The sultan and his vizier, who were occupied with a war against the Venetians over the island of Crete, viewed Sevi as a minor threat. In the greater scheme of the empire, he was insignificant, but even the insignificant
can irritate. As long as he remained in the provinces, he could be ignored. He may have been important to his followers, but he was a nonentity to the Ottomans—until he marched on Istanbul proclaiming the end of the empire and the coming of a new kingdom. Then he aroused a response.
Soon after arriving in Istanbul, Sevi was arrested. He might have been left in jail indefinitely, but the influx of pilgrims who had come to greet the new messiah was not something that the sultan was prepared to tolerate. On the orders of the vizier, who astutely used the movement to solidify his status as the sultan’s most humble servant, Sevi was taken to the summer palace a hundred miles from Istanbul in Edirne (Adri-anople), and offered a choice: he could suffer execution for inciting rebellion, or he could renounce his faith and convert. To the horror and astonishment of his followers, he decided to convert. According to most accounts, he did so willingly, even cheerfully, and required little coaxing before he denounced the religion of the Torah, recited the Muslim profession of faith—”There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet”—in Arabic, in front of the sultan, and took a new name, Aziz Mehmet Effendi.
The story, however, does not end there. Sevi was released from prison, and most of his followers drifted away, shocked that their messiah had committed an act of apostasy and embraced Islam rather than dying for his faith. A few, however, did not quite see it that way. Rather than interpreting what had happened as a repudiation, they claimed that Sevi’s actions were part of a master plan revealed in the kabbalah. His supposed conversion was a test of his followers. Jewish communities became sharply divided between those who remained faithful to Sevi’s vision and those who renounced him for having renounced them.
As for Sabbatai himself, he remained in Istanbul and Edirne, supported by a smaller group of acolytes. Some of them converted; some did not. Surrounded by an unlikely community composed of Jews, Muslims, and Jews who had converted to Islam, Sevi was once again at the center of his world, looked to for leadership and guidance. Soon after his release from prison, he proclaimed that he and his Muslim disciples were not really Muslims but were indeed fulfilling a mysterious kabba-listic prophecy. In 1672, the Ottoman authorities reacted to the provocation and exiled Sabbatai and his group to a remote part of the Albanian coast on the Adriatic, where he died in 1676.
For the sultan and his court, Sabbatai Sevi’s movement was a sideshow that for a brief moment looked as if it might lead to an uprising of the empire’s Jewish population. Revolts by disaffected groups were not uncommon but neither were they frequent. They happened, and they required attention. When the issue could not be resolved by suasion and money, it was handled with swift and brutal efficiency by the Janissaries. Sabbatai Sevi spared his followers certain death by his act of conversion, though whether that was part of his motivation we will never know. His memory survived in Jewish communities, and his life gave rise to legends and kabbalistic prophecies about the end of days. For the Ottomans, however, the movement barely registered.
That is itself a testament to the supreme capacity of the Ottomans to maintain order. Faced with an uprising led by a man who loudly announced his intention to overthrow the sultan, the government reacted calmly, deliberately, and effectively. The fact that the man was a Jew who claimed to be the messiah, as well as the fact that he proclaimed that his revelation would supersede not just the Old Testament but also any subsequent messages in the New Testament and the Quran, did not in and of itself agitate the Ottoman authorities. They were secure enough to tolerate outrageous claims. When Sevi crossed the line from rabble-rouser to rebel and marched on the imperial capital, only then was he arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. His crime had less to do with creed than with law and order.
Sevi’s movement tells us a good deal about the nature of the Ottoman state and about the status of non-Muslims within it. One of the most striking things was how quickly Sevi’s message spread throughout the empire and into Europe. Within months of announcing his mission and marching on Istanbul, word had reached every Jewish community in Europe and the Near East. The seventeenth century was hardly notable for the ease of travel and communication, yet knowledge of Sabbatai Sevi penetrated the farthest corners of Poland, Russia, Greece, and the Near East with remarkable speed. That shows how connected the Jewish community was, even though it was spread out among different states. Jews were international conduits not just of commerce but of information as well. Sevi’s story also highlights that one way the Ottomans were able to remain in control of their vast territory was through well-developed and equally well-maintained networks of both communication and transportation.
The movement also demonstrates just how indifferent to religion the Ottomans could be. As long as Sevi didn’t challenge the state, his actions were permitted. He could travel freely and unencumbered from one part of the empire to another, say what he wished, and never be required to answer to any Ottoman authority outside of Istanbul. He was forced out of different places not by the Ottomans, but by conservative rabbis who were concerned about their own positions and his potential to unseat them. Sabbatai Sevi lived his entire life in the Ottoman Empire, but even as a rebel, his contact with the state was limited. Once he had converted, he was left alone, and only after repudiating his conversion and hinting that his movement would again challenge the sultan did the state once again take action against him.
STRENGTH BECOMES WEAKNESS
THE WAY
that the Ottomans handled Sevi is emblematic of the way they managed an imperium of different races, religions, and peoples. They took Occam’s Razor to heart, and believed that the simplest solution was usually the best. They understood that in matters of state, less was often more, and that to maintain the equilibrium, they would take action only when it was forced upon them.
That allowed communities as diverse as Jews, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Moroccans, Egyptians, Bulgars, Serbs, and Turks to thrive. The tolerance that permitted communities to go about their lives and pursue their own particular ambitions was a strength. The fact that Istanbul contained Janissaries, Ottoman princes, Armenian and Greek merchants and craftsmen, and Jewish doctors, to name a few, contributed to its greatness. Some of the world’s most vital urban centers have been the product of different groups living next to one another, if not actually with one another. Rome in its imperial grandeur teemed with peoples from every corner of Europe and the Mediterranean, and New York in the nineteenth century flourished with a population that consisted mostly of immigrants.
