192 chapter 5
rather than in their rulers’ hopelessness. Obviously, Veysi was responding to an
expanding sense of decline for which departures from the old law were mainly
held responsible. It is noteworthy, too, that the work is fictional in character,
especially since political discourse is placed into the sphere of dreams, not un-
like the prophetic vision in Papasnâme.
According to Baki Tezcan’s recent reading of seventeenth-century Ottoman
history, this canonization of the “old law” was one of two ways in which the on-
going “constitutionalization” of Ottoman power was expressed. Tezcan spoke
of “the second Empire”, explained as “the expansion of the political nation and
the limitation of royal authority”, when “a much larger segment of the impe-
rial administration came to consist of men whose social origins were among
the commoners” and “[t]hus more and more men whose backgrounds were in
finance and trade came to occupy significant positions in the government of
the empire, replacing those military slaves and civilizing the imperial polity”.
In this process, various factions (ulemas, military groups, powerful households,
etc.) began to challenge and legitimately limit (or claim to have the legitima-
cy to limit) royal authority from the beginning of the seventeenth century.8
Islamic political theory, at any rate, had already been putting restraints on ab-
solute rule, be they the religious (or legalist) approach favored by Ibn Taymiyya
and (as seen, and as shall be seen later) Birgivi and his followers, or the need
for justice stressed by Persian writers. What was originally Ottoman in all this
is the cult of the “old law” and of the institutions of the “Golden Age” as well
as the underlying notion that these rules and institutions served or were in-
tended to serve as a kind of constitution, i.e. as binding rules for the sultan
to follow.9 It was seen in chapter 4 that, in a (perhaps deliberate) slip of the
tongue, Mustafa Ali writes literally that Mehmed II “promulgated an old law”
(bir kanun-i kadim), thus identifying the established rules with those that are
just. It was in the early seventeenth century that this identification took on an
elaborate and systematic form.
1.1 “Constitutionalism” and Charismatic Rulership
Somewhat paradoxically (if one keeps the association of the “old law” theo-
rists with “Ottoman constitutionalism”), however, this kind of reasoning was,
in more than one way, associated with Murad IV, seemingly one of the most
autocratic sultans in Ottoman history. Indeed, the most famous expounder
of the “Golden Age” idea, Koçi Bey, was also perhaps the most successful, as
8 Tezcan 2010a, passim (the citations are from pp. 232 and 10); cf. Vatin – Veinstein 2003, 84, 219;
Yılmaz 2008; Sariyannis 2013; Yılmaz 2015a.
9 Tezcan 2010a, 48ff.