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Post by depletedreasons on Mar 27, 2008 2:25:48 GMT -5
Ilber Ortayli, "THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALITIES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE FOLLOWING THE SECOND SIEGE OF VIENNA"
in Das Osmanische Reich und Europa 1683 bis 1789: Konflict, Entspannung und Austauch, Vienna, 1983, pp. 223-236. IOne unquestioned development in the Ottoman Empire following the second siege of Vienna is the clear-cut emergence of the problem of nationalities. Doubtless the causes of this go back to before the rout in which the siege ended; but it is also true that here at the end of the seventeenth century, it was demonstrated not only to the powers of Europe but also to the Balkan peoples living under the Sultan that the Ottoman might was capable of defeat and even debacle. This was a stimulus to them in organizing national movements; Ottoman Rumelia of the later seventeenth century was host to a very different dynamism than had existed before. Meanwhile thanks to the hastening-induced by the rout at Vienna-of the process of administrative change, the Turkish element within the Empire's Muslim population acquired a greater role in matters of government. Thus, though the overriding culture and the process of ruling were still Ottoman, Turkish Anatolia began definitely to come to the fore; with the net result that the traditionally structured Empire, until then "Ottoman" in character because cosmopolitan, as ancient Rome and medieval Byzantium had been cosmopolitan, was in actual fact ceasing to be Ottoman. By the time we reach the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman state has assumed all the earmarks of a political and social system in which the problem of disruptive nationalism is the predominant factor. Ottoman conquests in the Balkans during the fourteenth century in a way brought stability to the region The throes of social change that tossed the Balkans throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were quelled with the restoration of stability and a feudal system. But inevitably, as Ottoman power reached its zenith in the sixteenth century, the beginnings of economic and social unrest began to make themselves felt, not only in Rumelia but, more particularly, in Anatolia as well. Coming up to the seventeenth century, we see an empire that has lost its former might and, carried inexorably forward by the stream of time, finds itself unable to adapt in a modern world of changing condhions; so much so, that it is still an unresolved question of historiography how the Ottoman armies managed, in 1683, ever to reach the gates of Vienna at all. The State's land tenure and bureaucratic structuring, and most significantly the military chain of command, were rocked by one upheaval after another. In all likelihood, the fact that the siege actually took place, and even achieved initial success, is owing partly to the turmoil caused in Central Europe by the Thirty Years' War, partly to the waning but still felt superiority of the Ottoman troops, and in some measure to the failure of the Austrian lands to develop. We know that among the various religious and linguistic groups which came under the Ottoman sway, certain movements, or at least stirrings, that could be described in some cases as cultural, in others as national, began to make their presence felt in the sixteenth century. To call the events of 1789 the cause for national awakening in the Balkans cannot be an entirely prudent course for the historian to take. The national consciousness of the Balkan peoples was a feature of their medieval heritage that survived the Ottoman period, with every community having its own schools, and its own guilds helping to regulate economic life. Thus national identity or, if one prefers, early nationalism has its roots, for the peoples of the Balkans, as far back as the Renaissance. It is no mere coincidence that the ideas put forward by Machiavelli in The Prince were greatly in vogue at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, among the intelligentsia in certain south Slavic communities. Furthermore the spontaneous peasant uprisings that occurred in the sixteenth century, or the hayduk movements! opposing local Ottoman authority, show that, to some extent at any rate, national identity in the Balkans had not completely disappeared. The nationalist movements of the Balkan peoples, and the way in which these movements developed, were quite different from those to be found in the various countries of western Europe. They are also different-I am speaking of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Balkans-from the nationalist movements of today's world. Under the socio-economic and legal order imposed by the Ottomans, the hereditary aristocracy in the Balkans ceased to develop, and native aristocracy in existence before the fourteenth century had all but died out. So it was that the nationalist movement of the Balkan Slavs developed, first and foremost, with the participation of the Church, to which starting in the eighteenth century was allied a rising commercial bourgeoisie and, in time, the peasantry. In opposition to nationalism stood "Ottoman-ness" (but not Ottomanism), a