140 chapter 3

official in various ranks. It is better to give the mukataas, the public revenues,
as government offices (emanet ile) rather than as tax-farming (T39). Every year,
the budget must be checked in order to plan for the next.
Another striking novelty of Lütfi’s treatise is his obsession with prevent-
ing peasant mobility. Somewhat awkwardly, he inserts a remark at the end of
his chapter on the grand vizier stating that a reaya cannot be a sipahi if he is
not a son or grandson of a sipahi, otherwise, everybody would want to be a
sipahi and nobody would produce anything. He takes up this subject in detail
in his fourth and final chapter (T40–44), which concerns the reaya. Instead of
the usual emphasis on justice, here Lütfi prefers to stress the need to prevent
peasant mobility. His specific concern is the unauthorized intrusion of peas-
ants into the army’s ranks. He emphasizes that only certain types of soldier
(the eşkinci, ellici and akıncı) are to be recruited from the peasant population.
The administrative tool permitting control of the reaya is the tax registers, he
writes, which have to be conducted every 30 years and are kept in the impe-
rial council. Whenever a reaya leaves one place for another due to oppression,
the judge must send him back to avoid the ruin of the land (Lütfi makes no
further reference to stopping the oppression!). Even the descendants of the
Prophet must be controlled by their chief, who has to check for intruders. If a
reaya obtains a fief for some reason, or becomes an ulema, his relatives must
still remain taxable peasants. More generally, Lütfi argues that the reaya must
not be encouraged (re’ayete çok yüz virmemek gerekdür); if they obtain large
properties, they should not be oppressed, but they cannot dress in the manner
of a sipahi. Thus, for Lütfi, strict compartmentalization is the essence of reaya
administration. Everything he has to say regarding justice, of course, is again to
do with specific Ottoman institutions and realities: namely, that extraordinary
levies (avariz) must be collected at regular intervals and that oarsmen for the
fleet are to be levied according to the empire’s law and paid by the treasury.

...

Lütfi, it seems, deliberately chose to avoid any theoretical or even moral mus-
ings, focusing instead on highlighting his day-to-day experience in the Ottoman
administration in order to compile a manual for his successors. This does not
mean, however, that there is no theory underlying his advice: the passages
on the moral qualities of a vizier, on the importance of the imperial council,
and—perhaps most importantly of all—on the strict compartmentalization of
society between the taxable reaya and the untaxable administrative and mili-
tary personnel (the askeri) clearly follow earlier trends (although the two-fold
division of society according to taxation comes from Ottoman practice rather