Former Students have said knowing about the Ottomans is important for the ap test so…

The Ottomans Over Time
Former Students have said knowing about the Ottomans is important for the AP test so….
Work in your study groups to create a flow chart that shows continuity and change over time within the Ottoman empire from 1400 – 1914. What periods will you use? Important turning points? Global Processes? Create no more than FIFTEEN factoids to tell the story. Turn in at the end of class. Look also at attached maps and the short reading.
The Ottomans were a 600 year family dynasty. 1300 –1326 Osman built a small state in Anatolia. Successors expanded it through buying land, alliances with other emirs, and conquering everyone they could. Military success was based on gunpowder. Cannons were used as offensive weapons. In 1361, the second most important city in Byzantium was captured (Adrianople). Treatment of the conquered was kind: ruled through local leaders, Muslims served in army but no tax, non-Muslims paid tax but no military service. But, Timur Lane defeated the Ottomans in a battle where the Sultan was caged, dying in captivity. But Mehmet II (son of caged Sultan) 1451 took Constantinople, controlling the Bosporus. Hagia Sophia was declared a mosque and the Ottomans opened Constantinople to many peoples and faiths.

By 1512, Sultan Selim the Grim had expanded the empire by defeating the Safavids, and moving into Egypt, (ending the Mameluke dynasty there), Syria, Palestine, and North Africa. He captured Mecca and Medina (around the same time Cortez conquered the Aztecs). Suleiman I (son of Selim) was called the lawgiver. The west knew him as Magnificent due to his court and accomplishments. Using their land and naval power, they moved into the Balkans (Belgrade), Hungary, Austria, Greece, dominating the whole eastern Mediterranean as well as the North African coast (Tripoli and Morocco). They were stopped at Vienna where the Hapsburgs managed to prevent a successful siege of the city.

Social Structure: palace bureaucracy, slaves including janissaries (elite security force drawn from conquered Christian territories). Trained, educated and converted to Islam, Discipline was key amongst these recruits. Freedom of worship within the empire esp to Jews and Christians.

Cultural Achievements: simplified taxation and reduced bureaucracy. Supported the arts and sciences as well as large public works projects.

Weak rulers following Suleiman began a slow decline. Battle of Lepanto in 1571 defeat of Ottomans by Italian and Spanish forces. In 1529 and later again in the 17^th century, the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna, but never captured the city being prevented from further western expansion by the Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1699, the Ottomans lost control of Hungary, beginning a steady decline in territory. 18^th century Ottomans continued to experience military challenges and by 19^th could not prevent independence movements in places such as Egypt and other parts of North Africa. Meanwhile European states seized parts North and West of the empire.

Limits of expansion by the late 17^th century due to loss of military power: defeats on battlefield especially against Russians and Austrians. Lagged behind in terms of strategy, tactics, weaponry and training. Janissaries were no longer disciplined or loyal—they were behind numerous palace coups. -> this loss of military power led to decline in political power.

Increasingly the Ottoman empire became a network of independent states which collected their own taxes and created their own institutions and armies, weakening central control. Russian and Austrian forces took away territories in the east and west. Nationalist uprisings in Serbia and Greece (1829 with the support of British, French and Russians) resulted in a loss of those territories as well. By 1820, Muhammad Ali in Egypt had built a powerful European style army, industrialized, and had all but broken off completely from the empire, actually threatening to invade Istanbul itself. Intervention by the British prevented Egyptian expansion. The British were concerned that if the Ottoman empire disintegrated completely, the Russians could expand into the Mediterranean. This would have threatened British naval dominance in that region. In 1853-4, the Crimean war began as the Russians looked for control of the northern part of the Black Sea trying to get access to warm water ports. The British and French came to the assistance of Turkey, restoring Crimea to the Ottomans.

To make matters worse, the empire declined economically as well. Trade revenue declined since they lost their role as intermediaries as Europeans interacted directly with the Chinese and Indians in the Indian Ocean basin, and later as the bulk of European trade shifted to the Atlantic basin. Increased European imports of manufactured goods forced local producers of goods to lead urban riots protesting the foreign products. Most of the Ottoman exports were raw materials such as grain, cotton, hemp, indigo, and opium. With emerging industrialization funded by European capital, debt grew and soon interest payments alone consumed more than half of the empire’s revenues, forcing foreign intervention in the economy.

