by Jared Rubin
Where kings had weak religious legitimacy or had limited control over the military, they had to give up more in the quid pro quo with the economic elite. For example, in Alfonso IX’s call for a Cortes to stabilize his weakly legitimized regime he laid out a host of promises: he offered to administer justice impartially, refrain from acting arbitrarily, and guaranteed the security of persons and property.23 Rulers often called parliaments soon after they came to the throne in order to stabilize and legitimize their rule. van Zanden et al. (2012) calculate, for instance, that between 1307 and 1508 the English Parliament met much more on average in the first few years of a king’s reign than they did later in his reign.
Propagation by parliament was clearly a substitute for religious legitimacy. Where one was more expensive or less effective, it was more worthwhile to use the other. Once a ruler adopted the Reformation, he could no longer turn to the Church to propagate his rule. There was, therefore, stronger incentive for Protestant rulers to turn to parliaments than for Catholic rulers and certainly more than for Middle Eastern rulers, who did not have to contend with institutions similar to European parliaments. With religious legitimacy weakened, Protestant rulers had to give the elite even more rights and privileges than they had in the past in order to incentivize them to act in accordance with their wishes.
The importance of parliament in a given time and place is highly correlated with how frequently it was called in session. Typically, it met only when called into session by the ruler, who could disband it at will. Meanwhile, members of parliament only had collective power vis-à-vis the king when in session. Kings therefore called parliament into session when they could not meet their fiscal needs.24 An increase in the frequency of parliamentary sessions was therefore generally the result of two different, mutually compatible events: increased royal expenses or lower revenues. In an ideal world for the king, he would be able to cover all royal expenses with streams of revenue that did not come from parliament, since obtaining funds from parliament meant giving up rights in return.
After the Reformation, there was a much greater use of parliaments in Protestant regions than in Catholic regions. Figure 6.6 confirms this point by showing the average number of times rulers called parliament into session in all regions that converted to Protestantism by 1600 and those that did not. The Protestant regions include England, Scotland, the Netherlands, different parts of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Scandinavian countries. The Catholic regions include Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the Italian states, France, Belgium, Poland, Bavaria,25 and Austria. Prior to the Reformation (twelfth-fifteenth centuries), parliaments were more frequently called in regions that remained Catholic. Economically advanced Spain and the Italian territories called the most parliaments in this period. It was only after the Reformation commenced in the sixteenth century that Protestant rulers called parliaments in greater numbers.26 While this trend reflects partly the fact that rulers called parliaments in the sixteenth century in order to deal with the Reformation, the difference between Catholic and Protestant regions was even greater in subsequent centuries. In addition to the Protestant English and Dutch parliaments – discussed in detail in Chapter 7 – the first meeting of the Swedish Riksdag occurred in 1527 in order to establish the Reformation, and it met every three years after 1527 – a very high rate relative to the rest of the continent. The Swiss parliament also met frequently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and from the 16th century onward it had the highest meeting rate in Europe.27
Figure 6.6 Average Parliament Meetings per Century, Protestant and Catholic Territories
Sources: Data from van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker (2012).
Figure 6.6 only provides motivating evidence. There was a clear shift toward Protestant parliaments propagating rule following the Reformation. This did not occur in the Catholic lands; if anything, parliaments became less important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was clearest in France, where the Catholic Bourbon kings Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643), Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), and Louis XV (r. 1715–1774) had sources of revenue outside the scope of their parliaments, such as the taille, and were otherwise highly legitimate. As a result, they were able to avoid calling the Estates-General for 175 years (1614–1789).
But did this institutional shift have any economic consequences? If not, then the rise of parliaments in the Protestant lands is nothing more than an interesting historical footnote. The remainder of this book suggests that this shift toward parliaments did indeed have a fundamental effect on the policies Protestant rulers pursued. These policies were much more in line with economic success than were previous policies or policies enacted in Catholic or Muslim regions.
A comparison of the propagating arrangements that persisted in the Ottoman Empire to those in the Protestant lands further amplifies the effect of the Protestant shift away from religious legitimation. It is in this comparison that this book’s broader arguments begin to take shape. The Reformation was possible in Western Europe in large part due to the spread of the printing press, the absence of which made such an event less likely in the Ottoman Empire. The spread of printing in Western Europe but not in the Ottoman Empire was itself a consequence of the marginally weaker efficacy of religious legitimation in Western Europe. It is possible to trace these differences back even further to the formation of Islam and Christianity. In other words, differences in legitimizing arrangements in early Christianity and Islam had long-run, path-dependent effects on eventual economic outcomes. Each link of the argument makes sense taken in isolation, but the connection between the first link and the last link is far less obvious.
