The Second Empire [of Ottoman]

 

The Second Empire: The Transformation of the Ottoman Polity in the Early Modern Era Baki Tezcan

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These expressions are strikingly reminiscent of the language used by the pro-Parliament jurists during the English Civil War of the 17th century and its aftermath. The doctrine of the ancient constitution of England and the immemorial rights of Englishmen are central to the arguments which were used to justify Parliament against the King in the Civil War and, in a different way, in the ensuing struggles of the later 17th and 18th centuries. . . . Slade applied these characteristically English doctrines to the Turkish situation, and pursuing them in great detail, found that they fitted. 3

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he presidential palace, with closed portals jealously guarded, is the shrine of autocracy; but the mosque, with its doors wide open from dawn till after sunset, inviting all to enter for repose, meditation, or prayer, is the temple of democracy.” This statement could well belong to a Muslim democrat movement of today. One could imagine it being said in Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, or Syria. But the original statement, which includes “the seraglio” instead of “the presidential palace,” actually belongs to Adolphus Slade, a British navy officer who spent many years in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century.1 Slade argued that the Ottoman monarchy used to possess a “constitution: defective, and in a state of chronic disorder, but still a roughly balanced system.”2 As noted by Bernard Lewis, Slade saw the modernizing reforms of Mahmud II and Reşid Pasha in the first half of the nineteenth century as a “subversion of the ancient Turkish constitution” or a “subversion of the liberties of his (Turkish) subjects.”

According to Slade, this ancient Turkish constitution was based on the law of the land, which consisted of the Sharia, a legal system inspired by quest for the divine will in social action, and on custom. It was protected by the ulema, that is, jurist-scholars, local notables, and the janissaries, the special infantry soldiers of the Ottoman central army. Slade regarded the This article is based on a lecture given in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, 30 March 2007, and presents a summary of some of the arguments laid out in my The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2010. An earlier version of the third part of this article and parts of the introduction were previously published as the second half of “Khotin 1621, or How the Poles Changed the Course of Ottoman History,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 62 (2009): 185–98. I thank Leslie Peirce, Silver Professor of History at New York University, for giving me the opportunity to present my work in New York;

I am also grateful to the audience, especially Molly Greene and Daniel Vitkus, for their comments, questions, and suggestions. 1.  Adolphus Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War: A Narrative of Historical Events (London: Smith, Elder, 1867), 17. 2.  Ibid., 10. 3.  Bernard Lewis, “Slade on Turkey,” in Social and Economic History of Turkey, 1071–1920: Papers presented to the First International Congress on the Social and Economic History of Turkey (Hacettepe University, Ankara, 11–13 July 1977), ed. Osman Okyar and Halil İnalcık (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), 220.

Slade’s views on Ottoman history, especially those related to the janissaries, the depositions they staged, and the ancient constitution, did not have much of a following in Ottoman historiography. More than 170 years after Slade started writing on the Ottomans, two historians of Ottoman literature, Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, echo his perspective: “The movement in England from late-Tudor absolutism to an increasingly limited monarchy under the Stuarts is well defined and widely accepted. In the Ottoman Empire, there appears to be a parallel to the English case in the double enthronement (1618 and 1622) of the mentally incompetent Mustafa I sandwiched around the deposition and regicide of (Genç [the Young]) Osman II.” 6 Unlike Slade, however, Andrews and Kalpaklı are hesitant in pushing their case beyond “appears to be.” They are very much justified because as two historians of literature they could not locate a work of political history that argues for an Ottoman movement toward limited government in the seventeenth century. According to the prevalent view in Ottoman historiography at the beginning of the twenty-first 4.  Adolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece, and Malta, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 1:303, 304, 305, 306. 5.  Ibid., 303–4.

Ottoman Polity in the Early Modern Era

The conventional narrative of Ottoman history used to suggest that in the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire entered a prolonged period of decline marked by steadily increasing military decay and institutional corruption. In the past thirty years, Ottoman historiography challenged this understanding radically from several perspectives, declaring the Ottoman decline a myth and turning the notion of decline into the “d word,” but not quite replacing the older narrative with something that has the same sort of explanatory power, which some people still expect from history.8 The Ottoman

6.  Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 322. 7.  Ibid., 323.

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Their power had frequently occasion to be brought into action; but as very little attention was given to Turkish internal policy by Europeans, on whose accounts alone we have had to rely, so their motives were generally misunderstood, their acts maligned. The deposition of the grand vizier, the firing of the city, a demonstration against the seraglio, would excite sensation at Pera, and would be ascribed solely to their licentiousness. No one asked whether undue authority had been exercised, whether a new tax had been imposed, a monopoly granted, or a corporation oppressed. 5

century, the regicide of Osman II and the many other rebellions and depositions of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are nothing but military rebellions, hence signs of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, or of a transition the final destination of which is not clear. In the absence of any study on the question of the politics of Ottoman depositions as of the year 2005, Andrews and Kalpaklı hesitate to offer any conclusions: “Why movements toward limitations on monarchical absolutism are seen as an advance in the one case and as a decline in the other we will leave to nonliterary historians to thrash out.”7 Why indeed? How are we led to believe that the English Civil War and the “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 are an advance in the history of limited government while the Ottoman depositions are simply signs of decline or an ambiguous transition? Why did Slade’s views on the ancient constitution have so few followers in Ottoman historiography? If there was indeed a very clear case to be made for limited government in the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which I call the times of the Second Empire and elaborate on shortly, why has the political legacy of the Second Empire been both neglected and misrepresented as corruption and decay? I return to this question at the end of this study.

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janissaries as a “chamber of deputies,” constituting the “legal opposition in the state,” “engaged in shielding the rights of feudality, of democracy, of theocracy (according to the portion of the empire) from the abuse of power in the hands of pashas. . . . It was the sultan’s prerogative to send a pasha; but it was their business to see that he governed according to law.” 4

8.  See, for instance, Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Darling’s introduction is titled “The Myth of Decline.”

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Empire, however, must have declined at some point, as it ceased to exist in 1922. To adapt my Americanist colleague Alan Taylor’s phrase, one should not treat the coming of the Ottoman decline as irrelevant to the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—just as one cannot and should not allow that knowledge to overwhelm the other possibilities in that past.9 The best one can do may be an attempt to balance the creative tension between teleology and contingency in Ottoman history of the early modern period. For that attempt to succeed it is crucial that we approach the period that starts in the late sixteenth century and ends in the early nineteenth century in its own terms. When one studies this era in such a way, one realizes that it does have a character all to its own, which makes it quite legitimate to call the political structures of this period the “Second Empire.” In this study, I show in some very large brushstrokes the defining characteristics of the Second Empire, to allow us see the accomplishments of the Ottomans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the dynamics that prepared the empire for collapse when it was challenged by an alliance of European imperialism, which was strengthened by capitalism, and its local collaborators. I also make a suggestion as to why the legacy of this period was ignored for so long, and how it became possible now to notice this legacy, however selectively. The first part of the article is devoted to a discussion of the prehistory of the Second Empire, that is, the political structures of the Ottoman Empire before the late sixteenth century. I deal with this part in two sections: the feudal kingdom and the patrimonial empire. Second, I briefly discuss the socioeconomic transformation of the sixteenth century, which is the main force behind the Second Empire. The third part of the article is divided into two halves: the seventeenth-century struggle for limitation of royal authority and the eighteenth-century balance in the polity. Finally, in the fourth part,

after touching very briefly on some of the dynamics that brought the Second Empire to an end, I focus on the historiographical project of the New Order that replaced the Second Empire and point out the impact of this project on our understanding, or misunderstanding if you wish, of the Second Empire. The Feudal Kingdom and the Patrimonial Empire

