Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

(Footnotes available on request)

Kortepeter, C. Max. Ottoman Imperialism During the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus. New York: New York University Press, 1972. (278 pages).

C. Max Kortepeter chases away shadows at the edge of the main stage of Reformation Europe in his book, Ottoman Imperialism During the Reformation: Europe and the Caucasus. He illuminates roles taken up by the Ottomans, Muscovites, Safavid Persians, Crimean Tatars and others as events played out elsewhere, in areas that Western historians usually place in the spotlight: the Habsburg domains, western Mediterranean, Holy Roman Empire, Italy, France, the Swiss states and other environs.

Kortepeter dwells almost exclusively on the Balkan, Crimean plain and Caucasus regions. He spends considerable time in Hungary, where the Islamic Turkish East met the Catholic Habsburg West in the early sixteenth century. Kortepeter’s use of “Reformation” in the title seems to be a misapplication. Except for narrow consideration in explaining the influence of the Habsburg-Catholic-Counter-Reformation powers in Hungary, the Reformation is virtually absent from the work. East-West balances of power, but not Christian-Islamic tension, seem present just under the surface of the main narrative. Kortepeter concentrates on the period between the end of Suleyman the Magnificent’s reign in 1566 to the death of the Crimean khan Gazi Giray II in 1608, although he briefly reviews such important events as the Battle of Mohacs in 1526 and the fall of Kazan and Astrakhan to Muscovy in 1552.

Kortepeter starts by considering the historical, economic and political significance of the various sections of the Ottoman Empire as it expanded in the early- and mid-sixteenth century: the Black Sea area, Danube basin, the Balkans, the Crimean steppe, the Caucasus and Anatolia. He concludes the first of eleven chapters with an outline of the political structure of the Crimean khanate and the politics of the plain. This sets up the bulk of the remainder of the book, which keeps Giray, a descendent of Genghis Khan, the Mongol, at center. Chapter 2 outlines Crimean Tatar affairs and Giray’s early years, from his birth in 1554 to 1578. Next, Kortepeter turns to the Ottomans’ rivalry with the Safavids and their contest for control of Transcaucasia.

Kortepeter then gets to the meat of the work, the role of the Crimean Tatars in Ottoman affairs in general – they usually comprised the front line of Ottoman expansion – and in the Ottoman-Persian rivalry specifically. He utilizes his doctoral dissertation, “The Relations Between the Crimean Tatars and the Ottoman Empire.” The Tatar revolt of 1583, which resulted in the Ottoman sultan sacking the Crimean khan Mehemmed Giray Khan and the escape of the future khan Gazi Giray, comprises a short Chapter 5. Kortepeter draws connections between Ottoman-Crimean relations, the Tatars’ position politically and geographically vis-à-vis Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy on the decline and the final stages of the Livonian War. The author explains the revolt by pointing out that the Crimean khan probably was distracted by ventures, along with the Nogays, into the southern Muscovy regions. Kortepeter then turns to Giray’s accession to khan in 1588 and subsequent Crimean Tatar relations with the Nogays, the effect of the Ottoman-Crimean muddle on the empire’s growing tensions with Poland-Lithuania, Ottoman aggression toward Muscovy, and Tatar-Ottoman affairs just before the war in Hungary.

Kortepeter, in Chapter 7, explores general unrest in Eastern Europe in the 1590s, in particular the social climate in Hungary, before looking at the positioning by royals in Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia and other regional states, including Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, an Austrian Habsburg, to form an anti-Ottoman alliance. The league succeeded only partially because strong states such as Spain, Venice, Poland and Muscovy declined to participate, Kortepeter points out. The author then recounts the early stages of the Hungarian war, the involvement of the Crimean Tatars, the demoralization of the Ottomans and dismissal of Giray. Kortepeter traces the Ottoman-Habsburg war to its conclusion in 1606, spending considerable effort on Habsburg-Catholic efforts to fend off Protestantism, the Counter-Reformation’s effects on Hungarian loyalties, and the Habsburgs’ unintended role in fostering the establishment of both Protestant and Ottoman influence.

Kortepter concludes with a look at how decisions of politics, war and peace were made in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the seventeenth century, giving special attention to the empire’s war with Safavid Persia in 1578 and the eruption of war with the Austrian Habsburgs in 1592-1593. He closes with a last look at the last days of Giray in Chapter 10 and offers “apparent and elusive” conclusions in Chapter 11.

Kortepeter bemoans the “many gaps in our knowledge of the Ottoman Turks” in his preface. Perhaps because he assumes even most educated readers know so few details about the subject, Kortepeter saves a clear statement of his main thesis for the antepenultimate and penultimate paragraphs of the book. According to Kortepeter, Ottoman political elites responded more prudently to challenges on the Ottoman frontier, specifically with problems arising from the Reformation in Hungary, than they did with trouble spots in their own territories, such as problems with tribes in Asia Minor and violence associated with the spread of Shi’ism. He spells out his assertion:

"The Ottoman elite, acting on expediency, found it easier to employ its armies to make war on a neighboring state, in hope of seizing that country’s movable wealth and population, than to create a healthy social environment and to use wisely its own vast physical and human resources. The great Ottoman state, on the eve of the seventeenth century, was slowly being destroyed by the cupidity, venality, and insensitivity of its own ruling classes."

