The Ottomans could not allow the Shia Safavids to undermine the authority of the sultan in the eyes of his Arab and Kurdish subjects. No alternative remained for Ahmed but to mobilize a second army that would suppress the celāli rebels and crush Shah Abbas and his army. The Ottoman commander assigned to this difficult mission was Kuyucu (Kuyuju) Murad Pasha, who swept through Anatolia, capturing and massacring celāli rebels and their sympathizers. By the summer of 1608 the ruthless and determined Ottoman commander had crushed the celālis. He then moved against the main Safavid army. As the large Ottoman force pushed toward eastern Anatolia, Shah Abbas ordered his troops to fill water wells, burn the harvest, and force the evacuation of the local population. As the Safavid army retreated, thousands of villagers, mostly Armenians, were forced out of their homes and marched eastward to the interior of Iran. Many were never allowed to return. Instead, Shah Abbas ordered them to reside in various provinces of his empire.
Despite his earlier success, Murad Pasha could not dislodge the Safavid forces from eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. With his death in 1611, the Ottoman offensive came to a sudden halt. Recognizing the change in Iranian military capabilities and the determination of the Safavid shah to hold his newly gained territories, Ahmed I agreed to a peace treaty with Iran, which was signed in November 1612. According to the new treaty, the Ottoman sultan accepted the Iranian conquest of Azerbaijan and Caucasus, while Shah Abbas agreed to send the sultan “two hundred loads of silk annually” and to support the Ottoman government’s efforts to check Russian incursions into the Caucasus (Sykes: 2:179). Despite the peace treaty, border skirmishes continued, and Shah Abbas reneged on his promise to send the loads of silk. Instead, he organized a campaign against Georgia. In 1615–1616 Ahmed I dispatched a large Ottoman army to lay siege to Yerevan. The campaign against Iranian-held Armenia, however, proved to be a disaster. Thousands of Ottoman troops froze to death as they tried to retreat during the harsh winter of the south Caucasus.
Ahmed I died in 1617. Despite the many difficulties and challenges he had confronted during his 14-year reign, the young sultan left behind a remarkable legacy in his promotion of arts and architecture. It was during his reign that the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was constructed. One of Istanbul’s architectural wonders, the mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, continues to dazzle visitors to the magnificent city. An accomplished poet, the sultan also sponsored literary and scholarly works and supported the construction of new schools. His death caused panic and anxiety within the royal harem, where a struggle ensued over the succession. A faction led by Ahmed’s concubine, Mahpeyker, known as Kösem Sultan, triumphed. Instead of his being succeeded by one of his sons, Kösem Sultan secured the throne for Ahmed’s brother, who ascended the throne as Mustafa I.
See also: Empire and Administration: Abbas I, Shah of Iran; Sultans: Kösem Sultan; Mehmed III; Mustafa I; Primary Documents: Document 2
Further Reading
Bon, Ottaviano. The Sultan’s Seraglio, An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court. London: Saqi Books, 1996.
Della Valle, Pietro. The Pilgrim. London: Folio Society, 1989.
Eskandar Beg Monshi. History of Shah Abbas the Great (Tarikh-e Alamara-ye Abbasi). Translated from the Persian by Roger M. Savory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978.
Finkel, Caroline. Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Roemer, H. R. “The Safavid Period.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, edited by Peter Jackson and Lawrence Lockhart, 6:189–350. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Somel, Selçuk Akșin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Sykes, Sir Percy. History of Persia. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1951.
Ahmed II (1643–1695)
An Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1691 to 1695. He was born on February 25, 1643. His father was the Ottoman sultan Ibrahim (r. 1640–1648). His mother was Muazzez Sultan. Before ascending the throne, Ahmed spent much of his life in palace confinement (kafes).
