Rivers of the Sultan by Faisal H. Husain;

Author:Faisal H. Husain;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Abandoning Ship

Relentless expansion by Baghdad in the Tigris-Euphrates basin corresponded to the retreat of the Ottoman central state. The most striking sign of Istanbul’s disengagement from the naval affairs of the region can be found in the Birecik shipyard. From the sixteenth century, Birecik emerged as the most vital naval installation and conduit for military provisions in the entire drainage basin. In the late seventeenth century, the Iraq crisis in the south and Ottoman war in the west impinged on Birecik’s ability to command from out of town the timber and labor necessary for shipbuilding. As early as 1701, shipyard officials were airing their grievances, claiming that building a frigate in the imperial capital would be about 40 percent cheaper than building it in Birecik.70 For a few decades, nevertheless, Birecik persisted. In 1733 and 1743, for instance, it built 300 and 124 vessels, respectively, in response to encroachments on Iraq by the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah.71 Amid the mounting political and financial pressures of the late eighteenth century, however, the central government finally relinquished this strategic shipyard, a move that reinforced Baghdad’s control over the Tigris and Euphrates.

In May 1777, Istanbul and Baghdad were coordinating a military operation to rescue Basra from a brief Persian occupation. A chamberlain at the Ottoman court dispatched a letter to Baghdad’s governor to vent his frustration over the lack of imperial support he found in the Birecik shipyard. None of the necessary material for ship construction was available. Timber from Maraş, Elbistan, Behisni, and Ayntab did not arrive, nor did the needed provisions from Aleppo and Raqqa. He had to purchase timber from the market at a high price, with which he constructed a mere twenty vessels. Had he had the necessary timber and provisions, he claimed, he could have constructed and loaded 150 vessels to join the war effort in Iraq. “By God I am bewildered,” he grumbled, helpless to change a bitter reality.72

The chamberlain’s letter is one of the last records of an Ottoman attempt to build river boats for the imperial Shatt Fleet on the Tigris and Euphrates. By the 1770s, Istanbul was no longer able to provision its eastern naval bases, nor was it able to meet the exigencies of its debilitating wars in eastern Europe without the goodwill of independent local grandees in the provinces. A few years later, the Ottoman central government ceased all shipbuilding operations in Birecik and Basra and devolved all naval duties to the Pashalik of Baghdad, which maintained a modest squadron in the waters of Iraq with the support of foreign maritime powers like the East India Company.

The breakdown in Ottoman military logistics, once the envy of Europe, was most visible during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–1774, a humiliating defeat that cost the Ottoman army tens of thousands of lives and its entire Mediterranean fleet in the bay of Çeşme. Many perished in the crossfire, but countless others died from famine and malnutrition caused by confusion and disorder in the supply system.73 The

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