by Amy Chua
Friendships across religious lines were possible; political and commercial alliances between families of different faiths were common. During religious holidays, Muslims and non-Muslims often made friendly gestures to each other. On Easter, for example, Christians might give red-dyed eggs to their Muslim neighbors, who later reciprocated by sharing meats prepared for the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice. Perhaps most tellingly, Jews and Christians pursued whatever livelihoods they chose, and many flourished economically. Indeed, some of the wealthiest people in the Ottoman major cities were non-Muslims.3
Of course, even under the beneficent Suleyman the Ottoman Empire was a pre-Enlightenment power—no subjects had any political rights—and it would be misleading to suggest that Muslims, Jews, and Christians mutually respected one another. People of different faiths generally kept to their own communities, which frowned upon or even prohibited intermarriage. Because Jews, Christians, and Muslims used different calendars, “the demarcation of months and the very numbering of the years varied, with each community marking the passage of a shared time differently.” More fundamentally, the Ottomans maintained a clear hierarchy based on religion, and it went without saying that Islam was supreme. No matter how wealthy or successful a Christian or Jew became, his social status was always below a Muslim, just as the social status of women was always below men.4
To underscore their social subordination, non-Muslims were officially subject to numerous, largely symbolic restrictions. Non-Muslims were in principle required to wear attire of designated colors, such as blue-dyed tunics or red shoes, and they could not wear green, the Prophet's color, or white turbans. In addition, at least on the books, Ottoman law prohibited Christians and Jews from carrying swords, riding horses or camels (they could ride only donkeys or mules), buying land, building new houses of worship (they could only repair existing ones), having a house taller than that of Muslim houses, and holding positions that exercised authority over Muslims.
In practice, however, most of these restrictions were ignored or laxly enforced. Many non-Muslims came to wield enormous power and influence. The career of Joseph Nasi provides a vivid example. Nasi was born in Portugal to a wealthy converso banking family with clients all over western Europe, including the mon-archs of Spain and France. In 1554 Nasi left the Hapsburg lands for Istanbul, where he and his family reembraced Judaism, becoming leaders of the Ottoman Jewish community. Within a few years, the Nasi family was among the primary financiers of the Ottoman treasury, with extensive monopolies and commercial holdings throughout the empire and beyond.
By about 1570, Joseph Nasi—now one of the leading entrepreneurs in the country—had also become one of the most powerful individuals in the Ottoman court. A close advisor to the sultan, and a major influence in foreign affairs (in 1569, he helped persuade the Dutch to rise against Spain with the promise of Ottoman support), Nasi was rewarded with the governorship of Naxos and the Cyclades Archipelago, as well as the Italian title of duke. Nasi's story illustrates not only how high an “infidel” could rise in the Ottoman Empire, but also how loosely some of the official restrictions on non-Muslims were (at least in some cases) applied. It is most unlikely that Nasi rode only donkeys and mules to the imperial court or that his celebrated mansion near Istanbul was no taller than any Muslim houses. Moreover, as one of the most prominent imperial tax collectors, Nasi in practice, if not in the eyes of the law, must have exercised considerable authority over many Muslims.5
Another major component of Ottoman tolerance was its embrace of Muslim converts. Notwithstanding extraordinary individuals such as Nasi, Ottoman society was generally characterized by a hierarchy, at the top of which was the askeri, or ruling class, open almost exclusively to Muslims. But almost anyone in the empire, of any ethnicity or social class, could become a Muslim and a member of the askeri. Moreover, converted Muslims were every bit as good as “natural-born” Muslims, with virtually no limits on their success. Thus Busbecq, the Hapsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during Suleyman's reign, wrote admiringly:
It is by merit that men rise in the service, a system which insures that posts should be assigned to the competent…[The Ottomans] do not believe that high qualities are either natural or hereditary…but that they are partly the gift of God, and partly the result of good training, great industry, and…zeal…Honors, high posts and judgeships are the rewards of great ability and good service. This is the reason that they are successful in their undertakings.