way of life and a social order, but not yet an ideology. Only after the eighteenth century would Ottoman-ness begin to evolve into an ideology, which in turn was to be altered by the influence of Balkan nationalism(s), until finally the Etnpire's Muslims too were caught up in the wave, clamoring for their own national existences. The Church conducted a campaign in which Christianity and nationalist ideology were at the very least conjoined, and in doing so played a highly active ideological role in the national movements of liberation. The very existence of the Church, and the process of its evolution, bore within them the seeds of dispute between the Ottoman rulers and the Orthodox believers; disputes which were naturally to affect the nationalist movement. coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst373/readings/ortayli2.html
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Post by depletedreasons on Mar 27, 2008 2:26:26 GMT -5
II. From the moment of its inception in the 14th century, and all through its spectacular rise for the following two centuries, the Ottoman Empire was in fact a Balkan empire. The Ottoman culture and way of life had, it would seem, long since received the stamp of the Balkan and Mediterranean cultures; with the corollary that an understanding of Ottoman society is hardly possible without a previous knowledge of medieval Byzantium and the structure of the Balkan states. In the middle of the I 5th century, the peoples who owed allegiance to the Eastern Orthodox Church lived under Ottoman rule; the second Orthodox state was Czarist Russia. Mehmed II (the Conquerer) followed a deliberate policy of favoring unilateral rule in the Church. He appointed as Patriarch Gennadios, virulent enemy of Rome, and displayed towards him a consideration greater than he had enjoyed during Byzantine times. The Patriarchs of Constantinople now enjoyed a position in the official protocol. In addition, the Bulgarian and Serbian Churches had been deprived of their autocephaly, with spiritual, administrative, financial and judicial authority authority over all Balkan Orthodoxy devolving on the Patriarch in Constantinople. In these circumstances, Greeks living in the Ottoman lands enjoyed prerogatives and a general prominence; for just as the Orthodox Church had autonomy and privilege, the Greek tongue under the empire, and greek education, were able to go their way unhindered. To a certain extent, even Byzantine legal heritage continued to exist and be applied. At Bab-u ali (the Sublime Porte), edicts were drawn up in Greek, which thrived as a semi-official language. Over and beyond these distinctions, the Greeks were the sole non-muslim group to be employed in the bureaucracy and in chancellery service. In this respect the Greeks were better off than any other ethnic group, the Turks included. For until the 18th and 19th centuries the Turks, usually thought of as the heart of the empire, took only a limited part in governing, and the very name of "Turk" was used to mean "uncouth peasant lout". Authors of Ottoman times are insistent in saying that Turkish element must not be allowed to meddle in the business of government. "Turk" was an insulting epithet not only among the Ottoman meritocracy, but also among the Istanbul populace at large; for example, "Babe Himmet", the most idiotic, unlovable figure in all of Karagoz (the Turkish shadow theater), is constantly referred to as "the Turk". The Greeks were a sea-faring people, they had had relations with Italy and Central Europe since the Renaissance, and they were viewed with feelings of kinship by Europe as a whole. It was then only natural that they would have nationalist sentiments from a very early date, but this under European patronage. Meanwhile Ottoman supremacy was making it possible for the Greek Patriarchate to exert monolithic control over Orthodox Slavs in the Balkans, which in turn encouraged the strengthening of resistance and nationalist feelings in the latter. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Patriarchate was as unwelcome to the Bulgarians as was the Sublime Porte. The Bulgarian national movement strove from the outset to establish an independent church, and succeeded in doing so during the second half of the nineteenth century. Ottoman rule was never a threat to the survival of Greek education and culture. From the seventeenth century on, schools were opened by wealthy Greek merchants not only in the Peloponnese and Epirus, but also in western Anatolia and on the Black Sea coast. This process continued in Cyprus and Crete after they fell to the Ottomans. The positive contribution of Europe to the Greek enlightenment came not only in these schools, but also thanks to the children of the commercial bourgeoisie who carly on began receiving their education in Europe. Another point was that the Ionian islands were not beholden to the Sultan, and therefore came under Italian and French cultural influence, on account of which the local Grecks were more exposed to classical Creek culture and modern humanism. These islands in turn exerted their cultural influence on all the Ottoman Greeks. On them there was wide-spread learning of French, Italian and English and classical Greek in its choicest