The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 193
his advice is said to have been followed closely by Murad, to whom it was ad-
dressed. However, Koçi Bey’s work by no means stands alone; a whole wave
of similar texts, mostly of anonymous or contested authorship, shared the
same view of the present situation as a dangerous deviation from the rules of
Süleyman’s Golden Age and of the solution lying in a return to those rules. In
terms of form, these works were often composed as a continuation of earlier
“mirrors for princes”, such as Mustafa Ali’s Nushatü’s-selâtîn, which seems to
have set the standard for the genre. On the other hand, the themes dominant
in this ideological trend differ in many ways from Ali’s ideas; for instance, while
Ali was strongly critical of the devşirme system itself and favored the use of
educated freemen in the administration, the writers to be examined now con-
sider problematic the abandonment of the devşirme method of recruitment,
focusing rather on its enhancement against the intrusion of “strangers” into
the janissary ranks. The recurring themes of this trend show remarkable stabil-
ity: redress of the timar system and of the economic basis of the timariot sipa-
his, discipline and control (in terms of numbers and salaries) of the janissaries,
and suppression of bribery—these are the main lines that guide the reasoning
of political literature from the 1620s through to the 1640s. It would, perhaps,
be more fruitful to regard this trend as a reaction to the rise of the janissaries’
power rather than as an expression of a “constitutionalist” argument against
autocratic rule. Authors of this trend (closely associated with the government
apparatus, as shall be seen) clearly considered the widening of the janissaries’
social basis as an imminent threat to the social order and proposed a redressed
sipahi nobility as a potential counterweight.
Moreover, the transformation of the sultan’s power at a symbolic level
reached its climax with Osman II’s execution. Although eulogies of the Ottoman
dynasty are still found in all political works from throughout this century,
the personage of the sultan had undergone a rapid “desacralization” (to use
Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein’s words), one which reached a critical point
with Mustafa I’s deposition and continued right down to the early nineteenth
century.10 As has been seen, Ottoman political texts never (or almost never)
made too much of the sultan’s personal charisma: he had to be a mortal striving
for perfection, and he could succumb at any moment to the temptation of in-
justice and thus bring about his downfall. The notable exception can be seen in
various works authored during Süleyman’s reign (for instance, Celalzade’s) and
is probably linked with Süleyman’s own legitimizing endeavor, which, as has
been seen, was based (during the first decades of his reign) on messianic and
eschatological claims. Such claims continued on the part of individual sultans,
10 Vatin – Veinstein 2003, 66–68, 218–251.