The ability of enterprising Muslim converts to rise almost without limit stood in marked contrast to the situation in Catholic Spain, where Jews whose families had long converted to Christianity were frequently banned from holding high positions because of their “impure blood” and for centuries risked being burned at the stake.6
Ottoman strategic tolerance was, nonetheless, distinctly pre-modern and certainly not rooted in the respect for human rights or individual liberty familiar today, as attested by the fascinating Ottoman system for the recruitment and training of the special imperial guard known as the Janissaries. Every year, the Ottomans collected as a “tax” a certain percentage of boys ages eight to twenty from conquered Christian lands. Muslims were not eligible as recruits, because it was thought that young Christians given the chance to convert and rise in an alien land would be more zealous and more loyal. Until the seventeenth century, the youths came mainly from the Balkan peasantry, including Albanians, Bulgarians, Croats, Serbians, and Greeks; later, boys were also drawn from Russia and Ukraine.
Considered the sultan's property, the youths were completely severed from their families, converted to Islam, and trained to be either soldiers or administrators and officials in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Harsh restrictions were imposed. “Slaves of the state,” all the recruits were bound to celibacy and lifetime service. The most promising among them were handpicked and prepared for entry to the askeri. At these elite schools, students became fluent in Persian and Arabic, studied the Koran, and were groomed for military leadership. The very brightest could rise all the way to the coveted imperial position of grand vizier, the sultan's chief minister and military advisor. All but one of Suleyman's nine grand viziers were former Christian slaves, from the humblest of backgrounds.
The recruits who did not make it into the askeri were assigned to the Janissaries, an elite infantry corps that formed the sultan's private guard. At the height of their effectiveness in the sixteenth century, when they were probably better trained than any troops in Europe, the Janissaries included roughly 20,000 men, none of them native Turks. The Janissaries enjoyed high living standards and, because they inherited the wealth of dead Janissaries, accumulated great collective wealth. Thus, while some Christian families saw the youth “tax” as the worst form of Ottoman oppression, others saw it as an avenue of upward mobility for their children, and a means of placing a family member in a position of status and authority otherwise unimaginable.7
The Ottomans derived great benefits from their strategic tolerance. First, it bought them the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of conquered populations from Transylvania to Yemen to the Iranian plateau. As with every empire, there were sporadic rebellions, put down viciously by the Ottoman war machine. But by and large, the fundamental ethnic and racial tolerance of Islam proved a stunning strategic asset for the Ottomans. Large numbers of Christians converted to Islam shortly after being conquered. While some may have been touched by the Prophet's revelation, for most, conversion to Islam was pragmatic.
For the Ottomans, the “color-blind” embrace of conversion meant a swelling of the ranks of more or less cooperative Islamic subjects, a huge pool of available agricultural and military manpower, and at the top level, a core of genuinely talented individuals who had risen through the strikingly meritocratic Ottoman system. As the Janissaries and Suleyman's grand viziers illustrate, the Ottomans were able to deploy conversion to create specially loyal, elite servants of the sultan.
Among those who did not convert, the O
ttoman Empire's relative religious tolerance worked to enormous advantage as well. Non-Muslims of all stripes—Christian Maronites, Jacobites, Egyptian Copts, Nestorian Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Orthodox Christians, and Greek and Iberian Jews, just to name a few groups—contributed immensely to the economic expansion and vitality of the empire. In particular, Jews who fled the Hapsburgs brought to Turkey invaluable trade and financial networks, which helped Ottoman cities like Istanbul, Cairo, Aleppo, and Salonika become major centers of international commerce.
European Jews also provided the Ottomans with scientific and medical knowledge, as well as new technologies for industry, arms, and munitions. The remarkable Jewish contribution to Ottoman success was attested to by Nicolas de Nicolay and Pierre Bellon de Mans, two well-known European travelers who visited the empire around 1550:
[The Jews] have amongst them workmen of all artes and handicrafts moste excellent, and especially [the converses] of late banished and driven out of Spaine and Portugale, who to the great detriment of Christianitie, have taught the Turks divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make ar-tillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot, and other munitions: they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries.
