The Second Empire [of Ottoman]

                Compar ative St udies o f          S outh A sia, Afr ica and          the  Middle  East             Vol. 29 , No. 3,  2009          d oi 10.1215 /108920 1x-2009 -038      © 2009  by Duk e Unive rsity Pr ess 

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The Second Empire:

The Transformation of the Ottoman

Polity in the Early Modern Era

Baki Tezcan

he presidential palace, with closed portals jealously guarded, is the shrine of autoc-racy; 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

of-ficer 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.”

These expressions are strikingly reminiscent of the language used by the pro-Parliament jurists dur-ing the English Civil War of the 17th century and its aftermath. The doctrine of the ancient constitu-tion 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 doc-trines to the Turkish situation, and pursuing them in great detail, found that they fitted.3

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 ac-tion, 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 pre-viously 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

His-tory of Turkey, 1071–1920: Papers presented to the First Interna-tional Congress on the Social and Economic History of Turkey (Hacettepe University, Ankara, 11–13 July 1977), ed. Osman Okyar 

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janissaries as a “chamber of deputies,” constitut-ing the “legal opposition in the state,” “engaged in shielding the rights of feudality, of democ-racy, of theocracy (according to the portion of the empire) from the abuse of power in the hands of pashas. . . . It was the sultan’s preroga-tive to send a pasha; but it was their business to

see that he governed according to law.” 4

Their power had frequently occasion to be brought into action; but as very little attention was given to Turkish internal policy by Europe-ans, on whose accounts alone we have had to rely, so their motives were generally misunder-stood, their acts maligned. The deposition of the grand vizier, the firing of the city, a dem-onstration 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

Slade’s views on Ottoman history, espe-cially those related to the janissaries, the depo-sitions 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 histori-ans of Ottoman literature, Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, echo his perspective: “The movement in England from late-Tudor absolut-ism 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 en-thronement (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 his-toriography at the beginning of the twenty-first

century, the regicide of Osman II and the many other rebellions and depositions of the late six-teenth and sevensix-teenth centuries are nothing but military rebellions, hence signs of the de-cline 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 limi-tations 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 his-tory 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 govern-ment 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 Em-pire been both neglected and misrepresented as corruption and decay? I return to this question at the end of this study.

The conventional narrative of Ottoman history used to suggest that in the late sixteenth cen-tury 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 de-cline 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}

4. Adolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece, and Malta, 2 vols.  (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 1:303, 304, 305,  306.

5. Ibid., 303–4.

6. Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, The Age of

Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Otto-man and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: 

Duke University Press, 2005), 322. 7. Ibid., 323.

8. See, for instance, Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising

and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Adminis-tration 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 cre-ative 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 six-teenth century and ends in the early ninesix-teenth 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 accomplish-ments 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 im-perialism, which was strengthened by capital-ism, 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 pos-sible now to notice this legacy, however selec-tively. The first part of the article is devoted to a discussion of the prehistory of the Second Em-pire, that is, the political structures of the Otto-man 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 transforma-tion 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 bal-ance in the polity. Finally, in the fourth part,

after touching very briefly on some of the dy-namics that brought the Second Empire to an end, I focus on the historiographical project of the New Order that replaced the Second Em-pire 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 Sül-eyman I (1520–66) “SülSül-eyman Bey,” as the an-cient Turkic title bey/beg/big, or “lord,” would be an insult for this emperor who came to be known as Süleyman the Magnificent in

Eu-rope.10 _{The same could be said for his father,}

Selim I (1512–20), who conquered eastern Ana-tolia, Syria, and Egypt and received recogni-tion 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 “Mechemet-beg, who is ruling now,” probably in Bursa, as the sultan was on his way to a bathhouse.

Geor-gius refers to him regularly as the “king (rex).”11

So the usage of beg is not to diminish his author-ity; 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 here-after), 2:579–81.

11. Georgius de Hungaria, Tractatus de moribus

con-dictionibus et nequicia Turcorum: Traktat über die Sit-ten, 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.

