The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Alan Palmer Page B

hostility to Venetian rule. With Holy Russia assuming the
role of militant guardian of the True Faith, it became increasingly difficult for Orthodox believers within the Ottoman Empire to maintain their passive acceptance of second-class citizenship under
the Sultan’s rule. In 1452 a Byzantine official, critical of his Emperor’s attempts to reunite the Eastern Church with Rome, is said to have remarked, ‘It would be better to see
the royal turban of the Turks in the midst of this city than the Latin mitre’; and in 1710 that view still prevailed among most Greek churchmen. 14 But, however much they might mistrust the Latins, respect for the turban was wearing thin. By the second half of the century there were many Greeks who hoped that the finest of
their dreams would soon become a reality: to hear the Holy Liturgy sung once more in Constantinople’s domed Basilica of the Divine Wisdom no longer seemed an impossibility.

 
    C HAPTER 3
    T ULIP T IME AND A FTER

    T HE DECLINE OF THE O TTOMAN E MPIRE WAS NEITHER RAPID NOR continuous. By 1700 the age of Islamic conquest
in Europe was over; frontiers had contracted after lost or indecisive campaigns; and peripheral provinces, acquired somewhat haphazardly in North Africa and the Yemen, would soon be slipping into
virtual independence. From the closing years of the seventeenth century outsiders predicted the collapse of the Sultanate time and time again. Yet, against all expectancy, the Ottoman Empire
outlived imperial Spain, republican Genoa and republican Venice, the elective monarchy of Poland, British colonial America, the vestigial Holy Roman Empire, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, and the
temporal power of the Papacy; it even survived by a few years the Habsburg and Romanov empires, so long its apparent residuary legatees, and the Hohenzollern empire which had aspired to overtake
France as its chief creditor.
    It is easier to identify signs of decay in the Ottoman Empire than to discover why it became such a durable institution. Undoubtedly one source of vitality was a conviction within the ruling
élite and the ulema that the Ottoman Empire was Islam. The prestige of the Caliphate, whether held legitimately or by appropriation, enhanced the secular power of a Sultan
after he was girded with the Sword of Othman at Eyüp, however feeble his personality might be. ‘May it be known to His Imperial Majesty that the origins of good order in kingship and
community and the guarantee of a stable foundation for the faith and the dynasty lie in a firm grasp on the strong cord of the law of Muhammad,’the Ottoman counsellor
Mustafa Koçi Bey wrote in 1630 in a famous treatise which he presented to Murad IV; and later memoranda to several of Murad’s successors similarly stressed the wisdom of basing public
and private life on Holy Islamic Law (the ş eriat ). 1 But there remained in the structure of the Ottoman state an innate conservatism which was
always restorative and reformist in character rather than narrowly obscurantist, as some members of the ulema wished. This is a thin distinction, but an important one: provided outward forms
looked familiar, the military and naval techniques of Western Europe might be adopted and changes of practice introduced into the day-to-day business of government. Already, under the
Köprülüs, the Grand Vizier had acquired an official residence, in a road skirting the outer wall of the Topkapi Sarayi, and from 1654 he retained there an administrative staff in the
residence which because of its lofty gate became known as the Sublime Porte ( Bab-i Ali ) and remained the recognized seat of government until the fall of the Empire. There were several
periods in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries when a Sultan or a Grand Vizier cautiously experimented with westernization, seeking to introduce a European style to the well-worn
fabric of Ottoman rule.
    The earliest and most original innovator was Ibrahim Pasha