Can climate be a historical actor?
The Celali Rebellion and the Ottoman Empire’s century of crisis
By the end of the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire was in turmoil.
While the military was bogged down in a prolonged war with the Habsburgs in the west, peasants in Anatolia were in revolt against the ever-increasing demands of the state. Armed bands were roaming the land, laying waste to fields, and provoking a flight to the urban centers. Known as the Celali Rebellion in Ottoman history, this uprising was the beginning of a period of crisis that spanned the whole of the 17th century. It had severe long-term consequences for the Ottoman Empire, the most important of them being a sharp decrease in population from which Ottomans could not recover fully until the mid-19th century.
Earlier historiography perceived the Celali Rebellion, which began in 1596, as a sign of “Ottoman decline.” Historians argued that the crisis and its aftermath were a result of the weakening of the Ottoman central authority, the breakdown of the military structure, and the socio-economic crises that Ottoman peasants experienced at the time.
In The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Sam White complicates this narrative by bringing climatic factors, particularly the Little Ice Age, into the picture. He explores how “the crisis of the Little Ice Age marked a critical conjuncture in the human ecology of Ottoman lands, as centuries of growth and expansion turned for a time to contraction and retreat.”1 Although he does not dismiss earlier explanations or reduce the crisis that the Ottoman Empire faced from the late 16th century onwards to a simplistic analysis, White nevertheless considers climate to be the critical factor in understanding this period.
White begins his book by exploring the foundations of the Ottoman system of provisioning. He narrates how the Ottomans developed an efficient provisioning system that adeptly managed the resources and population and aligned them with the state’s overarching objectives as they transitioned from a small band of warriors into a full-fledged empire. White identifies this system, which he calls the “imperial ecology,” as a critical factor in the Ottomans' early success.2 As the empire expanded, however, the imperial ecology came under increasing strain, particularly from the 1570s onward.
Several factors led to the breakdown of the empire’s system of provisioning at this time. One such factor was the rapid population growth that the Ottomans experienced throughout the 1500s, which started to put more and more pressure on the empire’s resources. By the end of the 16th century, the empire’s Mediterranean core could not keep up with the fresh agricultural demands of the growing population since the limits of arable land had been reached. Peasants were also constrained by environmental, social, and technological barriers, leading to diminishing marginal returns. What made things even worse was that a combination of a lack of land for the people, inflation, and unemployment led to the emergence of a new class of desperate and dangerous men. Within this framework, the prolonged wars against the Habsburgs brought the Ottomans’ once-effective resource management system to the brink of collapse.
As a result, the Ottoman Empire became increasingly vulnerable to external shocks, most notably the climatic impacts of the Little Ice Age, which led to the complete breakdown of this “imperial ecology.” According to White, there was a direct correlation between the climate conditions and the political fortune of the Ottoman Empire. While the Ottoman expansion and population growth in the 16th century coincided with very temperate weather, starting from the 1560s, the climatic conditions became more erratic, culminating in the severe crisis that the Empire started to experience at the end of the 16th century. Between 1591 and 1595, for instance, the Ottomans went through one of the longest Eastern Mediterranean droughts of the past six centuries. This drought, combined with the severe cold of the Little Ice Age, brought extreme famine and mortality into the Ottoman domains.3
White considers this severe drought to be the main trigger of the Celali Rebellion, which began to unfold in 1596. He is, however, careful not to label it as the only cause of the uprising. A combination of climate-led and man-made factors created the conditions for a perfect storm. The drought, for instance, coincided with the war against the Habsburgs, which compelled the Ottoman government to put new demands on an already desperate population. The prices of goods also started to increase dramatically because of the shortage of supplies and the demands of war. Meanwhile, the policies implemented by Sultan Murad III and Mehmed III to control the prices were inadequate, if not downright harmful, to solve the crisis.
Even though the Ottoman government was fairly successful at supplying the army, the prolonged drought and the government’s increasing demands on the rural population fueled discontent among the peasants, leading to banditry in the provinces. These pressures triggered a massive exodus to the cities from the countryside, resulting in outbreaks of epidemics. What pushed the Ottoman peasants over the edge, however, was the government’s demand for two hundred thousand sheep from the Karaman region (in central Anatolia) in 1595 for the army. From that moment on, White claims, the peasants stopped seeing the sultan as a “just” ruler who could protect them from lawlessness and rebelled against the state.4
White takes the Celali Rebellion to be a turning point for the Empire. It marked the beginning of a period characterized by a massive contraction of population and cultivated land, which continued to affect the Empire for nearly two centuries.5 According to him, there were clear parallels with the “ongoing climate fluctuations and other natural disasters” that the Ottomans had to deal with throughout the 17th century and the political instability that they faced during this time, including the deposition of Osman II in 1622 and Mehmed IV in 1687.
