The Ottoman Empire and the sea, 1789–1922

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Even at its height around 1800, the Ottoman navy could not project its power far beyond the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. The loss of Greece and Egypt cost the empire most of its ships and seamen, and neither the efficiency of its government nor the strength of its industrial base were enough to bring it effectively into the industrial era. In the Balkan wars of 1911–1913 Italy and Greece made extensive conquests of Ottoman territory which the navy could not protect. RESUME. Meme au sommet de sa puissance, autour de 1800, la marine ottomane ne parvint pas a etendre son pouvoir au-dela de la Mediterranee orientale et de la mer Morte. La perte de la Grece et de l'Egypte couta a l'empire la plupart de ses vaisseaux et marins, et ni l'efficience de son gouvernement ni sa forte assise industrielle ne suffirent a le conduire efficacement dans l'ere industrielle. Lors des guerres balkaniques de 1911–1913, l'Italie et la Grece firent d'importantes conquetes sur les territoires ottomans que la marine ne pouvait proteger. The first among the problems which the Ottoman Empire faced as a naval power were the constraints of geography. Territorially, as a land empire stretching across large parts of three continents, the Ottoman state at its apogee in the 16 th century had controlled(at least in theory) some of the major maritime “pinch points” of the Old World: the Black Sea Straits(the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles); the exits into the Black Sea of the Don and Dnestr rivers; the Bâb al-Mandab; the Straits of Hormuz. But the whole was a sum much less than that which its disparate parts might suggest: the Ottomans, even at their height, were a naval power predominating mainly in the Black Sea and the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin which, until the construction of the Suez Canal, was a maritime cul-de-sac. The Ottoman galley fleet of the 16th/early 17 th centuries had never been able to get beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and was rarely strong enough to penetrate even beyond the Tunis-Sicily narrows. Nor did matters change very much after the Ottomans' tardy adoption(tardy, that is, in contrast with their North African corsair allies and confreres) of the three-masted, saildriven man-of-war.