History of the Late Ottoman Empire

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  • Soldier of Macedon
    Senior Member
    • Sep 2008
    • 13670

    History of the Late Ottoman Empire

    Full title is "A brief history of the late Ottoman Empire", by M. Sukru Hanioglu. I found it an interesting book, I don't agree with some of the writer's statements and terminology, but on most points he is generally accurate, and he also provides a good insight into some of the events leading up to the complete disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Below is a list of quotes and citations from the book for reference purposes, which I will present in a chronological order by date of event rather than page number. The book also consists of a number of interesting historical photos and documents taken from surviving Ottoman archives.

    Local hospodars had ruled Wallachia and Moldavia on behalf of the Ottoman sultan until 1715-16, when the Ottoman center began to award these positions to imperial dragomans belonging to the major Greek Phanariot families in Istanbul. This practice provoked considerable discontent in the principalities. (7-8)
    By the terms of the Kucuk Kaynarca Treaty of 1774……Wallachia and Moldavia, came under Russian protection………… (7)
    ……..humiliating defeats – such as the rout of more than 120,000 Janissaries at the hands of 8,000 Russian troops on the shores of the Danube in 1789 – rendered reform inevitable. (44)
    In 1790, the Ottoman Empire for the first time concluded a “defensive and offensive alliance” with a Christian power, Prussia. (48)
    The first Serbian gimnazija (high school) was established in Karloca in 1791.After the closure of the Serbian Patriarchate in 1776, the town emerged as a major religious centre, sporting the second most important seminary (after the one in Kiev) in Orthodox Christianity. (52)
    The most organized banditry took place during the Mountaineers Revolt of 1791 – 1808 in Rumelia, when former soldiers and deserters, in league with local notables, subjected large areas to their rapacious rule, sacking major towns and rendering transportation insecure. (26)
    In 1795, the government launched a major reorganization of Ottoman provincial administration designed to strengthen central control over the periphery. A new law decreed that there would be 28 provinces in the empire, each to be governed by a vizier. These were: Adana, Aleppo, Anatolia, Baghdad, Basra, Bosnia, Cildir, Crete, Damascus, Diyar-i Bekir, Egypt, Erzurum, Jeddah, Karaman, Kars, Mar’as, the Mediterranean Islands, the Morea, Mosul, Rakka, Rumelia, Sayda, Sehr-i Zor, Silistra, Sivas, Trabzon, Tripoli in Syria, and Van. In practice, however, central control remained weak. (49-50)
    In Vidin In 1795, Pazvandoglu Osman, a former mercenary in the service of the Wallachian prince, took advantage of being the son of a former notable who been executed by the central administration, and subjected a vast area in present-day Serbia and western Bulgaria by force, dismissing local administrators and installing his own men. Two years later, the central government dispatched an army to put an end to the situation, but Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 compelled it to grant Pazvandoglu Osman an imperial pardon and appoint him governor of Vidin with the rank of vizier. (16)
    In 1802, an imperial decree redefined the status of Ottoman merchants engaged in commerce with Europe. Henceforth, all Ottoman merchants, regardless of their religious affiliation, were entitled to the same privileges previously bestowed on aliens. (47)
    In 1802, the Ottoman Empire signed a peace treaty with France. (49)
    The first revolt to acquire a national character was the Serbian uprising of 1804………However, the origins of the Serbian national awakening lay in Austria, not in the Ottoman Empire. (51)
    A bitter struggle ensued between the Ottoman centre and the Mamluks, with the participation of Janissaries and Albanian irregulars. After three years of chaos, serial assassinations, and much intrigue, Mehmed Ali, in May 1805, compelled the notables and religious leaders of Cairo to declare his governor of Egypt. (50)
    Alemdar Mustafa was the primary beneficiary of the erosion of Ottoman power in the European provinces in the wake of the Serbian revolt………Idris Pasha, governor of Vidin, could muster only 8,000 troops from his truncated lands to face the threat from Alemdar Mustafa, who controlled a vast area between the Danube and the capital, and established an important alliance with Serezli Ismail, ruler of modern-day Macedonia. Serezli Ismail was not a warlord in the strict sense of the word. Lacking a substantial military force, he ruled by the consent of his subjects – Muslim and non-Muslim alike. He was especially popular among non-Muslism for the encouragement he afforded them to engage freely in argriculture and commerce. (55)