Summary: Explaining the Diverging Institutional Paths
Why did the Middle East and Western Europe, particularly Protestant Europe, undergo such divergent institutional histories? Part of the answer has to do with the presence of printing in Europe, but much more important was how the spread – or absence – of printing reinforced or undermined the relationships between political and religious authorities.
Prior to the spread of the press in Western Europe, heretical movements such as the Hussite and Lollard movements arose but did not spread far. It was only after the press was widespread that a movement like the one started by Luther could succeed. The absence of the printing press in the Ottoman Empire meant that even if such anti-authority thoughts did exist, they were unlikely to spread.28 This meant that Ottoman institutions were self-reinforcing (see Figure 6.7). The high degree of relatively inexpensive legitimacy bestowed by religious authorities discouraged the Ottoman sultan from permitting the spread of printing in the Arabic script. And it follows that the absence of the printing press was the very thing that prevented alternatives to religious legitimacy from emerging. And it was not simply the case that there was little opposition to the Ottoman religious establishment – mystical and dervish anti-Ottoman orders abounded even at the height of Ottoman power, especially among the tribes in the provinces. The Ottomans crushed the most famous of these movements, the Kizilbash movement, in the mid-sixteenth century – incidentally, right around the time of the Reformation.29 As was the case with rulers in pre-Reformation Europe, the Ottomans were able to quash any religious dissent from spreading too far before it was out of their control. While it is impossible to know whether these mystical movements would have been more successful had they had access to the press, the European experience suggests the possibility. After all, Jan Hus, John Wyclif, Jean Gerson, and other pre-Reformation reformers also lacked the press – and met similar fates.
Figure 6.7 Self-Reinforcing Institutions and the Absence of an “Islamic Reformation”
The (Eventual) Rise of Ottoman Printing
In our 2012 articles,30 Metin Coşgel, Thomas Miceli, and I addressed one final puzzle: If religious legitimacy were so important to the Ottoman sultan, why did the Ottomans eventually relax the ban on printing in the Arabic script? Sure, it took 242 years for the Ottomans to permit a press printing in the Arabic script, but time alone
is not an explanation. If it were indeed the fear of losing religious legitimacy that encouraged the sultan to enact the ban in the first place, then something must have changed in the period between the initial ban and the eventual acceptance of the press. There must have been a rise in the demand for printed works, a change in the manner in which the Ottomans propagated rule, or some combination of the two.
It is possible that the demand for printed works increased between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, Ottoman literacy was around 2–3 percent at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and real wages were lower in the latter half of the eighteenth century than they were in the latter half of the fifteenth century.31 It is therefore unlikely that demand conditions were so different in the eighteenth century as to incentivize the formation of the printing industry in the presence of restrictions imposed by the sultan. The “virtuous spiral” that propelled literacy in Western Europe – printing decreased the cost of books, which increased access to books, which increased literacy, which increased demand for books, which triggered a supply response, and so on – never occurred in the Ottoman Empire prior to the nineteenth century.
This is not to say that there was no demand for printed works in the nineteenth century, but simply that the demand was not much greater than it had been in centuries past. In fact, the publication industry performed well enough in the nineteenth century to indicate that a market for mass printing in the Ottoman Empire was possible in the absence of restrictions by the sultan. The Ottomans eventually lifted the ban on printing on Islamic topics in 1802, and printers adopted the lithographic press soon after its invention in Germany. In 1831, the publisher Takvimhane-i Amire printed the Ottoman Empire’s first official newspaper. Six new presses appeared in the ensuing decade, publishing 278 books. Publishers launched thirteen new presses in the 1840s, altogether publishing 394 books.32 The industry was well established by the mid-nineteenth century, and the state actively supported the printing of schoolbooks, official newspapers, and administrative publications.
The spread of printing presses capable of printing in the Arabic script corresponded with two parallel developments. The first was a change in the internal organization of the religious establishment in the seventeenth century. Over the course of the century, it increasingly became the case that a cleric’s connections and wealth, rather than his merit or seniority, determined whether he received a promotion within the religious hierarchy. This allowed prominent families to dominate the highest ranks over several generations. Institutionalized privilege was the norm: twelve of the forty-two Grand Muftis in the seventeenth century came from only five families. The proportion rose in the eighteenth century, with half of the fifty-eight Grand Muftis appointed between 1708 and 1839 coming from eleven families.33 This resulted in a misalignment of incentives between the top of the mufti hierarchy and the rank and file. The latter, who were the primary conduit between the religious establishment and the people, had little incentive to publicly support the ruler, since doing so did not improve their possibility of rising in the ranks. The growing resentment of the lower members of the hierarchy therefore undermined the capacity of the hierarchy as a whole to legitimize the sultan. This altered the sultan’s decision-making calculus with regards to how best to propagate his rule. With the efficacy of religious legitimacy weakened, other propagating agents became relatively more attractive sources of propagation.