form was a medium of instruction. In the early eighteenth century, when Austria became commercially and politically more innuential along the shores both of the Adriatic and the Danube, a sizable number of Greeks, having in view political, commercial or cultural aims, migrated to major Austrian cities from Epirus, Macedonia and the Ionian islands, and there established their own churches and their own schools. Having been the first to establish contact with Europe, the Greeks wasted no time in exerting a cultural and ideological influence over the other Balkan peoples. Undeniably, Bulgarian monks in their monasteries on Mount Athos made contact with the newly enlightened Greek culture, and in the Balkans this culture just as undeniably became institutionalized. In 1694 Prince Constantin Brinceveanu set up for the Romanians the "Saint Savas Academy" where instruction was given in Greeks. Before long the Balkans had established direct cultural ties with Western Europe. In fact, it would be a mistake to explain the emergence of the national problem in the Balkans entirely by the Greek Enlightenment or, as we said, by the French Revolution. A certain idea of irredentism or Slav unity can be seen among the Balkan Slavs as early as the sixteenth century. When Ottoman rule led to the bestowing of all spiritual authority on the Patriarch in Constantinople, the Balkan Slavs found themselves deprived of independence not only in religious matters, but equally in questions of language, law and education. Pushed by those adverse circumstances the Balkan Slavs turned early on to Russia, a sovereign power. It is possible that the first glimmerings of Slav irredentism were born from the ideas of Machiavelli; engaged as they were in intense cultural and commercial relations with Renaissance Italy, it cannot be coincidence that Ragusan and Croatian thinkers make mention in their writings of a kind of Slavic unity and liberation. In 1626 the Ragusan poet Ivan Gundulic, in his Iyric poem "Osman", speaks of liberation and the unity of the Slavs in a style reminiscent of Tasso's. It was Gundulic's belief that this historic mission could only be accomplished under the aegis of the Polish king. One of the most striking instances of this phenomenon is the Croatian priest, philosopher and historian Juraj Kritanic (1618-1683). Having settled in Russia, he proposed that all Slavs unite under the leadership of the Czar and a church of Catholic tendency to break away from the Ottomans. To accomplish this historic task, he recommended the modernization of Russia, a build-up of its might, and reform of its church and social system. Needless to say, his views were highly unpopular with clerics and conservatives, and were quickly forgotten. An active role for Russia was one recurrent theme in the discussion of national awakening among the Balkan Slavs. Balkan historians, no less than those in Turkey, at one period laid great emphasis on the expansion of this Russian role; and nineteenth century European thought tended also to see Russia as the most active element in the "eastern question". Now, although there is no arguing with the fact that this role increased following thc Treaty of Kuc,uk Kaynarca (1774), it would nevertheless be wrong to consider the Russian role as the most dominant factor in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Balkan nationalism. In fact, as can be seen in the example of Krizanic, ideologically the Balkan Slavs were ahead of Russia. Russia's role became more influential as she developed and modernized. The westetnizing process in Muscovite Russia began afler the sixteenth century. The period of the Romanov Dynasty in particular saw the establishment of permanent ambassadorial relations with the whole of Western Europe, and Russian merchants were familiar with cities in Scandinavia, Germany and Poland. These improving political and commercial relations could not but introduce into Russia, however slowly, a western style of living. A number of noblemen began furnishing their homes in European fashion, at the same time adopting Renaissance and Baroque ways along with German customs. Russian culture at this period began to be acquainted, through translation, with Eutopean literature and science. One such europeanized noble was Knez Golitzin, favourite of the Regent Sophia. Russia had long ago set her sights on becoming the successor to Byzantium, and there were now many Balkan Slavs and Greek intellectuals and members of the church within her marches. These arrivals worked in libraries or in the palace printhouse, did translations from Greek and Old Church Slavonic, or tutored the children of wealthy families; on their visits back to the Balkans they took with them numerous books of a religious, literary or political nature. About the middle of the seventeenth century we see in the Balkans the beginnings of a certain Russian political influence. One instance of this is the first printing press in the Moldavian city of Iasi, which went into operation in 1640 thanks to the good offices of Pjotr Mogila, Metropolitan at Kiev. As time went by, Balkan Slavs were to follow more and more closely cultural developments in Russia. Russia's relations with the Balkan Slavs, unlike those of