Read Online A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, Nicolas Pelham - Free Book Online Page A

frontal assault of the kind it had confronted seven hundred years earlier, in the First Crusade: it was being penetrated in a more subtle and insidious manner. The foreign non-Muslim tradingcommunities had originally been granted their privileges and immunities, which came to be known as the Capitulations, in order to benefit the empire’s economy. The first were given to the Genoese in the Galata suburb of Constantinople immediately after the capture of the city in 1453. The most famous were probably those granted to Francis I of France by Sulaiman the Magnificent in 1535 as a reward for French co-operation with the sultan against the Christian Habsburgs. The Capitulations were not only commercial: they granted full religious liberty to the French in the Ottoman Empire and, more significantly, the right to guard the Christian holy places. What amounted to a French protectorate was established over all the Latin Catholics in the Levant. In the mid eighteenth century these privileges were confirmed and extended as a reward for French diplomatic support in negotiations with Austria. The extraterritorial privileges created by the Capitulations were remarkable. Special consular courts had complete jurisdiction over the nationals of the countries concerned. Non-Muslim foreign nationals living in Turkey were not subject to Ottoman law, however grave the crime they might have committed.
    France was ahead of its European rivals, but not by far. Russia claimed similar protective rights over Orthodox Christians in the empire. England’s special ties were only with the smaller religious minorities such as Jews and the Druze, but these were supported by England’s growing maritime and commercial dominance in the world.
    By the end of the eighteenth century, British sea-power and trading ambitions formed another threat to Ottoman sovereignty in the world of Islam, on the eastern fringes of the empire. The English were not the first Europeans to arrive in force in the Persian/Arabian Gulf: the Portuguese came some thirty years before the Ottomans and, to further their aim of building a great empire in India and the East, attempted to dominate the Red Sea and the Gulf. They attacked and pillaged the eastern Arabian coast from Muscat to Bahrain, leaving forts and garrisons to dominate the indigenous Arab trading and pearling communities. Throughout the sixteenth century the Portuguese controlled the waters of the Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz. Occasionally the Turks, with the help of local tribes, were able to challenge their supremacy and drive the Portuguese out of Bahrain and Muscat, but it was Portuguese naval supremacy which counted.

    The Portuguese presence was also a deep affront to the Persians on the northern side of the Gulf. Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty which ruled from 1501 to 1736, protested vigorously but, owing to his life-and-death struggle with the Ottoman Turks, he could do little more. In fact, throughout the sixteenth century it was the presence of Persia as a hostile neighbour on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern border which reduced the power of the Turks to expand into Europe. In 1599 the English even attempted – unsuccessfully – to persuade the Persians to ally themselves with the Christian powers against the Turks.
    The real challenge to the Portuguese came from two rival powers: England and Holland. By the end of the sixteenth century, English and Dutch adventurers (or pirates) were competing with the Portuguese for the spice trade. Shah Abbas I of Persia (1571–1629), a great military leader and administrator, encouraged the English and Dutch East India companies to establish special branches in Persia, giving the fledgeling companies special privileges. In 1602 he was able to oust the Portuguese from their foothold on the Persian mainland north of the island of Hormuz, and twenty years later, with the aid of the fleet of the English East India Company, he ousted the Portuguese from Hormuz