No one in his or her right mind would call Süleyman I (1520–66) “Süleyman Bey,” as the ancient Turkic title bey/beg/big, or “lord,” would be an insult for this emperor who came to be known as Süleyman the Magnificent in Europe.10 The same could be said for his father, Selim I (1512–20), who conquered eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt and received recognition of sovereignty over the lands of the Hejaz, including the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. Yet the grandfather of Selim I, Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, the man who brought the ancient empire of the Romans to an end and thus inherited the title of caesar by virtue of his sword, was known as Mehmed Beg among his people, as attested by Georgius de Hungaria, who lived in Ottoman lands for a long time and also saw “Mechemetbeg, who is ruling now,” probably in Bursa, as the sultan was on his way to a bathhouse. Georgius refers to him regularly as the “king (rex).”11 So the usage of beg is not to diminish his authority; it is also not the official title of Mehmed II. This popular usage, however, must have had a certain ring in the ears of the Anatolians and the inhabitants of the Balkans for whom the memory of many other begs sharing the rule of the land was not only fresh but was pretty much alive, as most of the Ottoman officers who are designated as district governors or fief holders in English translation were called begs. What distinguished Mehmed II was his claim to be the greatest one of them, as expressed in his official title, Sultan Mehmed, al-amir al-kabir, which was translated as the “megas amiras” or

9.  See Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), xv. 10.  See Louis Bazin and Harold Bowen, “Beg or Bey,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, 1:1159; and M. Fuad Köprülü, “Bey,” İslâm Ansiklopedisi (İA hereafter), 2:579–81.

11.  Georgius de Hungaria, Tractatus de moribus condictionibus et nequicia Turcorum: Traktat über die Sitten, die Lebensverhältnisse und die Arglist der Türken (Treatise on the Customs, Conditions, and Malices of the Turks [Latin original with German translation]), ed. and trans. Reinhard Klockow (Cologne: Böhlau, 1993), 24, 149, 225.

12.  Kate Fleet, “Early Ottoman Self-Definition,” Journal of Turkish Studies 26 (2002): 237–38. 13.  Benno Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations in the European Middle Ages: History and Theory,” International Organization 52 (1998): 338.

the argument that intra-ruling-class conflict constitutes a separate order of reality—the sphere of politics proper, understood in Weberian terms as the status-driven competition for power—collapses. Equally, geopolitical relations do not occupy an independent, self-enclosed sphere of reality (the geopolitical), as Neorealists and neo-Weberians maintain. In feudal societies, intra-ruling class conflicts, both domestic and geopolitical, are not conflicts over the maximization of power, but conflicts between and among politically accumulating classes over their relative share in the means of extra­economic coercion.15

14.  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Vintage, 1981), 3:926– 27, quoted in Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003), 52. 15.  Teschke, Myth of 1648, 57.

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sponse of some Marxists inspired by the work of Louis Althusser has been to argue for representing the state as an independent social force in historical analyses of medieval societies. Weberians, by contrast, traditionally emphasized “the political.” More recent followers of Max Weber, such as the “state theorists,” concede that Karl Marx may have been correct in his analyses that pertain to capitalist societies. Yet in precapitalist societies the primacy belongs to the political. Thus it is the state and its military activities that led historical processes in the Middle Ages. A group of British Marxists respond to the Weberian line of the “state theorists” by reminding us that the primacy accorded to “the political” depends on “an abstraction in which the political form is emptied of its economic content and granted autonomous causal status.”13 The economic and the political were intimately connected with each other. One could actually talk about their fusion through the mediation of extra-economic surplus appropriation: “In all forms where the actual worker himself remains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production and the conditions of labour needed for the production of his own means of subsistence, . . . the surplus labour for the nominal landowner can only be extorted from them by extra-economic compulsion, whatever the form this might assume.”14 When this fusion between the economic and the political is reinstated into its proper place,

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“magnus admiratus” in contemporary sources and which we could render as the “great beg” or “great lord.”12 The transformation of a warlord, which Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, was in the late thirteenth century, first, to a great lord in the fifteenth century and then to an emperor in the sixteenth century, symbolizes the transformation of Ottoman political structures in the same period. I start with the first transformation. The most useful conceptual model to understand the political structures of the early Ottoman period is Benno Teschke’s model for international politics during the European Middle Ages. Teschke’s model is especially useful as it points out that the “economic” and the “political” were inseparable during the Middle Ages and thus provides a persuasive response to those arguments that emphasize the agency of the state, which represents the “political,” in historical development. Since I am mostly suspicious of the centrality of the state in Ottoman history, I found Teschke’s model very lucid. Moreover, his model also provides a conceptual explanation for the swift series of conquests during the early Ottoman period that is usually treated under the heading of the “rise” of the Ottoman Empire, a concept that failed to receive the revisionist attention paid to its “decline”—for some reason we are all suspicious of the decline of the empire, yet we never question what it was that really rose. Before I proceed with how Teschke’s model sheds light on the early Ottoman period, however, some theoretical introduction is in order. One of the serious critiques directed toward Marxist historical approaches to the Middle Ages has been their strong emphasis on “the economic” at the expense of “the political.” Committed as they were to show that the social infrastructure, that is “the economic,” determines the superstructure, or “the political,” Marxists were not able to find a proper place for the actions of the state that seemed to have such a strong impact on “the economic.” The re-

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The fusion of the economic and the political in the Middle Ages produces the institution of lordship as the basic feudal unit. Yet no lord “owned” the land in the Middle Ages. “Land, in fact, was not ‘owned’ by anyone; it was ‘held’ by superiors in a ladder of ‘tenures’ leading to the king or other supreme lord.”16 The fief holder could only enjoy the exploitation of his land for definite purposes. “Property was conditional.” Not only was property conditional, but the “conditional property” was also competed for by rival lords. To compete successfully, lords had to engage in what Robert Brenner calls “political accumulation,” which includes strategies that, in one way or another, imply an investment in the means of violence, such as conquering neighboring regions either to colonize and settle in the lands there or to establish client states under conditions of annual tribute payments.17 The lords had to engage in such violent strategies that produced intra-ruling-class conflict not because of the autonomy of the sphere of politics, as the Weberians would maintain, but rather as a result of the pressures produced by the peasant strategies of reproduction. Since feudal property structures and class relations dictated that the peasant surplus was to be extracted from them via extra-economic means, the peasants did not have any serious incentives to invest in productivity beyond the necessary level for reproduction. Their reproductive strategies included diversification of agricultural production and reduced labor time, both of which set limits to productivity. Should their lords squeeze them further to extract a greater surplus of their labor, they always had the option of flight, which deprived the lords of labor power.18 Feudal conditions of social action, then, encouraged the peasantry toward strategies of basic reproduction, which set limits to their exploitation by their lords. The material needs of their lords, who were competing with other lords over a basically stagnant peasant surplus,