Western Europe, came not through the channels of trade but through the Church. From the seventeenth century on, Serbian, Montenegrin, Romanian and later Bulgarian priests were in contact with Russia. Between 1557 and 1766, the Ipek (Pec) Patriarchate in Serbia, which performed its function autonomously, experienced financial and administrative difficulties which meant that the survival of Serbian monasteries and churches was to some extent only possible with the help of Russia. Each year Serbian priests carried to Russia a number of manuscripts and icons. These priests, some of them admitted into Moscow, others turned back at the border with a gift of alms, began in the eighteenth century to bring with them lay publications as well. The Russian Church made extensive use of Balkan priests and the manuscripts in Balkan monasteries, starting in the seventeenth century. As C. Rogel points out, "during the period of Russian church reforms in the mid-seventeenth century, requests for manuscripts and books were frequently sent to Serbian monasteries. In 1655, for example, three Hilander monks carried to Moscow eleven handwritten books (seven Old Slavonic, four Greek) which had been specifically requested by the Russian patriarch Arsenii Sukhanov; they were to be used according to the official request to correct Russian religious books.'' It was nevertheless true that compared to Montenegro, Walachia-Moldavia and Bulgaria, Serbian monastic life aher 1690 was to a certain extent culturally influenced by the Habsburg Empire. This was behind the choice made by D. Obradovic (1742-1811), best known of all Serbian clerics, to substitute secular for religious learning. After 1804 Obradovic became Karageorgi's secretary and superintendent of Serbian schools. The one most important factor in the persistence of church leadership in the Balkan national awakening was the ability of the clerics to adopt secular education and secular views. They were the first to pen popular works on subjects such as history and geography. Foremost among such priests were the Serbians Jovan Rajic (1726-1801) and the Romanians G. Sincai, Petru Maior, and Samuel Clain. Finally, Paissij Hilandersky, justly considered the father of Bulgar nationalism for his writing at the Hilander monastery on Mount Athos in 1762 of the first popularized Slavgan-Bulgarian history; and after him Sofronij Vracansky, are two typical examples of Balkan Slav church clerics contributing to the development of Bulgarian national feeling. Throughout the eighteenth century such men were busy translating works from ancient Grcek and Old Church Slavonic into contemporary tongues, and were thus instrumental in transforming the vernacular into a polished literary language. In this matter they were very different from the Greek priests, who persisted in the use of a language remote from the colloquiall2. It is true that Balkan Slavs always had a xenophobic attitude towards the Roman church, but they were impelled by the presence of the Constantinople Patriarchate-which they viewed as more oppressive than their Ottoman rulers-into entertaining the idea of an alliance with the Catholic Church in order to obtain cultural and spiritual autonomy for the Slavic peoples. To some extent this idea was put into action. We know of active centers for Catholic propaganda in Bulgaria and Romania, not very successful enterprises which date back almost to the beginning of Ottoman rule in the region. The French envoy to Istanbul, Girardin, writes in his report of 13 February 1686 that a Bulgarian orthodox priest had approached him with a petition directed to the French king, in which the Bulgarians are declared ready to convert to Catholicism and to seek the protection and intervention of the king. It should not come as a Breat surprise to meet with such a bid in the years immediately following the rout at Vienna. The Bulgarian historian B. Cvetkova says that during the war years there was an increase in the hayduk movements along the banks of the Danube. The petition sent in 1688 to Czar Ivan IV and to Peter I by the Vlachian ruler Serban Cantacuzen is well known. It contained a declaration of intent on the part of the Serbians, Bulgarians and Moldavians to aid the Russians if they advanced to Akkerman. The rout at Vienna, in the third century of Ottoman sway, had an accelerating effect upon this reaction. coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst373/readings/ortayli2.html
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Post by depletedreasons on Mar 27, 2008 2:26:55 GMT -5
