Gábor Ágoston: The Twilight of Islamic Power: Ottoman Military Might in Comparative Perspective

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Monument Building
Room: 
Gellner Room
Friday, November 6, 2009 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Friday, November 6, 2009 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire was feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccolò Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. In 1547, the latter regarded the Ottoman Empire of Mehmed the Conqueror as a model for his ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy, and indeed Ottoman methods of resource mobilization and warfare were taken into consideration in Muscovy. Similarly, Ottoman expansion and military superiority played an important role in Habsburg military, fiscal and bureaucratic reforms. However, by 1699 the Ottomans had lost Hungary to Habsburg Austria, and by 1783 the northern Black Sea littoral and the Crimea to Romanov Russia. Eighteenth-century Ottoman thinkers considered the military reforms of Peter the Great as an example worthy of imitation. These events and opinions reflect major changes in the military balance among the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans that await explanation. The lecture challenges the fashionable but misleading Orientalist and Eurocentric views about the innate conservatism of Islamic empires and war departments and their inevitable decline. Instead, it tries to understand the shift in military fortunes by comparing and contrasting military, fiscal, and bureaucratic transformations in these empires and, more broadly, by looking at the ways the Ottomans and their rivals responded to the challenges they faced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue that Islamic conservatism was not, in the final analysis, an important reason for the Ottomans failure in keeping pace with their continental rivals.