thus created “a systemic pressure to build up military power. Unsurprisingly, development of agricultural technology was relatively lethargic, whereas military innovations based on systematic investment in the means of violence were, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, spectacular.” The violence of the Middle Ages, then, cannot be theorized without incorporating the social relations of lordship. “Feudal property structures and dominant forms of social action are dialectically mediated.”19 The conditional, nonabsolute nature of property brought about a political organization that rested on a series of interpersonal bonds among the members of the lordly class. Yet a vassal who paid homage to an overlord could also opt to join the following of another lord or aspire to become an overlord himself. In this sense, the sovereignty of the ultimate overlord was never absolute but conditional, very much in the same sense that medieval property was conditional. This was especially so in the frontier regions, the marches. “Ethnic, religious, natural-topographical, or linguistic aspects were secondary in determining the ‘demarcation’ of frontier regions. The extension of medieval territory followed the opportunities of military conquest, that is, political accumulation. . . . To the degree that marcher-lords had to be invested with special military powers of command to deal effectively with unruly neighbors, they became semiautonomous. More often than not, they abused their privileges for the buildup of regional strongholds.”20 The early Ottoman historical experience fits Teschke’s model perfectly. Osman was a marcher-lord of this kind who most probably recognized Ghazan Khan (d. 1304), the Mongol ruler of the Il-khanate centered in western Persia, as his sovereign. Coins struck in the name of Mongol khans in the early Ottoman period, as well as quasi-archival and literary evidence from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centu-

16.  Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formulation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 312, quoted in ­Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations,” 339.

Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, ed. Trevor Henry Aston and Charles Harding English Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 236–42.

17.  Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations,” 339, 340–41. For “conditional property,” see Robert Brenner, “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and

18.  Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations,” 341. 19.  Ibid., 342. 20.  Ibid., 345–46.

21.  Aydın Ayhan and Tuncer Şengün, “Anadolu Beyliklerinin ve Osmanlı Beyliği’nin İlhanlılar adına kestirdiği sikkeler” (“The Coins Struck by the Anatolian Principalities and the Ottoman Principality in the Name of the Ilkhans”), in XIII. Türk Tarih Kongresi, Ankara, 4–8 Ekim 1999: Kongreye sunulan bildiriler, 3 vols. in 5 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2002), 3, pt. 2: 1161–71; Ahmet-Zeki Validi [Togan], “Mogollar devrinde Anadolu’nun iktisadî vaziyeti,” Türk Hukuk ve İktisat Tarihi Mecmuası 1 (1931): 1–42 (trans. Gary Lei-

ser, “Economic Conditions in Anatolia in the Mongol Period,” Annales Islamologiques 25 [1991]: 203–40); İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Tarihi (Ottoman History), vol. 1, Kuruluştan İstanbul’un fethine kadar (From the Foundation [of the Ottoman state] to the Conquest of Istanbul) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1947), 30–31. 22.  Halil İnalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954): 103–29.

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a world of limited agricultural productivity. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for many others, they had a competent leadership that delivered its promise of satisfaction to its vassals by a swift series of conquests. Thus came the Ottomans to the heart of southeastern Europe, on the one hand, and eastern Anatolia, on the other, rather quickly. Yet their unity always remained ambivalent because the feudal ties the Ottomans established with their vassals were by their very nature vulnerable. In the second half of the fifteenth century, however, the Ottomans replaced their vassals by governors. One after another, all Anatolian and Balkan principalities, including the Byzantine capital Constantinople, were annexed to the Ottoman Empire, leaving Mehmed II the one and only great lord of the lands stretching from the Danube to the Euphrates. This corresponds to the second stage of Ottoman conquests in the analysis of Halil İnalcık, who argues that the Ottomans did not intervene with local affairs at first and engaged in centralization efforts only later.22 While İnalcık leaves one with the impression that this two-tiered approach to conquests was a conscious policy choice on the part of the Ottomans, the analysis offered here suggests that the first stage of the conquests could not be imagined in any other way because of the political limitations imposed on a “great lord” by the nature of feudal relations. The great lord was the suzerain of his vassals, who were lords in their own areas. Thus it was impossible for the former to intervene in the internal affairs of the latter. It was only after Mehmed II formed a unified monetary zone—the akche zone—and secured a rich treasury that the second stage ensued. Already in the fifteenth century one could observe the beginning of a gradual move toward a monetary economy in the tax regulations of Ottoman realms. A very significant indication of this move was the development of the akche

Baki Tezcan 

ries, suggest that the Ottomans recognized the suzerainty of Mongol overlords well into the mid-fourteenth century and beyond.21 While Osman would be a vassal in his relationship with his suzerain, he was an overlord in his relationship with his alps, or knights, who had their own subservient companions. I suggest that this feudal nature of the Ottoman polity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries created two related sources of political tension that brought about the series of conquests the narrative of which constitutes the “rise” of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and eventually led to the development of the patrimonial political system that came into being in the sixteenth century, on the other. The source of the first tension, which may be called the horizontal one, was the fact that the Ottoman ruler was not the only superior political power in the region. Thus he had to earn and sustain the homage of his vassals by securing their satisfaction, as he was only one of many overlords who competed with one another for the support of their vassals. If Osman’s son Orhan did not show himself to be the more capable and promising ruler, his men would start shifting their allegiance toward the neighboring lordly families, such as the House of Aydın, Germiyan, and Karasi or even the Byzantine Empire. Orhan, then, had to perform well to keep his men on his side. The trouble with this pressure was that its successful resolution brought only more pressure. A victory on the battlefield or a conquest attracted more men to the Ottoman enterprise, creating further pressures to keep their allegiance under conditions of limited agricultural resources. The creation of new resources was only possible through further conquest, as agricultural productivity was limited for reasons touched on earlier in the discussion of Teschke’s model. Thus the Ottomans had to conquer new territories for political survival in

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zone between the Danube and the Euphrates, an area in which until recently many different currencies were in place. Instead of the various Byzantine denominations, the South Slav monetary systems that had risen in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and all the different examples of coinage one finds among the Anatolian principalities, one now could use a single currency throughout the geographical unit that roughly corresponds to the Byzantine territories four hundred years ago.23 What is of utmost importance to note is that the Ottomans did not have any other silver denomination than the akche in circulation in the second half of the fifteenth century. Their territories were well integrated monetarily without much effort, suggesting that such an integration might well have been under way long before the political integration was brought about by Mehmed II. While it may be difficult to demonstrate the preceding social dynamics of monetary integration for the want of evidence, it is definitely clear that the socioeconomic move toward a more market­oriented economy created monetary resources that allowed Mehmed II to initiate the transformation of Ottoman political structures. As noted above, there were two inherent tensions in Ottoman politics that arose from the nature of feudal political relations. The first, which I called the horizontal one, created pressures on the suzerain for territorial conquests so that his vassals would be satisfied and would not work for some other overlord. The second inherent tension, the vertical one, was the everexisting possibility of an Ottoman vassal becoming an overlord in his own right to compete with the Ottoman ruler himself. The Ottomans were well aware of the latter risk as they themselves had been vassals of superior powers in their early history. These two fundamental sources of political tension, the horizontal competition among suzerains over the allegiance of vassals and the vertical competition between the suzerain and the vassal to sustain the hierarchical relationship of power, were further complicated by their interaction with each other. While strengthening a vassal with a view to secure his

