Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  The sequence of events that led to Ibrahim's assassination began with the arrival in Istanbul on 6 August 1648 of a senior Janissary officer from Crete, bearing urgent requests for reinforcements and supplies. While awaiting an audience with the sultan, the officer informed his colleagues of the failure of the central government to supply the troops on campaign. Hearing of this, and fearing that he would be blamed, Grand Vizier Ahmed Pasha attempted to have the officer killed, but he escaped and complained about the chaos in Crete to the Chief Mufti, who consulted with other members of the clerical elite and the leading judges of the city. The following day a group of conspirators met in a mosque to discuss appropriate action.

  After consulting Ibrahim's mother, Kösem Sultan, the Chief Mufti went to the palace to demand the appointment of a new Grand Vizier. Ibrahim started to shout abuse and attacked bystanders with his stick; the conspirators retaliated by strangling Ahmed Pasha, and throwing his body into the street where the crowd swiftly dismembered it (hence his later nickname Hezarpare: ‘Thousand pieces’). Early on 8 August the conspirators sent a letter to Ibrahim demanding that he get rid of some concubines and all of his furs, that he pay the arrears of his troops, and that he restore all the goods unjustly confiscated from his subjects. Ibrahim read their letter and promptly tore it up. The angry troops now asked the Chief Mufti ‘what did someone who refused to accept the justice of God deserve; and he replied, having read the books of the Law, that the subjects of such a prince were dispensed of their duty to be faithful to him’. He therefore issued a fatwā ordering Ibrahim's deposition on the grounds that he was incapable of ruling the empire and protecting the Muslim faith.37

  Guards now persuaded Ibrahim that, for his own protection, he should retire to an inner apartment – and promptly locked the door behind him. Shortly afterwards a large number of Janissaries, accompanied by the Chief Mufti, forced their way into the palace. Finding Ibrahim already confined, they sought out his oldest son Prince Mehmet, aged seven, and ‘in the name of the ‘ulema and the soldiers’, hailed him as the new sultan. The next day, the Janissaries opened the treasury of the late Ahmed Pasha and found a huge fortune in cash, which they appropriated as their traditional ‘accession bonus’ (equivalent to a full year's salary); but at this point Ibrahim escaped from confinement (probably freed by one of his concubines) and, with a sword in his hand, searched the palace intending to kill Mehmet. Eventually guards overpowered him and locked him in the ‘cage’ where he had lived before his accession, and there the leading conspirators (including the Chief Mufti) confronted him and denounced his failures: ‘You have ruined the world by neglecting the affairs of sharî'a and the religion of the people. You spent your time with entertainment and slothfulness while bribery became widespread and wrongdoers fell upon the world. You wasted and squandered the state treasury.’ Balthasar de Monconys, a French visitor in the capital, claimed that ‘such a peaceful revolt has never been seen: the whole process took only 40 hours, and affected only the sultan, his chief vizir and one judge’.38

  Nevertheless, Ibrahim continued to scream and rage in his sealed room, gaining the sympathy of some members of his household, while outside the palace the sipahis, who had not received an ‘accession bonus’ like the Janissaries, resolved to restore him. To avoid such a development, on 18 August 1648 the Chief Mufti issued another fatwā that legitimized the second regicide in Ottoman history and personally ensured that his decree was put into immediate effect. In the words of Monconys:

  This unfortunate monarch, who 12 days before exercised absolute command over large parts of three continents, was strangled by a hangman in the capital city of his empire, and in the palace where his son was acknowledged as king and where his mother issued the principal orders of state.39

  Up to this point, the capital had remained calm but now rioting broke out, led by medreses students and junior palace officials. Both groups, their career aspirations blocked by the lack of money to pay salaries, gathered in the Hippodrome to make their protest; but the Janissaries surrounded and butchered them. Such savagery, coupled with the continuation of high food prices as a result of the Venetian blockade, provoked widespread rioting. Robert Bargrave, an English resident in the city, complained of the ‘daily hazards of being stabbed by the drunken sottish Turks, who supposing all to be Venetians that wore our western [dress] (as if the world were divided between Venetians and Turks)’, and ‘having lost in the war perhaps some near relations, were always apt to mischief us’.40

  Kösem Sultan – Mehmet's grandmother as well as Ibrahim's mother – and her supporters retained power until the summer of 1651, when continuing food shortages, heavy taxation, currency devaluation and military defeats provoked a new round of rioting in Istanbul. The city's tradesmen, who claimed that they had received a dozen demands for new taxes that year alone, shut their shops and demanded that the Chief Mufti go to the palace, as in 1648, to demand reforms. The frightened sultan, only nine years old, agreed to abolish all taxes imposed since the reign of Suleiman the Lawgiver a century before. To restore order, Kösem Sultan turned once more to the Janissaries for support, but she faced a more formidable adversary within the palace: Turhan, Mehmet's mother, supported by a faction among the eunuchs. In a desperate bid to retain power, Kösem decided to kill the young sultan and replace him with one of his brothers – one with a more docile mother – but Turhan's supporters acted first and had her strangled and dragged naked from the harem.

