The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

Reasons for their early success.

So as the flood of conquest began to abate the submerged races began to reappear. Christendom had not to reconquer Turkish provinces, as Germany has had to reconquer French provinces, it merely had to remove the foreign incubus which was lying upon them and crushing them, to oust the foreign garrison. Accordingly the tide of Turkish invasion had hardly ceased to flow in south-eastern Europe when it began to ebb. The Turks owed their wonderful success to three causes. The disunion of Christendom, the extraordinary vigour and ability of the earlier Ottoman Sultans, and the institution of the Janizaries which gave them the best disciplined army in Europe. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these all combined to advance their power. They came as an army, organised not as a nation but as a camp, led by men second to none among the greatest sovereigns of Europe for military and personal gifts. The strength of their forces lay in the tribute of children exacted from the Christian races, who were brought up in the faith of Islam to be its special defenders and champions in the disciplined life of an army, half fanatical and half professional. They hurled themselves upon Europe at a time when the great powers were slowly and painfully organising themselves into personal monarchies out of the ruins of feudalism, when as yet professional armies were in their cradle. Under Orchan, the founder of the institution of the tribute children, they first crossed over into Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. Under Murad I. they overran Roumelia and Bulgaria, under Bajazet I. they carried their victorious arms into Servia and across the Danube into Wallachia, and defeated Sigismond of Hungary at the great battle of Nicopolis in 1396. Under Murad II. they spread into Macedonia and Hungary. To Mohammed II. was reserved the crowning honour of the conquest of Constantinople, but he also extended his sovereignty over Trebizond, Greece and the islands of the Ægean, Bosnia, Albania and even the Tartars of the Crimea. At the death of the great conqueror in 1481, the Turkish empire in Europe had reached the dimensions which it retained in the middle of the present century. But it still continued to grow. Suleiman the Magnificent, 1520–1566. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, who reigned from 1520 to 1566, it attained its greatest power. He drove the Knights-Hospitallers out of Rhodes, crossed the Danube, captured Belgrade, and turned half Hungary into a Turkish province under a pasha at Buda, while he forced the princes of Transylvania and Moldavia to pay him tribute. So powerful had he become that the powers of Europe began to realise his importance, and Francis I. of France did not disdain to purchase by his friendship the aid of the Sultan against his great enemy the Emperor, and to lay the foundations of French influence in the East by the privileges which he obtained for his countrymen at Constantinople. Alliance with France. From that time to the present day French policy has always had for one of its chief objects the maintenance of a group of alliances in northern and eastern Europe, which may serve to threaten Germany with the danger of being caught between two fires, should she find herself at war with France. For many years Sweden Poland and Turkey formed such a group, and the endeavour to keep them in firm friendship with France was always a leading feature of French diplomacy. In the seventeenth century, when the House of Austria was the chief opponent of France, the assistance of Poland and of the Sultan was naturally of great importance. In modern days, during the decay of the Ottoman empire and the growth of the rivalry with northern Germany, the Czar has taken the place of the Sultan as the necessary ally of France. Thus in the sixteenth century, mainly through the selfish policy of the French kings, the Ottoman Sultans found themselves admitted into friendship and alliance with European sovereigns, just at the very time when they seemed to be threatening ruin and destruction to European civilisation.

Beginning of Turkish decline, 1566.

In reality, however, the flood had already reached high-water mark. The Sultans had begun to prefer a life of ease in the palace of Stamboul to the active leadership of the army, or the laborious administration of the empire. Suleiman himself farmed out the taxes and left the management of the affairs of state mainly to his ministers. Under his feeble successors degeneration grew apace. The reins of power fell from the listless hands of the Sultans into those of incapable and despicable favourites. Palace intrigues decided important affairs of state, and ministers were made and unmade by the cabals of women and eunuchs. Corruption spread like a cancer over the whole administration. Discipline became deteriorated in the army, and the Janizaries, like the Praetorian guard, ceased to be the champions of their country’s ambition, and became but the heroes of domestic revolutions. In a loosely organised empire like that of the Turks, which stretched from Buda to Bagdad, from the Caspian to the Pillars of Hercules, there was no cohesive force except that of the central government, no centre of unity except that of the ruler of Stamboul in his double capacity of Sultan and Caliph. When the head became effete and incapable the life blood of the whole organism failed and decay began. Under Selim the Sot, the successor of Suleiman, Christendom won its great victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571; a battle, which, though its loss was repaired with incredible energy and counterbalanced by the conquest of Cyprus, has nevertheless set for all time the limits of Turkish rule in the Mediterranean, just as the failure of Suleiman’s attack upon Vienna in 1529, and the subsequent partition of Hungary, had fixed the extreme boundaries of Turkish power in the valley of the Danube.