continuing loyalty in the face of competing over­ lords for his homage could encourage him to go independent, weakening the same vassal in order to prevent his independence could encourage him to look for an alternative overlord. These tensions arising from feudal political relations shaped the formative period of the Ottoman Empire in two fundamental ways. While the horizontal competition among overlords culminated in the series of conquests that created the Ottoman Empire, the vertical tension between the Ottoman overlord and his vassals was resolved in a patrimonial political system in which feudal relations were replaced by artificial ties of kinship constructed by real as well as fictive bonds of slavery. The Ottoman political system of the period of circa 1450–1580 may best be analyzed as a kind of patrimonialism in which feudal political relations were replaced by artificial ties of kinship constructed by real as well as fictive bonds of what I call “political slavery.” I use the term political slavery simply to distinguish the slavery of, say, a grand vizier from that of an African laborer in North America in the eighteenth century. In comparison with the master of the latter, an Ottoman sultan had very expensive obligations toward his slaves, which, in the case of a grand vizier, included a compensation that may well exceed the treasury revenue of several small kingdoms in Europe combined. Thus the difference between feudalism and patrimonialism, as I use these terms, is not a qualitative one. In the final analysis, both are based on mutual obligations created by a political bond that defines a power relationship between two parties, one of which is cast as superior to the other. The difference between the two seems to be related to the question of stability. Feudalism is inherently instable, as the political bond between the overlord and the vassal may not be taken for granted. The vassal of today may aspire to become the suzerain of tomorrow, or the vassal of a certain king may shift his allegiance to another one. Ottoman patrimonialism, however, is supposed to be a system in which the bond between the master and his servant, or 23.  On the South Slav monetary systems, see David Michael Metcalf, Coinage in the Balkans, 820–1355 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1965), 200.

The Sixteenth-Century Socioeconomic Transformation

While the system seemed to work like a clock, a lot of things were actually changing. Arguably the most important change was in the essential source of economic wealth. While in the Ottoman feudal kingdom and the patrimonial empire, the focus of political attention was the control of land resources whether one was the vassal of the king or his slave, in the sixteenth 24.  Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1:145. 25.  There were, however, certain parts of the empire of Süleyman where one may be able to talk about vassalage, such as Ottoman Kurdistan. 26.  For biographies of these grand viziers—except Semiz Ahmed Pasha—see the relevant entries in İA and Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi (İA2

here­after). Semiz Ahmed Pasha, for whom no entry is provided in reference works, was third vizier in the mid-1570s, while Piyâle Pasha was second vizier. The latter died in 1578, thus Semiz Ahmed must have been the second vizier in 1579, when Sokollu died; Selânikî Mustafa Efendi, Tarih-i Selânikî (The Chronicle of Selânikî), ed. Mehmed İpşirli, 2 vols. (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1989) (hereafter Selânikî, 1:1–432, 2:433–864), 113, 125; Şerâfeddin Turan, “Piyâle Paşa,” İA, 9:566–69.

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century a transformation took place that shifted the focus largely to monetary resources. This change is most visible in the shifting meaning of what it is that a soldier does. The following anecdote is quite telling in this regard. A group of close friends, Zübde Beg, Mirim Çelebi, Sinanbegzade Mustafa Çelebi, Karanfilzade, Baki Beşe, and Ahmed Beg, who were all soldiers on the payroll of the Ottoman sultan in late-sixteenth-century Edirne, enjoyed drinking together. One day, while they were having drinks at the tavern, they noticed a poorly dressed dervish drinking quite a bit of wine all by himself. Ahmed Beg, the chief of the drinking party, sent him a platter of food to accompany the wine and also paid his bill. Although Ahmed Beg continued his favors to the dervish for a few days, the latter never joined them, excusing himself by saying that he did not mingle with people. On the day before he was to leave the city, however, the dervish came to thank them. He said it was time to reward them and asked them each to make a wish. “The gate of God is open, you will attain your wishes,” he added. They all laughed, but, being good sports, they agreed. Zübde Beg, probably a cavalry soldier, asked for the local command of his regiment (kethudâ yeri). Mirim Çelebi, a cavalry soldier from a different regiment (silahdârân, the sword bearers), asked for the same position in his own regiment. Mustafa Çelebi wanted to become the superintendent of guilds and markets in Edirne. Karanfilzade requested the trusteeship of a royal foundation. Baki Beşe, the janissary, asked for forty thousand gold ducats. Then the dervish turned to Ahmed Beg and insisted that he ask for something more important than what the others had wished for. Ahmed Beg refrained and said, “You tell me whatever you consider me worthy of.” After a momentary trance, the dervish prophesied: “They have given you the administration of the affairs of the Ottoman state.

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slave, cannot be broken. Thus it is supposed to be more stable than feudalism. Ottoman patrimonialism, then, is the transformation of one of the defining characteristics of feudal social relations, vassalage, which basically meant being “the ‘man’ of another man,” 24 into a seemingly more stable bond, that of artificial kinship through slavery. Süleyman the Magnificent, then, was not the suzerain of many vassals but, rather, the master of his slaves.25 The patrimonial system seemed to have reached such a level of perfection during his reign that one did not need to wonder about who was going to be the next grand vizier. Everything appeared to work like a clock. The promotion system in place selected the gifted servants of the sultan and raised them in the hierarchy through proper steps up to the second vizierate. Whoever happened to be the second vizier at the time of the dismissal or death of a grand vizier replaced his predecessor in office. Ayas Pasha (grand vizier, 1536–39), Lutfi Pasha (1539–41), Hadım Süleyman Pasha (1541–44), Rüstem Pasha (1544–53, 1555–61), Kara Ahmed Pasha (1553–55), Semiz Ali Pasha (1561–65), Sokullu Mehmed Pasha (1565–79), and Semiz Ahmed Pasha (1579–80) were all former royal servants who were appointed as ­v iziers to the imperial council during the reign of Süleyman and were promoted to the grand vizierate in due course after serving as second vizier.26

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May your name be identical with the one on the royal seal!”27 At the time Ahmed Beg was apparently a member of the imperial cavalry regiments; he was the son of Hacı Mehmed, an Albanian baker who was the head of the bakers’ guild in Edirne, hence Ahmed’s nickname Etmekcizade, the son of the baker. Subsequently Etmekcizade Ahmed Beg made enough capital for himself in the market of Edirne to get involved in the collection of the taxes imposed on the Gypsies. Later he became the finance director of the Danubian provinces. In 1599 he was the acting finance minister in the military campaign directed against the Hapsburgs under the command of Saturcı Mehmed Pasha. Despite his close association with Saturcı, whose execution in 1599 caused him to be imprisoned for a short while, Etmekcizade could keep his position under the new commander-­general of the campaign, the grand vizier Damad İbrahim Pasha. Etmekcizade succeeded in becoming one of the rare finance ministers who enjoyed a long tenure, and he was made a vizier during the reign of Ahmed I. He even held the deputy grand vizierate in 1616 while the grand vizier Öküz Meh­med Pasha was engaged in a military campaign against the Safavids and thus held the imperial seal that carried the name of his namesake. The dervish proved to be right in his prophecy. The dervish also kept his promise to Baki Beşe, the janissary, whose father was a merchant from Aleppo. Baki himself was born in Edirne and somehow managed to enter into the janissary corps. After he was promoted to the cavalry regiments, he followed in his elder friend’s footsteps. In AH 1007/1598–99 he was the collector of taxes imposed on the Gypsies. In 1604 he had become the finance director of the Danubian provinces. The next year, he was the acting finance minister in the military campaign of

