© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_006
chapter 4“Mirrors for Princes”: the Decline Theorists
According to the view prevailing up to the early 1990s, it was during the
Süleymanic era that signs of Ottoman decline started to appear.1 Military
victories were by no means absent, but no spectacular conquest like Selim’s
expansion in the Middle East or Süleyman’s in Hungary was made after the
1540s; the new front against the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean was never
very successful, although it continued to bring occasional victories until the
1580s. Moreover, Süleyman allegedly became a much more secluded and pious
person after the execution of his vizier Ibrahim (this also seems to have been
reflected in his patronage of poetry, with disillusionment of the literati being
a secondary outcome).2 The execution of the popular prince Mustafa in 1553
soon led to the rebellion of Süleyman’s second son, Bayezid, who was trying to
secure his place against his brother Selim. Bayezid raised an army consisting of
peasants who had abandoned their lands; he was defeated near Konya in 1559
and fled to Iran, where he was held as a hostage before being executed by an
Ottoman envoy. When Süleyman died during the siege of Szigetvár in Hungary,
the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha kept his death secret until Selim was
informed and successfully enthroned.
Selim II (r. 1566–74) is generally considered an incompetent sultan who was
lucky to have his father’s major two statesmen, namely Ebussu’ud Efendi and
Sokollu. The latter successfully suppressed a major revolt in Yemen and con-
cluded a treaty with the Habsburgs. On both fronts he envisaged ambitious
projects of building canals (in Suez and in the Volga—to fight in Astrakhan
and the Caspian Sea), but none was effectively built. Finally, although at the
beginning he was reluctant, it was under Sokollu’s vizierate that Cyprus was
conquered from the Venetians (1570–71), and it was through Sokollu’s efforts
that the major naval defeat of Lepanto (1571) had no lasting consequences
for the Ottoman presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Sokollu remained
in post after Selim’s death as well, under Murad III (1574–95); however, the
grand vizier’s assassination in 1579 led to a change of policy. Sokollu’s succes-
sors favored war rather than peace. Consequently, a long war against Safavid
Iran started in 1578; after initial difficulties, successes, such as the occupation
1 For the chronology, again the most recent account is Imber 2009, 52ff.; see also Mantran 1989,
155–158; Emecen 2001b, 39–47.
2 Cf. Necipoğlu 1992; Andrews – Kalpaklı 2005.