European-style order and discipline, not weapons, gave Europe battlefield superiority over the Ottomans.

Evidence

In the early eighteenth century the great French soldier Maurice de Saxe, observing battles between the Austrians and Ottomans in south-eastern Europe, put his finger on the main reason for the Ottoman lack of success: “What they [the Turks] lack is not valor, not numbers, not riches; it is order, discipline, and the manner of fighting.” The important thing was “la manie`re de combattre,” and it was this that gave the European enemies of the Ottomans their growing superiority in the battlefield. The Turkish commanders had certainly not read the Reˆveries of Maurice de Saxe, but they had independently come to the same conclusion, and initiated a process of change which began as a limited military reform and culminated as a far-reaching social and cultural transformation. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1068

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Said-adjacent claim that Western superiority was read as civilizational, yet here the agent of change is borrowing specific military method — relevant to how Ottoman reform was framed for Western audiences.