DECLINE OF A “MYTH”: PERSPECTIVES ON THE OTTOMAN “DECLINE”

Few themes are more important to or controversial in the current historical research into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Ottoman Empire than “decline.” An older, still axiomatic position sketched out most famously by Bernard Lewis places the imperial history in the framework of three and a half centuries of “inevitable decline.” An alternate approach, originating in the works of western historians such as Fernand Braudel, Roger Owen, Linda Darling, and Gábor Ágoston, to name but few, begins with the basic question of how an empire can sustain over three centuries of unrelenting decline. Locating itself in the latter alternative approach, the aim of this project is to shed light on the inadequacies of the declinist historiographical model by focusing on the Ottoman administrative practices in the western/Habsburg frontier with a special reference to the Köprülü restoration in the second half of the seventeenth century. This work suggests that although the Ottoman writers and the modern historians have argued about an Ottoman decline in the period, political and military achievements of the Köprülü viziers and flexible policies of the Ottoman pashas in the frontier prove the opposite.