© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_010
chapter 8The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists
The 1703 Edirne event may have not ended in outright regicide, but it was
one of the most spectacular Ottoman rebellions: that a rebel army occupied
Istanbul and almost clashed with an army raised by the sultan, eventually over-
powering the latter, was unprecedented and was to remain a unique incident
in Ottoman history.1 However, it soon became clear that no irreversible harm
had been inflicted on the empire. Under the financial and military reforms
(which mostly followed a traditional vein, i.e. along the lines of inspecting
the army and redressing the timar system, with a more modernist approach
to the navy) of the grand vizier, Çorlulu Ali Pasha, Ahmed III’s army was able
to stand against Peter the Great’s invasion at the Pruth river and impose the
terms of the treaty that followed (1711). In the immediate aftermath of this,
the Ottomans launched a successful attack on the Venetians and managed to
reconquer the Peloponnese; on the other hand, however, the Habsburg allies
of Venice launched a campaign that reached as far as Belgrade, which they
captured. Both conquests were ratified by the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718).
The period that followed, and which ended in another major revolt, was
later (in the early twentieth century) named the “Tulip Period” as a result of
the Istanbul urban strata’s obsession with gardening and, especially, tulips.
More particularly, the Tulip Period was perceived to have coincided with the
vizierate of Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim Pasha (1718–30). Traditionally, this pe-
riod has been regarded as one of the exhibition of excessive wealth by the
palace elite, and it has also been connected with ideas of Westernization and
a more tolerant stance in matters of religion and science; recent interpreta-
tions have focused on the emergence of a “mass consumer” culture (with the
popularization of elite forms of entertainment), on the “luxury antagonism”
that was imposed on the elite by the palace, as well as on the cultural features
that bear similarities with the early period of the European Enlightenment,
including cosmopolitanism, religious tolerance, and the valorization of nat-
ural philosophy and social mobility (what Shirine Hamadeh has termed the
Ottoman décloisonnement or “the greater porosity of social and professional
1 On the events of the period up to Selim III, see Mantran 1989, 265–425; Emecen 2001b, 55–62;
Beydilli 2001, 63–70.