142 chapter 3
and thus he managed to inaugurate a whole new style of treatises, one that was
distinctively Ottoman.114
6 As a Conclusion: the Ideas at Hand, the Forces at Work
Instead of describing one specific line of thought, this chapter has offered a
panorama of ideas and trends that were circulating in the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury, an era that in the following century came to be considered as the heyday
of the Ottoman Empire. Some of these trends were in fact the ends of long
trains of thought, whose beginnings dated back to medieval times. These were,
primarily, the morality-centered view of politics and the abstract advice given
regarding rulership, which focused on ancient wisdom and the figure of the
ideal king. Works that were part of this trend, such as those of Celalzade, often
offered new insights (the glorification of the scribal bureaucracy, for instance)
within an old genre without departing from traditional moral theory. Others
were radical reconfigurations and calibrations of older debates and discus-
sions, such as the fikh arguments on the relationship between the Sharia and
secular government. Finally, with Lütfi Pasha’s influential essay, there is the
glorious beginning of a new tradition, one focusing on institutional rather than
personal advice and on up-to-date information on the state and its functions.
At the same time, this era saw an array of social conflicts and of economic,
social, and political developments that would soon radically transform the
structure from which they had arisen. In many ways, Süleyman’s reign was
thus a time of balance between emerging and declining powers, emerging
and declining genres and theories, and paths that would soon be abandoned
and roads about to be followed. Of course, it would be somewhat naïve to say
that there is a one-to-one correspondence between social groups and actors
on the one hand, and genres or ideological currents on the other. Yet it is cer-
tainly possible to explore affinities and dependencies, and political thought
has never been produced in vitro. Thus, Süleyman’s era was probably the final
time that the old feudal apparatus could feel confident and that it was the mas-
ter of the socio-economic structure. Feudal relations had already begun to be
disrupted, but there was still the grip of the state and the whole government
apparatus was trying hard to keep these relations intact. One may see this con-
fidence in the way Ebussu’ud used fikh in order to serve the purpose of keeping
114 Semerkandi’s Latâ’if al-Afkâr (1529), Alayi b. Muhibbi al-Şirazi al-Şerif ’s Düstûrü’l-vüzerâ
(1558; Şirazî – Dokuzlu 2012) and ‘Ârifî Ma ’ruf Efendi’s ‘Ukûd al-jawâhir (1560) also discuss
the vizier rather than the sultan (Yılmaz 2005, 68–70, 99–101, and 91–93, respectively).