Suleyman I (Kanuni Sultan Suleyman), known in the west as as Suleiman the Magnificent, and in the east as the lawgiver (kanuni), for his legal reforms, was remarkable man. From 1520 to 1566, he ruled an Ottoman Empire at the height at of its power, prestige and prosperity, leading armies to conquer the Christian strongholds of Belgrade, Rhodes, and most of Hungary before his ambitions were checked at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. A good deal of the Middle East was annexed from Persia, and north Africa as far west as Algeria. The Ottoman fleet also dominated the seas, from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.

To add to those accomplishments, he was an outstanding poet, goldsmith and patron of the arts. His marriage to a harem girl — Roxelana, then Hurrem Sultan — was equally unusual, as was the sultana's influence on the court and sultan.

Organization of the Ottoman State

The Ottoman state was intricately organized through checks and balances, ostensibly divided between a landowning class that commanded armies, administered and taxed, and a subject class, largely agricultural but including merchants and workshop artisans. Further organization came in Sufi orders, brotherhoods and communities (millets) with their own rites, education, justice systems, charities and social systems. Each millet answered to the Sultan. A parallel legal system of lawyers, bureaucrats and judges came under the authority of the grand vizier. The devshirme or janissaries began life as the Sultan's bodyguards, but soon had administrative roles in government, the military and the arts. While advancement was by merit, as it was until the eighteenth century, the state was exceptionally cohesive, surviving ethnic unrest, and rule by mediocre sultans and corrupt viziers. {6-11}

In its decline, however, the empire increasingly suffered the defects of its own excellence. {7, 8-11}

The empire drew its wealth from territorial expansion, traditional monopolies and a tax on land and agricultural products. Roads, so necessary for trade and the transporting of those agricultural products, were not generally improved, however, though a system of caravanserai was extended into the Balkans. Their safety was improved in the eighteenth century, after the Jelali revolts, but that was no more consistent a state policy than the maintenance of the powerful navy built by Bayezid II. The navy suppressed piracy, protected shipping and transported armies, but did not otherwise interfere with the sea trade, the empire preferring to tax a free-trade system. Wheat was transported from the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, spices from Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and wheat and lumber from the Black Sea. Only briefly in the sixteenth century did the state undertake its own trade in spices. {6-11}

Technological advances cut travel times in the nineteenth century, from Venice to Istanbul in 10 days by steam ship from the customary 15-81 days by sail, for example, and carried larger tonnages, 1000 tonnes rather than the earlier 50-100 tonnes. Indeed Istanbul handled 10 million tonnes in 1900, up from 4.5 million tonnes in 1873. But 90% of shipping was owned by European interests, and a similar picture held for road transport. Steam engines speeded the transportation of agricultural products to the coast for export, but 10,000 camels were still employed to serve the railway stations. Employment gains were modest. Low salaries, a sparse population and expensive sources of capital did not encourage industrialization. {6-11}

The Ottoman Empire was essentially an agrarian society where taxes on land supplied 40% of state revenues. Most worked on small family holdings, where only part of the crop or livestock production went for export. Families also produced handicrafts, and nomads supplied animal products and textiles. Agricultural techniques were gradually improved, however, and tens of thousands of ploughs and even combines were in action across the Balkans, Anatolia and Arab lands by 1900. Agriculture was also extended into poorer soils, particularly by refugees. Agricultural schools and model farms proliferated, and the value of Anatolian agricultural products rose 45% between 1876 and 1908, and tithe products by 76%. Generally, however, the local wheat could not compete with cheap imports of American grain, and there were periodic economic and political crises. {6-11}

The middle class was small, and generally comprised non-Muslim merchants and bankers and bureaucrats, who were part of the establishment, protecting their positions and resistant to change. Indeed the seventeen sultans after Suleyman (1566-1789) were men of little knowledge of or interest in the outside world. The average periods of rule were half those of the previous sultans, and many incumbents were incompetent if not mentally defective, being brought up wholly within the harem and so open to its influence. {6-11}

Gradually the empire lost the power to tax its commerce, and the ideal of service to the state was replaced by self interest. Governors in Arab lands became independent, and attempts by strong viziers like Ibrahim Pasha (1718-30) and rulers like Selim III (1789-1807) were thwarted. Under the cry 'Islam is in danger' the janissaries formed an alliance with the Ulama to curb modernizing practices and central rule. {6-11}

