The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire Read Online Free PDF

prevails in the Austrian capital. Old enmities dissolve in the
mystery of time past.

 
    C HAPTER 2
    C HALLENGE FROM THE W EST

    S ULTAN M EHMED IV WAS SOVEREIGN OF MORE THAN THIRTY million subjects, twice as many as King Louis XIV and
six times as many as Emperor Leopold I. Even after the disaster on the Danube, his empire remained formidable. He ruled over almost the whole of the Balkans, up to the eastern approaches to Zagreb,
and his troops held outposts along the Polish river Bug and the Russian rivers Don and Dnieper. In Europe alone his lands were greater in area than France and Spain taken together, while in Asia
Minor he was direct ruler over a vast region which stretched as far south as the head-waters of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and he held as tributary states the Caucasian lands eastwards to
the Caspian Sea. Rhodes, Crete and Cyprus acknowledged his sovereignty; so, too, did Egypt and the lower Nile valley, and he could claim vassal authority over Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers.
    Along most of these frontiers there was, however, a clear limit to imperial expansion, well defined on the map. In the East the Ottoman advance was checked by a combination of geography and
military science, to which might be added the religious hostility of convinced Shi’ites: the Safavid dynasty of Persia possessed the skill to exploit natural defences high in their
mountainous central plateau; and it was never likely that the Ottomans would emulate the early Arab invaders and reach the Punjab. In the South the barrier to expansion was purely geographical:
sand imposed a natural frontier, and apart from protecting the pilgrim trail to Medina and Mecca, there seemed no reason for the Ottomans to penetrate deeply along caravan routes into the Sahara orthe Arabian deserts. The south-western limits were also settled long before the closing decades of the seventeenth century, for new conquests in that direction depended on
sea power, and Turkish shipyards did not build vessels stout enough to face the challenge of the Atlantic. Although the Sultan’s calm-water fleet was still effective to the east of the
Sicilian narrows, Ottoman maritime pretensions never fully recovered from their defeat in 1571, when Don John of Austria’s Spanish, Genoese and Venetian armada gained a decisive victory at
Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras. Thereafter successive Grand Viziers left naval harassment of the Sultan’s Christian enemies in the western Mediterranean to ‘Barbary pirates’,
untrustworthy allies though these notorious corsairs often proved to be.
    Yet, while mountains, sands and ocean confined Ottoman power in three directions, there was no natural obstacle to the north of the Balkans, short of the Carpathians and the Alps. An artificial
barrier, a string of fortresses built by the Habsburgs in the late sixteenth century, formed the so-called ‘Military Frontier’ across western Croatia, but the Danubian plain formed a
vast arena in which generals who could master the changing techniques of military science might engage the enemy in battle. In the fifteenth century the Turks had soon perceived the value of
cannon; even as early as 1453 a ‘super-gun’ twenty-six feet long lobbed stone balls against the walls of Constantinople. But they did not maintain their lead in exploiting new weaponry.
The relief of Vienna and the fall of Esztergom showed the world what several foreign travellers had suspected over the past half-century: the Ottoman war machine was beginning to seize up. It may
have enabled the Sultans to raise a standing army earlier than other sovereigns in Europe, but the Danubian campaign had shown that Kara Mustafa’s combination of specialist troops,
feudatories, daredevil light horsemen and untrained auxiliary plodders could not match the new professional soldiery of the West. Turkish flintlock muskets remained deadly, but heavy artillery
trains drawn by oxen, buffalo or camels made slow and lumbering