Decline and Reform in the Ottoman Empire: 1600 to 1800

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a long, uneven period in which the Ottoman Empire lost its military primacy in Europe, reformed its institutions in piecemeal fashion, and laid the foundations for the modernizing efforts of the nineteenth century. The conventional dividing line is the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, the first major peace treaty in which the Ottomans ceded substantial European territory to their enemies. The broader history of the Ottoman Empire is set out in the main overview.

Key dates

1606 — Treaty of Zsitvatorok; Ottoman-Habsburg parity.
1639 — Treaty of Zuhab; Ottoman-Iranian frontier fixed until 1918.
1669 — Fall of Candia; Ottoman conquest of Crete.
1683 — Second Ottoman siege of Vienna lifted.
1699 — Treaty of Karlowitz.
1718–1730 — The Tulip Period.
1774 — Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca.

The age of the queen mothers

The decades following the death of Suleiman in 1566 are often called the Sultanate of Women, a translation of the Turkish phrase kadınlar saltanatı. It refers to the political influence of the harem, the queen mothers (valide sultan), and the chief eunuchs. The practice of confining princes to the kafes, the cage of the harem, after their accession meant that many sultans reached the throne with little experience of state affairs. Power flowed to the queen mother, the grand vizier, and the ulema.

This was not, however, a period of unmitigated decline. The empire continued to expand in some directions, and the cultural life of the court reached new heights. The harem politics of the period have been the subject of intense historical revisionism in recent decades, not least by Leslie Peirce, whose Imperial Harem (1993) showed that the queen mothers and chief eunuchs were often effective administrators who managed the imperial household, the pious foundations, and the court ceremonies. The chief black eunuch (kızlar ağası) had a diplomatic role that extended beyond the palace. The dynasty survived the long period of fraternal succession, a result that owed much to the system of confinement in the kafes and to the careful management of the imperial household.

The Long War and the Treaty of Zsitvatorok

The Ottoman-Habsburg frontier remained contested throughout the seventeenth century. The Long War of 1593 to 1606, fought over Hungary and Transylvania, ended in the Treaty of Zsitvatorok, which recognized the equality of the two empires for the first time. The treaty marked the end of the Ottoman tribute payments from the Habsburgs and symbolized the new parity between the two powers.

The seventeenth century also saw the continuing contest with the Safavids. The Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 fixed the eastern frontier along the line that would remain Ottoman-Iranian until 1918. The contest with Venice over Crete, which ended with the fall of Candia in 1669 after a 21-year siege, was a major Ottoman naval and logistical achievement. The cost of these long wars was enormous. The Ottoman state had to support a much larger standing army, financed by tax farming and by the sale of office, and the resulting fiscal strains contributed to a series of inflationary crises.

The Great Turkish War

The Great Turkish War of 1683 to 1699 was the decisive conflict of the period. The unsuccessful second Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, lifted in September of that year by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, marked the high water mark of Ottoman expansion in central Europe. A Holy League army, including forces from the Habsburg Empire, Poland, Venice, and Russia after 1686, then took the offensive. Belgrade fell in 1688, Buda in 1686, and the Morea in 1687. The war ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz of 26 January 1699. By its terms, the Ottomans ceded Hungary, Transylvania, and most of Croatia to the Habsburgs, Podolia to Poland, and the Morea to Venice. For the first time, the empire had to negotiate a peace in which it lost substantial territory.

The reform diagnosis: Koçi Bey and Katip Çelebi

The shock of Karlowitz forced a reexamination of Ottoman statecraft. Two of the most remarkable documents of the period are the reform risales of the seventeenth century. Koçi Bey, a former janissary who had risen to be a senior palace official, presented his Risale to Murad IV around 1631, a 30-page diagnosis of the empire’s decay that lays the blame on the corruption of the Janissaries, the erosion of the timar system, and the proliferation of iltizam tax-farming. The tone is a mixture of moral panic and technical prescription, and the text became a touchstone for Ottoman reformist writing for the next two centuries. Katip Çelebi, the polymath bibliographer and geographer, took a more statist line in his Düstûrü’l-Amel li-Islâhi’l-Halel (1653), a detailed programme of fiscal and military reform that drew on Ottoman and European sources:

