Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (review)

Gábor Ágoston's newest book is a much-needed addition to English language works dealing with Ottoman military affairs. Based on sound archival and other primary sources, it looks at the employment, manufacture, and cost of Turkish gunpowder weapons in the 1400s to 1700s. From the castle smashing kale-kob down to the infantryman's tüfenk (musket), Ágoston starts with a history of Ottoman gunpowder technology, and how it was employed on the battlefield and in siege warfare. He gives equal time to analyses of weapons manufacture, the artisans who did the work, and how it all was financed.

Ottoman leaders embraced the new weapons after encountering gunpowder technology during their invasions of the Balkans in the 1300s and 1400s. By 1430, significant resources were expended to develop an artillery train, one that was powerful enough to take on the heavily fortified city of Constantinople twenty-three years later. By the 1500s, a mix of field artillery and infantry weapons allowed Ottoman armies to blast away opponents in major battles like Çaldiran or Mohács. Ágoston sees this rapid evolution as a clear sign that Ottoman Sultans were "flexible" and pragmatic" in their approach to new technologies—a marked difference between themselves and leaders of rival Middle Eastern powers like Mamluk Egypt or Safavid Iran.

Reading Guns for the Sultan leaves one with the strong impression that Ottoman armies were as good, or maybe even better, than their European counterparts. Ágoston portrays a state self-sufficient in supplies of raw materials and workmen—vital ingredients needed to produce the "high-tech" weapons of the early modern world. He also discusses the Turks as disseminators of weapons technology in Central Asia, the Middle East, North-East Africa, and South-East Asia.

Another important contribution is Ágoston's critique of the "Islamic conservatism" theory that portrays Muslim nations as technically impaired by religious dogma. He cogently argues that special interest groups within the armed forces, like the Yeni çeri (Janissary) or Sipahi Corps, combined with terrible economic problems, endemic through much of the 1600s and 1700s, were the real culprits.

"Perceptions of honor and manliness," as he puts it, rather than Islamic conservatism, play a role in slowing the advance of Ottoman gunpowder technology during the 1600s. Combine these with regular revenue shortfalls, which made it difficult to hire and train artillerymen, or released musket-armed irregulars joining the growing ranks of bandit or separatist forces and the result was a significant decline in Ottoman military potential. Even then, Ottoman artillery and small arms were not tremendously behind European designs. Rather, Austrian and Russian armies had the advantage of "better drill, command and control, and bureaucratic administration."

Guns for the Sultan is a good book. It contains extensive notes with frequent references to contrary points of view. Readers interested in military technology, siege warfare, and Balkan or Near Eastern history, should consider it for their libraries.