    When, for instance, Russia had supported the Serbian rebels during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1806-12, European policy makers and public opinion refrained from making a moral issue of the “Serbian Question”. (68)
    In 1826, the sultan, riding a wave of popular admiration for the modern army of Mehmed Ali following its defeat of the Greek rebels at Missolonghi,finally felt read to confront the Janissaries. (58)
    …...a general census carried out in 1830-31 provided the government with precise data about its subjects for the first time in the modern history of the empire. (61-62)
    Husein Kapetan Gradascevic (known as Zmaj od Bosne, the Dragon of Bosnia), whose superb army won a military engagement against imperial troops in 1831-32 under the conservative green banner of the crescent and star, was nonetheless unable to exploit his victory in the absence of international support. (61)
    ….uprisings in Nish and Vidin in 1841 and 1849-50, respectively, revealed the stiff resistance of Christian leaders to the economic reforms proposed by the Tanzimat leaders…..(88)
    Having achieved a reasonable degree of centralization in the heartlands of the empire, the Tanzimat statesmen set their sights on reforming provincial government beginning in 1853………In areas heavily populated by Albanians and Kurds the state crushed any resistance. (86-87)
    The supranational ideology of Ottomanism, perhaps the Tanzimat’s most significant contribution to the empire, presupposed a rapid embrace of rational ideas and the abandonment of religious obscurantism……..Wider swaths of the Ottoman population, such as Bulgarian peasants who continued to chafe under their Gospodars, or Christian Bosnian and Herzegovinian peasants serving Muslim landowners, derived little benefit from the new ideology. This helps to explain why nationalist movements during and after the Tanzimat often carried strong socialist undertones, the best examples being the Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Armenian nationalist movements. (106-107)
    Ottoman influence over Wallachia and Moldavia diminished sharply after 1858, when new organic regulations came into effect there; the unification of the two principalities, followed by Ottoman recognition of the fait accompli in 1861, reduced Ottoman leverage to nil. (85)
    The state, in turn, continued to recognize the religious foundation of the millets, drafting organic laws governing the self-administration of the three major non-Muslim communities; the Greek Orthodox (1862), the Armenians of the Apostolic Church (1863), and the Jews (1865). (76)
    ……….the emergence of patriarchs independent of Istanbul and beholden to St Petersburg would significantly reduce Ottoman control over the Greek Orthodox population of the empire, which encompassed millions of Albanians, Arabs, Bulgarians, Macedonians and Vlachs, as well as ethnic Greeks. (80)
    In 1870, the Bulgarians petitioned the sultan to “strengthen forever the ties that attach us Bulgarians to your throne, by proclaiming our religious and political autonomy, based on a free Constitution, and by adding the title ‘Tsar of Bulgarians’ to your [present] title ‘Sultan of the Ottomans’”………As late as 1870 the Bulgarians appealed to the state for recognition not as ethnic Bulgars, but as a distinct religious community in the traditional mode, to be headed by an ethnarch in Istanbul. (75-76)
    Reformed Macedonia (my note: after San Stefano), in particular, was destined to saddle European diplomacy with a most burdensome problem in the decades to come, as it turned into a battleground for armed groups whose excesses were designed to provoke Ottoman retaliation, leading in turn to foreign intervention. Subsequent events in Macedonia played a significant role in the background to the Young Turk Revolution, the Balkan Wars, and the First World War. (123)
    Due to the loss of territory heavily populated by Christians and the influx of Muslim refugees, the Muslim proportion of the Ottoman population had grown to 73.3 percent, according to the general censuses of 1881/2 - 1893. (130)
    ......Bulgarian meddling in Macedonia was a constant irritant. To reduce the menace, the sultan exerted considerable effort to forge an alliance with Greece, Serbia and possibly Rumania to encircled Bulgaria and contain it. Concurrently, the Ottoman administration turned a blind eye to Greek band activity in Macednia so long as it targeted the Macedonian Slavs.......(134)
    .......Macedonia, (my note: in the year 1907) then undergoing a civil war and in danger of European-sponsored partition.........The plan called for the conversion of Ottoman military units into sizeable armed bands, similar to the nationalist guerilla groups fighting each other in Macedonia at the time (Includng Macedo-Slav, Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Kutzo-Vlach, and Albanian groups), and led by officers loyal to the CPU. (147)
