Four disasters kept tensions high within the global Jewish community. First, in 1645, Portuguese settlers in the parts of Brazil conquered by the Dutch rebelled (see chapter 14 below). Whereas the Dutch colonial regime had actively encouraged Jewish settlement, the Portuguese now destroyed Jewish property and killed (or delivered to the Inquisition) all the Jewish settlers they could find. Second, that same year, the outbreak of war between Venice and the Ottoman empire ended a lucrative commerce that had sustained Jewish communities living in both states. Third, in 1647 Philip IV declared a state bankruptcy in Castile and confiscated the capital of all loans made to his government over the previous two decades, most of them by Jewish bankers from Portugal. All were ruined. Fourth and finally, in Ukraine the Cossacks massacred thousands of Jews (see chapter 6 above).54
Harrowing reports of all these catastrophes reached Izmir (Smyrna), a prosperous port-city whose Sephardic community included a religious student called Shabbatai Zvi. One day in 1648, while walking in solitary meditation outside the city, he ‘heard the voice of God speaking to him: “Thou art the saviour of Israel, the Messiah, the son of David, the anointed of the God of Jacob, and thou art destined to redeem Israel, to gather it from the four corners of the earth to Jerusalem.”’ From that moment on, Shabbatai later told his disciples, ‘he was clothed with the Holy Spirit’ and felt empowered to behave in extravagant ways. He went on to demolish a synagogue door with an axe on Shabbat, to arrange a wedding ceremony in which he married the Torah, and to pronounce repeatedly the forbidden Tetragrammaton. Such ostentatious flouting of Jewish laws led the rabbis of Izmir first to condemn him as a fool and then in 1651 to send him into exile.55 Shabbatai now travelled widely in Europe, Asia and Africa, living in various cities of the Ottoman empire until his outrageous behaviour caused his expulsion. Then in May 1665, in Hebron, a young kabbalist called Nathan of Gaza transformed the situation by proclaiming that Shabbatai was the true Messiah.
Much had happened since Shabbatai had first made the same claim two decades earlier. He himself had married a refugee from the Ukrainian massacres and so he became personally aware of the catastrophe; a group of Portuguese Jewish exiles in Izmir published a new edition of Manasseh ben Israel's Hope of Israel; and the destruction and displacement of the Jewish community in Istanbul after the Great Fire of 1660 raised anxieties among their co-religionists throughout the Ottoman empire.56 Meanwhile, many Christians calculated from a passage in the Book of Revelation that the world would end in 1666 and predicted that, immediately beforehand, a charismatic leader would unite all the Jews of the world, wrest Palestine from Muslim control, and then become a Christian.
By 1665, therefore, many Jews and Christians were predisposed to accept Nathan of Gaza's claim – circulated by sermons, letters and a remarkable series of forged documents – that the long-awaited Messiah had come. Acclamation began in Safed, the former centre of Kabbalistic study now ruined by prolonged drought, where ten prophets and ten prophetesses began to proclaim Shabbatai's Messianic status. Thanks to letters exchanged between Jewish scholars and study groups, the news spread rapidly; and before long male and female prophets had proclaimed Shabbatai as the Messiah in Aleppo, Izmir, Edirne, Thessalonica and, above all, Istanbul, where
There were women and men, youths and maidens, even young children, all of whom prophesied in Hebrew or the language of the Zohar … They would fall to the ground like one afflicted with epilepsy, foaming at the mouth and twitching, and would speak Kabbalistic secrets in Hebrew on many matters. The sense of all of them, each in his unique language, was this: Shabbatai Zvi is our lord, king and Messiah.
