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IN the field of Ottoman history, scholars have often advanced an interpretation of decline. Traditionally, the argument states that the Ottoman empire reached its peak in the sixteenth century under Suleyman the Magnificent, and thereafter began an inexorable stagnation and decline lasting until the twentieth century. Historians often point to the Ottoman naval defeat at Lepanto in 1571 or the failure of the second siege of Vienna in 1683 as events marking the waning fortunes of Ottoman power and the beginning of the "decline."1
The use of the term decline as it has been applied by Middle East scholars to the Ottoman case presents several problems. Implicit in any notion of "decline" is some kind of comparison. After all, an empire can only be seen as declining in comparison to some measure, whether it be other powers or its own imperial past. As historians have employed the concept, the unit of measure (if mentioned at all) is often overly broad or inappropriate to the Ottoman context. In its broadest application, Ottoman "decline" has served as a negative judgment on Islamic society as a whole and its inability to match the march of progress and rising power of Western society since the seventeenth century. In this instance the unit of comparison is the civilization.2 Such a basis for comparison is ill-chosen because the notion that the strength of a civilization can be measured in military success is an obviously dubious proposition, as the examples of Renaissance Italy or the thirteenth-century Mongols make clear.
Besides selecting a vague unit of measure, proponents of the decline thesis tend to be rather imprecise about the scale by which they measure the Ottoman "decline." For example, they may posit an economic or cultural/social decline that contributed to a military decline, but invariably this so-called decline was in relation to an economically expanding "West."3 However, neither the "West" nor "Islamic society" was a monolithic entity, and within each civilization there existed states with varying degrees of military capability. Most often scholars have used the term the West or Europe generically, when they actually meant England, France, and Holland. The use of these western European states as the basis for measuring Ottoman military decline has obscured the actual Ottoman conditions by placing...