Massive size and central control

It is by now rather trite to emphasise that the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stretched from what were virtually the outskirts of Vienna all the way to the Indian Ocean, and from the northern coasts of the Black Sea to the first cataract of the Nile. But the implications of this enormous presence are so significant that in my view the risk of triviality must be taken. As a recent work on British imperial history has shown, even in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, King and Parliament wished for the sake of Britain’s trade and power in the Mediterranean to live at peace with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, even though quite a few British subjects rowed on the galleys of these cities. This conciliatory stance was not only due to the fortifications maintained by the three ‘corsair republics’, or even to the power of their navies, but resulted mainly from wider political concerns. Given the precarious situation of bases such as Gibraltar, angering the Ottoman sultan, who was after all the overlord of the North African janissaries and corsair captains, might have had dire consequences for British trade and diplomacy. Certainly in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, any number of European authors wrote books on the imminence of ‘Ottoman decline’. But when it came to the judgement of practical politicians, before the defeat of the sultan’s armies in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74, the power of that potentate was taken seriously indeed.