The writer continued that, ‘because so many prophets and prophetesses arose in all the cities of Anatolia, everyone believed wholeheartedly that the End of Days had come’ – adding apologetically for the benefit of later readers: ‘These were indeed miraculous occurrences and wonders, the like of which had never happened since the day the world was created.‘57 Followers of the new Messiah had visions in which they claimed to see pillars of fire above his head, while Nathan of Gaza's pamphlets pictured Shabbatai as the Messiah sitting on the throne of kings as angels placed the imperial ‘Crown of Zvi’ on his head.58
By 1666, Shabbatai had won widespread support. In Africa, rabbis in Morocco, Tunisia and Libya became staunch adherents, and some of their followers set out for Jerusalem. Reports in newspapers and pamphlets kindled enthusiastic support for the movement in the Jewish communities of Europe, especially in Italy and the Dutch Republic (with followers of Manasseh ben Israel in the forefront), while in London, Samuel Pepys reported that the Jewish community ‘offer[s] to give any man £10 to be paid £100, if a certain person now at Smyrna be within these two years owned by all the princes of the east, and particularly the Grand Signor [the Sultan], as the king of the world … and that this man is the true Messiah’.59 In Moscow, Tsar Alexei himself listened intently while his ministers read Russian translations from perhaps two dozen pamphlets and newspaper stories received from the west, based not only on letters written by Jews but also on correspondence from European merchants and missionaries living in the Ottoman empire, anxious to know whether the Day of Judgement was nigh.60
Meanwhile, in the Near East, devout Egyptians who had known Shabbatai while he lived in Cairo elevated belief in his mission to the same level as belief in the Torah. The Jewish community in Yemen, perhaps in response to news of the Messiah, marched into the palace of the local governor to demand that he abdicate in Shabbatai's favour. Before he left Izmir for Istanbul in February 1666, the new Messiah not only performed ‘miracles’ (at least according to the gushing reports distributed by Nathan of Gaza and others) but also appointed several of his leading believers to govern specific regions as kings under the overall supervision of his two brothers, one for the Islamic world and the other for Christendom – dramatic reminders that Shabbatai's claims possessed a political as well as a religious dimension.61
According to a Western eyewitness in Istanbul, now the entire Jewish community's ‘conversation turned on the war [in Crete] and the imminent establishment of the kingdom of Israel, on the fall of the Crescent and of all the royal crowns in Christendom'; and when Shabbatai arrived, many underwent ‘transports of joy such as one can never understand unless one has seen it’. Not surprisingly the Grand Vizier imprisoned Shabbatai almost immediately. Nevertheless, the mass hysteria continued and Jews in the capital continued to fast and pray instead of working and paying taxes.62
Clearly, the Ottoman authorities could not allow this situation to continue. In September 1666 the sultan's council presented Shabbatai with a stark alternative: they would execute him (and, according to some sources, all his followers) unless he either proved immediately by some miracle that he was the Messiah, or else converted to Islam. Shabbatai chose the latter course. He apostatized and lived as a Muslim pensioner of the sultan until he died a decade later – but some followers kept the faith: until the nineteenth century in eastern Europe the ‘Frankists’, although outwardly Catholic, continued to regard Shabbatai as the Messiah, as did the ‘Dönme’ (meaning ‘converts’ in Turkish) in parts of Greece and Turkey. For most disciples, however, apostasy ended Shabbatai's appeal and abruptly terminated ‘the most important messianic movement in Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple’.63
The Tipping Point
Köpülü Fazil Ahmed's 15-year tenure as Grand Vizier, one of the longest on record, saw not only the return of stability to Istanbul but also notable territorial gains. First he led an invasion of Hungary and captured a number of fortresses before securing an advantageous truce with the Austrian Habsburgs; then he joined the soldiers in the trenches in Crete until in 1669 they forced the last Venetian garrisons to surrender. The whole island now became an integral part of the Ottoman empire, and remained so until 1898. Fazil Ahmed followed up these victories with three campaigns against Poland, one of them led by the sultan in person, forcing the Commonwealth to cede parts of Ukraine
and increasing the boundaries of the empire to their largest extent. He even managed to balance the state budget. In 1675, to celebrate all these successes, Mehmet IV and his Grand Vizier held 'a scrupulously orchestrated exhibition of dynastic splendour and munificence’ that lasted 15 days.64
