Murad III
Murad III ruled for twenty-one years without leaving his palace, and the empire's decline is conventionally dated from him. He came to the throne in 1574 and had his five brothers strangled on the first night, which was law rather than cruelty by then. What was new was that he then stopped campaigning. Every sultan before him had led armies; Murad governed through his mother, his favourite concubine and a succession of grand viziers, from inside the palace, and no sultan after him would routinely take the field either. Power moved from the sultan's person to the household around him, and the harem and the palace factions became the arena in which the empire was actually run. His reign was not obviously a decline while it lasted. The wars with Persia from 1578 to 1590 ended with the largest territorial gains in a century, taking Georgia, Shirvan and Azerbaijan. The navy operated across the Mediterranean and the corsair regencies of North Africa raided as far as the English Channel under Ottoman flags. Ottoman diplomacy opened formal relations with England, in part to encourage a Protestant power against Spain. Underneath, three things were going wrong at once. American silver arriving through European trade halved the value of the Ottoman coinage and destroyed the fixed incomes of the cavalry class whose land grants were the basis of provincial order. The Persian and Habsburg wars required more infantry with firearms, so the standing corps was expanded and increasingly recruited from Muslims who kept their families, their trades and their local loyalties. And offices, including provincial governorships, began to be sold. By his death in 1595 the professional army had grown to a size the treasury could not pay, the provinces had armed unemployed soldiery in them, and the risings that would occupy his successors were already beginning.
- Lived: 1546 CE – 1595 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
