They knew it very well. Ottoman observers felt there was “a disturbance in the force” even before “the Eastern Question” became a common name. We have good reason to think that there were Ottoman state officials who felt that Europeans were gradually surpassing the Ottomans in terms of military and political might as soon as the mid-17th century. One such, famous name is Koçi Bey, who, in a tract that bore his name, put it in clear terms that there was a decline in the Ottoman might. However, and key for our story here, Koçi Bey did not pay that much attention to the changing dynamics in Europe, nor did he really think of the Ottomans as “the sick man of Europe” per se. He rather thought that the change in the balance of powers was due to increased corruption and decay in Ottoman society. Like many others of his time, Koçi Bey believed that the Ottoman power could be restored if the state reverted to the old ways of the ancestors.
Fast-forward the story to mid-early 18th century. Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi is appointed as the Ottoman ambassador to France. If the likes of Koçi Bey were full of disdain and contempt for European ways (at least mostly), we see glimpses of a change, a new appreciation of European might and European culture in Mehmed Çelebi. He leaves France clearly impressed and he notes his impressions in his treatise. Aware of the growing difference between two ways of life, as it were, he concludes that the world is the hell of the believer (Muslim, of course) and the heaven of the infidel (at least of the French!).
The Ottomans could not help but notice that the rise of European power dwarfed their once victorious armies. The armies that once raided German cities and besieged Vienna were now having difficulties even retaining discipline. One crucial moment is the Ottomans’ wars against the Russians and the Austrians in the 1770s. It was largely in response to this political and military failure that the Ottomans became conscious of their novel status as “the sick man of Europe”. Unsurprisingly, most efforts concentrated on the military reformation in European lines. As early as the late 18th century, Selim III tried to reform the Ottoman army and founded a new army and set up financial institutions to back this new army, which was quite appropriately called nizam-ı cedid; the new order in Ottoman Turkish. This, European inspired and French-trained army were disbanded as a result of internal conflicts, which involved bloody janissary revolts. Mahmud II succeeded in disbanding the Janissary Order in 1826; he took steps towards making changes in the tax and land structure of the Empire. Yet, he too failed in the last analysis. To add insult to injury, the Ottoman Army was defeated twice by the Egyptian Khedivate’s modernised army (which was officially supposed to be part of the Ottoman Empire but had been acting independently at least for three decades). A renewed, deeper process of Westernisation began in 1839; a process named Tanzimat then and now. Abdulhamid II (1876-1909), the Committee of Union and Progress which toppled him (roughly speaking, 1913-1918) all attempted to reform the state, the army, the bureaucracy, the tax structure, and increasingly even the civil and moral life. In fact, I must note, the coup/revolution against Abdulhamid II in 1908 (would be complete in 1909 with the Sultan’s forced abdication after a bloody revolt in Istanbul against revolutionaries) was launched at a time when the Unionists (mostly young officers in the Ottoman Army) believed that the British and the Russian agreed to the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the summer of 1908 (the famous Reval meeting). Such was the awareness and the anxiety about being the sick man of Europe and standing on the verge of disappearance.
One can observe a gradual shift from a solely military reform perspective towards a more general spirit of reform; nevertheless, the necessity of reform was dictated by the recognition that the Ottomans had become the sick man of Europe. There were many differences when it came to particulars; Islamists sought to revitalise the Empire through Western technique and a resuscitated Golden-Age-of-Islam morality; some radical (and, must be said, in minority) Westernisers disagreeing and finding even the best of morality in the West. Yet, as a contemporary and a founding father of Turkish nationalism, Ziya Gökalp noticed then, virtually all parties agreed that some change was necessary (Gökalp, p. 1). It was after the WW1 and the Turkish War of Independence that an even more radical and more decisively Westerniser (and Turkish nationalist) approach took the reins in the country; that is, the Kemalists.
Finally, why did these efforts fail to improve the chances of the Ottomans vis-a-vis the West? Well, why did the Democrats fail to stop Donald Trump? Why did the French fail to resist the Nazi offensive in the WW2? I hardly think there is a single, straightforward answer. Sometimes they did not have the right idea, sometimes they lacked proper application due to shortage of funds or personnel, sometimes (I would assume) they were simply unlucky. But, personally, I can offer two explanations, which do not necessarily exclude other sorts of explanation. First, there were many different parties involved in the process of “modernisation”. Not only these tended to have different interests, sometimes they also believed to be doing the better thing for their land by opposing modernisation. Second, and linked to this, even the revolutionary Unionists were somewhat reluctant (if, of course, they actually believed in the merits of full-blown Westernisation like most Kemalists did). To give an example, the change to the family law they made in 1917 was considered very reformist in Islamic terms, basing itself on various schools of Islamic jurisprudence. By contrast, nine years later, Kemalists almost wholly imported the Swiss Civil Code, banned polygamy, raised the age of consent to 18, and so on. Previous reformists either had no desire for such radical reform and/or felt the necessity to compromise. That is not to say, however, that the previous reformists were wholly unsuccessful. Not at all. The Ottomans beat the Greeks in 1897 and hold their stand quite impressively and for quite some time against the Allied forces in the WW1. But, if you say that, the victory over the Greek resulted in not much diplomatically and was followed by the catastrophic Balkan Wars (1912-13), and the WW1 ended with the victory of the Allies; well, you would be right. But there is still a difference between the Ottoman Army and society during the WW1 and those during, say, the 1770s. There is no straight line from the 1770s to the WW1; there were many ups and downs when we consider the intensity of Ottoman modernisation attempts and the success of these as measured on the battlefield.
Sources and References:
Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
Ziya Gökalp, Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak, ed by İbrahim Kutluk (Ankara: Devlet, 1976). François Georgeon and Uriel Heyd, among others, have worked on the ideas of Gökalp.
Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire and Europe: The Ottoman Empire and Its Place in European History, (İstanbul: Kronik, 2017); also published in Turkish as Osmanlı ve Avrupa.
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