Islamic Gunpowder Empires

Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals

Douglas E. Streusand

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979217
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: Middle Eastern Politics

Islamic Gunpowder Empires provides readers with a history of Islamic civilization in the early modern world through a comparative examination of Islam's three greatest empires: the Ottomans (centered in what is now Turkey), the Safavids (in modern Iran), and the Mughals (ruling the Indian subcontinent). Author Douglas Streusand explains the origins of the three empires; compares the ideological, institutional, military, and economic contributors to their success; and analyzes the causes of their rise, expansion, and ultimate transformation and decline. Streusand depicts the three empires as a part of an integrated international system extending from the Atlantic to the Straits of Malacca, emphasizing both the connections and the conflicts within that system. He presents the empires as complex polities in which Islam is one political and cultural component among many. The treatment of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires incorporates contemporary scholarship, dispels common misconceptions, and provides an excellent platform for further study.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

There is no list of seven wonders of the early modern world. If there were, it would certainly include the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, the royal complex in Isfahan, Iran, and the Taj Mahal in Agra, India. These architectural and artistic achievements alone would justify the study of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires that produced them. The importance of the three empires, however, goes far beyond what they wrought in stone.

To a world historian, they were among the most powerful and influential polities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, in the case of the Ottomans, the fifteenth century as well. They dominated much of the environment that Europeans encountered in their first era of exploration and expansion; their history is inextricably intertwined with that expansion. The image and influence of these empires affected Western views of non-Western societies profoundly. To a historian of Islamic civilization, they represent an era of cultural achievement second, perhaps, only to the first flowering of Islamic civilization in the time of the Abbasid caliphate, as well as a new form of polity that produced a level of order and stability not achieved for some five centuries before. For political historians, the empires offer an example of the evolution of new political doctrines, institutions, and practices in response to continuing challenges. For military historians, they were among the first to use firearms effectively. Significant developments in popular piety and religious identity took place under their sponsorship. Their impact on the contemporary world also garners attention. Much of the disorder in the post–Cold War world, in the former Yugoslavia and in Iraq, reflects the difficulty of replacing the Ottoman regional order. The Safavid dynasty set the pattern of modern Iran by combining the eastern and western parts of the Iranian plateau and establishing Shii Islam as the dominant faith. The idea of political unity in South Asia passed from the Mughals to the British and into the present. For all these reasons, the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires deserve and demand close attention.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to the three empires, intended for students and other readers with some general familiarity with world history and Islamic civilization. It attempts to bridge the gap between general texts on world and Islamic history, such as Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam and Ira Lapidus’s A History of Islamic Societies, and the specialized literature on the three empires. As the title implies, this book is a study of empire, an analysis of power and order. It is not a comprehensive history of the early modern Islamic world or even of the areas ruled by the empires. I focus on political and military history, with economic history not far behind. Social, cultural, and intellectual history receive much less attention, except when they pertain to political matters, though I do not neglect them entirely. I do not pretend, however, to give all components of society equal attention; the inequality of my treatment reflects, I hope accurately, the inequalities of the time.

Interpretive Themes

Comparison of the three empires began with the Western travelers that visited them. They form a natural unit for study because of the sharp disparity between them and their predecessors in the Islamic world. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the exception of the steadily expanding Ottoman principality in Anatolia and the Balkans and the distinctive, nondynastic Mamluk kingdom of Egypt and Syria, most principalities lasted only a few generations. Their rulers—dynasties like the Aqquyunlu, the Qaraquyunlu, the Tughluq, the Lodi, and the Muzaffarid—have fallen into obscurity. No evidence of their fluid boundaries remains on modern maps. Instability was chronic. To paraphrase Hodgson, politics had reached an impasse. The extent, durability, and centralization of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires show that their regimes broke that impasse.¹ Hodgson and his University of Chicago colleague William H. McNeill label them “gunpowder empires.” Following the distinguished Russian scholar V. V. Bartold, they attribute Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal political success to their ability to use artillery to take stone fortresses. The term gunpowder empire has remained current, but as the book explains, the gunpowder-empires hypothesis, as Hodgson and McNeill articulate it, is not an adequate or accurate explanation. The phrase “gunpowder empires” in the title means “empires of the gunpowder era” not “empires created by gunpowder weapons.”

The concept of gunpowder empire implies a fundamental similarity among the three polities. Despite immense geographic, social, and economic differences, the three empires faced similar political, military, and administrative problems and carried the same set of political and institutional traditions. Politically, the doctrine of collective sovereignty and the appanage system, established in the Islamic world by the Saljuqs in the eleventh century and a vital part of the political legacy of the Chingiz Khanid Mongols, prevented lasting political unity. The impossibility of the central collection and distribution of revenue in vast empires with incompletely monetarized economies made fiscal decentralization inevitable, thus fostering political disunity. In Anatolia, Iraq, and Iran, tribes of pastoral nomads dominated political life, and empires consisted of tribal confederations; the patrimony of such confederations affected politics elsewhere. The three empires overcame these common problems, but in different ways, under different conditions, and along different timelines. Gunpowder empire is a convenient classification that facilitates comparison and contrast, not an ideal type that the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals approximated.