With increased foreign presence, foreigners became increasingly entitled to special privileges. Capitulations were agreements that exempted European visitors from Ottoman law and provided European powers with extraterritoriality (right to exercise jurisdiction over their own citizens according to their own laws.) Capitulation treaties dated back to the 16^th century to let the Ottoman sultans avoid the burden of administering justice for communities of foreign merchants. By the 19^th century however, Ottoman officials saw the capitulations as humiliating intrusions on their sovereignty.

By the early 20^th century, the Ottomans lacked the resources to maintain its costly bureaucracy. Declining salaries led to difficulties in recruitment, lower morale and increased corruption. Increased taxes led to an increased burden on the peasantry and a decline in agricultural production.

Reforms were tried over the years… until the early 1800’s most reforms led to uprisings by the Janissaries or others who felt threatened by change. Mahmud II (1808-1839) was able to have the Janissaries all massacred and that allowed for a wave of Western style restructuring. Following the example of Muhammad Ali of Egypt, he created a more effective army, a system of secondary education, more centralized leadership, new roads and communication systems. Despite the smaller size of the empire by the end of his reign, the empire was stronger. From 1839- 1876, an even more vigorous period of reform began, the Tanzimat era. Ottoman law was restructured making it modeled more on the French in the hopes of removing the capitulations. As part of this, reformers introduced a new commercial code, a penal code, a maritime code, and a new civil code. Included here were increased rights for all including public trials, rights of privacy, and equality before the law. A complete free elementary and secondary education system was developed as well. Matters of divorce and marriage remained under religious law, though the educational reforms undermined the ulama who controlled religious education. All of these reforms sparked opposition from several segments of Ottoman society including palace bureaucrats, religious conservatives, and also Ottomans who wanted more of a constitutional system modeled after the British. In 1876, a coup put Abd Hamid II into power as sultan forcing him to accept a constitution and establish a constitutional government. Within a year, he had suspended the constitution and ruled autocratically for thirty years, continuing some of the Tanzimat reforms while trying to keep the empire out of European hands. Active opposition formed in part as young bureaucrats (due to the reforms) were educated in the west and learned not only western science and military affairs but also enlightenment thought and other political traditions. Falling out of favor with the Sultan, they were exiled and spent years living in the west seeing that the biggest problem in the empire was the unchecked power of the Sultan.

The most active dissident organization was the Ottoman Society for Union and Progress (the Young Turks). Founded in 1889, they promoted reform through newspapers, advocating universal suffrage, equality before the law, freedom of religion, free public education, secularization of the state, and the emancipation of women. In 1908 they overthrow the sultan and establish a parliamentary state under a puppet sultan. They pursued their agenda however, in the process of promoting Turkish control of the empire (much of which was Arab and Slavic) they increased tensions between subject people outside of Anatolia resulting in the rise of nationalism and resistance, especially in Syria and Iraq. The empire continued to survive not due to its own inner strength but because the Europeans had not yet figured out how to maintain the balance of power in Europe without the empire, so they propped it up. This was known as the Eastern Question- what to do with the Ottomans. Increasing nationalism in the region, combined with increased militarization throughout Europe, Ottoman weakness and aggressive European expansionism would combine to create WWI. The defeat of the Ottomans in World War I would result in the dismemberment and partial colonization of the empire, due to the Treaty of Versailles.

The 1920 Peace Treaty of Sevres carved Turkey into spheres of influence controlled by France, Italy and Greece. An independent Armenia was to be established. Mustafa Kemal led a rebellion protesting the treaty driving out foreign forces and resulting in the genocide of almost 2 million Armenians. By 1923, Turkish sovereignty was acknowledged. Out of this, a secular Turkey evolved under Kemal (renaming himself Ataturk- Father of the Turks). He declared, “Religion is like a heavy blanket that keeps the people of Turkey asleep.” Amidst controversy, he got rid of what he saw as traditional trappings of Islam and made his people abandon the fez hat, Arabic script, Islamic law including polygamy, and all religious authority in the state. With innovative advances in agriculture and technology, as well as a development loan from the Soviet Union, Turkey quickly modernized. After Ataturk’s death in 1938, the nation found a bit more of a balance between religious and secular.