5 - War and peace

Summary

Introduction

Writing the history of Ottoman warfare and diplomacy from 1603 to 1838 is charting much unknown territory, and combating long-held assumptions about Ottoman obscurantism, paralysis and obstinacy in the face of defeat, shrinking borders and European incursion. In many ways, the era can be characterised by a slow, imperceptible tilting towards European-style diplomacy, as Ottoman bureaucrats came to terms with fixed borders and the potential power and sometimes debilitating limitations of negotiations, what J. C. Hurewitz long ago called ‘the Europeanization of Ottoman diplomacy’. The eighteenth century, in particular, saw a hundredfold increase in the use of diplomatic initiatives, including the sending of special envoys to Europe, increasing emphasis on foreign affairs in the bureaucracy, establishing permanent embassies in Europe in the latter part of the period under study, and the sometimes adroit, sometimes maladroit manipulation of the large and unruly European diplomatic community in Istanbul.

Ottoman warfare is not as easy to characterise, as studies of so many of the major campaigns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and of the 1800s as well, for that matter) have yet to be undertaken from the Ottoman point of view, a striking lacuna for an empire whose single raison d’être is almost invariably described in military terms. Much of the debate on military reform, or lack of it, in the Ottoman context has been influenced by western European historiography, which pits rational and progressive against religious and regressive societies, accounting for the spectacular success of the West and, by-the-by for the failure of the Ottomans to make the transition to a modern-style army.