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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 struc-tures 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 Eu-ropean Middle Ages. Teschke’s model is espe-cially useful as it points out that the “economic” and the “political” were inseparable during the Middle Ages and thus provides a persuasive re-sponse to those arguments that emphasize the agency of the state, which represents the “po-litical,” 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 suspi-cious 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 politi-cal.” Committed as they were to show that the social infrastructure, that is “the economic,” de-termines 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-sponse of some Marxists inspired by the work of Louis Althusser has been to argue for represent-ing the state as an independent social force in historical analyses of medieval societies. Webe-rians, 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 precapital-ist 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 remind-ing us that the primacy accorded to “the politi-cal” depends on “an abstraction in which the political form is emptied of its economic

con-tent 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 produc-tion of his own means of subsistence, . . . the sur-plus labour for the nominal landowner can only be extorted from them by extra-economic

com-pulsion, whatever the form this might assume.”14

When this fusion between the economic and the political is reinstated into its proper place,

the argument that intra-ruling-class conflict constitutes a separate order of reality—the sphere of politics proper, understood in Webe-rian 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 Neoreal-ists and neo-Weberians maintain. In feudal so-cieties, intra-ruling class conflicts, both domes-tic and geopolidomes-tical, are not conflicts over the maximization of power, but conflicts between and among politically accumulating classes over their relative share in the means of economic coercion.15

12. Kate Fleet, “Early Ottoman Self-Definition,” Jour-nal of Turkish Studies 26 (2002): 237–38.

13. Benno Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations in the Eu-

ropean Middle Ages: History and Theory,” Interna-tional Organization 52 (1998): 338.

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.

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The fusion of the economic and the politi-cal 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 condi-tional.” 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 “po-litical 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 set-tle 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 con-flict 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 ex-tracted 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 strat-egies 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 op-tion 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 system-atic investment in the means of violence were, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, spec-tacular.” 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 fron-tier 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 in-vested 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 Per-sia, 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

Formu-lation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, 

MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 312, quoted in   Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations,” 339.

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

Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, ed. 

Trevor Henry Aston and Charles Harding English Phil-pin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985),  236–42. 18. Teschke, “Geopolitical Relations,” 341. 19. Ibid., 342. 20. Ibid., 345–46.

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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 over-lord 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 eventu-ally led to the development of the patrimonial political system that came into being in the six-teenth 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 vas-sals. 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 pres-sure was that its successful resolution brought only more pressure. A victory on the battlefield or a conquest attracted more men to the Otto-man enterprise, creating further pressures to keep their allegiance under conditions of lim-ited agricultural resources. The creation of new resources was only possible through further con-quest, 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

a world of limited agricultural productivity. For-tunately for them, and unforFor-tunately for many others, they had a competent leadership that de-livered 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 east-ern 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 vulner-able. 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 Ot-toman 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}

impres-sion 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 politi-cal 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

21. Aydın Ayhan and Tuncer Şengün, “Anadolu Bey- liklerinin ve Osmanlı Beyliği’nin İlhanlılar adına kes-tirdiği 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 dev-rinde 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,” 

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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 mone-tary systems that had risen in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and all the dif-ferent 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 in-tegrated monetarily without much effort, sug-gesting that such an integration might well have been under way long before the political inte-gration was brought about by Mehmed II. While it may be difficult to demonstrate the preced-ing social dynamics of monetary integration for the want of evidence, it is definitely clear that the socioeconomic move toward a more oriented economy created monetary resources that allowed Mehmed II to initiate the transfor-mation 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 pres-sures 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 ever-existing possibility of an Ottoman vassal becom-ing 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 su-zerain and the vassal to sustain the hierarchi-cal relationship of power, were further compli-cated 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 en-courage him to look for an alternative overlord. These tensions arising from feudal political re-lations shaped the formative period of the Ot-toman Empire in two fundamental ways. While the horizontal competition among overlords culminated in the series of conquests that cre-ated 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 fic-tive bonds of slavery.