Kortepeter saves his last paragraph to point out that, despite the decline that began immediately after Suleyman the Magnificent’s peak military and political accomplishments early in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman State, after all, did survive until the twentieth.

Kortepeter’s deep knowledge of Crimean-Ottoman relations gives him a certain expertise on the politics of the vast regions of Central and Eastern Europe in general. His command of the subject allows him to get under other historians’ somewhat superficial treatment of important events.

For example, Kortepeter points out that the fall of Kazan and Astrakhan came after a few years of political wrangling, but following decades of social and economic decline. He emphasizes the Ottomans’ neglect of this northeastern part of their frontier, caused specifically by contretemps and war with Safavid Persia. Historian Richard Bonney, in The European Dynastic States: 1494-1660, seems to credit only the ambition of the Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV for the conquest of the two khanates and subsequent warring against the Crimea. In another instance, Kortepeter asserts that the Safavids might have beaten the Ottomans had they had access to seas, waterways and other natural resources, had comparable technology to the Ottomans’ and enjoyed their foes’ adeptness at army logistics. Bonney just blames the Safavid army for its failures.

Central to Kortepeter’s interpretation is the role of the Crimean Tatars as “forward scouts, as skirmishers, and even as assault units” in Ottoman military campaigns. The Tatars’ reputation for invincibility surrounds almost every angle of the author’s explication of Giray’s role and importance. Bonney barely considers the ramifications of this, although he does point out that the Ottomans had a vassal state in the Crimea that provided a power base from which to rule the Black Sea, as well as “a regular supply of fighting men.” Kortepeter’s interpretation of peace, the settlement of the Ottoman-Habsburg “Long War” of 1592-1606, has him again at odds with Bonney. Kortepeter lists seventeen major clauses of the Peace of Szitva-Torok, which ended the war, then expressly points out that in contrast to “most textbooks and histories,” which emphasize it as a landmark in the Ottomans’ history with the Habsburgs, he sees it as a “convenient accommodation for both parties.” Bonney acknowledges the benefit Rudolf II gained by being allowed to pay a one-time lump sum to Ahmed I, rather than continuing “the humiliating annual ‘gift’ to the Sultan for his retention of Royal Hungary,” but seems to emphasize the more strategic benefit to the Ottomans that accrued from the transfer of Habsburg fortresses in Hungary to Turkish control.

Finally, the two historians differ in their interpretation of the creation of the Uniate Church in Poland-Lithuania. Kortepeter has the Swedish-Polish King Sigismund Vasa III, a converted Catholic, instigating the Union of Brest and “establishing the Uniate Church to wean (the Cossacks) away from Orthodoxy,” which brought peace to his borders but strained the Polish crown’s relationship with Giray and the khanate. Bonney has “a section of the Orthodox hierarchy based in Lithuanian territory” forming the Uniate Church. Kortepeter stressed the role of the king in permitting the creation of the Uniate Church because it affected his relationship with Giray. Bonney stressed the role of the “Orthodox hierarchy” to point out that, while it lent stability to the Vasa kingdom, the Union of Brest strained Polish-Lithuanian Christians’ relations with the Muscovy Orthodox, who saw the Uniates as heretics.

Kortepeter’s research on Ottoman Imperialism is strongest when it draws on his dissertation on the Crimean Tatars’ relations with the Ottoman Empire, which he completed at the University of London in 1962. He conducted his work from 1957 to 1961, under the direction of Professor Bernard Lewis, head of the Department of Near and Middle East History, and Professor Paul Wittek, Professor of Turkish, whose seminars on the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman historiography Kortepeter found especially enlightening. Kortepeter also expressed debt to Professor Halil Inalcik, historian at Ankara University. The springboard for Kortepeter’s research was Stephen A. Fischer-Galati’s 1959 book, Ottoman Imperialism and German Protestantism, 1521-1555. Several reviewers laud Kortepeter for the Crimean Tatar aspects of his Ottoman scholarship, for which he used a wealth of primary sources, most of them Turkish. The praise mostly ends there.

Many reviewers find Kortepeter’s book poorly organized and weak in areas outside his main expertise. The unkindest cut, perhaps, comes from Fischer-Galati, Kortepeter’s inspiration, who praises his scholarly descendant’s research on the Crimean Tatars, but otherwise demolishes his book for its lack of cohesion and failure to prove his thesis. Fischer-Galatin, from the University of Colorado, praises Kortepeter for his use of primary sources in Latin, Romanian and Russian, but then damns him with faint praise for uncovering “marginally novel” data – then dismisses him as a linguist, suggesting he is not a genuine historian. The reviewer lowers the boom with his assessment of Kortepeter’s historical methodology: “The individual chapters appear to have been put together directly from index cards.”

