Selim II, who succeeded Süleyman in 1566, reigned for eight years and rarely left the palace. He was the first Ottoman sultan in five generations not to lead his armies in person. He drank heavily — his nickname in the Ottoman court was Selim the Sot — and left governance largely to the grand vizier, the formidable Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who had served under his father. Sokollu was, by general agreement of contemporaries and historians, one of the great administrators of the sixteenth century. He kept the empire functioning through Selim's reign, through Murad III's, and into the early years of Mehmed III, before being assassinated in 1579.
The empire's most famous defeat occurred under Selim II's nominal command. The Ottoman fleet, commanded by Ali Pasha, met a Holy League fleet under Don John of Austria at Lepanto, off the western coast of Greece, on the 7th of October 1571. The Ottomans were outnumbered and outgunned by a combined Venetian, Spanish, and Papal force using new-design galleasses — large hybrid sailing-rowing warships with broadside artillery. The result was the largest naval battle in European waters since antiquity. The Ottomans lost two hundred and ten ships and around thirty thousand men, including Ali Pasha himself, killed in the boarding actions. The Christian fleet lost about forty ships and seven thousand men, including the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes's left hand, mangled by a harquebus ball.
Lepanto was an enormous propaganda victory for the Holy League. The Pope ordered the church bells of Rome rung for three days. Titian painted Philip II receiving his newborn son with a captured Ottoman banner; Veronese painted the battle itself; Cervantes spent the rest of his life describing the day as "the most glorious occasion the past or present has seen." But the Ottomans rebuilt their fleet in eight months. The grand vizier Sokollu reportedly told the Venetian ambassador, who had come to negotiate, "When you defeated us at Lepanto, you cut our beard; it has grown back stronger. When we took Cyprus from you last year, we cut off your arm; you cannot grow that back."
The crisis of the seventeenth century
The next seventy years are sometimes called, by Ottomanists, the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. The empire faced a perfect storm of difficulties — most of which it shared, in different forms, with the rest of early-modern Europe: massive monetary inflation following the influx of New World silver; a population boom that outran agricultural capacity; pressure on the rural tax base from a state apparatus that kept growing; revolts in Anatolia (the so-called Celali rebellions) by demobilised provincial cavalry and unemployed soldiers; a series of weak sultans, most of whom had been raised in seclusion within the harem rather than as provincial governors, and were politically incapable when they came to the throne.
The defining cultural fact of the period, however, was an institutional change at the very top: the abandonment of the traditional Ottoman princely apprenticeship. Mehmed III, who succeeded in 1595, had his nineteen brothers strangled with bowstrings on his accession day — the largest single fratricide in the dynasty's history. He was deeply traumatised by it. His son Ahmed I, succeeding in 1603, refused to continue the practice. He confined his brother Mustafa instead in a windowless chamber of the palace, the so-called kafes (cage), with a few servants and concubines. The new system spared the lives of the princes but it produced sultans who had spent their entire pre-accession lives in a single room. Several of them — Mustafa I, Ibrahim "the Mad" — were, by the time they came to the throne, mentally unfit to rule.
"He spent fourteen years in the cage. When they brought him out and put him on the throne, he asked the grand vizier whether the world had always been so big." — Ottoman court historian, on the accession of Mustafa I, 1617
The Köprülü grand viziers
What kept the empire functioning during the worst stretches of the seventeenth century was the unusual rise to power of a single Albanian family. Köprülü Mehmed Pasha was an obscure provincial administrator from the small Anatolian town of Köprü when, at the age of seventy-one in 1656, he was appointed grand vizier by the regent mother Turhan Hatice Sultan, who had concluded that the empire needed a man fierce enough to discipline its corrupt court. Köprülü accepted on three conditions: that his orders would not be countermanded, that no minister would be appointed without his consent, and that no one would interfere with his use of the death penalty.
He used the latter freely. In his five years in office he is said to have executed thirty thousand corrupt officials, rebel soldiers, and political enemies. He also restored fiscal discipline, reconquered the islands of Lemnos and Tenedos from Venice, suppressed the Anatolian rebellions, and revived the empire's military reputation. He died in 1661, succeeded as grand vizier by his son Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, who held the office for fifteen years; by his son-in-law Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, who held it for seven; and intermittently by other family members afterwards. The Köprülü era — roughly 1656 to 1710 — was the Ottoman equivalent of a brief institutional renaissance under a single capable extended household.
Vienna, again
The high point — and the breaking point — of the Köprülü revival came in the summer of 1683. Kara Mustafa Pasha, ambitious to surpass Süleyman, decided to attempt what no Ottoman commander had attempted in 154 years: a full siege of Vienna. He marched in July with an army of around 150,000 men, the largest Ottoman force ever assembled for a single campaign.
The siege began on the 14th of July 1683. For two months the Ottomans dug mines beneath the city walls, conducted artillery bombardments, and probed the defences. The city, under the command of Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, was reduced to a garrison of perhaps eleven thousand by mid-September. The walls had been breached in two places. The defenders were down to their last reserves.
What saved Vienna was a Polish-German relief army. King Jan III Sobieski of Poland-Lithuania, with thirty thousand Polish troops and forty thousand German Imperial troops under the Duke of Lorraine, arrived on the Kahlenberg heights north of the city on the morning of the 12th of September 1683. The Ottoman commander, distracted by his ongoing siege operations, allowed the relief army to deploy on the heights without adequate response. At dusk Sobieski's heavy cavalry — fifteen thousand Polish winged hussars in their iconic white-feather frames — charged downhill into the Ottoman flank. The Ottoman army broke. By midnight Kara Mustafa was in retreat with what remained of his force.
The empire lost forty thousand men, almost all its artillery, and — for the second time in its history — a major campaign against a fortified European city. Kara Mustafa fled to Belgrade, where, on the orders of Sultan Mehmed IV, he was strangled with a silken cord on the 25th of December 1683. His severed head was sent back to Istanbul. (It is now, by an oddity of history, in the Vienna Museum of Military History.)
The defeat at Vienna is, conventionally, the moment at which the Ottoman Empire stopped advancing in Europe. From this date the territory it would lose, over the next two centuries, would always be greater than the territory it would gain. The next chapter takes up that long retreat.
End of Chapter V