The Ottoman political system of the pe-riod of circa 1450–1580 may best be analyzed as a kind of patrimonialism in which feudal po-litical 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 eigh-teenth century. In comparison with the master of the latter, an Ottoman sultan had very expen-sive obligations toward his slaves, which, in the case of a grand vizier, included a compensation that may well exceed the treasury revenue of sev-eral small kingdoms in Europe combined. Thus the difference between feudalism and patrimo-nialism, as I use these terms, is not a qualita-tive 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 be-tween the overlord and the vassal may not be taken for granted. The vassal of today may as-pire to become the suzerain of tomorrow, or the vassal of a certain king may shift his allegiance to another one. Ottoman patrimonialism, how-ever, 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.

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slave, cannot be broken. Thus it is supposed to be more stable than feudalism. Ottoman patri-monialism, then, is the transformation of one of the defining characteristics of feudal social re-lations, 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 perfec-tion 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 predeces-sor 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 viziers 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

The Sixteenth-Century Socioeconomic Transformation

While the system seemed to work like a clock, a lot of things were actually changing. Argu-ably the most important change was in the es-sential 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

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, Karan-filzade, Baki Beşe, and Ahmed Beg, who were all soldiers on the payroll of the Ottoman sultan in late-sixteenth-century Edirne, enjoyed drink-ing together. One day, while they were havdrink-ing 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 drink-ing party, sent him a platter of food to accom-pany 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, ex-cusing 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 der-vish prophesied: “They have given you the ad-ministration of the affairs of the Ottoman state.

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 

here after). 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

Chron-icle 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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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 mar-ket of Edirne to get involved in the collection of the taxes imposed on the Gypsies. Later he be-came the finance director of the Danubian prov-inces. In 1599 he was the acting finance min-ister 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, Etmek-cizade could keep his position under the new commander- general of the campaign, the grand vizier Damad İbrahim Pasha. Etmekcizade suc-ceeded in becoming one of the rare finance mi-nisters 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 Meh med Pasha was engaged in a military campaign against the Safa-vids 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 janis-sary corps. After he was promoted to the cavalry regiments, he followed in his elder friend’s foot-steps. In AH 1007/1598–99 he was the collec-tor of taxes imposed on the Gypsies. In 1604 he had become the finance director of the Danu-bian provinces. The next year, he was the act-ing finance minister in the military campaign of

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 min-ister in the military campaign directed against Canpoladzade Ali, the “rebel” ruler of northern Syria. Baki Pasha was later to state that on his re-turn 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

min-istry 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 minis-ters, which did not use to be the case in the fif-teenth and early sixfif-teenth 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}

pres-tige 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 min-isters. They and their drinking companions were soldiers, albeit of a different kind. Although we do not know anything about the social back-grounds of their companions, the -zâde ending in their names, as in Sinanbegzade and Kara-nfilzade, suggests that they were not devshirme

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 uniden-tified 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.,  Prince ton University, 2001), 309nn2–3. 29. See Klaus Röhrborn, “Die Emanzipation der Finan- zbürokratie im osmanischen Reich (Ende 16. Jahrhun-dert)” (“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 cen-turies, 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 Contin-uations), 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.

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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. Nei-ther 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 Otto-man 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 military-administrative personnel as a reward for their

services.30 _{They saw entrance into the}

Otto-man army in a way quite similar to a well-to-do 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 chan-nel of social mobility that was opening up for men who lived in the Ottoman domains: finan-cial 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.

The Making of the Second Empire

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-turies, 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 ques-tion 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:

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 mur-der 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 politi-cally 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 po-litical notion most often subsumed under the phrase the divine right of kings.

The bond is, in fact, more than the grant-ing 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 mes-sianic responses to a changing world had made this theoretical bond more real and visible dur-ing 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 under-lying characteristics of the very modern notion of the separation of church and state.31

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.

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The murder of the beloved by his lovers, then, not only marks the end of the “Age of Be-loveds” in Ottoman cultural and literary history, but also symbolizes a major fissure in the Otto-man political order. I am not so sure, however, whether this fissure is reminiscent of the separa-tion of church and state, although, as I point out below, there is something secular about the Ot-toman state after the seventeenth century. More important, I am not confident that the separa-tion of church and state is a necessary feature of modernity. In Turkey, supposedly the most secu-lar country of the Middle East, Friday sermons are produced centrally in Ankara, to be read in each and every mosque in the country; in Is-rael, 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 Eng-land” 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 be-tween 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 prin-ciple 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 for-mulation of this principle, was signed in 1555, the same year that the Ottomans and the Sa-favids 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 fis-sure 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 regi-cide 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 sul-tan. This tradition, which is part of the Greco-Islamic 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 pro-portion 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 be-comes 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 strik-ing a balance between one’s souls, the constit-uents of one’s household, and finally between the classes of a polity. There is a clear continua-tion 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, Istan-bul, 12–15 April 1999, ed. Ali Çaksu (Istanbul: IRCICA, 

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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 fam-ily and that of the larger polity. The larger pol-ity was imagined as an expansion of the mon-arch’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 em-peror’s patrimony and that he was ruling it all personally with the help of his household slaves. The conceptual continuation between the gov-ernment of the family and that of the imperial polity could not be more perfect than that. There was a one-to-one correspondence be-tween the imperial polity and the household of the emperor. As argued above, this understand-ing had grown out of the feudal political prac-tices 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, es-sentially, 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 radi-cal 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 de-positions represent a near rupture in the Otto-man 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 rebel-lions 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 sys-tem 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 pe-riod of circa 1580–1826 the Second Empire. If the political structures of the feudal kingdom and the patrimonial empire were to be repre-sented by a pyramid at the apex of which stood

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 educa-tional-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 them-selves descendants of emperors’ slaves but had bought their way into the imperial administra-tion 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 rul-ing 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 reflecting the changing socioeconomic structures. While land had not lost its impor-tance 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 rela-tively peaceful resolution.

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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 janis-saries, the ultimate guardians of the Ottoman political order in the Second Empire. Notwith-standing its close association with military and territorial decline, I propose to regard the eigh-teenth 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 Em-pire (1580–1703) and the earlier periods of Ot-toman 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 bureau-crats; the fifth one’s father was a Muslim mer-chant in a town around Niğde; the sixth one was the son of a wealthy Muslim man from Ka-rahisar; 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 col-lector representing the authority of the sultan

but instead came from the ranks of the

socio-economic 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 historiographi-cal 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 in-terests than ever before. These social inin-terests included those of the merchant elite in the cit-ies, whose representatives had infiltrated the janissary corps, as well as those of the agricul-tural landlords who had secured an official sta-tus 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 transfor-mation of a polity in which men with military power dominated the political process into a form of government in which civil power hold-ers 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

33. See their biographies in Osmanzade Ta’ib Ahmed,  Dilaverağazade Ömer Vahid, Ahmed Cavid, and Bag-dadi Abdülfettah Şevket, Hadîkatü’l-vüzerâ (ve

zeyil-leri) (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 Har-old Bowen, which refers to a rebellion on the part of  Muslims to take offices into their hands. See H. A. R. 

Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West:

A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Mos-lem Culture in the Near East, vol. 1, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University 

Press, 1950–57); and their critique by Norman Itz-kowitz, “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   Ottoman Historiography,” in The Early Modern

Otto-mans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia H. Aksan 

and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2007), 167–98.

36. Quoted by Niyazi Berkes, The Development of

Sec-ularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 

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conscripted into the ruling class, whereas civil power holders could originate from more mod-est political backgrounds and make their way into it by virtue of their socioeconomic capi-tal. 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 educa-tion 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 eigh-teenth 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 sev-eral 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 develop-ments 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 seculariza-tion 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

In-terestingly enough, with the exception of the Jewish messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, the Ottoman Empire did not witness much

mes-sianism 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 obsta-cles. This is at least the impression one has from the periodization found in certain chronicles of the time. Several seventeenth-century chron-icles display a tendency in their periodization

that I call the desacralization of a regnal under-standing 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 previ-ous 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

his-tory.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 janissar-ies 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

offi-cial historiography started to be read.40 _The

central legitimizing concept for this political in-stitution 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 au-thor’s wish that God make his rule everlasting, with the qualification, of course, “until the end of times” (khallada Allah mulkahu ila inqiraz

al-zaman). 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-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 con-temporary Ottoman religious movements, see Marc  David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam:

Conver-sion and Conquest in Ottoman

Europe (Oxford: Ox-ford 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.