Ahmed ascended the throne after his brother, Süleyman II (r. 1687–1691), died on June 23, 1691, in Edirne. Ahmed II inherited an empire at war with the Holy League (the Habsburgs, Poland, Venice, and Russia). The war against the Holy League had begun after the Ottoman armies had failed to capture Vienna in 1683. In 1691 the able grand vizier Köprülüzade Fazil Mustafa Pasha embarked on his second campaign against the Habsburgs. The Ottoman forces, however, were routed at Slankamen in present-day Serbia, on August 19, 1691. Fazil Mustafa Pasha was killed on the battlefield. The Ottoman forces retreated to Belgrade. For the next four years, as the Ottomans and the Habsburgs wrangled over the terms of a possible peace treaty, Venice, Poland, and Russia tried to expand their territorial gains against the Ottoman state. In 1692 Venice attacked the island of Crete. The Venetians captured Chios in 1694. They also seized parts of Dalmatia on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea in present-day Croatia. Several rebellions erupted in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including Iraq, Syria, and western Arabia (Hijaz). Ahmed II died a mere four years after he had ascended the throne, on February 6, 1695, in Edirne.
See also: Beys and Pashas: Köprülüzade Fazil Ahmed Pasha; Sultans: Mustafa II; Süleyman II
Further Reading
Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Somel, Selçuk Akșin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
Sugar, Peter. Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1805. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977.
Ahmed III (1673–1736)
An Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1703 to 1730. Ahmed was born in present-day Bulgaria in 1673. He was the son of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV. Ahmed ascended the throne after his brother, Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703), was deposed.
The Ottoman state entered the 18th century in turmoil and decline. Long wars against the Habsburgs, Venice, Poland, and Russia had drained the resources of the state. Corruption and nepotism were rampant. When a rebellion forced the Ottoman sultan Mustafa II to abdicate, his brother Ahmed III ascended the throne on August 22, 1703. The new sultan tried to buy time and reorganize the Ottoman army by keeping the empire out of war. Every effort was made to increase the revenue generated by the central government and reduce state expenditures. Despite these efforts, the Ottomans once again were pulled into European power politics and eventually into open warfare, first against Russia and then against the Habsburgs. The Swedish monarch Charles XII sought allies in his confrontation with Peter the Great of Russia. In addition, the khan of Crimea, Devlet Giray, was anxious to mobilize Ottoman support behind his efforts to resist Russian incursion into the northern shores of the Black Sea. Initially the Ottomans resisted the temptation to confront the Russian and Habsburg threat. The Ottoman refusal to form an alliance with Sweden, however, emboldened the Russians, who defeated Charles XII at Poltava in the summer of 1709. Following his defeat, the Swedish king sought refuge at the Ottoman court.
The Ottoman court emerged once again as a center of intrigue. The Swedish king, the Crimean khan, and the French ambassador agitated against Russia. The Russian and British ambassadors supported peace. In 1710, with the war party beating the drums of war, the sultan appointed the governor of Aleppo, Baltaci (Baltaji) Mehmed Pasha, as his new grand vizier, and declared war on Russia. Fortunately for the Ottomans, the Habsburgs did not provide any support to Peter. Having recognized the threat from an aggressive Russia, the Tatars and Cossacks joined forces with the goal of coordinating their ra
ids against Peter’s army. With his rear threatened and the princes of the Romanian-populated principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia reneging on their promise to provide support for his troops, Peter, who had crossed the Pruth (Prut) River, a tributary of the Danube River, into Moldavia in July 1711, was forced to retreat. As the Russian forces were about to cross the Pruth on their return journey, the Ottoman forces struck and encircled the czar’s army. Recognizing the severity of his situation, the czar agreed to surrender his cannons, return the Ottoman territories he had occupied, destroy the Azovian forts he had built, and stop his intervention in Polish and Cossack affairs. One of the implications of the Russo-Ottoman war was the change in the political structure of the two principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The secret negotiations between the princes of Wallachia and Moldavia and the Russian government convinced the sultan that he should remove the native princes and replace them with governors appointed directly by the Porte (Jelavich: 101–102). The new governors were selected from the Greek Phanariote families of Istanbul, who had served as the dragomans of the sultan (Jelavich: 102). With the rise of these new governors to power, the population in the two Romanian-populated principalities began to develop a deep resentment toward the ascendancy of the Greek language and culture in their administrative system (Shaw: 1:231).
