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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 233

In another way, however, Turkish rule bore heavily on Christians. Through a
process known as the devshirme (devv-shirr-MEH) (the collecting or gathering),
Ottoman authorities siphoned off many thousands of young boys from Christian
families into the service of the state. Removed from their families and required to
learn Turkish, these boys usually converted to Islam and were trained for either the
civil administration or service in the elite Ottoman infantry force known as the
Janissaries. Although it was a terrible blow for families who lost their children,
the devshirme also represented a means of upward mobility within the Ottoman
Empire. But this social gain occurred at a high price.
Beyond the devshirme, Ottoman authorities used other techniques for funding
and administering their vast domains. Early on, in a system known as timar, sultans
granted land and tax revenues to individuals in return for military service. Later a
system of tax farming was practiced in which the state auctioned off to the highest
bidders the right to collect taxes, allowing them to keep a portion of the revenue
for their own use.
If Ottoman authorities were relatively tolerant toward Christians within their
borders, the empire itself represented an enormous threat to Christendom gener-
ally. The seizure of Constantinople, the conquest of the Balkans, Ottoman naval
power in the Mediterranean, and the siege of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683
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raised anew “the specter of a Muslim takeover of all of Europe.” One European
ambassador reported fearfully in 1555 from the court of the Turkish ruler Suleiman:
“He tramples the soil of Hungary with 200,000 horses, he is at the very gates of
Austria, threatens the rest of Germany, and brings in his train all the nations that
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extend from our borders to those of Persia.” Indeed, the “terror of the Turk”
inspired fear across much of Europe and placed Christendom on the defensive, even
as Western Europeans were expanding aggressively across the Atlantic and into the
Indian Ocean.
But the Ottoman encounter with Christian Europe spawned admiration and
cooperation as well as fear and trembling. Italian Renaissance artists sometimes
portrayed the splendor of the Islamic world in their paintings. The sixteenth-
century French philosopher Jean Bodin praised the religious tolerance of the

Ottoman sultan in contrast to Christian intolerance: “The King of the Turks who
rules over a great part of Europe safeguards the rites of religion as well as any
prince in this world. Yet he constrains no-one, but on the contrary permits every-
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one to live as his conscience dictates.” The French government on occasion
found it useful to ally with the Ottoman Empire against its common enemy of
Habsburg Austria, while European merchants willingly violated a papal ban on
selling firearms to the Turks. Cultural encounter involved more than conflict.
In the neighboring Persian lands to the east of the Ottoman Empire (see Map 4.5), AP ®
another Islamic state was also taking shape in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth COMPARISON
centuries — the Safavid (SAH-fah-vihd) Empire, which had emerged from a Sufi How did the origins of
religious order founded several centuries earlier by Safi al-Din (1252–1334). It was the Safavid Empire differ
the latest expression of a Persian imperial tradition some 2,000 years old. Lasting from from those of the
Ottoman Empire?
1501 to 1736, the empire was led by an absolute monarch, known as the shah, who
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