CHAPTER III
The Ottoman and Persian Empires and the Growth
of European Enterprise (1517—1770)
LIKE THE Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Turks had to divide
their effective power between the Middle East and their even
more important interests in the Balkans. Both empires were
essentially Levantine; but they wasted their resources in continual
wars against a powerful rival in Persia, from which they were
estranged by deep religious differences. Just as the inconclusive
Byzantine-Persian wars weakened both states and exposed them to
the Arab invasion and conquest, so the inconclusive Ottoman-
Persian wars of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries weakened both
and exposed them to European commercial penetration, leading
eventually to their helpless manipulation by European Powers in
the nineteenth century. In both the Byzantine and the Ottoman
periods the possession of Iraq was disputed with Persia, and in both
periods likewise the sovereign in Constantinople, being also the
master of Egypt, was led by force of geographical propinquity to
seek to control the opposite Arabian coast of the Red Sea; but with
little permanent effect, so that in both periods the greater part of the
Arabian peninsula remained practically independent of the Great
Power ruling in the Levant, and was only lightly touched by its
civilization.
The Ottoman principles of provincial administration were not
unlike the Byzantine, though in a cruder form. The Empire was
essentially military in its organization, and its object was frankly the
power and well-being of the state, personified by the sovereign, with
little thought for the well-being of its subjects. It distributed large
tracts of land in feudal fiefs to its military commanders, though with-
out disturbing the existing tenant-cultivators. The function of the
provinces was to provide the central government with revenue in
the form of material wealth and manpower for the armies, and the
function of the provincial governor to collect this revenue, with