27.  Na’îmâ, Ta’rîh-i Na’îmâ (The History of Na’ima), 6 vols. (Istanbul, 1281–83), 2:72. Na’îmâ’s source is Kâtib Çelebi, who, in turn, seems to have heard the story from Zübde Beg himself, or perhaps an unidentified written source that relates Zübde Beg’s story; see Fezleke, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1286–87), 1:327. 28.  For contemporary sources on the lives of Ahmed and Baki pashas, see Baki Tezcan, “Searching for Osman: A Reassessment of the Deposition of the Ottoman Sultan Osman II (1618–1622)” (PhD diss., Prince­ton University, 2001), 309nn2–3.

the grand vizier Mehmed Pasha, which resulted in the reconquest of Esztergom (in northern Hungary). In 1607 Baki accompanied the grand vizier Murad Pasha as the acting finance minister in the military campaign directed against Canpoladzade Ali, the “rebel” ruler of northern Syria. Baki Pasha was later to state that on his return from this campaign he finally succeeded in saving forty thousand gold ducats, the amount he had asked for from the dervish. Despite some occasional downturns in his later career, Baki Beşe of the tavern in Edirne became a pasha and died in 1625, still holding the finance ministry with the title of vizier.28 There are a couple of significant points to note about the careers of Ahmed Pasha and Baki Pasha as well as the dervish story. First, both men came to carry the title pasha and even became viziers while they were finance ministers, which did not use to be the case in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The status of the finance ministers had been rising since the late sixteenth century, and Ahmed Pasha was not the first one to carry the title vizier. The later seventeenth century even witnessed grand viziers, such as Salih Pasha (d. 1647), Hezarpare Ahmed Pasha (d. 1648), and Sofu Mehmed Pasha (d. 1649), whose backgrounds were in the finance ministry.29 Clearly, money and its prestige in politics were rising. More important, in contrast to many of their predecessors, the backgrounds of Ahmed Pasha and Baki Pasha had little to do with either the educational-judicial career or the scribal one, the traditional background of finance ministers. They and their drinking companions were soldiers, albeit of a different kind. Although we do not know anything about the social backgrounds of their companions, the -zâde ending in their names, as in Sinanbegzade and Karanfilzade, suggests that they were not devshirme

29.  See Klaus Röhrborn, “Die Emanzipation der Finanzbürokratie im osmanischen Reich (Ende 16. Jahrhundert)” (“The Emancipation of the [ministry of] Finance Bureaucracy in the Ottoman Empire”), Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 122 (1972): 118–39. For finance ministers who carried the title of vizier in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, see Tezcan, “Searching for Osman,” 310n4. For biographies of these grand viziers, see Şeyhî Meh­ med Efendi, Vakâyi’ü’l-fudalâ (The Events [i.e. lives] of the Virtuous Ones), 2 vols., facs. ed. with indexes in Şakaik-ı Nu’maniye ve Zeyilleri (The Anemones [a six-

teenth century biographical dictionary] and its Continuations), ed. Abdülkadir Özcan, 5 vols. (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 1989), vols. 3–4 (hereafter Şeyhî), 3:155–56; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Hezarpâre Ahmed Paşa,” in İA2, 17:301–2; and Şeyhî, 3:599, respectively.

30.  See, for instance, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, Kamil Kepeci 1767, fols. 17b, 28b, 33a, 39b, 40a; see also Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 149–50. 31.  Andrews and Kalpaklı, Age of Beloveds, 322–23.

From the perspective of poetic scripting alone, the death of Osman II can be seen as a watershed event . . . the death by sorrow or even the murder of the lover is a commonplace everywhere in the literature of the early modern world. But the murder of the beloved (by those of the lover class) is a rare and immensely disruptive symbolic act. It is disruptive psychologically as well as politically because it breaks the symbolic bond that links the absolute monarch on earth with the supernatural absolute. It is this bond that scripts in erotic and emotional terms a theoretical political notion most often subsumed under the phrase the divine right of kings. The bond is, in fact, more than the granting of a divine right to rule; it is the equation by analogy of the monarch with God, of earthly rule with heavenly rule . . . apocalyptic and messianic responses to a changing world had made this theoretical bond more real and visible during the early years of the Age of Beloveds. When this bond no longer holds, when the beloved as God and the beloved as monarch are no longer as self-evidently identical, then the perception of power has already undergone a dramatic change. In a symbolic sense, absolute love for an absolute beloved here on earth is no longer as possible, and a fissure opens up between the world of absolute truth and the ordering of this world, a fissure that even has some of the underlying characteristics of the very modern notion of the separation of church and state.31

Ottoman Polity in the Early Modern Era

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, six rebellions occurred in the imperial capital (in 1589, 1593, 1595, 1600, 1601, and 1603, to be exact) that claimed the lives of some of the most well-known courtiers of the palace. During the century following, six depositions took place between 1618 and 1703, two of which were followed by regicides, the first one being that of Osman II in 1622. What all of this may mean for Ottoman history is an important question to consider. Andrews and Kalpaklı likened the murder of Osman II to the murder of the beloved by the lover in the context of early modern Ottoman cultural and literary history:

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recruits, that is, they had not been conscripted by the levy imposed on Christian children. The former was the son, or perhaps the grandson, of a certain Sinan Beg, who must have been a member of the political elite as suggested by his title beg, and the latter was also known by his predecessors’ appellation, karanfil, or carnation, perhaps after a tradesman dealing with flowers. If Ahmed, Baki, and their companions were not devshirme recruits, why, one wonders, had they joined the military—leaving aside the question of how? What they aspired to become in life did not have much to do with a military career. Neither the supervision of guilds and markets in a town nor the trusteeship of a royal foundation would be expected to be the dream of a regular soldier. It is quite probable that Ahmed Pasha, Baki Pasha, and their drinking companions in Edirne, or their fathers, had entered the central Ottoman army, which at this point was about to become a mainly financial institution rather than a military one, by means of money. Small investors of capital had started to see the Ottoman army as an institution that provided one with financial security and social status since, at least, the mid-sixteenth century. Tax-farmers were now demanding entry into the militaryadministrative personnel as a reward for their services. 30 They saw entrance into the Ottoman army in a way quite similar to a well-todo Frenchman buying his way into the noblesse de robe. Thus the dervish story and its connections to the Ottoman socioeconomic and political life of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries point out, among other things, a new channel of social mobility that was opening up for men who lived in the Ottoman domains: financial entrepreneurship. Men whose power came from economic and financial activities rather than from military ones began to permeate the privileged classes of Ottoman society in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They were going to change the empire forever.

