Best Books on the Ottoman Army and Military Modernization

In 1529, Ottoman armies besieged Vienna. They failed to take the city, but the very fact that they had reached it sent shockwaves through Europe. The Ottoman military was the most powerful and professional fighting force in the world, equipped with artillery that could reduce medieval fortifications in days and organized around a corps of elite infantry, the Janissaries, who had no equivalent in the armies of European monarchs. Three and a half centuries later, the same empire was called "the sick man of Europe." Its armies were being defeated by smaller European forces with more modern equipment, better training, and more effective logistics. What happened in between is one of the most consequential stories in military history. It's also a story about the limits of reform, about what happens when an institution tries to change itself without undermining the political interests that depend on it staying the same. ## The Ottoman Military in Its Prime Rhoads Murphey's *Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700* is the best scholarly treatment of the Ottoman military system at its height. Murphey draws on Ottoman administrative records, campaign diaries, and logistical documents to reconstruct how Ottoman armies actually functioned, not as the popular imagination depicts them, but as complex organizations that had to feed, supply, and coordinate tens of thousands of men across enormous distances. The result complicates a lot of myths. Ottoman armies were not simply overwhelming in numbers. They succeeded for so long because of organizational sophistication, especially in logistics, and because of the artillery advantage they maintained over European opponents for much of the sixteenth century. When that advantage eroded, as European armies caught up and eventually surpassed Ottoman capabilities, the structural weaknesses of the system became more visible. ## The Janissary Problem The Janissaries are central to any account of Ottoman military history, and not just because they were effective soldiers. By the eighteenth century, they had become one of the primary obstacles to military reform. Originally a corps of elite infantry recruited through the devshirme system, which levied Christian boys from the Balkans and raised them as Muslim soldiers, the Janissaries had by the early modern period become a hereditary caste with significant political power. They mutinied repeatedly to block reforms that threatened their privileges, and they were capable of deposing sultans who pushed too hard. Virginia Aksan's *Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged* covers the long period of military decline and attempted reform in depth. Aksan is a Canadian historian who has spent her career on Ottoman military history, and her account of the successive reform efforts, the resistance they encountered, and the military disasters that resulted from moving too slowly, is detailed and convincing. The Janissaries were finally destroyed in 1826, in an event the Ottomans called the "Auspicious Incident," when Sultan Mahmud II used loyal artillery units to massacre them in their barracks in Istanbul. It was a brutal act and a political necessity. The modern Ottoman army was built on their ruins. ## Modernization and Its Limits The nineteenth century saw intense efforts to rebuild the Ottoman military along European lines. European officers, especially German ones in the later period, were brought in to train Ottoman soldiers and design the new officer corps. Military schools were established. The telegraph was used to coordinate operations across the empire's vast territory. David Nicolle's work on the late Ottoman army covers the equipment and organization of this modernized force in accessible detail, though serious readers will want to supplement it with more analytical accounts. The problem was that military modernization could not be separated from the broader political crisis of the empire. A more effective military required better tax collection, which required administrative reform, which threatened the interests of provincial elites, which generated resistance that undermined the reforms. Each piece of the system depended on the others, and the empire lacked the fiscal and political capacity to change all of them at once. ## The End of the Army The First World War destroyed what remained. The Ottoman military fought on multiple fronts with inadequate supplies and was systematically defeated by British and French forces. The campaigns in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia are the best-known to Western audiences, but the collapse of the Caucasus front and the Arab Revolt were equally significant. What came after, the Turkish War of Independence and the founding of the Republic, was in part a story of Ottoman military officers who had survived the disaster and rebuilt from the wreckage. Understanding that continuity helps explain why the modern Turkish military occupies the political role it does. It is, in important respects, the direct inheritor of the late Ottoman reform tradition. ## Further Reading Find more books on military history and empires at [/category/history](/category/history).