WEST COMES EAST 223once the expansion stopped, the devshirme began to stagnate. And then
the janissaries began to marry. And then they did what people do for their
children: swing their clout to get the kids the best possible educational and
employment opportunities. It was perfectly natural, but it did mean the
janissaries encrusted into a permanent, hereditary elite, which reduced the
vigor of the empire because it meant the experts and specialists who ran
the empire were no longer drawn exclusively from those who showed early
promise but also included dullards with rich and important parents.
No one linked these stagnations to the fact that Suleiman had failed to
conquer Vienna decades ago. How could they? The consequences were so
distantly and so indirectly related to their causes that for the general pub-
lic they registered merely as some sort of indefinable social malaise that
was hard to explain, the sort of thing that makes religious conservatives
rail about the moral fabric of society and the importance of restoring old-
fashioned values like discipline and respect for elders.
Then came the follow-up to Suleiman's failure. In 1683, the Ottomans
tried again to take Vienna and they failed again, just as they had 154 years
earlier, but this time they were routed by a coalition of European forces.
Technically this second battle for Vienna was also merely a failure to score
a victory, but the Ottoman elite knew they had been trounced and some-
thing had gone very wrong.
It made them doggedly determined to pump up their military strength.
Too easily did they assume that the might and vigor of their empire de-
pended on troops and weapons. Against the formless forces eroding the
empire, they thought to fling up a military bulwark. Pouring resources
into their military, however, only imposed more expenses on a government
that was already overburdened.
It was overburdened in part because European traders entering the
economy had upset the delicate checks and balances in the Ottoman sys-
tem. Forget the battle of Lepanto. Forget the failed siege of Vienna. Ulti-
mately, it was traders, not soldiers, who took down the Ottoman Empire.
Let me trace some of the details. In the Ottoman Empire, guilds (in-
tertwined with Sufi orders) controlled all manufacturing and they pro-
tected their members by locking out competition. One guild had a
monopoly on producing soap, for example, while another had a monopoly
on making shoes .... The guilds couldn't exploit their monopoly positions