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The murder of the beloved by his lovers, then, not only marks the end of the “Age of Beloveds” in Ottoman cultural and literary history, but also symbolizes a major fissure in the Ottoman political order. I am not so sure, however, whether this fissure is reminiscent of the separation of church and state, although, as I point out below, there is something secular about the Ottoman state after the seventeenth century. More important, I am not confident that the separation of church and state is a necessary feature of modernity. In Turkey, supposedly the most secular country of the Middle East, Friday sermons are produced centrally in Ankara, to be read in each and every mosque in the country; in Israel, one of the most modern countries of the region, citizenship rights are primarily based on one’s religion; in Germany, the land where modernity was theorized most thoroughly, the state collects church taxes to support national churches, and religion is taught in schools; in the United Kingdom, the monarch has been the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England” since the sixteenth century; and last but not least, in the United States, “in God we trust” as we spend each dollar in our pockets. Rather than a separation, in several historical cases one witnesses the establishment of a closer bond between church and state around the beginning of modernity. Cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose region, his religion,” the principle adopted by the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which is so often taken as a marker for the beginning of modern international relations, was not about the “separation of church and state.” This principle did separate the Roman Catholic Church from European states but only replaced it by “national” churches. Interestingly enough, the Peace of Augsburg, which included the first formulation of this principle, was signed in 1555, the same year that the Ottomans and the Safavids signed the Peace of Amasya, after which both the Sunni identity of Ottoman Islam and the Shiite identity of Safavid Islam were further consolidated. Thus modernity is perhaps not so

much about the separation of church and state as it is about the control and identification of the former by and with the latter. Nevertheless, Andrews and Kalpaklı are right in surmising a fissure in the Ottoman political order after the murder of Osman II. I would argue that this fissure was created in the conceptual bonds that held Ottoman notions of government together. When analyzed through the perspective provided by Ottoman intellectual traditions of governance, it is possible to see that the regicide of Osman II and other depositions of the seventeenth century broke the ties that held together ethics, economics, and politics and thus brought limitations to the power of the sultan. This tradition, which is part of the GrecoIslamic legacy, legitimizes itself by the premise that the ultimate perfection for a human being is in reaching unity with the One. Since this is an impossible aim to achieve in this world, human beings must substitute equality and proportion in their actions for unity with the One; hence the emphasis on justice as the noblest virtue and on balance as the central principle of virtuous action in the literature on ethics. In short, the idea of a balance based on justice becomes the next best thing to unity with God. This idea is then applied on the three fields of practical philosophy: ethics, economics—in the sense of household management—and politics. All three fields are about governance: ethics concerns itself with the government of the self, economics with that of the family, and politics is about governing the community at large. One has to uphold justice in all three fields by striking a balance between one’s souls, the constituents of one’s household, and finally between the classes of a polity. There is a clear continuation between the government of the self, of the household, and of the polity.32 I would suggest that the regicide of Osman II by his soldiers and the following depositions mark the opening of a fissure in the conceptual continuity between governing the family and the larger polity in the art of government. This 32.  See Baki Tezcan, “Ethics as a Domain to Discuss the Political: Kınalızâde Ali Efendi and His Ahlâk-ı Alâî,” in Proceedings of the International Congress on Learning and Education in the Ottoman World, Istanbul, 12–15 April 1999, ed. Ali Çaksu (Istanbul: IRCICA, 2001), 109–20.

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the sultan, the Second Empire would best be symbolized by a spider web with the monarch at the center but not on top of anyone else. There were people who were closer to the center, and some who were farther away, and yet the web provided links to get closer to power even for those who were farthest away. The military-administrative and educational-judiciary institutions that consolidated the hegemony of the patrimonial empire over Ottoman society were now being appropriated by social forces and being used to limit the royal authority of the dynasty and its agents. The best representative of these social forces are the ­ejnebi, or the “foreigners,” who were not themselves descendants of emperors’ slaves but had bought their way into the imperial administration from the ranks of commoners thanks to economic opportunities such as tax-farming. If the striking feature of the patrimonial empire was a polity run mostly by slaves of non-Muslim origin who were positioned at the top of the ruling class of a predominantly Muslim population, the Second Empire strikes one as an empire that gradually came to be run predominantly by Muslims who had been “foreigners” to the previous ruling class. The subjects, or the re’aya, were now becoming part of the ruling group, or the askeri. The weblike imperial political structure was ref lecting the changing socioeconomic structures. While land had not lost its importance overnight, the gradual development of a market society shifted the primary focus of political power toward the control of monetary resources through a network of patron-client relationships in a weblike structure that did not have a single center. Some political actors, whom I would call constitutionalists, such as certain bureaucrats and jurists who were in an uneasy alliance with the janissaries, would like to place the monarch at the symbolic center of this web, which, not unlike the center of some spider webs, was devoid of any real significance. The absolutists centered on the imperial court, by comparison, would rather have the sultan control the very spinning of the web. At the end of the long seventeenth century, after 1703, the struggle between the two groups came to a relatively peaceful resolution.

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continuation was very firmly cemented in the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century, which was the ultimate embodiment of the conceptual continuity between the government of the family and that of the larger polity. The larger polity was imagined as an expansion of the monarch’s household. The political structures of the empire that was constructed during the reign of Mehmed II (1451–81) and perfected during Süleyman’s reign (1520–66) were based on the principle that the whole empire was the emperor’s patrimony and that he was ruling it all personally with the help of his household slaves. The conceptual continuation between the government of the family and that of the imperial polity could not be more perfect than that. There was a one-to-one correspondence between the imperial polity and the household of the emperor. As argued above, this understanding had grown out of the feudal political practices of the formative period of the Ottoman Empire. The relationship between the suzerain and his vassals had been transformed into that between the patriarch and his slaves. Thus, essentially, the pyramid-like political structure of the empire had not changed from its inception to the late sixteenth century. What the murder of Osman II and later depositions symbolized was a much more radical transformation than the earlier one from a feudal kingdom to a patrimonial empire, which had taken place at some point in the late fifteenth century. The seventeenth-century depositions represent a near rupture in the Ottoman political tradition, as they transformed the pyramid of political control at the apex of which stood the Ottoman emperor, whose authority was represented by his slaves in all corners of the empire. I argue that the various military rebellions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that culminated in the deposition of Osman II in 1622 and continued their thrust into the system in later depositions opened the way for a fundamentally different political system than both the one that had been in place previously and the one that was going to replace it eventually, hence my suggestion to call the period of circa 1580–1826 the Second Empire. If the political structures of the feudal kingdom and the patrimonial empire were to be represented by a pyramid at the apex of which stood

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The second half of the period I propose to call the Second Empire starts in 1703 and comes to an end in 1826, the year in which the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II destroyed the janissaries, the ultimate guardians of the Ottoman political order in the Second Empire. Notwithstanding its close association with military and territorial decline, I propose to regard the eighteenth century—after 1703—as the golden age of the Second Empire. During its golden age, the Second Empire was functioning much more smoothly, as royal authority had finally accepted the power of the circles that surrounded it. With the exception of the 1730 rebellion, the dynamics of which were somewhat different from earlier rebellions, the eighteenth century is strikingly peaceful internally in comparison with the formative period of the Second Empire (1580–1703) and the earlier periods of Ottoman history. What is most striking about it, however, is its political leadership. Grand viziers such as Nişancı Mehmed Pasha (1717–18), Naili Abdullah Pasha (1755), Yirmisekiz-­çelebi-zade Mehmed Sa’id Pasha (1755–56), Mehmed Ragıb Pasha (1757–63), Hamid Hamza Pasha (1763), Silahdar Mahir Hamza Pasha (1768), and Yağlıkçızade Mehmed Emin Pasha (1768–69) were unheard of in the sixteenth century. The first one was the son of a Muslim merchant from a village in Kayseri; the second, third, fourth, fifth, and last ones were professional bureaucrats; the fifth one’s father was a Muslim merchant in a town around Niğde; the sixth one was the son of a wealthy Muslim man from Karahisar; and the father of the last one was a rich Muslim merchant from Istanbul who traded with India.33 Unlike most of their predecessors during the age of the patrimonial empire, they had not been handpicked by the devshirme collector representing the authority of the sultan