In 1715 Ottoman armies attacked Venetian positions and captured Morea (Peloponnesus) in present-day southern Greece. Ottoman advances against Croatia, however, forced the Habsburgs to ally with the Venetians and declare war on the sultan. The war with the Habsburg armies under the command of Eugene of Savoy proved to be disastrous for Ahmed III. The Ottoman forces were routed at Petrovaradin in present-day Serbia on August 5, 1716. The Ottomans lost Temeșvár (Temeshvár) in September 1716, followed by Belgrade, which was captured by the Habsburgs on August 18, 1717.
These humiliating losses convinced Ahmed III to appoint his adviser, Nevşehirli (Nevshehirli) Damad Ibrahim Pasha, as his new grand vizier in May 1718. The peace negotiations resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Passarowitz, which was concluded on July 21, 1718. Both sides agreed to maintain possession of the territory they had conquered. Ahmed III retained his conquests from the Venetians, but was forced to cede Hungary and parts of Serbia to the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs received the Banat of Temeșvár and northern Serbia, which included Belgrade and Oltenia (Wallachia west of the river Olt) (Jelavich: 68). They also received assurances that their merchants could operate freely in the sultan’s domains. Catholic priests regained their old privileges, which allowed the Habsburg emperor to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire by acting as the champion and protector of the Catholic community (Shaw: 1:232–233).
Portait of Ottoman sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730). (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
The Treaty of Passarowitz dealt a deadly blow to the self-confidence of the Ottoman ruling elite. Recognizing the superiority of European military organization, the new grand vizier, Damad Ibrahim Pasha, reversed the hostile Ottoman posture toward the Habsburgs and Russia and adopted a peace strategy: warfare had to give way to negotiations and diplomacy. He purged the sultan’s inner circle and installed his own men in key positions within the royal harem and the central administration. To divert the sultan’s attention from the daily political affairs of the empire, he encouraged the construction of a palace named Saadabad (Place of Joy), which was to serve as the center for various royal entertainments. Designed after Fontainebleau, Saadabad emerged as the model for other palaces later built by the wealthy members of the Ottoman ruling elite along the banks of the Bosphorus. Ibrahim Pasha built a palace for himself on the Anatolian side of the strait. It contained gardens and fountains. The tulip emerged as the flower of the era, which later came to be known as Lale Devri (Tulip period) (Quataert: 43–44). During late night garden parties, turtles with candles on their backs moved through the tulip beds while entertainers, including poets and musicians, performed their latest lyrics and songs for a bedazzled audience that included foreign dignitaries and diplomats (Shaw: 1:234).
A crisis in Safavid Iran and Ottoman intervention in the country’s internal affairs brought the Tulip period to a sudden end. Ottoman-Iranian relations had remained peaceful following the campaigns of Sultan Murad IV and the signing of the Treaty of Qasr-i Shirin (Kasr-i Şirin) in 1639. In October 1722, however, an Afghan army led by Mahmud, a leader of Ghilzai tribesmen in southern Afghanistan, who had rebelled against the Safavid monarchy in Iran, marched to the Iranian capital, Isfahan, and deposed the Safavid monarch, Soltan Hossein (Roemer: 324). The sudden collapse of the Safavid state created opportunities as well as anxieties for Ahmed III. Battered by long wars with the Habsburgs and the humiliating treaties of Karlowitz and Passarowitz, the Ottomans now had an opportunity to regain their lost credibility by scoring a quick and easy victory in Iran. Ahmed III and his grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, could use the vacuum created by the disintegration of the Safavid state to occupy Iran’s western provinces and increase the revenue collected by the central government. But the sultan was not the only sovereign determined to conquer valuable territory. Having successfully triumphed over Sweden, the Russian czar, Peter, also was determined to profit from the sudden disappearance of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, a country that could serve Russia as a land bridge to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf and the riches of India.
