150 • 9 FIREARMS, SLAVES, AND EMPIRESliving in a particular place. The Capitulations also attracted European
traders and technicians to reside in the empire, while sparing the Ottomans
the trouble of settling their quarrels.
Ottoman Decline: Signs and Causes
The accession of Selim II in 1566 and the defeat of the Ottoman navy at
Lepanto in 1571 are commonly identified as the first signs of decline. Some
of its root causes go back earlier, though, and the outward signs were not
visible until later. Well into the seventeenth century, Ottoman armies went
on attacking European Christians and Persian Shi'is almost at will.
True, the Ottoman princes no longer got on-the-job training, nor were
they put to death if they did not reach the throne. Rather, they were con¬
fined to the imperial harem and manipulated by factions of janissaries or
bureaucrats until they reached the throne unfit to rule. And true, occa¬
sional border setbacks showed that the janissaries were no longer keeping
up their high training standards or using the latest weapons and techniques
of war. In fact, they were living outside their barracks, getting married, en¬
rolling their sons in the corps, rioting to obtain more privileges, and taking
up trades more lucrative than soldiering. The Ottoman navy was still using
oar-driven galleys when rival powers had converted to sailing ships and
could blockade the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and even the
Persian Gulf.
Other aspects of Ottoman society were also declining, but most Euro¬
peans did not notice any problems until the late seventeenth century. The
Ottoman army besieged Vienna in 1683. It had done so once before, only
to be driven back by an unusually cold October; but in that second siege
the superior arms and tactics of the Europeans saved the Habsburg capital
and repelled the Turks, despite their greater numbers. By 1699, when the
Ottomans signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, ceding control of Hungary to
the Habsburg Empire, they were clearly on the defensive. The Ottoman
Empire had ceased to be the scourge of Christendom.
Why did the Ottoman Empire begin to decline in the sixteenth century?
No state has yet found a political fountain of youth that would arrest its ul¬
timate downfall. Perhaps we should admit that countries, like people, have
life spans that, though variable in length, are never infinite. But historians
have noted other causes of the Ottoman Empire's decline. One was its insis¬
tence on having only one army, for the experience of previous Muslim
states had been that dividing their forces led to breaking up their realms.
Besides, the army was, in principle, led by the chief ghazi—that is, either by