The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 209
a story he relates, one of the things that can destroy a powerful state is that
the gates of bribery open and posts start to be bought and sold (Y30, A630).
Koçi Bey also considers bribery the root of all evil and corruption and argues
that the first step toward its abolition is the independence of the grand vi-
zier. Moreover, the allotment of positions in the ulema and bureaucracy must
be free from bribery; the number of all these positions should be defined and
those that surpass it should be given timars and serve as sipahis. If all positions
and fiefs were given with honesty and uprightness, nobody would give or take
bribes (A59–60; Ç77–78).
Bribery, it should be noted, had been a common feature of works complain-
ing about societal problems ever since the beginnings of the Ottoman state.
However, whereas older references placed more emphasis on the sinful use of
bribes by judges and poor peasants, having to bribe officials in order to save
their property, in these early seventeenth-century texts (following a trend seen
earlier in Mustafa Ali and Selaniki) almost every reference to bribery concerns
the buying and selling of posts, and especially of high-ranking ones. As in the
case of Ali’s grievances about a lack of meritocracy, here again there is prob-
ably a reaction against newcomers in the bureaucracy and administration: by
this time, pasha households had begun to push their own men into provin-
cial administration, as shown by Metin Kunt, and the ongoing monetization
of the economy might have replaced old patterns of patronage (intisab) with
a system of money-lending ties not dissimilar to tax-farming.36 It has been re-
marked that similar procedures can also be seen in early-modern Europe and
that, in any case, they were part and parcel of state formation rather than man-
ifestations of decline.37 It must be noted that, unlike Ali, who lamented the
dominant position of kuls in administration and advocated a more medrese-
oriented career path, these authors defend the palace-trained kul administra-
tion against the practice of recruiting newcomers from the emerging urban
strata.
2.3 The Sultan and His Government
To sum up, it is clear that all these texts belong to a common trend, one quite
distinct from but often using ideas that originated in earlier, late sixteenth-cen-
tury “mirrors for princes”. The general idea of a “Golden Age” vs. decline apart,
they share a common set of ideas for the reorganization of the state apparatus
along the lines that once led it to might and glory. We read that the viziers
36 On the development of the Ottoman administration at the turn of the seventeenth cen-
tury see Kunt 1983; Kunt 2012; Faroqhi 1994, 570–572.
37 Abou-El-Haj 2005, 8–9 and 129–131 (n. 13).