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

How did the Ottoman Empire become one of the world's greatest empires and how did it maintain its military might for centuries? These questions have long puzzled scholars. In-depth studies of the empire's arms and weapons industries have been scarce. But now, in his brilliantly researched and written Guns for the Sultan, Gábor Ágoston not only offers solid scholarship to fill this gap, he also sets out to rectify several Eurocentric views and misperceptions that persist in military historiography, largely owing to general ignorance of the nature of Ottoman firearms and their manufacture.

The book draws almost exclusively on original records, kept mainly in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. On this ground alone Ágoston deserves the highest praise. He deals with the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, but concentrates on the sixteenth and seventeenth, the heyday of Ottoman military power in Europe. He offers the most extensive examination to date of Ottoman production of gunpowder and saltpeter, and of cannon, guns, and muskets. He unearths a "bewildering terminology" of firearms, which suggests the Ottoman sophistication (and perhaps also "weakness") in this technology, and rightly suggests that this complexity has perplexed historians writing about the Ottoman military. He himself not only manages to overcome this enormous difficulty, he also gives us a hundred rigorously designed tables enumerating names, sizes, weights, dates, provenances, and quantities of Ottoman firearms. These are the main strength of this book, a treasure sure to be appreciated by military and Ottoman historians.

Engaging a large number of scholarly works, Ágoston energetically challenges some misperceptions of Ottoman military power. First, he refutes the claim that "Islamic conservatism" presented a major obstacle to innovation and development, arguing that religion was not a decisive factor in Ottoman military matters—not, for example, in the adoption of firearms, a case often put forward as exemplifying religious conservatism. The reluctance of the sipahis, light Ottoman cavalry, to adopt firearms in the fifteenth century had nothing to do with Islam. They simply "regarded the use of firearms as beneath their dignity" (p. 57), to say nothing of the inadequacy of early firearms for the mounted warrior. Feudal knights in medieval Europe—as well as the samurais in Edo Japan—disdained the use of firearms for the same reasons. Contrary to claims of Islamic and military "despotism," Ágoston shows that pragmatism shaped the Ottoman military establishment, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For example, the Ottomans were quick to deal with their own military shortcomings—as revealed in their confrontations with the Hapsburgs and Venetians—by modifying their firearms and introducing new organizational structures into their army and arms production system. In so doing, they maintained a military superiority over their European rivals in firepower and logistics until the end of the seventeenth century.

Second, there is the myth that Ottoman artillery was dominated by gigantic cannons and heavy and clumsy guns. Ágoston traces this to reports by two European experts in the employ of the Ottoman military, Luigi Marsigli (1690s) and Baron de Tott (1770s), which were later overplayed by Orientalist writers and thus became exaggerated in the European imagination. The Ottomans did cast some very large cannon to place in major forts. But Ágoston produces masses of statistics to show that most Ottoman cannon and guns were small or medium size, as in Europe. In fact, it was the better mobility and superior logistics of their military machine that gave the Ottomans a crucial advantage over their rivals. The Ottomans deployed a "greater variety of artillery pieces" than some of their opponents, such as the Austrians, sharing this "deficiency" with Venice and Spain. This may mean that the Ottomans "lagged behind" in a kind of "standardization," causing difficulties in the supply of ammunition.

Third, there is the exaggeration of Ottoman dependence on Europe through direct imports of materials and the hiring of experts, which are...