III. One of the most important outcomes of the second siege of Vienna was the strengthening of the Habsburg Empire's politico-military power in central Europe, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterrancan, and the improvement of its commercial position. This spreading commercial influence went hand in hand with increased cultural influence, while internally Ottoman Europe entered a time of crisis, brought on by the detcat, in which prolonged deficiencies in the military, administrative and economic mechanisms led inevitably to a process of decentralization in the provinces. This process was witnessed not only in the Balkans but in Anatolia as well, and it meant the beginning of momentous structural changes. Until the end of the seventeenth century, Austrian trade, whether foreign or domestic, was not at a level to enhance tax revenues. Because of her lack of control over the territories along the Danube, Austria's river-based commerce had also failed to develop. Another barrier to the flourishing of trade on Austrian soil was the paucity of trade relations among the German states belonging to the Holy Roman Empire. Having almost no access to the Mediterranean, Austria had not taken to the seaways to project her power abroad. (The "Orientalische Handelskompagnie" set up by Becker in 1667 declared bankruptcy after a brief struggle.) Nor was it any help that roads in the country were terribly primitive, compared to those of Western Europe. One primary factor in the OUoman defeal in 1683 was the deteriorated state of the road system in Niederosterteich. Following the treaties of Karlowitz and Passarowitz however (1699) and (1718) the Habsburg Empire moved into the Danubian basin, making possible inroads into Balkan commerce. The Balkans became a market and a source of raw materials. When in 1719 Karl VI opened Trieste as a major port to rival Venise it meant the launching of Austria's career in the Mediterranean. During the eighteenth century she signed navigation acts with the Ottomans to secure safety of passage in their waters. And thus, legal or illegal, trade was carried on throughout the Mediterranean and the Balkans. In the vanguard, with a fleet of 600 ships, came the Greeks. This burgeoning of commerce and Austrian manufactures facilitated the emergence in the Balkans of a commercial bourgeoisie. In the eighteenth century the growth of raw material and semi- manufactured goods oriented towards the demands of industry wrought changes in the cities of the Balkans. To the Ottoman Empire's senior commercial people, the Greeks, were now added the Serbo-Croatians and Bulgarians. During the eighteenth century, cultural renovation at the national level developed parallel to the emergence of the commercial bourgeoisie among all the Balkan peoples. In the European cities of Livorno, Naples, Trieste, Venice and Vienna, and in certain cities of Russia, there appeared sizeable groups of merchants, religious clerics and students, as churches and cultural centers sprang up. It was in the wake of these events that the effects of the European enlightenment truly began to make themselves felt. Eighteenth-century philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Herder and Lessing became known to the Balkan intelligentsia. Albanians in southern Italy, Serbs in the cities of central Europe, Bulgarians in Romania, all these groups enjoyed a culture and an education that was western in orientation . Austrian influence in the Balkans was particularly great during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One factor in this was the cultural flourishing of the western Slaves within the Habsburg Empire. There is increasing recognition of the importance to Balkan cultural development of Austrian and Hungarian baroque culture, literature, theatre and plastic arts. Following the second siege of Vienna the Ottoman Empire's Balkan provinces were immediately thrown into turmoil, lawlessness and economic collapse. The heavy taxation necessitated by war and the attempt to enforce order brought on a similar collapse in Anatolia. The rout of the army, the attrition of garrisons assigned to enforce order in the cities, the crumbling of the economy, the disappearance of safety on the highways, and the fighting of wars that never seemed to be over, all spelled a virtual end to central government control in the Balkans. The citizenry of Bosnia, for example, made repeated appeals to Istanbul for funds and military assistance, appeals which the central government was unable to answer. As a result people in the cities had recourse to law-enforcement on their own. From the beginning of the eighteenth century problems of security and fnance in the Rumelian cities began to be solved by the people in concert with local notables. The ayans, who were local landowners and administrators of pious foundations (known as vakf), assumed surrogate authority in the cities. Peter Sugar has described in detail this coming to the fore of local authority in the cities and provinces of Rumelia. The Muslim beys, who were the descendants of minor Bosnian aristocrats who converted to Islam immediately after the Ottoman conquest, had, through the viziers and sandjak beys that they produced throughout the Ottoman reign, always managed to stay on good terms with the central administration. Now, although remaining loyal to the Sultan they were impelled by the anarchy that follows long wars to take over the reins of local government. In the face of peasant uprisings and the specter of roving hayduk bands, Istanbul looked upon this new decentralization and shift of authority with benevolence. The local population of course preferred these new rulers, who, by language and tradition were Bosnian; and the governor was often nothing than an honored guest. It was the local lords who ran the province as they pleased. The same conditions could be said to have prevailed in the Albania-Epirus region. The