33.  See their biographies in Osmanzade Ta’ib Ahmed, Dilaverağazade Ömer Vahid, Ahmed Cavid, and Bagdadi Abdülfettah Şevket, Hadîkatü’l-vüzerâ (ve zeyilleri) (The Garden of Viziers [and Its Continuations]), (Istanbul, 1271), pt. 2, 27–29; pt. 3, 8–10, 16–18, 18–19, respectively. See also Mücteba İlgürel, “Hamza Paşa, Silahdar,” İA2, 15:515–56; Kemal Beydilli, “Mehmed Emin Paşa, Yağlıkçızâde,” İA2, 28:464–65. 34.  It should be clear to the reader that my argument is different from the thesis of H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, which refers to a rebellion on the part of Muslims to take offices into their hands. See H. A. R.

but instead came from the ranks of the socioeconomic elite.34 I argue that the smooth functioning of the Second Empire in the eighteenth century was the result of the fine balance that the various components of Ottoman society had reached after a long period of political struggles. This balance is well reflected in the historiographical output of the era, which is marked by the wide acceptance of the official historiography produced by the state in contrast with earlier periods of Ottoman history when chronicles commissioned by the court had generally failed to withdraw any attention outside the court. 35 This became possible because in the eighteenth century the government of the empire came to represent a much larger spectrum of social interests than ever before. These social interests included those of the merchant elite in the cities, whose representatives had infiltrated the janissary corps, as well as those of the agricultural landlords who had secured an official status for themselves as provincial nobles, or a’yan. The delicacy of the balance established among the various interest groups was noted by Meh­ med Ragıb Pasha: “I am afraid that we shall be unable to re-establish order if we once break the harmony of the existing institutions.”36 I also suggest that the Second Empire as a whole is marked by the gradual demilitarization of the upper ruling class, or its civilization— civil in the sense of being nonmilitary. What one observes in the long term is the transformation of a polity in which men with military power dominated the political process into a form of government in which civil power holders increasingly came to control the central political apparatus. This transformation has some democratic implications to the extent that men with military power were either born or

Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1950–57); and their critique by Norman Itzkowitz, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman Realities,” Studia Islamica 16 (1962): 73–94. The crucial point is not about the religion of the officeholders but about the empowerment of the social forces to represent themselves in the political process, which gradually erased the power of the dynasty to decide who would be in the ruling class.

35.  See Baki Tezcan, “The Politics of Early Modern ­O ttoman Historiography,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167–98. 36.  Quoted by Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964), 53.

37.  Andrews and Kalpaklı, Age of Beloveds, 322. On messianic movements, see, for instance, Cornell H. Fleischer, “The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleymân,” in Süleymân the Magnificent and His Time, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: Documentation Française, 1992), 159–74. 38.  For this movement in the larger context of contemporary Ottoman religious movements, see Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 121–32.

39.  See Tezcan, “Politics,” 180–84. 40.  For the imperial currency, see Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149–61. For the historiography, see Tezcan, “Politics,” 184–98.

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that I call the desacralization of a regnal understanding of historical time. Ottoman history is not recorded in units that are defined by reigns anymore; instead an arbitrary beginning, such as the year 1000, or the year with which a previous chronicle came to an end forms the starting point of many chronicles that come to an end in a similarly arbitrary way. Especially the way the official chronicles follow one another makes one feel that there will never be an end to history. 39 And that is exactly what their sponsor, the early modern Ottoman state, needed. The early modern Ottoman state was born out of a consensus among the members of the Ottoman ruling class, and the only legitimacy it aspired to have was the one it acquired from simply being there and appearing to be eternal. When the Ottoman dynasty stopped pushing for its own empowerment and acknowledged the powers of such institutions as the janissaries and the a’yan, the Ottoman state emerged as an institution that attracted respect from the representatives of Ottoman social forces. It was then that the Ottomans could come up with an imperial currency to be used all over the empire, and it was also then that the official historiography started to be read. 40 The central legitimizing concept for this political institution was more secular, that is, this-worldly, than divine: a claim to eternity. The name of an incumbent sultan of the patrimonial empire would always be followed with a supplication in literary sources that would articulate the author’s wish that God make his rule everlasting, with the qualification, of course, “until the end of times” (khallada Allah mulkahu ila inqiraz alzaman). While this tradition continued well into the Second Empire, gradually the supplication started addressing the state directly and the “end of times” was dropped, ultimately produc-

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conscripted into the ruling class, whereas civil power holders could originate from more modest political backgrounds and make their way into it by virtue of their socioeconomic capital. The New Order of the nineteenth century, by comparison, was eventually hijacked by the members of the military elite as the Ottoman autocratic modernization had made its greatest investment in the armed forces and the education of their officers. Modern Turkey inherited this legacy, which may well be observed in the professional background of its presidents, most of whom were former generals until the late 1980s. Thus the Ottoman Empire of the eighteenth century may well have had a more civil government than that of modern Turkey in the twentieth century. Last but definitely not least, there are several cultural and intellectual developments that marked the age of the Second Empire. Since the primary focus of this study has been on political history, I have omitted other developments that distinguish the age of the Second Empire. A very significant development that is closely related to the points made by Andrews and Kalpaklı above is what I call the secularization of historical time. As noted by Andrews and Kalpaklı, the beginning of the early modern era witnessed several messianic movements all over the world, including the Ottoman Empire.37 Interestingly enough, with the exception of the Jewish messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, the Ottoman Empire did not witness much messianism during the age of the Second Empire. 38 It is as if the end of times is finally postponed forever, and history can now flow with no obstacles. This is at least the impression one has from the periodization found in certain chronicles of the time. Several seventeenth-century chronicles display a tendency in their periodization

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ing the popular expression devlet-i ebed-müddet, or “the eternal state.” 41 The moment one enters the domain of an unqualified eternity, one operates in the secular historical time to which the early modern Ottoman state of the Second Empire belonged. The eternal state could only be a secular state.42

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What happened to the Second Empire at the end? I must admit that it collapsed. The transformation of the janissary corps into a sociopolitical corporation, which was open to the public and effectively limited the royal authority of the monarch, cost the empire its defenses. The connections between the corps and the civil tradesmen of the imperial capital that had been developing since the late sixteenth century ended up in an almost virtual identification in some cases, hence the observation of a contemporary that “many of the ortas or companies” had virtually become “guilds of bakers, butchers, glaziers, boatmen, armorers, and so forth.” 43 These men were far from being professional soldiers who could defend an empire, especially when the empire’s opponents had become so powerful as a result of their colonialist ventures. The janissaries, however, were not categorically against the development of a new and more professional fighting force that would do the job their predecessors used to do.44 Yet they could see that such a development would eventually bring their privileges and political power to an end. The absolutist ambitions of sultans like Osman II, who entertained such ideas as getting rid of old institutions that had acquired constitutional privileges, did not sooth the janissaries. Thus the whole question of military reform was a very political question on which the sociopolitical privileges of large masses were hinged. The soldiers defended their political

position of opposition against absolutist designs at the expense of military defeats that cost the Ottomans dearly. The military defeats that the Ottoman Empire suffered because of a deadlock between its janissaries and its royal authority, however, are not enough to account for our loss of memory with regard to the legacy of the Second Empire. Today, the times of the Second Empire are remembered as those of embarrassing military defeats and a corrupt regime. Although no one can deny the territorial losses of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, one also has to admit, however, that these losses are not as significant as, for instance, that which the British Empire lost in North America in the late eighteenth century. Most important, the destruction of the janissary corps in 1826 did not really improve the empire’s defenses; if anything, it made them worse—the empire lost larger territories more quickly after 1826 than it did before. It may, then, be prudent to look for the reason of our memory loss elsewhere. I would argue that the short answer for this question is the New Order of the nineteenth century. The definitive history of the Ottoman decline with its negative take on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to be written in the aftermath of the consolidation of the Ottoman New Order, the Nizâm-ı Jedîd, which was first introduced during the reign of Selim III (1789–1807) and then consolidated by Mahmud II (1808–39) and Abdülmecid (1839–61). The New Order entailed a heavy dose of state centralization that was supported by foreign powers with imperialist agendas. Late-nineteenth-century Ottoman histories, which had a defining influence on how Ottoman historiography developed in the twentieth century, were written from the vantage point of the New Order that had an-