Many Greeks, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, and other Christian groups were also extremely entrepreneurial, playing prominent roles in banking, shipbuilding, wool and tobacco production, and the luxury trades.8
In its heyday under Suleyman the Magnificent—with its spectacular territorial expansion, cultural blossoming, and prosperity—the Ottoman Empire looked as though it might become the first world-dominant Islamic power in history. It was not to be. Even at its peak, the Ottoman Empire was a regional power, surrounded on all sides by well-matched rivals, from Safavid Persia to the Haps-burgs to the Muscovite Empire of Ivan the Terrible.
If Suleyman could have lived another hundred years, things might have been otherwise. But Suleyman was succeeded by a string of thirteen sultans ranging in talent from incompetence to idiocy, and because of the extraordinarily hierarchical, indeed despotic form of Ottoman government, a poor sultan was a catastrophe. Many factors conspired to weaken the empire beginning in the second half of the 1500s, but the failure of Suleyman's successors to maintain his striking tolerance clearly played a role.9
Perhaps most significantly, the empire after Suleyman was unable to remain above the religious schism that has caused Islam's most fanatic bloodletting from the seventh century to the present day: the split between Sunnis and Shiites. Although the prevailing Ottoman practices were always Sunni, Shiism had been generally respected under Suleyman. After his death, however, the empire's religious arteries began to harden. Officials sought to suppress freedom of thought, including Shiite thought. The printing press was banned. Shiite dissident movements emerged in Iraq and Persia, which were then crushed by fierce and overwhelming imperial force, strengthening the hand of the Shiite kingdom of Safavid Persia and even leading the Safavids to ally themselves with European powers against the Ottomans.10
At the same time, the welcoming embrace of foreigners and non-Muslims that had characterized the empire in its golden age also began to show strain. There had always been a strand of Islamic thought critical of merchants and commerce, particularly commerce with non-Muslims. This aversion to trade may help explain why Jews and other non-Muslims came to dominate so much of the empire's commercial activity. But the fact that most merchants, entrepreneurs, and financiers were “foreigners” created a highly unstable situation. Whether due to resentment or genuine theological scruple, merchants and traders in the late 1500s began to be subject to increasing religious criticism and then to unpredictable taxation and confiscation of property. Exporting goods outside the empire was forbidden. Economic and technological in- novation was suppressed, not only stifling trade but undercutting the Ottoman military, whose weapons and ships grew increasingly outdated.”
While non-Muslims still enjoyed better treatment and prospects under the Ottomans than non-Christians did in most of Europe in the late sixteenth century, fault lines began to appear and eventually to crack open. Throughout the empire, itinerant Jewish merchants and peddlers were attacked, robbed, and murdered. When a Jewish court physician died, the chief physician argued successfully for replacement by a Muslim because there were too many Jews already; over the next fifty years, the number of Jews among the court's physicians would decrease in number from forty-one to four. To be sure, Ottoman Jews still had more to fear from the empire's Christian opponents. In 1594, when Prince Michael “the Brave” of Wallachia rebelled against Ottoman rule, he immediately massacred every Jew (and Turk) in Bucharest to whom any Romanian owed money. But as internal strife worsened, Jews came under Ottoman attack as well. In the 1660s, the leader of a messianic Jewish movement, Shabbetai Tzevi, was forced to choose between death and conversion to Islam. (He chose conversion.) In 1688, in another war with the Austrians, Janissaries burned and plundered the Jewish quarter of Belgrade.12