Using Astrakhan and the Volga River, Peter transported his armies through Daghistan to capture Darbend on the western shores of the Caspian Sea, claiming all along that he had invaded Iran to rescue the Iranian shah from his Afghan captors. The Ottomans invaded to prevent the Russians from occupying Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. Jointly recognizing the need to avoid a military conflict over Iran, in 1722 the Ottoman and the Russian governments began to negotiate an agreement that allowed the sultan to move his troops into Georgia. The Ottomans sent two armies to the east, the first entering the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, in July 1723, and the second occupying the western Iranian towns of Kermanshah and Hamadan in October (Roemer: 327). In a treaty signed on June 24, 1724, Ahmed III and Peter effectively partitioned northern and western Iran into Russian and Ottoman spheres of influence (Roemer: 327). The partition allowed Russia to claim the southern Caspian provinces of Gilan and Mazandaran as well as the eastern and central Caucasus all the way to the confluence of the Aras and Kur Rivers. All the territory west of this partition line, including the Iranian provinces of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Luristan, along with the important cities of Tabriz, Kermanshah, and Hamadan, was to be annexed by the Ottomans. This treaty allowed Ottoman forces to occupy Hamadan in August 1724, followed by Yerevan in October. On August 3, 1725, the Ottomans entered Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan, while a second and smaller force captured the town of Ganja in southern Caucasus in September. The Afghans remained in occupation of Isfahan, Shiraz, and most of present-day eastern Iran.
Ahmed III declared war on the Afghans and ordered Ottoman armies to move on Isfahan in central Iran. After capturing the cities of Maragheh in Azerbaijan and Qazvin, two hours west of present-day Tehran, an Ottoman army was marching south toward Isfahan when it was defeated by the Afghans, who despite their victory sued for peace (Sykes: 2:240). In return for the Afghans recognizing the Ottoman sultan as the caliph of the Islamic world, the Ottoman sultan recognized the Afghan leader Ashraf as the shah of Iran (Sykes: 2:240).
The newly established Afghan rule in Iran was short-lived. The Safavid prince Tahmasp rallied the anti-Afghan forces. He was joined by the charismatic Nader Qoli, a brilliant commander who would later emerge as the savior of Iran and the last great Iranian conqueror. Using the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan as his base of operations, Nader routed the Afghans twice in 1729. With the Afghans in flight, Nader moved against the Ottomans in July 1730, forcing them to withdraw from Hamadan and Nahavand. The defeat jolted the Ottoman capital.
In September 1730, as the Ottoman army was preparing for another campaign against Iran, Patrona Halil, an off
icer of Albanian origin, staged a revolt, which was joined by the ulema and a large number of soldiers and civilians. The rebels denounced Ahmed III and his grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, for mismanaging the war and losing territory to the Shia Iranians. To appease the rebels, the sultan ordered the execution of his grand vizier on October 1, but this concession only emboldened Patrona Halil and his supporters, who demanded the deposition of the sultan himself. Under intense pressure, Ahmed III agreed to abdicate in favor of the oldest living prince of the Ottoman dynasty, who ascended the throne as Mahmud I. Ahmed, who was known during his reign as an outstanding poet and calligrapher, as well as a generous patron of scholars and artists, died in palace isolation in 1736.
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1689–1762)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was one of the most prolific English writers of her time. In 1716, when her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, was appointed as the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary accompanied him on his journey to the Ottoman capital, Constantinople (Istanbul). At the time Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730) was the reigning sultan, having ascended the throne after his brother, Mustafa IV, had been deposed in 1703. In her letters written to family members and acquaintances in England, Lady Mary provided detailed accounts of the daily life of the Ottoman ruling elite during the reign of Ahmed III, including the daily lives and activities of the female members of the ruling dynasty. First published in 1837, her letters have appeared in various editions in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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