41.  Unlike ebed-paymân, the phrase ebed-müddet does not appear in Franciszek Meninski, Thesaurus linguarum orientalium turcicae, arabicae, persicae, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1680) (mainly a dictionary from Ottoman­Turkish to Latin, Italian, and German). The example used for the former, however, is not the state but rather the dynasty, hânedân; see vol. 1, col. 18, 1848. 42.  Incidentally, the English word “secular” comes from the Latin “seculum,” which Meninski uses in translating ebed, “eternity.” See ibid.

43.  Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’empire othoman (A General Picture of the Ottoman Empire), 7 vols. (Paris, 1788–1824), 7:342–43, quoted by Walter Livingston Wright Jr., ed. and trans., Ottoman Statecraft: The Book of Counsel for Vezirs and Governors (Nasā’ih ül-­vüzera ve’l-ümera) of Sarı Mehmed Pasha, the Defterdār (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1935), 41. 44.  See Taner Timur, Osmanlı Çalışmaları: İlkel Feodalizmden Yarı Sömürge Ekonomisine (Ottoman Studies: From Primitive Feudalism to a Semi-colonial Economy) (Ankara: Verso, 1989), 133–34.

45.  Ahmed Cevdet, Ta’rîh-i Cevdet (The History of Jevdet), 2nd ed., 2nd imprint, 12 vols. (Istanbul: Matba’a-ı ‘Osmâniye, 1309), 1:48. 46.  For a larger discussion of this issue, see Baki Tezcan, “Lost in Historiography: An Essay on the Reasons for the Absence of a History of Limited Government in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009): 477–505.

47.  Atatürk’s statement is from a letter that included his remarks on the first draft of history textbooks for Turkish high schools that were being written by the Turkish Historical Society. Cited by Uluğ İğdemir, Yılların İçinden: Makaleler, anılar, incelemeler (From All Those Years: Articles, Memories, and Studies) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1976), 26. 48.  Timur, Osmanlı Çalışmaları, 10.

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Today Ottoman history is being rehabilitated in Turkey, as a modern Muslim democrat movement, which calls some of its supporters “Muslim Calvinists,” has recently come to power.49 While the Muslim Calvinists will probably salvage certain features of the Second Empire from the dustbin of history—what I have in mind is mainly restoring respect to the ulema, that is, the jurists—they are as antagonistic to janissaries as anyone else could be, for they do not have any disagreement with their Westernizing predecessors on the virtues of liberal capitalist economy. Their disagreements with their political opponents lie elsewhere. The contemporary Turkish culture talk, if I may borrow a term used by Mahmood Mamdani, is about the appropriate place of Islam in political life.50 Whereas the secular autocrats believe that Islamic societies are doomed to backwardness if they do not imprison Islam into the private space, the Muslim democrats argue that Islam is not an obstacle to development. Both sides seem to assume that Turkey would solve all of its problems if only Turks agreed on the degree to which they were going to assign a place to Islam in their identity. More remarkably, the parties to the debate have also persuaded their constituencies that this is the most fundamental problem in front of them. As long as culture talk dominates the political space in Turkey and the consensus on the virtues of liberal capitalist economy is sustained, the janissaries will keep their place in the portrait of the culprits of Ottoman decline. Both sides in the current cultural divide agree that the janissaries were not only fanatically opposed to reform—which is a questionable assumption, to say the least—but also staunch defenders of protectionism and a relatively equalitarian economic philosophy, ideas that are simply incompatible with liberal capitalist economy. In addition to most of the factors discussed above, and arguably much more impor-

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nihilated the janissary corps in 1826 and weakened the ulema. Having no one left to defend it, the Ottoman Empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became a corrupt ancien régime in the hands of the New Order historians. Here is, for instance, how Ahmed Cevdet, the official historiographer of the New Order, rewrote the history of Osman II, whom most seventeenth century historians had regarded as an incompetent monarch worthy of deposition: “Sultan Osman Khan II was enthroned at the age of fourteen. Despite his youth he tried extraordinarily hard to reform the conditions of the state. But unfortunately, because the affairs [of government] had been taken off the rails, the disposition of the soldiers had become vicious, and the [rebel-soldier] bullies had gotten on in the world, he was deposed and martyred in a great rebellion that happened four years later in Istanbul.” 45 The attitude of the Ottoman New Order toward the Second Empire, which it recast as a corrupt ancien régime, was continued in republican Turkey.46 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the republic, was very much aware of the significance of historiography in molding a brand new nation. He took an active part in the foundation of the Turkish Historical Society and followed its activities closely, noting that “writing history is as important as making it.” 47 Things did not change with the Democratic Party that came to power in 1950. The Second Empire continued to remain in the dustbin of history. Modern Turkish historical memory became stuck at the beginning of the New Order. In the words of Taner Timur: “After the transition to a multi-party system with the motivation of a small group of statesmen­intellectuals and the international conjuncture, the ‘History of Ottoman Reform,’ which was actually a history of semicolonization, was transformed into a ‘History of Turkish Democracy’ with some minor revisions.” 48

49.  See European Stability Initiative, Islamic Calvinists: Change and Conservatism in Central Anatolia (Berlin and Istanbul: European Stability Initiative, 19 September 2005). 50.  Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves, 2005).

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tant than all of them, the memory of the janissaries, whose revolts had so effectively limited royal authority, has to be suppressed because of their old-fashioned economic attitudes: “In Istanbul and many other cities, the Janissaries had played a crucial role in the Ottoman urban economy. These one-time professional soldiers had become a group who first of all were artisans and guildsmen and only incidentally were on the military payroll. The sultan’s actions in 1826 disarmed the urban guildsmen and eliminated the most powerful and best-organized advocates of protectionism. Thus, the 1826 event paved the way for subsequent evolution of Ottoman economic liberalism.”51 Economic liberalism in the Ottoman case meant the opening of borders to European trade and capital with almost no restrictions. Soon the empire was transformed into a semicolony that finally gave up its own right to collect its own taxes with the establishment of the Ottoman Debt Administration in 1881. Those Ottoman liberals who cooperated with European capital made fortunes for themselves. What the late-Ottoman—and later modern Turkish—liberals needed least was the memory of a time when middle-class and lower­middle-class city dwellers actually had a direct say in the economic and other policies to be adopted in the country at large.

51.  Donald Quataert, “The Age of Reforms, 1812–1914,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, ed. Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 764.