed the concomitant benefits. Though later generations of Westerners decried the forced recruitment, the opportunity to have sons rise high in the ranks of the empire was not seen as a grave injustice by many families. Besides, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, no peasants—whether Christian or Muslim—had expectations of Jeffer-sonian democracy. The Ottoman ruling class was harsh and unsentimental, but they differed from the rulers of Europe only in efficiency. When the kings of France or Spain needed to raise an army, their troops also entered villages and violently drafted eligible young men without asking permission. The recruitment of the Janissary corps in the Balkans and Greece was, in that sense, no different.
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While the Ottoman ruling class was Muslim, the empire was not, and Islam did not act as a glue holding together the disparate parts of the state. A majority of the population of the European lands controlled by the Ottomans was Christian and remained that way until the end. Even
in regions such as Egypt and Iraq where Muslims were in the majority, the Sunni Islam of the Ottoman ruling class was somewhat different than the Islam of many Arabs. On the whole, while the sultan proclaimed himself caliph and protector of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he seems to have cared not one whit about the religion of his subjects. No efforts were made to convert Christians and Jews, nor did the Ottomans try to enforce one version of Muslim law. Being a Muslim was no guarantee of better treatment by local governors, and being Christian or Jewish was not necessarily a burden to overcome.
While the Ottomans fought against the Christian states of Europe, they fought against the Shi’ite shahs of Iran with just as much intensity. In neither case was the propagation of Islam a primary motivation. The Ottomans were a dynasty bent on expanding and perpetuating their own rule. As with the Romans, the Mongols, the Han, and other empires, power was primary, and all else was secondary. Religion was at best an instrument of control. If the mantle of religion could be used to justify expansion, all the better. If religious toleration helped pacify subject peoples and maintain stability, so be it.
JEWS UNDER OTTOMAN RULE
THE OTTOMAN FORMULA
that stressed obedience to the sultan and indifference to the religion of subject peoples was developed before the fall of Constantinople, but it only became vital to the empire’s success after. By leaving the religion of his subjects alone, the sultan was able to use them to enhance the power of the state. For instance, in his effort to restore the glory of Constantinople, Mehmed ordered thousands of people throughout the empire to relocate. Some of these were Turks and Muslims, but many more were not. Greek Orthodox from Anatolian cities with needed skills were told to move, and though they were given assistance and guaranteed an income and jobs, they were not given a choice. Nor were the soldiers of the sultan’s armies, of course. And nor were thousands of Jews, many of whom lived in the Balkans. Their ability to act as intermediaries between the Muslim eastern Mediterranean and the Christian West meant that they could, and soon did, play a pivotal role in the commercial and economic success of the Ottoman state.
Under the Byzantines, Jews had been tolerated but hardly embraced. In Christian Constantinople, an affluent Jewish community performed the same function as economic intermediaries that they did in numerous other cities in the Mediterranean world. They were represented at the emperor’s court by a chief rabbi who was both a leader and an advocate. In the Byzantine system, his authority was narrow. Under the Ottomans, however, the Jews gained more autonomy and in time became active supporters of the sultan’s rule. After the conquest, Mehmed allowed the chief rabbi who had served the Byzantines to retain his position. This rabbi was not, as some have suggested, the head of all Jews in the Ottoman Empire, though in time the position would become the chief rabbi of Jewish lore. Initially, he was responsible only for the Jewish community of Constantinople, which was fairly small in 1453, but which soon swelled by thousands because of Mehmed’s resettlement policies.
Faced with an underpopulated capital and insufficient numbers of people capable of carrying out complicated tasks, Mehmed ordered thousands of Jews to move to Constantinople. They were singled out not because of their beliefs, but because they were a close-knit group that possessed skills that the Ottoman state dearly needed. The forced relocation of Jews from various parts of the Balkans and Anatolia could not have been pleasant for those made to move their homes, and there have been heated debates among scholars about how to characterize Mehmed’s edicts. Some have likened the removals to the pogroms and persecutions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Others, including the fifteenth-century Jewish poet Elijah Capsali, had little to say about the relocations and saw the Ottomans as a significant improvement over both the Western Christian regimes in Europe and the Eastern Christian rulers of Byzantium. Capsali, in fact, took the fall of Constantinople as a divine punishment against those who had abused the Jews and a sign of God’s favor for those who showed tolerance.
In short, there was nothing about Mehmed’s policies that discriminated against the Jews as Jews, or against any Christian denomination as Christian per se. The Ottoman bureaucracy treated all subjects as instruments of the state and servants of the sultan, to be used and disposed of as he saw fit. In that sense, all citizens of the empire were discriminated against by the sultan and the ruling elite, and had few rights separate from what the sultan permitted. In no part of the world in the fifteenth
century was the situation dramatically different. While the Jews who were forced to relocate to the new capital may have suffered, only through a very particular contemporary prism can it be said that they suffered because of their religion.
And by the end of the fifteenth century, the Jews of Constantinople were thriving, and Jewish communities in other parts of the empire were living secure, prosperous lives. Skepticism and fear during the first years of Mehmed’s reign gave way to acceptance and then outright enthusiasm. While Jews and Christians had to pay a head tax, these were offset by the tax benefits they received for setting up business first in Istanbul and then in other major cities. Jews dominated what primitive forms of banking there were, as well as trade in jewels, pearls, and satin. The Jewish community of Egypt remained intact, and when Egypt was finally conquered by the Ottomans early in the sixteenth century, they reaped economic benefits. And one foreign community of Jews found a home in the empire and were met with a warm embrace that contrasted sharply with what they had left behind.
In 1492, after the defeat of the Muslim kingdom of Granada, the triumphant monarchs of Spain fulfilled a long-standing ambition of the Spanish Catholic Church and ordered the expulsion of the Jews. With little time to prepare and in danger for their lives, thousands packed what they could and left the country. The cities of Western Europe shunned them, and North Africa was divided into petty principalities with little economic vitality. But the Ottomans announced that the exiled Jews of Spain were welcome and would receive aid and support, including transportation from Spain to the heart of the empire on the other side of the Mediterranean. Jews were allowed to move to Istanbul, but the sultan proclaimed that he would be particularly pleased if they settled in one of the oldest cities in the Balkans, Thessaloniki, also known as Salonica.