Mahmud I

Ottoman sultan (r. 1730-1754)

• Born: August 2, 1696
• Birthplace: Edirne, Ottoman Empire (now in Turkey)
• Died: December 13, 1754
• Place of death: Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now in Istanbul, Turkey)

Mahmud I took over a troubled Ottoman Empire following the abdication of his uncle, Ahmed III. He was thwarted in his attempts to rule by unrest within the empire and by skirmishes abroad. He sought to improve the empire by modernizing the army and establishing a military technical school in Uskudar. He is best remembered for brokering the Treaty of Belgrade in 1739.

Early Life

Mahmud (mah-MOOD) I was raised in a climate of political stress in the Ottoman Empire. He was secluded for much of his early life and had little direct experience with the outside world. The empire, although led by his uncle, Ahmed III, was essentially controlled by a renegade band of Janissaries.

The reign of Ahmed III is often referred to as the Tulip Age, because Ahmed was caught up in the fever of the brisk trade in tulip bulbs. Finally, angered by the luxurious living and obvious excesses of the sultancy, the Janissaries staged a rebellion that toppled Ahmed III, clearing the way for Mahmud I to become sultan.

The once-elite Janissaries, after they were permitted to marry, became family oriented, making them reluctant to travel to the distant places where they were needed and causing them to practice nepotism, pushing into the Janissary corps their male children, many of whom could not have met the corps’ earlier high standards. When he was forced to yield to the Janissaries, Ahmed turned over to them his grand vizier and another important official, both of whom were summarily strangled. Ahmed III went into seclusion, appointing his inexperienced and unworldly thirty-four-year-old nephew, Mahmud, the son of his brother, Mustafa II, to become sultan.

For much of his childhood, Mahmud I was confined in the Cage, a prison, albeit a quite luxurious one. This measure was meant to ensure that he could neither rise up himself nor inspire others to overthrow his uncle Ahmed. Ironically, Ahmed III, after releasing Mahmud I from the Cage and making him sultan, took his place there. Ahmed remained confined to the Cage for the rest of his life.

Life’s Work

Mahmud I acceded to the sultancy in 1730. Since he had been confined in the Cage during Ahmed III’s reign, Mahmud was inexperienced and ill-equipped to assume the duties that were suddenly thrust upon him. Fortunately, he had the aid of the Nubian eunuch, Aga Haji Besir (1653-1746), who, during his long life, served as wise counsel to many sultans and grand viziers.

The new sultan’s first act, not unlike the first acts of his Ottoman predecessors, was to execute the leaders of the rebellion that had caused his uncle’s sultancy to collapse. Such acts were meant publicly to demonstrate the strength and determination of the new sultan, whose hold on his position was often tenuous at best. The next matter Mahmud faced was the Ottoman-Persian War. Relations with Europe under Ahmed had been quite peaceful, but such was not the case with his eastern neighbors. Forces led by Mahmud experienced some initial victories. Part of western Persia that had been lost during Ahmed’s sultancy was recaptured. A treaty in 1732 formally recognized the reclaimed Ottoman territory in Azerbaijan, Daghestan, and Georgia.

These small victories, however, did not continue. By 1733, the flames of war had been rekindled, and Ottoman forces were repulsed as the Persians won back parts of northern Persia near the Ottoman border and portions of the Caucasus. Finally, in 1736, Mahmud was able to broker an agreement, the Treaty of Istanbul, in which his government agreed to recognize the boundaries set by the Treaty of Kasr-I Şirin, which Murad IV had enacted and agreed to in 1639, almost a century earlier. In this treaty, Erivan, Tabriz, and the Zagros Mountains fell on the Iranian side of the Ottoman-Iranian boundary, whereas the Ottomans were given Kars, Van, Kirkuk, Baghdad, and Basra.

Just as this accord was being enacted, a war broke out between the Ottomans and the Russians following a Russian attack on the Crimea in which major Ottoman fortifications were attacked. This conflict was followed in 1737 by an ill-fated Austrian attack on Banja Luka and Niš. The Ottomans subdued the Habsburg forces in Belgrade, forcing the Habsburg army to negotiate a peace with Mahmud’s forces and marking a significant victory for the sultan.