    With the exception of one stillborn attempt to achieve a Serbo-Ottoman alliance in 1908, his successors abandoned these efforts, with disastrous consequences. (134)
    Henceforth, until 1908, Ottoman politics was reduced to a game played by two major actors: the bureaucracy of the Sublime Porte and the court of the sultan. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Janissaries, it was the court that benefited most. (59)
    On Ottoman Society:
    The shari’a applied to all issues involving Muslims. But when it came to the adjudication of internal matters, as family law, non-Muslims had a choice: they could submit cases either to their own religious institutions (eg., Christian ecclesiastical courts or Jewish rabbinical courts) or to shari’a courts. By and large, non-Muslims preferred the former course of action……….Legal conflicts between a non-Muslim foreigner and a Muslim were settled in shari’a courts with the presence of dragomans. (19)
    Society at large was traditionally organized along religious lines, the principal division being that between Muslim and non-Muslim. An estimated 80 percent of the population was rural. The overwhelming majority of the subjects was illiterate………an ethnic Albanian, for example, could belong to the Muslim, Greek Orthodox or Roman Catholic community depending on religious affiliation. In certain areas – as in the Muslim area of Bosnia, religion fused with ethnicity to produce identity. But no ethnic consciousness comparable to modern nationalism existed to an appreciable degree within any of the communities of the empire. (25)
    In a society organized along strictly religious lines, identity was closely linked to physical markers, especially clothing. The dominant faith, for instance, determined the colour code appropriate for non-Muslims……..As members of the privileged religious class entitled to bear arms, Muslims typically owned various types of weapons, ranging from daggers to rifles……..Islamic traditions forbidding non-Muslims to ride on a beast or in a horse-drawn carriage past a pedestrian Muslim, although unevenly enforced, did reduce ownership of riding animals and carts by Christians and Jews. (29)
    On the influence of the certain languages in the empire:
    All the languages of the empire, from Hungarian and Albanian to various Slavic tongues and Armenian, contributed in different ways to the enrichment of the imperial language. By the 19th century, Ottoman Turkish, although not widely spoken, had become one of the richest and most complex languages in the world……..In a way, Ottoman resembled Latin as used in medieval or early modern Europe. It supplanted Persian, which had served as the literary language of the cultured upper classes during the first three centuries of the empire…..Those who used the Ottoman language were not necessarily Turks. Rather, they constituted the educated upper classes of a variety of Ottoman groups. (34-35)
    While the Greeks of the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and the west Anatolian littoral continued to speak and write in Greek, the Greeks of Cappodocia (Karaman) spoke Turkish and wrote Turkish in Greek script. Similarly, a large majority of the Armenians in the empire adopted Turkish as their vernacular…….the first novels published in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century were by Armenians and Cappodocian Greeks; they wrote them in Turkish, using Armenian and Greek alphabets……..In the Balkans, the impact of centuries of Byzantine administration was not so easily effaced. As a result, Greek remained both the language of culture among the upper classes – wether Bulgarian, Macedonian, Vlach, Greek, or Orthodox Albanian – and the lingua franca of the major trade centres, coastal regions, and islands, where ethnic Greeks predominated. (36)
    One might say that the empire had one imperial language for the bureaucratic elite (Ottoman Turkish), three major lingua francas (Turkish, Arabic, and Greek) and a host of local languages split into a variety of dialects……….a speaker of the mainstream Albanian Tosk dialect (not to mention a speaker of Arvanitika, a subdialect of Tosk spoken by Albanians in the Peloponnese and Epirus) would encounter grave difficulties in conversation with a speaker of Geg, the other major Albanian dialect. (37)
    On Greek and Bulgar delusions:
    In present-day Bulgaria, the image of Hilandarski adorns two-Leva banknotes, presenting him as the man who envisioned the modern Bulgarian nation-state, while that of Rigas Velestinlis-Pheraios figures on ten cent Greek Euro coins. At the time, such recognition would have seemed absurd. (26)
    In the name of the blood and the sun, the dagger and the gun, Christ protect this soldier, a lion and a Macedonian.
  • sf.
    Member
    • Jan 2010
    • 387