  The brutal murder of Kösem, after more than three decades at the centre of power, outraged her allies among the Janissaries, who swore vengeance; but Turhan and her associates thwarted them by unfurling the Standard of the Prophet, one of the most sacred objects of Islam, and sending out town criers to urge all Muslim men and women to rally to the Standard. Thousands flocked to the palace from all over the capital, fully armed, and for three weeks the fate of the empire hung in the balance until the recalcitrant Janissary leaders perished. Their confiscated wealth served to win the allegiance of the rest.

  Nevertheless the new regime failed to solve the two most pressing problems that faced the empire: balancing the budget and defeating the Venetians. In 1653 Sultan Mehmet, now 14, invited his leading advisers to suggest solutions. ‘My expenditure is not as great as that of my father, and the revenues are the same,’ he pointed out. ‘What then is the reason that the income of the state no longer suffices to cover the expenditure, and why is it that money cannot be raised for the fleet and other important matters?’ After some discussion, Mehmet invited each of his ministers to submit written recommendations. One of them, Katib Çelebi, calculated that in 1648, the year of the regicide, the central treasury had received 362,000,000 akçes but spent 550,000,000. Two years later, income had soared to 532,000,000 akçes, but expenditure had risen, to 677,000,000. By 1653, according to Katib Çelebi, ‘expenditure exceeds revenue by 160,000,000 akçes’ and the government had already committed the yield of several taxes payable in future years. The main problem, he argued, was the catastrophic fall in receipts from the principal tax on property, while the war with Venice continued to drain the emperor's available resources (Fig. 22). Katib Çelebi suggested that only reducing the size of the standing army would cut spending significantly, and that only restoring the rule of law to the countryside, so that peasants would return to their land and resume farming and taxpaying, would increase revenues sufficiently. If the state failed to act, he predicted, ‘it is certain that the curse of disobedience to the law, and the burden of injustice and violence, will ruin the empire’.41

  Katib Çelebi had no illusions about the fate of his proposal: ‘Since I knew that my conclusions would be difficult to apply,’ he wrote in another of his works, ‘I took no further trouble about it.’ He merely hoped that ‘a sultan of some future time will become aware of it’ and act before it was too late. Instead, however, in 1653 Mehmet and his council rejected a Venetian peace offer (because the Republic refused to abandon Crete), and two years later they ended
another military revolt in Anatolia by incorporating the mutineers and their leaders into the standing army, thus raising its size from 71,000 to 130,000 soldiers – and adding 262,000,000 akçes to the expenditure of the central treasury.42

  As Katib Çelebi observed in another of his numerous writings, ‘It is a fact that when disputation and disagreement on any topic have once arisen among a people it is not possible, even after they have reached agreement, for that disputation or disagreement to be entirely eradicated.‘43 As long as the Venetian forces maintained their blockade of Istanbul, and held out on Crete, the palace factions in Istanbul continued their fruitless ‘disputation and disagreement’ on how to reverse the empire's decline. A stream of ministers came to power, each with a new policy initiative, only to lose their heads when they failed to produce instant success: in 1655 and 1656, seven Grand Viziers came and went, some within a matter of weeks. One lasted a single day. In March 1656 another attempt to balance the budget through a savage currency devaluation provoked another mutiny, when the city garrison found that no shopkeepers would accept payment in the virtually worthless new coins. The Janissaries once again marched on the palace and demanded 30 of the sultan's ‘wicked advisers’. Mehmet reluctantly complied, and they were murdered and hanged upside down from a great plane tree in the main public square of the capital – the fourth regime change in eight years.