Ottoman diversity amazed the elites of Europe. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the colorful, erudite wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman court, wrote an astute account of Ottoman
life. In addition to deflating some of the cherished English myths of the lascivious harem, Lady Montagu described an Istanbul defined by variety. “My grooms,” she wrote, “are Arabs, my footmen, French, English and German, my nurse an Armenian, my housemaids Russian, half a dozen other servants Greeks; my steward an Italian; my Janissaries Turks, [and] I live in the perpetual hearing of this medley of sounds.” There was nothing unusual about the Montagu household retinue. It was a microcosm of a cosmopolitan society. Little did Lady Montagu realize that the empire was slowly decaying.
When the empire finally crumbled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the first casualties was tolerance. Armenians suffered near annihilation, and Christians in the Balkans were brutalized. But these events should not stand as an indictment of earlier centuries, or be used as a proxy for five centuries of Ottoman history. Tolerance and coexistence were real, even if they dissipated at the end.
If tolerance was an Ottoman strength, lack of curiosity about the wider world was a weakness. The states of Europe, locked in deadly competition with one another, could not afford to be insular. As they jockeyed for advantage, they spread throughout the known and the unknown world. That meant not just voyaging to the Americas and beyond, but also paying more attention to the Ottomans.
Lucrative trade was reason enough to attract the revenue-hungry European states. Given that the Ottomans were less interested in coming to them (at least not until the eighteenth century), they came to the Ottomans. The empire accommodated them with the same level of indifference that it accorded to protected minorities, but Ottoman officials did make it clear that European merchants and official representatives were to limit their activities to trade. That was fine with the Europeans, who proceeded to open consulates and offices in the major ports and trading centers. The only condition they demanded was the right to be tried in their own courts. The Ottomans, accustomed to allowing the
millets
to govern themselves, agreed. They also permitted select nations to pay lower tariffs on the goods they imported and exported, which was a boon to trade but ultimately a bane to the Ottoman treasury. Known as “capitulations,” the self-governance that foreigners in the empire enjoyed became a wedge that helped the states of Europe undermine the Ottomans. Though the system initially
spurred economic activity to the mutual benefit of European merchants and the Ottoman state, as European power grew and Ottoman influence waned, the Ottomans came to regret the concessions they had made.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was clear to the major European powers that the Ottomans were becoming weaker. The Janissaries were no longer a premier fighting force, and instead were corrupt, undisciplined, and unable to compete with the more technologically advanced armies of the West. While the Ottomans suffered significant defeats on their borders north of the Balkans and in the Caucasus, these were not yet severe enough to shake the complacency. Said one wise European envoy,
The Ottomans will probably persist in their errors for some time, and submit to be repeatedly defeated for years, before they will be reconciled to such a change; so reluctant are all nations, whether it proceeds from self-love, laziness, or folly, to relinquish old customs: even good institutions make their progress but slowly among us The Turks are now an instance of the same; for it is neither in courage, numbers nor riches, but in discipline and order that they are defective.
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The end of the eighteenth century brought more military setbacks. The Russians, flush from the reforms of Peter the Great decades earlier, expanded their reach. As the tsar’s armies advanced south, the Ottomans were swept aside. The Russian victories signaled to the other states of Europe that the Ottomans were now an easy mark, and had it not been for the French Revolution and the subsequent wars that racked the continent, the empire might have faced even greater pressures. Instead it was given a respite, and successive sultans used the opportunity to make the first tentative steps toward change.
For too long, the Ottoman ruling class, not to mention most of the empire’s inhabitants, mistook internal stability for strength. At the end of the eighteenth century, the court still treated foreigners with disdain, and still demanded obeisance from European envoys. Ottoman emissaries to foreign states expected the sort of deference that the Romans had demanded from the Gauls and were shocked and appalled when that was not forthcoming. Many Europeans saw through the veil of vanity
and observed an arrogant, decrepit state. In the words of one English envoy:
It is undeniable that the power of the Turks was once formidable to their neighbors not by their numbers only, but by their military and civil institutions, far surpassing those of their opponents. And they all trembled at the name of the Turks, who with a confidence procured by their constant successes, held the Christians in no less contempt as warriors than they did on account of their religion. Proud and vainglorious, conquest was to them a passion, a gratification, and even a means of salvation, a sure way of immediately attaining a delicious paradise. Hence their zeal for the extension of their empire; hence their profound respect for the military profession, and their glory even in being obedient and submissive to discipline.
Besides that the Turks refuse all reform, they are seditious and mutinous; their armies are encumbered with immense baggage, and their camp has all the conveniences of a town, with shops etc. for such was their ancient custom when they wandered with their hordes. When their sudden fury is abated, which is at the least obstinate resistance, they are seized with a panic, and have no rallying as formerly. The cavalry is as much afraid of their own infantry as of the enemy; for in a defeat they fire at them to get their horses to escape more quickly. In short, it is a mob assembled rather than an army levied. None of those numerous details of a well-organized body, necessary to give quickness, strength, and regularity to its actions, to avoid confusion, to repair damages, to apply to every part to some use; no systematic attack, defense, or retreat; no accident foreseen, nor provided for….
The artillery they have, and which is chiefly brass, comprehends many fine pieces of cannon; but notwithstanding the reiterated instruction of so many French engineers, they are ignorant of its management. Their musket-barrels are much esteemed but they are too heavy; nor do they possess any quality superior to common iron barrels which have been much hammered, and are very soft Swedish iron. The art of tempering their sabers is now lost, and all the blades of great value are ancient. The naval force of the Turks is by no means considerable. Their grand fleet consisted of not more than seventeen or eighteen sail of the line in the last war, and those not in very good condition; at present their number is lessened.
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