    #2
    The first Serbian gimnazija (high school) was established in Karloca in 1791.After the closure of the Serbian Patriarchate in 1776, the town emerged as a major religious centre, sporting the second most important seminary (after the one in Kiev) in Orthodox Christianity. (52)


    The first revolt to acquire a national character was the Serbian uprising of 1804………However, the origins of the Serbian national awakening lay in Austria, not in the Ottoman Empire. (51)
    For those who don't know, Karloca is 'Sremski Karlovac' in Croatia. This is where the national character and symbols of the Serbs were defined and shaped.

    Also note the Russian support mentioned elsewhere. This external influence is no different than what happened with Greece and Bulgaria. We of course were not blessed with this, nor the freedom to define ourselves without interference.
    Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. - Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

    Comment

    • Soldier of Macedon
      Senior Member
      • Sep 2008
      • 13670

      #3
      Originally posted by sf
      We of course were not blessed with this, nor the freedom to define ourselves without interference.
      And that is where we ultimately fell short. We didn't have a sponsor or sponsors like all of our neighbours to play the role of 'big brother' and grant us freedom. However, in terms of home-grown ideology, ethno-national development and cultural solidarity, even without a 'big brother', our people demonstrated more local roots and strength than any of our neighbours. Our revolutionaries were also among the most fierce and respected opponents by the Ottomans.
      In the name of the blood and the sun, the dagger and the gun, Christ protect this soldier, a lion and a Macedonian.

      Comment

      • TrueMacedonian
        Senior Member
        • Jan 2009
        • 3810

        #4
        On Greek and Bulgar delusions:

        Quote:
        In present-day Bulgaria, the image of Hilandarski adorns two-Leva banknotes, presenting him as the man who envisioned the modern Bulgarian nation-state, while that of Rigas Velestinlis-Pheraios figures on ten cent Greek Euro coins. At the time, such recognition would have seemed absurd. (26)
        Thank you for this SoM. This will fit well in another topic
        Slayer Of The Modern "greek" Myth!!!

        Comment

        • Liberator of Makedonija
          Senior Member
          • Apr 2014
          • 1595

          #5
          Bump....................
          I know of two tragic histories in the world- that of Ireland, and that of Macedonia. Both of them have been deprived and tormented.

          Comment

          • Coleman
            Junior Member
            • Aug 2017
            • 16

            #6
            do you really think that book is accurate?

            Comment

            • Liberator of Makedonija
              Senior Member
              • Apr 2014
              • 1595

              #7
              Originally posted by Coleman View Post
              do you really think that book is accurate?
              Is there something you find about these excerpts to be inaccurate or unlikely?
              I know of two tragic histories in the world- that of Ireland, and that of Macedonia. Both of them have been deprived and tormented.

              Comment

              • Stojacanec
                Member
                • Dec 2009
                • 809

                #8
                Originally posted by Coleman View Post
                do you really think that book is accurate?
                not accurate according to the Greek idiom

                Comment

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