It is important to note that although the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon, the Ottomans took much longer to recover from its effects, which were prolonged by environmental conditions specific to the Near East. Throughout the 17th century, the Ottomans continued to be impacted by negative climatic and environmental events, including extreme colds, droughts, and harvest failures. According to White, “this century of setbacks goes further than perhaps any other factor in explaining the relative weakness of the empire vis-à-vis its neighbors to the north during the eighteenth century, as the Little Ice Age and its attendant crises came to an end.”6 This, I believe, is White’s most important contribution to the literature.
There were three main reasons behind this slow recovery. Population movements and climatic disasters, both leading up to and in the aftermath of the Celali Rebellion, for instance, led to extensive nomadic invasions of farms and villages, reducing the cultivated land for a long time to come. This shift towards a nomadic lifestyle at the core of the Ottoman domains wiped out the benefits of the long-term settlement efforts of the Ottoman government. It was also the most important reason why the Ottomans took a very long time to recover from the demographic and economic contraction that they had gone through during the 17th century.7
White enumerates both human and climatic factors for this nomadic invasion. These included the nomads’ desire to take advantage of the Ottoman government’s weak position during the Celali Rebellion, climate fluctuations that forced the nomads to move into new grazing territory, and the settlement policies of Shah Abbas in Iran, which forced the nomads out towards Ottoman lands. As a result, there was a drastic reduction in the amount of cultivated land in the Empire.
The mass migration of the rural population into the cities was another key reason behind the empire’s slow recovery from the crises of the 17th century. As mentioned above, people fled to the urban centers both before and after the Celali Rebellion, trying to get away from lawlessness and famine. The infrastructures of the cities, however, were not capable of handling this mass influx of people, which led to epidemics and death, creating a demographic disaster.8 In addition, people’s abandonment of their lands reduced the agricultural capabilities of the Empire and caused further disruptions in the system of provisioning.
Lastly, the gradual commercialization of Ottoman agriculture also prevented the Empire from experiencing a rapid revival. White demonstrates how Ottoman agriculture shifted from imperial provisioning to cash crop production as it integrated into the Euro-centric world economy during the 17th century. This gradual commercialization of agriculture led to shifts in land use in response to the demand for new crops and new markets.
As Ottoman agriculture became more commercialized, the economy experienced a brief revival. White argues, however, that the integration of Ottoman agriculture into the world economy put the Empire on the path of becoming an entity that exported commodities in return for importing European manufactured goods. This meant diverting resources to support the industries of the Western states, which led to the eclipse of the Ottoman power.9 The fact that the Ottoman Empire had to abandon its imperial provisioning system without successfully replacing it with another efficient method also led to the relative weakness of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis its rivals in the 18th century.10
White’s work was and continues to be groundbreaking for Ottoman historiography. It was one of the earliest examples in the field that used climatic and environmental factors as a tool of historical analysis. Although he is very careful to acknowledge political, economic, and social factors that led to the crisis that the Ottomans experienced from the end of the 16th century onwards, White emphasizes the negative climatic factors as the underlying cause that explains the almost perpetual state of emergency that the Ottoman Empire found itself in throughout the long 17th century.
In doing so, White situates the Ottoman Empire within a global context. He goes against the exceptionalist paradigm that takes the Ottoman case as a special one and analyzes how a climatic event that affected almost the whole world impacted the Ottoman lands. Within this framework, however, he also examines the specific reasons why the Ottomans were impacted much worse by the extremes of the Little Ice Age and why they took much longer to recover from this global crisis. According to him, this protracted recovery was the key reason behind the Ottomans’ loss of power and influence vis-à-vis their rivals in the 18th century. “[T]he Ottoman case” White argues, “emphasizes the nature of the seventeenth-century global crisis as a major turning point in world history. The event catalyzed a global shift in power as some countries recovered more quickly than others demographically, politically, and economically.”11
Thank you very much for reading. If you liked this piece, you may also enjoy my article on the idea of “Ottoman decline.”
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Until next time!
Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1.
Ibid., 18-19.
Ibid., 138-139.
Ibid., 161-162.
Ibid., 186.
Ibid., 222.
Ibid., 228-229.
Ibid., 268-275.
Ibid., 276-277.
Ibid., 291-292.
Ibid., 299.
Thank you; makes me want to read the book.
Fascinating. A comparative study of the impact of the Little Ice Age on the major political entities/regions would be good to have. Why did the LIA put the Ottoman Empire on a downward course, but preceded the dominance of the Western European powers?