The difference in timelines requires clarification. Because the reigns of the Ottoman sultan Sulayman I (1520–1566), known in the West as Sulayman the Magnificent and in the Islamic world as Qanuni-Sulayman (Sulayman the Lawgiver), the Safavid shah Abbas I (1588–1629), and the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605) overlapped, many historians have seen them as comparable figures. But Akbar and Abbas did for their dynasties what the Ottoman sultans Murad II (1421–1451) and Fatih Mehmet (1451–1481) did for theirs. They gave Safavid and Mughal institutions mature form nearly a century after the Ottomans achieved it. The Mughal ruler most comparable to Sulayman I was Shah Jahan (1628–1658).

Explaining the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal success in maintaining larger, more centralized, and more enduring polities than their predecessors is the fundamental interpretive theme of the book. Three aspects receive particular attention: military organization, weapons, and tactics; political ideology and legitimacy; and provincial government. The gunpowder-empires hypothesis, though inadequate as Bartold, Hodgson, and McNeill present it, correctly draws attention to the significance of military superiority. Discussion of the military systems of these empires raises another question. For some fifty years, the concept of a European military revolution in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has dominated the study of warfare in this era. The three empires did not go through the same transition. This book addresses the question of why.

Success in battles and sieges could not, however, have won and held the loyalty and cooperation of the diverse populations that the three empires ruled. The Christian subjects of the Ottomans and Hindu subjects of the Mughals did not regard themselves as captive populations. The three empires had complex, multifaceted, and dynamic forms of legitimacy that reflected several separate political traditions and evolved over time. The implementation of the ideological programs of the three empires had a profound effect on the religious life of their populations and thus on religious affiliation and identity throughout the Islamic world today. This process resembles what European historians call confessionalization. In Susan Boettcher’s words,

Confessionalization describes the ways an alliance of church and state mediated through confessional statements and church ordinances facilitated and accelerated the political centralization underway after the fifteenth century—including the elimination of local privileges, the growth of state apparatuses and bureaucracies, the acceptance of Roman legal traditions and the origins of absolutist territorial states.²

The concept of confessionalization asserts that church and state efforts to enforce the Peace of Augsburg principle of cuius region eius religio (the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the ruled) led to the development of national and linguistic, as well as religious, identities. The Safavids, from the beginning, imposed a new religious identity on their general population; they did not seek to develop a national or linguistic identity, but their policy had that effect. The text develops this theme in analyzing all three empires.

In addition to explaining imperial consolidation, the book emphasizes two other themes: the place of the empires in a connected world and the nature and causes of the changes in the empires in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Western historiography has generally defined the boundaries between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe on the west and the Safavid Empire on the east not only as zones of conflict but also as serious barriers to the movement of commerce, ideas, and individuals. The conflicts were not chronic; nor were the barriers impermeable. The Safavid imposition of Shiism fractured, but did not destroy, the cultural unity of the Islamic world. Even after the Portuguese established themselves in the Indian Ocean, most East Asian and South Asian products reached Europe through the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean. The Ottoman efforts to impose commercial blockades on the Safavids in the early sixteenth century had little lasting effect. There was a vast disparity between the cultural and intellectual lives of Renaissance and Reformation Europe and the Islamic world, but some ideas, especially those associated with esoteric learning, had influence in both regions.

A generation ago, the last of the interpretive themes would have been decline. Since the Safavid and Mughal empires effectively disappeared in the first third of the eighteenth centuries, the word “decline” is indubitably appropriate for them. But the Ottoman Empire survived, and Ottoman historiography has begun to emphasize transformation under stress, rather than decline, as the best categorization of the changes it underwent. Without question, Ottoman power and wealth declined relative to European rivals, but the current generation of historians emphasizes their resilience rather than degeneration. For most of the last century, historians paid more attention to the ends of these empires than to their establishment and consolidation. Some have done so simply because they could rely more heavily on materials in European languages.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European colonial historians recounted imperial triumphs. A book title from the thirties, Rise and Fulfillment of British Rule in India, exemplifies this type of literature. As resistance to colonialism developed and colonies began to gain independence, nationalist historians looked back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to explain their loss of independence and find lessons for the future.

Nationalist historiography has overlapped with Marxist historiography of varying levels of sophistication, which depicts European expansion as the spread of global capitalist exploitation. The most influential Marxist scholar of the early modern period in recent decades, Immanuel Wallerstein, depicts the development of a “modern world system,” in which the capitalist economies of Europe form the capitalist center and reduce the rest of the world to an economic periphery.³ In contrast to this approach, I emphasize the internal dynamics of the three empires. The political transformation of the Islamic world affected European overseas expansion more than European commercial and maritime activities contributed to the decline of the three empires.

