“Mirrors for Princes”: The Decline Theorists^157
laws.24 At any rate, these expressions show that, on the one hand, by the
mid-sixteenth century the notion of “old custom” as an unbreakable rule had
already begun to be developed and, on the other, that it was still challengeable.
The author of Hirzü’l-mülûk often displays a similar attitude. As he once
remarks (Y175, A35),
May the sultan know that, whenever Sultan Selim [I], from among his
illustrious ancestors, ... [wished to act] in a manner beneficial to the
dynasty and the religion, he never said “this is contrary to Ottoman law”
(bu kânûn-ı Osmanî’ye muhâliftir); he issued his order at once declaring
that “whatever the great sultans do, becomes law” (selâtîn-i ‘izâm her ne
iderlerse kânûn olur).As already noted, this claim that the sultan should yield actual power may be
relevant to the fact that the treatise is dedicated to Murad III, who tried to
impose his will over viziers and ulema. There is more than the expression of
Süleymanic-era equilibrium in the emphasis on the sultan’s absolute power in
these late sixteenth-century works. Both these texts, and others that preceded
and followed them, are defending the feudal order, based on the welfare of
a strong and landed sipahi class and on strict social compartmentalization,
against the intrusion of newcomers into the timariot army and the administra-
tion of revenues. Why, then, do they not make recourse to the concept of “old
law”? Although, as will be seen, its use as a binding and legitimizing frame-
work was elaborated at the end of the century, the notion that justice con-
sists of following the “old law” was already current in the “decrees of justice”
or adaletnames during the reign of Selim I25 (not to mention the attacks on
“innovation”, with their long history). Still, whereas conservative discourse
from the end of the sixteenth century onwards was to take what Tezcan termed
a “constitutionalist” form, Kitâbu mesâlih and Hirzü’l-mülûk formulate the
same discourse from an “absolutist” point of view.
One possible answer is that our anonymous authors had not yet discovered
the outstanding power of the “old law” argument—or that the use of the “in-
novation” argument by the anti-Ebussu’ud opposition was too recent to let
them sanctify the Ebussu’udic synthesis as “old law” (although all authors of
this trend appear to ignore such debates completely). Yet it is also plausible
to assume that they were attributing the “innovations” disrupting the timariot
24 Tezcan 2000, 664, fn. 54. On Hersekoğlu Ahmed Pasha see İnalcık 1969a, 120–123; Lowry
2011.
25 See Sariyannis 2011a, 142.