Not every reviewer heaped praise on the Crimean Tatar aspects of Kortepeter’s research. Andrew C. Hess at Temple University criticized “the undue concentration on Crimean affairs” for drawing attention away from the grander narrative of this period of Ottoman history: the end of the empire’s expansion. Hess also wondered why the author made no attempt to explain why the Ottomans did not try to directly control the Tatars. On the other hand, reviewer Alan W. Fisher of Michigan State University found Kortepeter’s concentration on the Crimean Tatars the most interesting part of the book. However, Fisher criticized Kortepeter for failing to sift the “massive amount of detailed information” to reveal clearly his own views of the structural problems of the empire, which, Fisher points out, Kortepeter promises to do in Chapter 7. Fisher also complains: “the title itself is misleading.”

The title of Kortepeter’s book irked other historians, as well. Alexandre Bennigsen of the University of Chicago found it disconcerting simply for mentioning the Reformation and the Caucasus together. Bennigsen criticizes Kortepeter for his book’s weakness on the Reformation, as well as its demonstration of limited understanding, stemming from the use of questionable secondary sources, on the Caucasus. Further, Bennigsen asserts, for Kortepeter’s chronology to match his own title, he should have dealt more with the reigns of the Ottoman sultans Suleyman and Selim II, which paralleled the beginnings of the Protestant movement. Harlie Kay Gallatin of Southwest Baptist College also criticizes the title, insisting that the reference to the Reformation is misleading for a work that concentrates largely on the Crimean Tatar khanate’s service as a tool of Ottoman administration and international relations. Gallatin expresses appreciation for Kortepeter’s work on the Habsburg Counter-Reformation in Hungary, but points out that he spends as much effort on the role of Shi’ites and Sunnis in explaining the Ottoman-Safavid war. Gallatin praises the book for giving English readers a digest of materials accessible only to Turkish specialists but suggests that the merely curious about Ottoman history could bypass it.

Rare unabashed praise for Kortepeter comes from Andreas Tietze at the University of California, Los Angeles, who fairly gushes over Kortepeter’s work. Tietze praises its “illuminating insights’ in bringing “sense to the chaos” of the Great Powers’ wrangling for supremacy and control of tribes on “these monotonous steppes,” the “misty plains” in a “far-away no man’s land” north of the Black Sea between the Balkans and the Caucasus mountain ranges. Tietze even finds justification for Kortepeter’s title, asserting that the author earns the use of it by bringing out the interplay of Ottoman success and the division in Christendom in his argument that the Holy Roman Emperor’s Counter-Reformation fervor added a century to Ottoman influence in Hungary.

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1950, a master of arts from McGill University, Montreal, conducting graduate study at the University of Michigan and obtaining his doctorate from London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Kortepeter spent his career as a professor and researcher of the Middle East and Near East, returning to the student desk for a master of science from Rutgers University in 1989. He retired in the late 1990s after 29 years as a professor of Middle East history at New York University. His membership and leadership in academic organizations such as the Middle East Institute, Turkish Studies Association, Association of Russian-American Scholars and Americans for Middle East Understanding indicate the depth of not only his knowledge but his personal involvement in applying the lessons of history to the present. Kortepeter, in fact, opens Ottoman Imperialism with an explicit comparison to what he considers too much involvement by the United States in other nations’ affairs, and closes it with a similar implication.

The book clearly is steeped in Kortepeter’s specialty, although coming as it did early in his career, it obviously does not express his full capabilities as a researcher and writer. Kortepeter plainly was greatly influenced by the four years he spent studying as a young man in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War between the American and Soviet superpowers. The experience seems to have thereafter influenced his interpretation of historical imperialism. In short, he sees nation-states that overextend themselves and squander their natural and human resources as destined for eventual comeuppance, especially if meddling in other nation-states’ internal affairs. Selected publications include authorship, co-authorship and editorship of numerous journal articles and larger works. Among others, he authored “Ottoman Imperial Policy and the Economy of the Black Sea Region” in Journal of the American Oriental Society; he wrote “The Islamic-Ottoman Social Structure: The Quest for a Model of Ottoman History,” in Near East Round Table I; he edited the “Literature and Society” section of The Modern Near East, a textbook; he authored “The Origins and Nature of Turkish Power” in Fakueltesi Tarih Arastirmalari Dergisi, a publication of Ankara University; and he co-edited The Transformation of Turkish Culture: the Ataturk Legacy. His work as a linguist and historian has him cross-listed in Directory of American Scholars.

Kortepeter’s harshest critic, Fischer-Galati, dismisses Ottoman Imperialism as “informative but not very important.” The book is enlightening, especially to one with virtually no prior knowledge of the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century. In addition, while the book primarily is concerned with the Crimean Tatars’ relationship with the Ottomans, it does provide limited but useful information and analysis of peripheral issues and events important, but not critical, for grasping the influence of the Protestant Reformation in Central and Eastern Europe, especially the sections on Hungary, Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania. The book provides an appendix of nine charts and tables outlining royal lines and leadership and societal structures, three basic maps, as well as a thorough bibliography. However, Kortepeter’s main text is difficult to read because of his disjointed lines of thought. In some places, he stops to list specific points or summarize his subtheses, but his main point is not made until the last page – and even then it is not at all clear that the previous 243 pages have backed it up.

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