As with every empire, the reasons for Ottoman decline are multiple and hotly debated. As the centuries wore on, there were military defeats and territorial losses. The western European powers achieved increasing economic and technological superiority, extending their reach to the Americas and Asia in the way the Ottomans never did. Proliferating internal revolts and the rise of nationalism played a critical, debilitating role. At the same time, the Ottomans’ final collapse was a paroxysm of horrific intolerance. The eventual destruction of the empire in 1922 was preceded, and in many ways precipitated, by vicious ethnic and religious bigotry, sectarianism, and violence, particularly in the Balkans. Muslims attacked Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians persecuted Greek Uniate Christians, and still others scapegoated and killed Jews. These ethnic horrors culminated in the Armenian genocide of World War I, in which an estimated 800,000 Armenian Ottoman subjects were slaughtered during and after their expulsion from the empire.13
MING DYNASTY CHINA
In the early fifteenth century, the Ming government sent the Muslim eunuch Admiral Zheng He, together with a fleet of three hundred giant “treasure ships” carrying more than 28,000 men, on seven spectacular ocean voyages through the Indian Ocean. At that time, the Ming dynasty had a much better shot at world dominance than any European power. Having inherited a united China from the Mongols, the Ming emperors ruled over more subjects than the Ottomans and the monarchs of Europe combined. Technologically, Ming China was far ahead of backward Europe, having already invented the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Fifteenth-century China outshone Europe in other respects too: At the Ming inauguration of their new capital, the Forbidden City, 26,000 guests were served a ten-course banquet on the finest porcelain; at the wedding feast of England's Henry V and Catherine of Valois, six hundred guests ate salted cod on “plates” consisting of stale bread.
As late as 1421, the Mings’ massive naval might dwarfed that of any other power in the world. Altogether, the imperial fleet totaled more than 4,000 vessels, including not just the colossal nine-masted treasure ships, but 1,350 patrol ships, 400 warships, and 400 freighters just for carrying grain, water, and horses. A pertinent contrast is the “royal fleet” assembled by Henry V to conquer France; it consisted of four fishing boats, each capable of ferrying just a hundred men across the channel at a time. The Ming ships were teak leviathans, armed with enormous iron cannons, able to carry four hundred times more cargo than their largest European counterparts. Their rudders alone were often as long as the entirety of the Nina, Christopher Columbus's flagship.14
But Ming China declined to seek global dominance. After 1424, the Ming emperors took a pathological turn inward, breaking up their own navy and rejecting foreign trade and foreign ideas. By 1600, the Chinese had fallen far behind Europe technologically, militarily, and commercially.
After driving out the Mongols in 1368, the early Ming rulers devoted their energies to domestic agricultural reform, ignoring the comm
ercial world beyond China. Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, banned “foreign” hairstyles and clothing in his court, twice issuing orders that his subjects model their appearances after those in the seventh-century Tang dynasty. (It is ironic that Emperor Zhu saw the Tang dynasty as quintessentially “Chinese,” given that it was founded by a prince who was probably half Turkic.) Born to a poor peasant family and enduring near-starvation conditions as a youth, Emperor Zhu believed that the government's primary duty was to protect farmers, on whom the state depended for all its wealth. He established an impressive agrarian tax system by registering China's entire immense population, and froze taxes at fourteenth-century levels. He also repeatedly banned overseas voyages by private merchants.
All this changed abruptly in 1403 with the ascension to the throne of Yongle, Emperor Zhu's son. Seizing power after a palace struggle with his nephew—whom his father had designated to be the next emperor—Yongle was conscious of being a usurper. To establish his legitimacy and grandeur, Yongle immediately embarked on a series of monumental projects. Partly to guard against the continuing Mongol threat in the north, Yongle ordered that China's capital be moved from Nanjing to Beijing, a task that required a massive repair of the Grand Canal, the construction of forty-seven new locks linking Hangzhou and Beijing, and the transport of 235,000 soldiers and their families. At the same time, Yongle was eager to project China's imperial power beyond its existing borders. He sent armies north to conquer Mongol territories and south to conquer what is now Vietnam (failing in both cases). It was also Yongle who commissioned Admiral Zheng He's extraordinary expeditions to explore the oceans, to exact tribute, and to demonstrate to the world the unsurpassed power and splendor of Ming China.
