Turkey In Focus - Discover Turkey: Experience the Best of Turkey - page 677

Where his predecessors had enjoyed the comforts of concubines, Süleyman fell in love
and became the first Ottoman sultan to marry. Sadly, monogamy did not make for domest-
ic bliss. Palace intrigues brought about the death of his first two sons, and the period after
his wife Roxelana's ascension became known as the 'Sultanate of Women'.
Weak Sultans
Some historians pinpoint Süleyman's death as the moment when the Ottoman rot began to
set in. The remarkable line of Ottoman sovereigns could not continue indefinitely. Süley-
man's successors were not up to the task, beginning with his son by Roxelana, Selim,
known disparagingly as 'the Sot'. He lasted only eight years as sultan (1566-74), and
oversaw the naval catastrophe at Lepanto, which spelled the end of Ottoman naval su-
premacy.
Furthermore, Süleyman was the last sultan to lead his army into the field. Later rulers
were coddled and sequestered in the fineries of the palace, gaining minimal experience of
everyday life and having little inclination to administer the empire. This, coupled with the
inertia that was inevitable after 250 years of unfettered expansion, caused the Ottomans'
once-irresistible military might to decline.
The late-17th and 18th centuries were a downward spiral for the Ottoman establish-
ment. The empire remained vast and powerful, but slowly fell behind the West socially,
militarily and scientifically. The Habsburgs in central Europe and the Russians became in-
creasingly assertive, and Western Europe was rich after centuries of colonising the 'New
World'.
Anatolia's Armenians
The Ottoman Empire's final years saw widespread human misery, but nothing has proved as enduringly controversi-
al as the fate of Anatolia's Armenians. The tale begins in 1915, with Ottoman army units marching Armenian popu-
lations towards the Syrian desert. It ends with an Anatolian hinterland virtually devoid of Armenians. What
happened in between remains an unresolved issue. Armenians maintain that, in an orchestrated 'genocide', 1.5 mil-
lion Armenians were executed or killed on death marches. Turkey, meanwhile, says the order had been to 'relocate'
Armenians, and the deaths were due to disease and starvation, caused by the chaos of war.