“The Janissaries, the timar holders, and the askeri, in the time of our ancestors, used to support the state; but now they devour it, and the state is fed by the reaya alone.” — Koçi Bey, Risale, addressed to Murad IV (c. 1631)

The Köprülü recovery

The period also saw the growth of provincial power bases, most notably the Köprülü family of grand viziers, who restored the authority of the central state in the early eighteenth century. The Köprülü grand viziers — Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, his son Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, and his son-in-law Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha — led successful campaigns against Venice, Poland, and Russia. The recovery was real but partial. The empire reasserted control over its Balkan possessions, but the dynamic of European power had shifted decisively. The eighteenth century would see Russia, in particular, emerge as the principal threat to Ottoman territorial integrity.

The Köprülü restored the authority of the central treasury, reformed the timar system, and reasserted the sultan’s control over the Janissary corps. They also patronized a series of mosque and madrasa complexes that set the standard for later Ottoman religious architecture. The recovery of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was genuine, but it rested on the increasing use of tax farming, which would prove to be a long-term fiscal liability.

Russia and the Eastern Question

The eighteenth century saw the steady expansion of Russian power at Ottoman expense. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, ending the first Russo-Turkish war of Catherine the Great, gave Russia the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, the right of navigation in the Black Sea, and the cession of the Crimea. The treaty was a milestone in what later became known as the Eastern Question, the diplomatic and political struggle over the future of the Ottoman state.

The Russian advances were a major stimulus to Ottoman reform. The army was reorganized along European lines, and the first Ottoman embassies to permanent missions in European capitals were established in the late eighteenth century. The reign of Selim III (1789–1807) saw the most ambitious reform program of the period, the Nizam-ı Cedid, or New Order. Selim established a new infantry, founded engineering and military schools, and tried to create a treasury independent of the Janissary corps. The Janissaries revolted in 1807, deposed the sultan, and forced the cancellation of the reforms. The Russian expansion of the eighteenth century, by allowing Russia to intervene in Ottoman internal affairs on behalf of the Orthodox population, introduced a principle of great power involvement that would dominate the nineteenth-century Eastern Question.

The Tulip Period and after

The Tulip Period (1718–1730) was a brief but significant opening to European culture. The Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, ending a war with Venice and Austria, was followed by a long peace during which Ottoman envoys were sent to Paris, Vienna, and other European capitals. The first Ottoman printing press was established in 1726 by İbrahim Müteferrika, and a small Francophone literary culture grew up in the European quarter of Pera. The Tulip Period ended with the Patrona Halil Revolt of 1730, the deposition of Ahmed III, and the reassertion of traditional religious authority under Mahmud I. Yet the Europeanizing impulse was not entirely extinguished. The eighteenth century saw the establishment of permanent embassies in London, Paris, and Vienna, the foundation of the Imperial School of Naval Engineering in 1773, and the publication of the first printed books in the Ottoman Empire.

The tulip, which had been cultivated in the empire since at least the sixteenth century, became a symbol of refinement and the focus of an elaborate festival culture. The palace of Ahmed III at the Topkapi, with its European-inspired decorations, was one of the architectural landmarks of the period. The introduction of the printing press marked a decisive break with the manuscript tradition that had dominated Ottoman intellectual life.

The end of the eighteenth century

By the end of the eighteenth century, the empire was in deep crisis. Russia, Britain, and France were all pressing at the Ottoman frontiers, and the Egyptian crisis, in which Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, demonstrated the limits of Ottoman power. The combined British-Ottoman expedition that expelled the French in 1801 was a small bright spot, but the underlying problems remained. The reform efforts of Selim III were a foretaste of the more systematic Tanzimat of the next generation. The long seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not simply a period of decline: they were also a long preparation for the modernizing reforms that would, in the nineteenth century, attempt to remake the empire.