ABSTRACT
In August 1648, while European diplomats were haggling over the final stages of the peace of Westphalia, after a series of wars which had diverted them for thirty years from the affairs of Turkey, mutinous janissaries, exasperated by his crazy, self-indulgent rule, and in particular by incompetent handling of the war against Venice, murdered Sultan Ibrahim and set in his place 7-year-old Mehmed IV. In one way or another, in Europe and Asia, he governed thirty million, more than any other ruler of his time. About half the people living round the Mediterranean were his subjects. The empire comprised altogether more than 32 provinces. Anatolia had seen the first consolidation of Ottoman power and it had the most disciplined and docile inhabitants. But Turks were not the most numerous element in the Empire. Along with them, Arabs, Kurds, Bosnians, Albanians, Circassians, Tartars and Caucasians made up the Muslim majority. There was a Christian minority of Serbs, Greeks, Magyars, Bulgars, Wallachians and Moldavians. South of the Danube were Thrace and Rumelia, corresponding to the European part of Turkey, and Bulgaria, today; also Greece, most of Yugoslavia and Albania as they are now. Most of Hungary, since Mohacs (1526), had been in Turkish hands, though crown and claims were Habsburg. Between the Danube and Dniester rivers, Moldavia and Wallachia were tributary principalities, though like the princes of Transylvania across the Carpathian mountains their rulers sought independence; meanwhile they found Ottoman suzerainty a useful card in dealings with their neighbours. The Tartar khan of the Crimea provided 20,000 men for the defence of the southern lands against the Cossacks of Dnieper and Don. In Dalmatia, where the Venetians maintained an uneasy frontier, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) bought independence with annual tribute. In Asia the Turks had relinquished their grip on Georgia, and after long costly wars on most of Persia, but they held Iraq. Egypt and Syria, first conquered in 1516-17 by Selim I, completed the barrier between Christendom and the Indian ocean. On the far side of the Mediterranean the ‘regencies’ of Barbary were useful clients and practised pirates-for the most part against Christian ships.