  With no effective government to oppose them, the Venetians routed the Ottoman fleet yet again and this time occupied the Aegean islands of Tenedos and Lemnos, which virtually cut Istanbul off from the Mediterranean. Many inhabitants, fearing that the Venetians would launch a direct attack, sold their property and left the capital. With provincial governors refusing to send money to the central administration, and the capital on the brink of starvation, the future of the Ottoman state seemed bleak indeed. Popular discontent reached such a level that, once again, the sultan's fate hung in the balance: ‘Public talk ran very hard against him,’ noted a foreign visitor, ‘so that upon the least unlucky turn and new disgrace in their public affairs, he stood in great hazard of a revolution’.44

  22. The Ottoman empire at war, 1630–1700.

  The sultans were almost constantly at war during the seventeenth century. Until the 1680s, they mostly managed to fight on only one front at a time, but for the last fifteen years of the century the Ottoman empire faced attacks from all its European enemies – as well as domestic rebellions and mutinies.

  The Return of Stability

  The Kadizadeli preachers, as usual, blamed all disasters on religious innovation. They had lost some influence while Kösem Sultan dominated government policy because she favoured Sufis, but after her murder in 1651 the Kadizadelis secured new legislation against smoking and drinking and approval for the destruction of certain Sufi lodges. Now, in 1656 they laid plans to demolish all dervish lodges throughout the capital, and all minarets except one on each mosque ‘to ensure that Istanbul would reflect the Prophet's Medina’.45

  The onslaught never took place, because on 15 September 1656 Mehmet IV appointed Köprülü Mehmet Pasha as Grand Vizier. A devşirme boy from Albania, now aged almost 80, Köprülü had previously held only minor government offices, but he possessed a deep understanding of the inner workings of the Ottoman state. Before accepting office as Grand Vizier, he conducted intense negotiations with ‘the palace’, gaining the support of Turhan Sultan, Mehmet's mother, and of the Chief Mufti and the ’ulema for a pre-emptive strike against the Kadizadelis. When a few days later they refused to call off their planned attack on the Sufi lodges, Köprülü had their leaders arrested and exiled. Following this success, he executed several unpopular individuals, most notably the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, whom he accused of treason, and many of the Janissaries who had surrendered Tenedos to the Venetians. When part of the capital's garrison rebelled against these arbitrary acts, Köprülü played off the sipahis against the Janissaries, thus cementing his authority. He then asked the Chief Mufti to certify that all the actions he had taken thus far had been legal. The official obliged but expressed surprise at the request. ‘In this day and age,’ Köprülü Mehmet replied, ‘when everyone constantly changes his mind and switches allegiance, I wanted to secure your support on paper.‘46

  Köprülü also mobilized religious support for an offensive against Venice. He ordered all the palace pages named Mehmet (after the Prophet) to recite the opening verse of the Qur'an every day until the end of the campaign; and he commanded 101 men to recite the entire Qur'an 1,001 times in the principal mosques of the capital.47 Confident that these measures would produce a miracle, Köprülü led the Ottoman fleet in person to fight the Venetians. He was not disappointed: the Venetian garrisons surrendered Lemnos and Tenedos, thus at last breaking the blockade of the capital and restoring the vital supply of food from Egypt. Next, Köprülü led an army into the Balkans, apparently intending to attack Venetian possessions on the Adriatic coast, but a revolt in Anatolia called him back. The rebel leader, Abaza Hasan, governor of Aleppo (the third city of the empire), had won widespread support from other regional governors in Anatolia and Syria, and preachers began to hail him as the ‘renewer’ and the ‘messiah’ who would restore the Islamic community to purity. He and his supporters demanded that the sultan depose his Grand Vizier.

  This presented Mehmet IV with a major challenge. Although he realized that refusal to sacrifice Köprülü would probably unleash a civil war, the sultan secured a fatwā from the Chief Mufti condemning the rebels: ‘Since they committed an act of oppression against the sultan, their blood can be shed lawfully: those who cause Muslim armies to abandon their fight with infidels by perpetrating sedition are worse than infidels.’ After endorsement by the ’ulema of Istanbul, multiple copies of the fatwā went out, together with a call for all adult males to fight against the rebels. The Little Ice Age also helped to rescue Köprülü: the landmark winter of 1657–8 followed by a failed harvest in Anatolia made it impossible for the rebels to maintain their army, and gradually support for the insurrection dissipated. Early in 1659 Abaza Hasan and his lieutenants surrendered against a promise of clemency – only to be executed.48 Köprülü Mehmet now sent his trusted lieutenant, Ismail Pasha, to round up renegades, to end unjustified tax exemptions and to confiscate all illegally held firearms. His success is reflected in two celebrated contemporary anecdotes. The first concerns a town in Anatolia that boasted 2,000 descendants of the Prophet Mohammed, each one therefore entitled to tax exemption: Ismail's investigation sustained the claims of only 20 individuals and he ordered the other 1,980 to pay not only current taxes but also full tax arrears for the preceding decade. The second anecdote relates that, after the sweep to confiscate guns (said to have secured 80,000 weapons), a peasant noticed a partridge chirping defiantly in the woods: ‘Well, you may chirp,’ he said wistfully, ‘your patron, Ismail Pasha, got all our guns.‘49