Loss of the command of the Danube valley in the seventeenth century.

The close of the sixteenth century therefore fixed the limits of Turkish advance. The opening years of the seventeenth century marked the first beginnings of Turkish retreat. By the treaty of Sitvatorok, concluded between the Emperor and the Sultan in 1606, the annual tribute of 30,000 ducats agreed to be paid by the Emperor for the portion of Hungary which he still retained under his own government was abolished. From that day to the present the history of the Ottoman Turks in Europe has been that of a gradual but steady decline in the strength of their authority over south-eastern Europe. In the seventeenth century the struggle was for the possession of the valley of the Danube. The contest was a severe one. The Turks fought more strenuously for the command of the Danube than they did for Greece or Bulgaria. Bit by bit with many changes of fortune they were slowly driven back, until soon after the end of the century not an acre of land on the northern bank of the river between the Theiss and the Pruth was still in their possession. Since then the work of liberation has progressed steadily but slowly. One by one the Crimea, Wallachia, Moldavia, Bessarabia, Servia, Greece, Bosnia, and Bulgaria have been won back by Christendom from the rule of the Turk, either to complete independence or to subjection to a neighbouring Christian power. But just as it was the mutual disunion of Christian powers which enabled the Turks to conquer south-eastern Europe so easily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so it has been the mutual jealousy of Christian powers which has made the task of emancipation so slow and so difficult in the nineteenth century. For many years the Ottoman Sultans have lived in Europe on sufferance, because it has seemed a lesser evil to the great powers of Europe to retain the Turk than to aggrandise the Czar.

Antagonism to the House of Austria.

Before the ambition of Russia gave rise to the Eastern Question the House of Austria was the Christian power chiefly interested in beating back the Turks. The Emperors no doubt felt somewhat the obligation which lay upon them, as the traditional lords of Christendom, to take the lead in the work of emancipating Christian lands and imperial vassals from the yoke of the infidel. But much more did they feel the political necessity which forced them, as kings of Hungary and Croatia and overlords of Transylvania, to make themselves undisputed masters of the valleys of the Danube the Drave and the Save. With the Turks securely planted at Buda, and within striking distance of Agram, Vienna itself was unsafe, and the communications between Austria and Italy liable at any moment to be cut. The more the Emperor was being deprived of leadership in Germany, the more he was being ousted from influence on the Rhine, the more essential it became to him to retain his hold upon the Danube. So during the whole of the seventeenth century the history of south-eastern Europe is the history of a duel between the House of Austria and the Sultans for political and military supremacy on the Danube and the Save. Other combatants such as the French, the Venetians, the Poles and the Russians, appear from time to time and take part in the struggle from motives of ambition or patriotism or interest and most powerfully affect its fortunes, but the essential character of the contest remains unchanged. Austria and the Turks fight for pre-eminence on the Danube, just as Germany and France fight for pre-eminence on the Rhine.

Misgovernment at Constantinople, 1603–1656.

Fortunately for the house of Habsburg the time of their greatest weakness was also a time of impotence and degeneracy among their foes. From the death of Mohammed III. in 1603 to the death of Murad IV. in 1640 the Ottoman empire was the prey of revolution anarchy and crime. The Sultans, effeminate puppets of a day, were in no position to take advantage of the opportunities given to them by the Thirty Years’ War. The satisfaction of their own pleasures and the preservation of their own lives were much more in their thoughts than the extension of their power. Murad IV. during the eight years of his personal rule (1632–1640) did much by a relentless severity to crush out the spirit of faction, and reduce the turbulent Janizaries to obedience, but on his death after a drinking bout in 1640, anarchy broke out again. Ibrahim I. his successor, having been with difficulty prevented from ordering a general massacre of the Christians all over the empire, contented himself by fitting out a fleet in 1645 which undertook the conquest of Candia; but the disorganisation of the government was far too great to enable the attempt to be made with any chance of success. It only provoked reprisals on the part of the Venetians and the Knights-Hospitallers. The miserable Sultan himself was deposed and murdered in 1648, the Ottoman fleet was defeated in the Ægean in 1649, civil war raged in Asia Minor, while at Stamboul ministers rapidly succeeded one another in obedience to the caprices of the harem or the demand of the soldiery. In 1656 Mocenigo the Venetian admiral occupied the Dardanelles and threatened Constantinople itself. It seemed as if the Ottoman empire was about to fall to pieces through sheer want of governance.