The weakening of the religious establishment allowed alternative agents to increase their role in governance. Prior to the sixteenth century – an age of Ottoman expansion – the most obvious alternative was the military elite. The sultan was able to control the military by giving soldiers tax farms in newly conquered territories under the timar system, a system where the military elite gained wealth and power in return for collecting taxes and supporting the sultan. But once the Ottoman Empire began to contract in the late sixteenth century, the military elite were no longer a good alternative, as it was increasingly expensive to win their loyalty. Instead, the group in the best position to replace the religious establishment were the notables (a’yan) – local elites who were eminent tribal leaders, owned land or resources, belonged to a prominent family, or possessed other sources of social, economic, or political power. They were often the descendants of Janissaries (military elite) stationed in the provinces, and they owed their position and wealth to their heritage as well as their ability to maintain law and order.34 Prior to the seventeenth century, the Ottomans were able to limit the power of the notables by controlling the provincial military through the timar system. With this option for controlling the notables no longer feasible, the Ottomans instead bargained directly with the notables to control the state’s relationship with the local population, collect taxes, mobilize troops, represent local interests, maintain public order, and manage civil disputes.35 Chapter 8 further discusses the economic consequences of this transition to propagation by the notables.
With respect to the sultan’s decision to permit the printing press, the rise of the notables at the expense of the religious establishment meant that there was a fundamental change in the costs and benefits of permitting printing in the Arabic script.36 While the notables were not necessarily beneficiaries of the printing press, its spread also did not harm them. The ability of the notables to propagate the sultan’s rule depended on their capacity to provide representation and local public goods, not on a monopoly over the transmission of knowledge. Hence, the shift from propagation by the religious establishment to propagation by the notables meant that mass printing was less of a threat to the sultan. In other words, while the benefits of permitting the press did not change much between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the costs of removing the restrictions – that is, the loss of religious legitimacy – decreased substantially. The sultan’s actions indicate that the benefits of permitting presses printing in the Arabic script outweighed the costs, and the Ottomans consequently lifted restrictions on the press.
This history permits a brief foray into a speculative, counterfactual history of Ottoman institutional development. The rifts between the Ottoman religious elite and the rest of the religious establishment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bear resemblance to the dissension within the Church at the time of the Reformation. It stands to reason that the printing press could have facilitated movements against the upper echelons of the Ottoman religious hierarchy. While we will never know the counterfactual – what would have happened had the Ottomans never banned the press – it is still instructive to analyze what happened with the establishment of the Ottoman printing industry in the middle of the nineteenth century. Is it possible that this was just the thing needed to provoke increased opposition to religious authorities in a manner akin to the Protestant Reformation?
In fact, soon after the printing press spread across the Islamic world in the nineteenth century, modernist thinkers proposed the first real calls for a “reform of Islam.” Reforms of Islam did not aim to change the fundamental tenets of the religion, but instead reform the control of the clerical class over religion. In many ways, the reform movements resembled the Reformation. In fact, Sunni and Shi’a Muslim thinkers from the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Egypt, India, Russia, and beyond explicitly invoked Luther as a liberalizing force. For example, the renowned Indian reformer Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) suggested that “we are today passing through a period similar to that of the Protestant revolution in Europe, and the lesson which the rise and outcome of Luther’s movement teaches us should not be lost on us.”37
Why did a widespread call for an “Islamic Reformation” occur in the late nineteenth century rather than centuries before? Many of the grievances of the would-be reformers were applicable to the Ottoman religious hierarchy for at least a couple of centuries. There is not one simple explanation for the timing of these events, and there were multiple, mutually compatible reasons the late nineteenth century saw the first large-scale push toward a “reformation of Islam.” For one
, the growth of secular education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided a large base of individuals outside of the religious establishment with the human capital necessary to challenge the legitimacy of political authority. Educational reforms began throughout much of the Ottoman Empire under Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and continued throughout the nineteenth century.38 Prior to this period, education was almost exclusively available to the religious and political elite. The spread of education to a larger part of the population broke the monopoly of religious authorities over education, especially in bigger cities such as Istanbul and Cairo. The first Ottoman secular military and bureaucracy schools opened in the early nineteenth century, and foreign language and secondary schools followed a few decades later.39 This permitted, in the words of Felicitas Opwis (2004, p. 30), an “intellectual atmosphere that perceived traditional religious law and its exponents largely as obstacles to progress and as antithetical to modernization. Enlightenment ideas, reason, and the rational sciences were held in high esteem, while adherence to traditional authority that could not stand the test of reason were rejected as obsolete.” This situation was not too different from Western Europe at the time of the Reformation, where most scholars were educated at universities, and humanist ideas permeated a new intellectual atmosphere.