This victory for Mahmud had a domino effect, because, even though Russia occupied Khotin, the Austrian defeat brought about Ottoman alliances with Poland, Prussia, and Sweden that placed the Russians in an untenable situation and forced them to negotiate a peace with the Ottomans. The Treaty of Belgrade, brokered by the French and adopted in 1739, called for the withdrawal of Austrian and Russian forces from Ottoman territory. This treaty also ceded Belgrade to the Ottomans.

With French-Ottoman relations at a new high, the Sublime Porte, or council of the grand viziers, granted capitulation to France. Capitulation could be granted to non-Muslims to assure their safety in Muslim countries. Such provisions were first established in the late seventeenth century and were used quite frequently in the following three centuries to protect non-Muslim merchants and others doing business in the Ottoman Empire and to grant them some reduction in the tariffs they faced in their trades.

Peace did not last long. The Iranian ruler, Nādir Shāh, demanded that the Ottomans recognize the Iranian Imamiyya Shia belief as a fifth legitimate school of Islam. In 1743, after Mahmud refused to recognize the Imamiyya Shia as requested, another war, lasting until 1746, erupted between the Ottomans and the Persians. There was no clear victor in this conflict, so, despite considerable loss of life on both sides, the original land borders were preserved.

Early in his sultancy, Mahmud IIII39IIII engaged the French strategist Claude Alexandre de Bonneval, also known as Ahmed Pasha, to reorganize the Ottoman grenadiers, a process that began in 1733 and continued for some years. Simultaneously, Mahmud established a military technical school (Hendesehāne) in Üsküdar to provide technical training for those who would lead future Ottoman military forces. These initiatives, which, if extended, would greatly have strengthened his nation’s armed forces, were strongly resisted by powerful Janissaries, who thwarted any changes that threatened to compromise their authority and position.

Significance

Mahmud I is one of the least recognized Ottoman sultans. He began his reign under a cloud, because he had little training to be sultan, having suffered confinement during his first thirty-four years. He inherited a nation at odds with its rulers and dominated by a splinter group of dissidents, the Janissaries, who limited the power of the sultancy.

Mahmud continued some of the excesses of the Tulip Age, holding firmly to its social and cultural practices. He attempted to serve his subjects in positive ways, engaging in public works that he hoped might being some honor to a regime that was, at best, viewed with public suspicion and scorn. He was responsible for the building of many mosques, as well as libraries and schools. In a country where a safe watersupply was not always assured, he saw to it that water mains were installed where they were most needed to bring that vital substance to the populace.

During Mahmud’s reign, İbrahim Müteferrika operated a printing press and, with Mahmud’s apparent blessing, employed a contingent of twenty-five translators to bring out Turkish editions of European works of scientific importance in such fields as physics, economics, geography, cartography, medicine, and astronomy. He introduced the Ottomans to the thinking of such giants as Aristotle, René Descartes, and Galileo.

Mahmud served as sultan until the end of his life. On December 13, 1754, on his way home after attending Friday services at a mosque in Istanbul, he fell to the ground and died, the victim of a heart attack that took his life at age fifty-eight. His brother, Osman III, succeeded him.

Bibliography

Barber, Noel. The Sultans. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973. Barber presents intimate portraits of the lives of the sultans. Although he devotes little time specifically to Mahmud I, he provides compelling background material that helps one understand the Ottoman sultans.

Kinross, John Patrick. The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire. New York: William Morrow, 1977. A detailed resource that covers well the Austrian campaign of Mahmud I and also, although dubbing him an ineffective ruler, shows how he brought new scientific knowledge to his empire.

Mansel, Philip. Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. This readable book is broad in its coverage of almost half a millennium of Ottoman history.

Somel, Selçuk Aksin. Historical Dictionary of the Ottoman Empire. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003. Although the entries in this excellent reference book are brief, they are direct and include valuable cross-references. An outstanding resource for all aspects of the Ottoman Empire.