The Ottomans aren't in any form of decline in the 16th century. They are by far the strongest military power in Europe, crushing Hungary, besieging Vienna and conquering the Eastern Mediterranean in it's entirety. By the 17th century, some European states are catching up, but Austria and Poland, two of Europe's most powerful Christian states, are barely managing to defend Vienna and push back the Ottomans, while those are also fighting Saffavid Persia at the same time. The Ottomans eventually do loose control over Hungary, but they are still considered one of the great powers all the way until the Crimean War in the 19th century. Remember how big a deal it was for the Russians to actually beat the Ottomans during Catherine's time? That the Ottomans declined after the Second Siege of Vienna is a very Eurocentric take, and one focused heavily on western Europe.
Military technology isn't the only kind of technology. A state can be militarily backwards and scientifically advanced at the same time. Europe was great at guns and naval technology. On the other hand, they took a long time to get the hang of large scale hydraulic engineering and metallurgy. Great Britain didn't outproduce China in cast iron until the mid 19th century.
militarily I agree it was the moment of greatest strength in relation to the rest of the world. In conjunction with outsourcing by hiring Christians in areas where they were lacking made them very strong.
Contemporary Ottoman historian Silahdar Findiklili Mehmed Agha (1658–1723) described the battle as an enormous defeat and failure for the Ottoman Empire, the most disastrous since the foundation of Ottoman statehood in 1299. So it was not barely.
yes, but this in my opinion has more to do with russia than anything else.
yes, the military is not everything despite being what it allows for the rest. The madrasa's productions on philosophy and on theories of interpretation of the Koran are beautiful, but that doesn't change much. Song dynasty Chinese wrote dozens if not hundreds of poems on how they would go and want to drive out the barbarians. But in the end they didn't do anything because just like in Islam (in that period) the outside world is irrelevant and what mattered was the inner discovery.
I wouldn't call that a funny thing. It's important to stand up for innocent people who are attacked on the basis of their religion, whether or not you adhere to their religion.
I thought it was obvious that I meant that I find it funny to be accused of being a religious fanatic when I am not.
Hm. Like Ian Morris said in his book, every period gets the thought it needs. The worldwide expansion of Europe forced a more radical interpretation of its tradition than China.
Hm. You have a point here, though part of me wonders if cause and effect aren't reversed in your post. Like, would Europe have been so competitive at a crucial period if their material circumstances were not what they were?
You can see in the gunpowder empires that they were not Arabs, but newly converted Muslims. Therefore, they did not have a great influence from the traditionalists. But as soon as they became established they started to lose their shine due to anti-logical traditionalist influence.
*looks at the Black Death* Are you sure about that?
I wouldn't argue that traditionalist Islam is anti-logical. I'd say the reactionaries took over and became more cautious thanks to the decline of the Silk Road and the trauma of the Mongol and Timurid invasions. If Al-Andalus had continued to stand to the early modern period, I have no doubt it would have reinvigorated Islam.
To be fair to the Christian and Islamic centers of learning, the philosophical systems of Western antiquity has begun to stultify long before the pagan centers of learning burned, with Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools having been the rigid standard in the golden age of the Roman Empire. One could argue that the collapse of the Greco-Roman tradition and the rise of Christianity and Islam brought in new life to the intellectual debates of the Western world, coming in with a new perspective and new questions. Orthodox Christianity, for one, eventually broke the perpetual hatred of matter that characterized the late Roman world, and Islam assimilated the knowledge of Western Eurasia into itself and breathed life back into the thought of Europe.
Did it? My impression was that Orthodox theology was extremely anti-material and even anti-rational, almost the opposite of the Hellenistic Greeks, whereas Catholic theology was the one that moved down the road of "matter is very important".
I mean the small-letter Christian orthodoxy, which as a whole is definitely less anti-material than one would expect. The Hellenistic Greeks were the fathers of Neoplatonism and the Gnostic schools, and though Christianity absorbed ideas from the Greeks, they never fully repudiated the idea of the material world being part of Creation. Not for lack of trying on the part of the Church Fathers, mind you, but thankfully the Judaic roots were never fully uprooted.
This conflates science and technology, however. The scientific revolution happened prior to the industrial revolution, and the scientific revolution's discoveries were often not that profitable--there's not an immediate commercial application from discovering the laws of gravitation, or heliocentrism. They date from before capitalism really took off. Even without a philosophy of endless growth, so long as there is an interest in discovering new information and figuring out how the world works, and the philosophical basis necessary for the scientific method, you will continue to see scientific discoveries.
I do not think that this depends on the prolesitelism of religion - the Roman Empire was highly urbanized, and dependent on maritime trade (especially if it is waiting for a split). In fact, religious ranks in it are civil positions (which is also true for the Christianized Eastern Empire).
If al andalus holds together it will be led by the Umayyads who were supporters of the mu'tazilites, being the place that questioned the book of al ghazali (inconsistency of the philosophers) with an andalusian book the inconsistency of inconsistency (made by Averroes). It is likely that Andalus and the Islamic Empire of the East dispute over which Islamic idea would be the correct mu'tazila or ash'ari. There may also be a new break in islam having then shia. western sunni (mu'tazila) and eastern sunni (ash'ari).
What a coincidence. There are economic historians who claim that the Black Death was the cause of Europe pulling ahead, by killing so many people it led to a sustained increase in wages which incentivised labour saving technology.
I support this idea, at least in part. This was not the only thing that allowed the advance, but it helped to strengthen the technological "movement"