Few observers of the sultan's ‘exhibition’ can have guessed that 12 years later mutinous troops would force him to abdicate. The process began that same year, 1675, one of the two ‘years without a summer’ in the seventeenth century, which initiated a period of intensely cold winters and unusually dry springs. A major eruption of Mount Etna in 1682 seems to have reduced crop yields all over the eastern Mediterranean and produced a particularly cold winter and wet spring.65 Fazil Ahmed did not have to face these challenges, since he died in 1676, succeeded as Grand Vizier by his brother-in-law Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa (‘Black Mustafa from Merzifon’), who almost immediately campaigned in Ukraine, in an attempt to exploit his predecessor's gains. Having done so, he made an advantageous settlement in 1681 – the first formal treaty between the sultan and the tsar. The Grand Vizier also commissioned a meticulous survey of the new Ukrainian lands (although the devastation of war was reflected in the fact that of 868 settlements surveyed, only 277 were still inhabited). Then, two years later, the Ottomans rejected the Austrian Habsburgs’ offer to renew the truce between the two empires, despite the refusal of the Chief Mufti to authorize a declaration of war. Instead, encouraged by Vani Mehmet Efendi, still the most influential preacher in the empire, Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa prepared a campaign to capture Vienna, the Habsburg capital.66
The campaign went badly from the start. Unusually severe winter snows and spring rains delayed the advance of the imperial army, which reached Vienna only on 14 July 1683. Its garrison therefore managed to hold out until Polish troops, resentful at their losses to the Ottomans, spearheaded a charge that not only relieved the city but killed large numbers of the besiegers. Mehmet IV had Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa executed and exiled Vani, but it was too late: Ottoman forces in Hungary fell back, while the Venetians exacted their revenge for the loss of Crete by gaining several Ottoman outposts along the Adriatic coast. Then, the severe winter of 1686–7 caused the Golden Horn to freeze over, and afterwards Istanbul went without rain for seven months. The central treasury spent over 900 million akçes, but received scarcely 700 million, and the deficit left the army in Hungary short of provisions – even as it endured a summer of exceptional rain – and in September 1687 it mutinied, defied orders to winter in Belgrade and instead marched on Istanbul. There they forced Mehmet IV to abdicate: the fifth forcible removal of a sultan in 60 years. In 1699, just after the Golden Horn froze over for the third time in a century, the Ottomans signed the peace of Carlowitz, which ceded most of Hungary to the Habsburgs and parts of Greece to the Venetians. It marked the first major territorial retreat of the empire in almost three centuries.67
One must not exaggerate the scale of these defeats. After all, the pivotal year 1683 saw the Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna, the Habsburg capital, whereas no Christian army threatened Istanbul until the twentieth century. Moreover, the Ottomans remained in control of all their other European possessions, including Crete. Nevertheless the speed with which the gains and the stability of the Köprülü era evaporated requires explanation. First Vienna lay at the outer limit of the effective Aktionsradius of the Ottoman state: even if the weather had allowed the sultan's troops to arrive earlier in the year and capture the Habsburg capital in 1683, it seems unlikely that they could have held it against a spirited Christian counter-attack. Second, although the Köprülüs helped the Ottoman state to recover from the bankruptcy of the mid-1650s, they failed to accumulate a substantial reserve in the central treasury. Admittedly the bribes paid by ministers in return for appointment, and the confiscation of their fortunes when they fell, provided substantial windfalls; but this could never replace the reduced inflow of taxes from the depopulated heartland of the empire. Other provinces also bore the scars of the mid-seventeenth century crisis. In Egypt, which suffered from plague and drought in the 1640s, a serious power struggle broke out between two factions, one supported by units of the garrison raised in the Balkans and Anatolia, the other upheld by troops raised in the Arab provinces of the empire. The rival factions would divide Egyptian society for over a century.68
Moreover, the Little Ice Age seems to have struck the lands around the eastern Mediterranean with particular force. Most areas suffered drought and plague in the 1640s, the 1650s and again in the 1670s, while the winter of 1684 was the wettest recorded in the eastern Mediterranean during the past five centuries, and the winters of the later 1680s were at least 3°C cooler than today. In 1687 a chronicler in Istanbul reported that ‘This winter was severe to a degree that had not been seen in a very long time. For fifty days the roads were closed and people could not go outside. In cities and villages, the snow buried many houses’. In the city's gardens, ‘lemon, orange, pomegranate, fig, and flowering trees withered’, while near the Golden Horn, the snow ‘came up higher than one's face’. The following year, floods destroyed crops around Edirne, ruining the estates that normally supplied the imperial capital with food.69
Nevertheless, the combination of climatic adversity with human ineptitude in the Ottoman empire had been far worse in the 1640s and 1650s – and yet no territory was lost to the Christian powers until 1683 (on the contrary, Mehmet conquered Crete). The relatively late ‘tipping point’ seems to have reflected above all a change in the military balance between the Ottomans and their enemies. In the earlier seventeenth century the principal Western states deployed most of their resources elsewhere: the Habsburgs fought in Germany (1618–48); Spain fought the Dutch Republic and France (1621–59); Poland fought the Cossacks, Sweden and Russia (1621–9, 1632–4, 1648–67). This European in-fighting allowed the Ottomans not only to make gains in the west, but also to defeat Iran. The end of the domestic wars of Christendom meant that Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa's 1683 offensive against the West triggered a far more effective response.
