“Mirrors for Princes”: The Decline Theorists^187
the problems created for the peasants by monetization and the disruption of
the old tax and landholding system. In terms of political power, late sixteenth-
century authors usually favored absolutism, as they urged the sultans to take
back the reins of power from their viziers and take action. However, as shall
be seen in the next chapter, it was inevitable that a more “constitutionalist”
view would prevail. On the one hand, as the notion of the “old law” was in-
creasingly sanctified and idealized while, at the same time, the person of the
sultan was undergoing a continuous desacralization, “old law” was bound to
form a sort of binding constitution that would claim to rule each individual
sultan’s whims. On the other hand, the rise of a new political force, the janis-
sary army, was making the conditional power of the ruler a de facto standard
feature of Ottoman politics. Even authors who wished to limit the janissaries’
power had to admit this reality, and by then the argument for an old, sanctified
order, one in which janissaries had been nothing more than faithful slaves, had
become stronger than any appeal to the personal power and will of the sultan to
repress them.