Empires of the Weak by Jason Sharman

Author:Jason Sharman
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

The Asian Invasion of Europe in Context

JUST AS EUROPEANS were beginning to expand into Asia, Asians were expanding into Europe. Indeed, in the 1500s and 1600s there was probably more European territory and population under Asian rule than vice versa. This situation lasted until the 1750s, when British forces began to conquer substantial populations in South Asia. Even here it was a company with sovereign powers, the British East India Company, professing allegiance to an Asian (Mughal) empire that was the agent of conquest, not a modern European sovereign state. The Asians in Europe in the early modern era were the Ottomans, a Turkic group originating from Central Asia that conquered an empire in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East roughly on the same scale of that of the Romans, centered from 1453 in the last Roman capital, Constantinople. Throughout the 1500s and until the late 1600s the Ottomans were feared as an existential threat to Europe as a whole.1

Why is the Ottoman Empire important to the central claims of this book? The first part of this chapter explains why as their primary non-Western opponent for several centuries, and the only one to engage in sustained, high-intensity warfare with the European great powers, the Ottomans are the most appropriate case for testing claims of a shifting military balance between Western and Eastern powers. The next section then gives a brief overview of the Ottoman military system. The most important points are the Ottomans’ ability to productively combine and adapt different styles of warfare, and even more significantly their anticipation of key innovations that are said to define the military revolution. The Ottomans had a permanent, standing infantry army equipped with guns, directly commanded by the sultan, well-supplied by a complex bureaucratic logistical system, and paid for with central tax revenues well before the European great powers started to do the same.

I then look at the wars between the Ottomans and their various Western opponents in Central Europe and the Balkans, which has been the traditional focus of Western historians, but I also consider the contest in North Africa between local, Ottoman, and European forces, which has received far less attention. The repeated European disappointments and defeats at the hands of Islamic foes in North Africa right through to the nineteenth century conclusively scotches any notion that Western overseas expansion swept all before it. These reverses are even more significant given that the Spanish and Portuguese committed far more resources in their failed expeditions across the Mediterranean than they ever did to those across the Atlantic or to the East. The Ottomans were dominant in Europe right through what is said to be the key century of the military revolution, 1550–1650. The fact that their eclipse came only in the second half of the eighteenth century, and then at the hands of the Russians, is an awkward fit with the tenets of the conventional story. It is a strangely underappreciated fact that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed far more extensive and

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