Historiography

The three empires have spawned vast and disparate historiographies, which of course form the basis of this volume. This book rejects the post-modernist/deconstructionist assumption that objective scholarship is impossible because no one can escape the restrictions and compulsions of his personal, political, and cultural biases. In the specific case of Western studies of the non-Western world, deconstructionists contend that those biases have made such studies, especially of the Islamic world, the intellectual component of Western imperialism and neocolonialism. This rejection is not, however, a complete dismissal. Shorn of the political agenda, extreme claims, and shrillness that typify this type of scholarship, it can be a fruitful line of inquiry. Long before the bitter controversy over Edward Said’s Orientalism, Martin Dickson demonstrated the fallacy of using cultural or civilizational degeneracy as a mode of historical explanation. Bernard Cohn’s judicious studies of British intellectual attitudes toward India provide significant insights into the nature of British rule.

The literature on the Ottomans is far vaster and more diverse than the literatures on the Safavids and Mughals for several reasons. From the fifteenth century onward, the Ottoman Empire was an integral part of the European power structure and drew attention from European historians from the beginning. The depth and variety of sources on the Ottomans far exceed what is available on their contemporaries. An immense number of Ottoman archival documents exist in collections in Turkey and the Ottoman successor states in the Balkans and the Middle East. There are many European documents, diplomatic and commercial, in various collections. European travelers’ accounts, the Ottoman chronicle tradition, and European accounts of the European wars with the Ottomans provide the narrative framework. Those narrative works formed the basis for the beginning of Ottoman studies in the West. Three massive histories, produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall, Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen, and Nikolai Iorga, embody the fruits of this tradition. These works provide a more complete chronological framework than any narrative work on the Safavid or Mughal empires.

Even as the tradition of narrative history reached its height and the Ottoman Empire came to an end, a new school of Ottoman studies appeared. Mehmet Fuad Köprülü (1890–1966) brought the social and economic concerns of what became the French Annales School to Turkey in the twenties and thirties. He and his students, most importantly Halil Inalcık, have advanced the study of Ottoman history far beyond that of any other Islamic society and moved historical studies within Turkey far ahead of those in any other part of the Islamic world. The existence of the Ottoman archives made this school possible. Omer Lutfi Barkan began the exploitation of the archives in the 1940s and 1950s. In the half century since then, the use of the Ottoman archives has led to the development of an extensive scholarly literature on Ottoman social and economic, as well as political, history.

Halil Inalcık has been the most influential Ottoman historian for half a century. The Ottoman section of this book follows his studies in almost all areas, more because of his stature within the field than because he was my teacher. Three of his articles, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-arms in the Middle East,” and “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire,” inspired this book. In the last several decades, numerous historians, imitating the examples of Inalcık and Barkan and frequently instructed by them, have advanced every aspect of Ottoman historiography. Suraiya Faroqhi discusses this historiography at length in her Approaching Ottoman History.

To master Ottoman historiography is a lifework; Safavid historiography takes a year. There are still only four comprehensive accounts of the Safavids in English. Prior to 1993, literature on the Safavids was extremely sparse. There is much less Safavid history than Ottoman history—roughly two centuries compared with six—and the scarcity of documents makes much of the history of the dynasty inaccessible. The Pahlavi regime’s exaltation of the pre-Islamic past, the disruption caused by the Iranian Revolution, and the diplomatic difficulties of the Islamic Republic have also hindered Safavid studies. Since 1993, however, a new generation of historians has transformed Safavid historiography. Because of the lack of archival documents, this literature differs significantly from most contemporary research on the Ottomans. These works either deal with the Safavid regime and ruling class or with international trade, about which European documents provide much of the information.

Mughal historiography occupies an intermediate position. Though the Mughal Empire never challenged the European powers the way the Ottomans did, it was immensely important to the British, who explicitly perceived themselves as the imperial heirs to the Mughals in India. Their concern with the Mughals led them to produce a series of narrative histories, culminating in the Cambridge History of India dealing with the Mughals, studies of institutional and administrative history, and, perhaps most importantly, a massive series of editions and translations of chronicles.

Studies of Mughal history in the subcontinent developed in parallel with the Indian independence movement. In the twentieth century Indian authors produced a series of narrative works on the reigns of the major Mughal rulers. Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the most famous and accomplished of the Indian narrative historians, produced massive accounts of the reign of Aurangzeb (1658–1707) and later Mughal history. These authors view the principle of religious toleration, established by Akbar, as the key to the Mughals’ success and Aurangzeb’s abandonment of that principle as the step that doomed the empire. They see this understanding of Mughal history as a guide for the future politics of the subcontinent. Sarkar, for example, ends his work on Aurangzeb with a chapter called “Aurangzeb and Indian Nationality,” with a final section headed “The Significance of Aurangzeb’s Reign: How an Indian Nationality Can Be Formed.”⁴ Pakistani historians invert this interpretation, condemning Akbar for abandoning Islam and lauding Aurangzeb for returning to it, despite the...