Bleeding Ottoman Empire

Bleeding Ottoman Empire Surviving 624 years, dominating an area of 24 millions km², being composed of lots of different religious and ethnic groups,Ottoman Empire is one of the most impressive states that have ever existed in history. Being located at a legitimate place to enlarge its territorry, Ottomans gained strength due to course. However, something began to go wrong with Ottoman Empire. Deterioration on management, educational underdevelopement and military corruption caused Ottoman Empire to lose its power. The first reason why Ottoman Empire lost its power is the deterioration on management. In province management, authorities gave priority to unintelligent people in exchange of taking bribe. In this way, these people came to the important positions of province management and the management quality worsened(Dr. Özdemir, Para 3). In Ottoman Empire, forests and agricultural areas characterized as land together with the areas such as pasture, summer pasture and winter quarters required for stockbreeding were determined as state property, which is also called Miri land. Since most of the Ottoman territory in areas was Miri lands, the Ottoman land management system was named as Miri land system (Bıyık and Yavuz, Para 2 and 3). If the annual income was less than 20.000 akche, it was called as Timar. Timars were given to commenders in exchange of feeding soldiers(Bıyık and Yavuz, Para3). However, lands were distributed unfairly in time and the price that is needed to feed soldiers had to be paid by the Empire. This led the number of soldiers to decrease and led also taxes not to be collected. Not only in army, this deterioration led problems in economical, social and managerial areas(Osmanlı Devleti'nin Duraklama Dönemi, Para. 3). After the death of I. Ahmet, the wisest and the oldest male dynastic family member became sultan whether he was experienced or not. Shahzadahs’ going to sanjaks was forbidden. By living in palace along their lives, sultans couldn’t be aware of what was going on outside so, most of

them failed(Dr. Özdemir, Para. 4). Each sultan had his own harem and had children from some of them. Since each male children was a possible sultan, harem members got into struggle with each other in order to make their children sultan. Another reason why Ottoman Empire lost its power is the educational underdevelopement. Renaissance spanned roughly the 14th to 17th century. It began in Italy and in the middle ages then spread to the rest of Europe. Scolastic ideas gave place to science and technique(Renaissance , Para 1). On the other hand, almost all so called intellectual people in Ottoman Empire were educated not in respect of science and technique but of religion rules. Since the education was not positivistic and limited within closed brackets, Ottoman people could’t help their countries to see beyond(Durmuş Günay, Para. 2). By using technology, European countries empowered their armies and enhanced their technical education to do better. Ottoman Empire however, couldn’t be aware of these scientific and technical enhancements and aborted.(Duraklamanın sebepleri,Iç sebepler 3.). After ratifying Islam in 10th century, almost all Turk states used arabic alphabet which was hard to learn and does not correspond to Turkish voices. People were getting hardship for learning this alphabet so,the rate of well-read people in Ottoman Empire was very low. Despite this low rate, there was a wide-spread thought that if printing houses had been opened, all penmen which were called Hattat, would have lost their jobs. Whereas books were rare and very expensive, there were many ignorant and poor people in Ottoman Empire. Hence, education underdevelopement accelerated the power losing process clearly.

The last reason why Ottoman Empire lost its power is the military corruption. In general, The Empire supported the conquiring ideology which requires a powerfull and a dynamic military. Not being aware of technology, it was very hard for Ottoman Empire to compute with European countries(Hülür and Akça, Para. 1). During the unproductive period, Empire underwent many long and frequent wars and soldiers were very tired and reluctant to fight. Successive failures led soldiers to lose their faith for their countries. They became undisciplined day by day and they began to dethrone sultans by rebelling(Hülür and Akça, Para. 3). Acting freely, soldiers began to be engaged in bussiness by making excuse for cost of living. They didn’t tend to leave their homes to fight in wars in which they didn’t believe. So, army was about to collapse and Ottoman was losing its most deterrent force(Hülür and Akça, Para 3 and 4). On the whole, there was a glorious Empire whose nation was called as Ottoman. Conquering Istanbul, it led to an age change in history. It dominated almost half of the world. However, after countless victories, Ottoman could not handle being one of the biggest states of all times. Deterioration on management, educational underdevelopement and military corruption caused Ottoman to lose its breathtaking power and to be called as “the sick man of the Europe” by Tsar Nicholas I. of Russia. Nevertheless, Ottomans did so many respected things of which their grand children are proud today.

REFERENCES

I. Cemal BIYIK & Ayşe YAVUZ, The Importance of Property Ownership and Management System in the Ottoman Empire in Point of Today, 2nd FIG Regional Conference Marrakech, Morocco, December 2-5, 2003. http://www.fig.net/pub/morocco/proceedings/TS10/TS10_4_biyik_yavuz.pdf II. Dr. Suzan ÖZDEMİR, Osmanlı Tarihi. http://osmanlitarihi.5u.com/osmdrklm.htm - gt1 III. DurmuşGünay. “Medreseden üniversiteye trajik bir yolculuk” Mimar ve Mühendis, Sayı 26, s. 41-49, 1999, İstanbul IV. Himmet HÜLÜR-Gürsoy AKÇA “the transformation of economy and society and the Dynamics of centralization from the empire to the republic”, 16th issue, Autumn 2004. http://www.turkiyat.selcuk.edu.tr/pdfdergi/s17/hulur.pdf V. 23-07-2007, OSMANLI DEVLETİ'NİN DURAKLAMA DÖNEMİ, http://www.izafet.com/osmanli-tarihi/129927-osmanli-devletinin-duraklama-donemi.html. VI. Erdal ŞAHİN ,Marmara Üniversitesi,Tatarlar ve Tataristan: Dünü, Bugünü, Yarını Sempozyumu, 27 Şubat 2003. VII. Renaissance, 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance.