98 chapter 2
in the second half of the sixteenth century, the pattern of the “circle of justice”
and the four-fold division of society, together with the emphasis on the need
for balance, was to form the basic vocabulary of Ottoman political ideas until
at least the middle of the seventeenth century. As for the underlying notion of
a divinely ordained, universal “world order”, this also continued to shape much
of the Ottoman world vision, well into the eighteenth century.