  The Little Ice Age also produced the greatest setback of Köprülü Mehmet's five-year tenure as Grand Vizier. In 1659–60 the lands around the Aegean and Black Seas experienced the worst drought in a millennium: no snow fell over the winter and no rain fell during the spring. In Romania, according to a peasant sale contract, ‘because of the dearth sent to us by God, we wanted to sell our property to our relatives, but they refused, and left us to die from hunger'; while, according to a chronicler, hunger forced others to sell their children. In Transylvania, a senior official noted in his journal that meagre harvests caused widespread starvation, so that ‘Transylvania never knew such misery as this last year’.50 The combination of drought and extreme heat turned the wooden buildings of Istanbul into a tinderbox, and in July 1660 a fire of unparalleled ferocity destroyed two-thirds of the capital, causing the minarets on the mosques to burn like candles. The chief casualty was the area where most of the capital's Jewish and Christian populations lived: 7 synagogues and at least 25 churches burned to the ground.

  Such was Köprülü Mehmet's hold on power that he survived these disasters, to
o, and the following year he died in his bed and passed on his office of Grand Vizier to his 26-year-old son Köprülü Fazil Ahmed: a peaceful transition with few parallels in seventeenth-century Ottoman history (and the first time a son had ever succeeded his father to the office). Almost immediately the new Grand Vizier, who had previously been a preceptor in a medrese, invited a charismatic Kadizadeli preacher named Vani Mehmet Efendi to join him in Istanbul. Following the example of Kadizade Mehmet a generation before, Vani attributed the Great Fire to abandoning the religious practices of the first Muslims. Once again, the sultan paid heed and forbade the consumption of tobacco, coffee and alcohol; condemned musical performances, public singing, dancing and chanting; prohibited any unsupervised meetings between unmarried people of the opposite sex; and insisted on the strict enforcement of the sharî'a. He also destroyed popular Sufi tombs, and exiled or executed Sufi leaders.51 Vani and other preachers also claimed that the disproportionate destruction of property belonging to Jews in the Great Fire of Istanbul was a sign of divine displeasure and called for legislation to prevent them from returning to the area. Köprülü Fazil Ahmed duly confiscated all the lands where synagogues had stood before the fire and put them up for auction: since he forbade non-Muslims to make a bid, the area became instantly Islamized. To symbolize the change, and to proclaim her own growing authority, the sultan's mother Turhan sponsored the completion of the huge ‘new mosque’ (Yeni Cami) in the area. When it opened in 1665, Vani Mehmet Efendi became its first preacher and his sermons there continued both to assert the supremacy of Muslim traditions and to criticize the Jews.52

  The Messianic Moment of Shabbatai Zvi

  These changes profoundly unsettled and alarmed the Jewish population throughout the Ottoman empire. Some were already on edge because the Jewish calendar had just begun a new century (5400: 1640 in the Christian calendar) and each new century normally occasioned a resurgence of Jewish Messianism. In addition, the years before 5400/1640 had witnessed a weakening of the authority of both rabbis and traditional texts (Torah and Talmud) among some Jewish groups, in favour of new sources of authority. One of these was Kabbalah (literally ‘something received’), a strain of Judaism that exalted mysticism and revelation as well as tradition and Torah, and revered prophets and healers as well as rabbis. A distinctive brand of Kabbalah, developed in the town of Safed in Palestine, spread throughout the Jewish world, first by word of mouth, then by manuscript and eventually by printed works, finding especially fertile soil in Italy and Poland. It was a tragic irony that some prominent Jewish writers argued that ‘in the year 408 of the fifth millennium [AD 1648] they that lie in the dust will arise’. Naphtali ben Jacob Bacharach published Emeq ha-Melekh (Valley of the King, 1648), predicting that the redemption of the Jews and the end of the world fast approached, while two years later Manasseh ben Israel brought out Esperança de Israel (Hope of Israel), soon translated into other languages, with much the same message.53