situation in the Anatolian peninsula was different only by nuance. The process of land concentration that had continued since the sixteenth century had led to the emergence of a new class of local landlords. The timariot system of military enfiefment had broken down, and troops could no longer be summoned to battle as in the past. The keeping of order in Anatolian towns and provinces at this period had been largely left to local power groups and representatives. The people by now habitually sought protection with the local rulers, in the face of heavy taxation and the depredations of the ever-present hayduk. Decentralization had become a fact of life. From the eighteenth century onward, the presence of this new governing class would lead to profound changes in the social and political structure of the Empire. coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst373/readings/ortayli2.html
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Post by depletedreasons on Mar 27, 2008 2:28:32 GMT -5
IV. In the year 1685, the sultan bestowed upon the bandit chieftain Yegen Osman the title of beylerbeyi or governor general. The decision to do so was hardly an outpouring of generosity, for Osman had gathered around him a powerful force of rebellious peasants, stoic souls who had finally had enough of being plundered whenever their villages became the target of tax agents or imperial soldiers who had deserted. The central Ottoman power was weary, depleted by constant war with Venice, Poland and the Czar. There seemed no choice but to distribute titles, rank and honour to bandit chieftains in the hope of pilling them against robber bands and rebels. A report drawn up by the French envoy Guilleragues in March of 1684 depicts a country in total disarray. "Highly placed corrunanders and functionaries are constantly being replaced, administrative authority is stricken with paralysis." During the war years the timariots had raided and appropriated each other's holdings, thus increasing land concentration. There was more frequent seizure of land and local power in a fashion that simply bypassed the central government, as repeatedly shown by the official records of the time and in the edicts issued by the Sultan. Meanwhile armies of bandits, deserting troops and timariots heedless of their fealty added another dimension to the growing anarchy. In these circumstances, with the central government unable to wield authority, responsibility was assumed by local notables called ayans who became, in place of the pa,sas, administrators both in matters of government and in the originally cosmopolitan dev,sirme (recruitment). During the long decades of turbulence, the government was to appoint to positions of responsibility army officers who had distinguished themselves in Anatolia, and local figures who had proven themselves capable of preserving order in their own territory. Replacing the valis, these local lords (known as mh'tesellims) represent an important change. For, where before one had dev~irme children recruited and trained in the Enderun (palace school), who went on to take up the reins of central rule, now, from the eighteenth century onward, this role was to fall more and more frequently upon the Anatolians, those who in Ottoman terms had always been regarded as "crude Turks" So it is that the renowned grand viziers and military commanders of the eighteenth century are mostly of Turkish extraction. Ibrahim Pasa and Halil Hamid Pasa, both reform-instituting grand viziers in the Tulip Age (Lale Devri), are typical examples of this new administrative class. This increase of the Turkish presence in administration lost little time in making itself felt in art and culture as well. In a feudal society the tastes and demands of the ruling class are bound to be carefully considered by artisls of every stamp. The poets of the eighteenth century, when Divan poetry was the literature of the highest class, to some extent abandoned the tortuous locutions of an Arabic- and Persian-laden style in favour of purer Turkish. The language of poets such as Nabi and Nedim is far closer to the Turkish of the ordinary people of Istanbul than had been that of earlier poets. What is more, the content too of poetry became livelier and closer to reality, Sadi in particular, of the poets of this time, openly pleaded for the written word to reflect the spoken language. As he put it: Nice Turk, dinur ol sirekim her lafzanun halli Lugatler bakmaya muhtac ide mecliste yaran