Moreover, European wars gave rise to three important technological advances which the Ottomans replicated only with difficulty, if at all. First, at sea the West deployed sailing warships capable of firing a broadside that could usually destroy any oar-driven galley with impunity; and the Ottomans proved incapable of constructing galleons to match them. Second, on land, the Europeans constructed fortresses of enormous sophistication, and at the same time developed siege techniques capable of taking all but the strongest Ottoman fortress: very few of the fortified places captured after 1683 in Hungary and the Adriatic ever returned to Ottoman control. Finally, the Europeans deployed massed musketry salvoes and artillery barrages to far greater effect in battle, which now became more common. Only three battles took place in Hungary between 1520 and 1665, of which the Ottomans lost only one, compared with 15 battles between 1683 and 1699, of which the Ottomans lost 11. The empire, as before, proved an adept imitator, and its Janissary corps successfully adapted the volley fire technique of its Western enemies, but it seemed incapable of innovating. The ‘decline’ of the Ottoman empire was thus relative rather than absolute: it eventually recovered from the mid-seventeenth-century crisis – but its European rivals recovered more quickly and more completely.
8
The ‘lamentations of Germany’ and its Neighbours, 1618–881
The Long Shadow of the Thirty Years War
In 1962 the regional government of Hessen sent out a questionnaire that asked respondents to place in rank order the ‘seven greatest catastrophes’ ever suffered by Germany. Most respondents mentioned the Black Death, defeat in the Second World War and the Third Reich, but the Thirty Years War topped the list. It is easy to understand why: the loss and displacement of people were proportionately greater than in the Second World War, the material and cultural devastation caused were almost as great; and both the catastrophe and its aftermath lasted far longer. Germany not only experienced these misfortun
es, however, it also exported them to its neighbours. Britain, Denmark, the Dutch Republic, France, Poland, Sweden, the Swiss Confederation, and several states of northern Italy all became involved in the Thirty Years War, and in each case that involvement created an economic and political crisis and, almost, state breakdown. Helmut G. Koenigsberger was correct to suggest that the conflict that began in Bohemia in 1618 and ended in 1648 amounted to a ‘European Civil War’.2
Within the borders of the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ (which included almost all of modern Germany and Austria, as well as Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and parts of western Poland and eastern France) lived some 20 million people.3 Although its population was thus much the same as that of France, whereas just one sovereign ruled France, public authority in the empire was divided between some 1,300 territorial rulers. At the apex stood the seven Electors (Kurfürsten) who met periodically to choose each new emperor: the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier (all of them ruling small states in the Rhineland); the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg and the king of Bohemia, all ruling large territories further east; and the Elector Palatine, who governed territories both on the lower Rhine and on the border of Bohemia. Collectively, the seven Electors governed almost one-fifth of the empire's population, and at meetings of the imperial Diet (Reichstag) they formed the most prestigious of its three ‘colleges’. Spiritual princes who ruled 50 fiefs, together with lay colleagues who ruled another 33 fiefs, formed the Diet's second College; while approximately 50 ‘Imperial Free Cities’, most of them in the south and west of Germany, formed the third College. About one thousand lesser rulers, both lay and secular, most of them also in the south and west, governed the rest of Germany – but lacked direct representation in the Diet.
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