Guilds began with the Sufi Ahi Brotherhood in the 13-14th century, which merchants and craftsmen saw as an extension of Muslim faith. True guilds were widespread in the 16th century, and ran workshops and even small factories. Domestic consumption increased, and steam-powered silk weaving factories appeared in the 1830s. Silk and carpet factories were employing 100,000 workers in 1914, mostly women. Wages were low, however, and locations shifted from urban areas to even lower-paying rural ones. Guilds controlled quality, gave some price protection, but products were gradually displaced by cheaper foreign products, first Asian and then European. {6-11}

The Ottoman Empire only slowly joined the industrial west. Global trade increased 60 fold in the nineteenth century, but only 10-16 fold within the empire. Cotton exports to France and England did double between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, but then shrank in the face of competition from industrialized mill production. Luxury goods, manufactured by the Ottomans or re-exported, also fell throughout the 18th century, and the direction of trade shifted: high quality goods were imported and raw materials exported. Nonetheless, there were no balance of payments problems until the later 19th century. {6-11}

Bureaucratic and military expenditures were funded by taxation, and both expanded through the 18th and 19th centuries. There were some 2,000 civil servants at the end of the 18th century, but 35,000 in 1908. Until 1850 there was no appreciable foreign debt, but nor was there a reliable Ottoman banking system. The government raised money for development with bond issues between 1854 and 1876, but Egypt in particular ran up large debts at the end of the century. Repayment of loans for railway, port and public utility developments consumed increasing proportions of tax revenues, and put the economy in foreign hands. {6-11}

Corruption spread as the empire declined in power. Bribery, purchase of office, favouritism and nepotism became commonplace, and officials would often borrow to buy the administration of provinces, which they would then plunder to repay loans. The devshirme or janissaries became an hereditary class, no longer created afresh from foreign slaves and so answering solely to the sultan. {6-11}

European shipping increasingly sidelined silks, porcelain and handicrafts brought from the east, and the growth of the Safavid state also stemmed or added costs to the overland silk routes. Nonetheless, the European threat did not at first call for a transformation of the Muslim state. European inventions could be simply purchased and installed — armaments, and then schools and institutions for scientific advancement. The empire did not suffer the attentions of Christian missionaries, and the old ruling order was not swept away, as was the case in India and north Africa. But the secular nature of European society, with its clear division between church and state, came increasingly to question the nature of Ottoman rule. Capitalism challenged the Qur'anic prohibition of usury. The European concept of rights challenged the Qur'anic acceptance of slavery. And the belief in equality challenged the traditional view of women — a man's right to four wives, to easy divorce, and to the seclusion of women in the harem or home. More threatening was the monolithic idea of the state's control over all aspects of physical and human resources, limited by law but still expressing the 'popular will'. Even education, focussing on the individual, was at odds with the Qur'anic revelation that legislated for the whole society. {6-11}

But European technology was clearly superior to Ottoman, and not benign. Change had to come, and a start was made by Mahmud II (1808-39). The janissaries were eliminated, and a modern army constructed and trained by Prussian officers. Schools taught European languages, and by 1863 all commercial, criminal, maritime and land legislation were based on codes of French origin. Edicts of 1839 and 1856 declared that all subjects, Muslim or not, were equal before the law. A new constitution was introduced, although unsuccessfully, in 1876, and Abdul Hamid (1876-1909) espoused a pan-Islamic ideology. Yet the Young Turks who seized government in 1908 imposed parliamentary rule by fiat, and troubles in the Balkans and Libya gave their administration a military focus, which caused the empire to unwisely join the Axis powers and so suffer defeat in W.W.I. {6-11}

It was Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), later called Ataturk, who wholly secularised the Ottoman state. He defeated the Greeks who had occupied Rumelia and western Anatolia in 1922, and made peace with the Allies the following year. The sultanate was abolished in 1921, and the caliphate in 1922. The last heir of Osman was put on the Orient Express and bundled off to Paris. Islam became a private affair, a matter of individual conscience, and the Shariah was no longer the basis of law. Turkey is now a regional power, with an economy that grew 5% p.a. between 2002 and 2012. Nonetheless, the modernization has been carried out by a westernised elite with mixed support in the countryside, and Turkey still faces threats from those actions: capital flight, Kurdish and Islamic insurgency, and blowback from US Middle East policies. {12-15}