220 DESTINY DISRUPTED
weapons and consultants from some distant, insignificant speck of an is-
land west of Europe seemed like a perfect solution. The Englishmen knew
their stuff, and a few of them from so far away couldn't possibly do much
harm, it seemed. And so it began: the practice of giving European advis-
ers commanding positions in the Persian army.
It's true, however, that not all interactions between westerners and Mus-
lims were peaceful. The Ottoman Turks had been fighting with Christian
Europeans for centuries; their western border was the frontier between
the two worlds, and here the friction showed. Between battles, however,
and even while pitched battles were raging in some places, a lot of trading
was going on in other places, because this was not a World War II-type
total-war situation. Battles were geographically contained. At the very
moment that two armies were clashing one place, business-as-usual might
well be going on just a few miles away. The friction had an ideological di-
mension left over from the Crusades, to be sure-Christianity versus
Islam-but in any practical sense the battles were outbursts of profes-
sional violence between monarchs over territory. Lots of Christians and
Jews lived within the Ottoman empire, after all, and some of them were
in the Ottoman armies, fighting for that side, not out of patriotic fervor
for the House of Othman but because it was a job, and they needed the
money. This kind of fighting certainly allowed for other people to be
going back and forth, buying and selling.
By the seventeenth century, it wasn't just Venetians but also French, Eng-
lish, German, Dutch, and other European traders who were traveling into
the Muslim world armed not with gold but with guns. These businessmen
contributed to a process that slowly and inexorably transformed the mighty
Ottoman Empire into the lumbering monstrosity that Europeans called the
Sick Man of Europe, or sometimes-more gently but in some ways even
more condescendingly-"the Eastern question." The process was so slow,
however, and so pervasive and so complex that it was hard for anyone going
through the history of it all day by day to make a connection between the
European encroachment and the burgeoning decay.
The first thing to note about the process is what didn't happen. The Ot-
toman Empire did not go down in flames to conquering armies. Long
after the empire was totally moribund, long after it was little more than a