One particular feature of warfare stands out Çelebi’s record of the Ottoman naval experience. Although naval warfare has changed significantly in the two hundred years leading up to the 21 st century, such was not the Ottoman case between the late 1400s and early 1600s, when several common strategies and tactics appeared to apply, notwithstanding occasional variations. In Naval Campaigns, Çelebi details two centuries of Ottoman naval history. By engaging these two works in conversation with each other, I identify at least corollary links between the Islamist “character” of the Ottoman Empire and the way in which it viewed and employed seapower. This latter source was Çelebi’s attempt to assess the tension between certain Islamic cultural and social practices with the actual living habits of Ottoman citizens at the time. Two primary sources are used to assess the Ottoman Empire’s naval operations and its Islamist character: the aforementioned Naval Campaigns and Çelebi’s contemporaneous The Balance of Truth. In testing this hypothesis, this paper focuses on the most clearly identifiable character of the Ottoman Empire and its people: the caliphate’s unique brand of Islamism. I argue that if Mahan’s argument has merit, it lies in not some universal truth about a particular type of societal character, but rather contextually-dependent types of character. However, if this is taken as absolute truth, then the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a significant naval power would be difficult to explain given the Turks’ origins in landlocked Central Asia. Citing Dutch and English examples, Mahan thought a long history of sea dependence and a willingness to invest in foreign mercantilist ventures were fundamental to those countries’ creation and sustainment of seapower. ![]() Secondly, this essay challenges the claim by Mahan that a particular “Character of the People” is crucial to a political body’s ability to be a successful sea power. Such a sea power deserves to be more richly examined, and this paper uses the frameworks laid out by Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett to, firstly, assess whether the Ottomans favoured particular approaches to naval force. Though often neglected by Western military and naval historians, the Ottomans’ naval supremacy over the Mediterranean lasted, to put it into perspective, approximately the same period as has the United States Navy’s pre-eminence since the Second World War. i This work, Tuhfet ü ’ l – kibar fi esfari’ l-bihar, or The Gift to the Great Ones on Naval Campaigns (hereafter simply Naval Campaigns), was the first comprehensive literary work on the history of the Ottoman navy. Sometime between June and October of 1657, Katib Çelebi presented a lavishly illustrated manuscript of some 260 pages to the Ottoman sultan, Mehmed IV. In so doing, it rejects Alfred Thayer Mahan’s claim that a specific “Character of the People” is necessary for the effective employment of seapower. A condensed version of a more detailed paper, this essay argues that the complexities of running an Islamist state creates an approach towards problem solving that emphasizes pragmatism, which was applied to the Empire’s naval matters just as it was to religious ones and was crucial to the navy’s success. The existing literature has primarily focused on naval warfare itself, with little consideration of the Ottoman Empire’s religiously-driven character. ![]() In this article, Timothy Choi argues that in the study of naval history and strategy, little attention has been paid to the Ottoman navy during its height between the mid-15 th to 17 th centuries.
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