(If the audience for a poem has to look everything up in the dictionary, how can you call it a Turkish poem?)On the military plane, the rout at Vienna made speedy and efficacious reform a necessity. When imperial schools of military engineering were opened (Muhendishane-i Bahri-yi Humayun and Muhendishane-i Berri-yi Humayun) the very first piece of business was to translate textbooks from foreign languages. In doing so, every effort was made to see that the vocabulary was Turkish rather than Arabic or Persian, since most of the students were Turks of humble origin. Such scholars as ianizade and Hoc,a tshak, although active in the fields of geography, medicine, chemistry and mathematics took their terminology from Latin, also did their best to fmd purely Turkish equivalents. Eighteenth-century Turkish is still virgin terrain for the researcher, but one thing is clear: the language of bureaucracy, education and literature was brought closer to the spoken tongue, as the 'Arabate" and "Persified" jargon of Ottoman began to give way to a more Turkish idiom. The dominance of the Turkish ethnic element in government and culture was a platform from which Turkish nationalism could rise in the centuries to come, but for a time no more than that. In the eighteenth century it is still too early to speak of the emergence, within the Ottoman Empire, of a Turkish nationalism rooted in the Turkish ethnic element. The first unmistakeable examples of Turkish nationalism came in the 1860's, with a book (Les Turcs anciens et modernes) by Mustafa Celaleddin Pasa, a Pole who had come to Turkey in 1849 as a refugee; and with the admonition directed by Ahmed Vefik Pasa to a Syrian Christian member of the first Ottoman parliament (1877- 1878): "If you know what is good for you", he said, "you will learn Turkish". Always the official language, Turkish was first proclaimed as such in the Constitution of 1876; and it would take until the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century for Turkishness to become the seed of a nationalism. Throughout the eighteenth century, nationalism in the Ottoman Empire was confined to the Balkans, as Anatolia witnessed no more than a strong process of purification. Because of this process, however, the Empire in the eighteenth century rapidly began to lose its centuries-old cosmopolitan character. With the loss of the central European eyalets (provinces) through the treaties of Karlowitz and Passarowitz, national developments all through the Balkans, and the beginnings of intervention by the European powers, a new Islamic ideology began to emerge in the Empire during the eighteenth century. For the first time in Ottoman history, fanaticism wound its way into religious life and thought. The institution and title of Caliphate took on a far greater importance. At the same time, of course, the threat posed to the Empire by Europe made it vital to modernize and become acquainted with developments in the West. At this period the report drawn up by the Sultan's ambassador to Berlin, Azmi Efendi, speaks in glowing terms of Prussia both as state and social order. It goes on to make various suggestions for Ottoman reform. Self-encomium, so long a hallmark of the Ottoman's, had clearly become a thing of the past. In architecture, central European influence had brought a new baroque style, visible in the eyalets as it is in the mosques, barracks and palaces of the epoch in Istanbul. In Ottoman painting as well, European influence was not restricted to Istanbul. The new style appeared also throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. There are grounds for the claim that this eighteenth century style was less refined then the classical Ottoman, but on the other hand there is a welcome infusion of movement and variety after the set, static forms of the centuries that preceded. Contributions of the West to eighteenth century Ottoman painting include perspective, landscape, and the depiction of the human form. There was no aspect of daily life not touched in some manner by the wave of modernization and westernization. That this would hasten the process of turcification is only natural, if we consider that printing presses began at this period turning out works in Turkish, thus malcing science and art available to a broader range of the people. There is an eighteenth-century canvas, an instance of Austrian folk art that depicts by means of stereotypes the nations of Europe. Beside the Spaniard, the Frenchman, the Swede and the Muscovite, we find the most antipathetic, evil personage to be a turbaned figure wearing a caftan. Curiously, he is labeled Turk or Greek. But this European ignorance of Turkish affairs would soon give way to an interest that led to serious research. In the first half of the eighteenth century, a number of students at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in Paris began receiving instruction in Turkish, while in Vienna eastern languages were introduced into the curriculum of the Maria Theresia Academy. By the end of the century Europe could boast of such famous Turcologues as Joseph von Hammer. As Turcology came into its own in Europe, a source of future inspiration for Turkish nationalism developed, in the form of linguistic and historical inquiries. In the central European countries, the eighteenth century marked the beginning of Balkanistic as well as Turcological studies, the effects of which were seen among both peoples. During that century all the nations of Europe were busy studying one another's history, language and ways; a pursuit that went hand in hand with the rise of nationalism.To some extent the Turks too took part in this; so that the long war, with its consequent loss of territories, was in some sense the beginning of a historical process that would result in the birth and further growth of a belated nationalism among the Turks. coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~fisher/hst373/readings/ortayli2.html
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