Islam • 137they were formulated under capita: headings) meant that Eu-
ropean traders living in Ottoman territory were not required
to observe the law of the land; their offences were tried ac-
cording to their own laws in their own courts, which were
presided over by their own consul. Suleiman had negotiated
these treaties with the nations of Europe as an equal. But by
the eighteenth century it was clear that these Capitulations
were weakening Ottoman sovereignty, especially when they
were extended in 1740 to the Christian millets in the empire,
who were now "protected" like the European expatriates, and
no longer subject to government control.
By the late eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire was in
a critical state. Trade had declined still further; the Bedouin
tribes were out of control in the Arab provinces, and the local
pashas were no longer adequately managed by Istanbul, were
often corrupt, and exploited the population. The West, how-
ever, was going from one triumph to another. But the Ot-
tomans were not unduly worried. Sultan Selim III tried to
take a leaf out of Europe's book, assuming that an army re-
form along Western lines would restore the balance of power.
In 1789 he opened a number of military schools with French
instructors, where students learned European languages and
studied the new Western sciences alongside modern martial
arts. But this would not be sufficient to contain the Western
threat. Muslims had not yet realized that Europe had evolved
a wholly different type of society since the Ottoman Empire
had been established, that they had now pulled irrevocably
ahead of Islamdom and would shortly achieve world power.
The three great empires were all in decline by the end of
the eighteenth century. This was not due to the essential in-
competence or fatalism of Islam, as Europeans often arro-
gantly assumed. Any agrarian polity had a limited lifespan,
and these Muslim states, which represented the last flowering
of the agrarian ideal, had simply come to a natural and in-