The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 213
throughout the seventeenth century, in what Rifaat Abou-El-Haj labelled “the
tendency toward a progressive separation between the state and the ruling
class”.45 By the late sixteenth century, the Ottoman bureaucracy enjoyed an
exceptional longevity of term (in sharp contrast with other administrative
apparatus), while its reproduction strategies ensured a continuity of mental-
ity and perhaps ideology. As the bureaucratization of the empire required a
large scribal apparatus, the old career lines (ilmiye education for the chancery,
palace kuls for the financial branch) became inadequate and clerks began to
use their own networks of intisab (patronage) to reproduce their skills.46 The
professionalization of the scribal class, which was to become even more in-
tense from the late seventeenth century onwards, led to its increased visibil-
ity in both political theory and practice. It would be only natural, one may
argue, that their voices would become increasingly distinct and visible in the
political discourse. Having identified their interests with those of the central
government, they perceived an enlarged political nation of janissaries-cum-
“lumpenesnaf ” (whom they called “intruding strangers”) as a major threat, one
which could be counterbalanced by a stronger sipahi army.
3 Administration Manuals: an Ottoman Genre
In order to understand better such political activity by the Ottoman bureau-
crats, one must step back and go back in time somewhat. If a common source
of “declinist” ideology can be traced in late sixteenth-century “mirrors for
princes” such as Mustafa Ali’s works, another lies at the very core of scribal
literary-administrative production, namely the tendency for the codification of
the law. In chapter 3 the obsession of bureaucrat authors (such as Celalzade)
with lists was noted; and one may say that such lists (of janissary numbers,
of timars, of provinces) had a normative role in the Kitab-ı müstetâb and in
Koçi Bey’s work. In fact, even before the 1630s, authors who shared Koçi Bey’s
(and his predecessors’ and followers’) views about the causes and solutions
45 Abou-El-Haj 2005, 7. My discussion here is based on Sariyannis 2013, 103–111; cf. also
Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 63ff.
46 This self-reproduction appears to have begun with the financial branch, whereas the
chancery remained attached to the medrese tradition for slightly longer: Fleischer 1986a,
- The story of the rise of the post of the re’isülküttab, the chief of scribes (as opposed
to that of the nişancı, the chancellor), in combination with the former’s short tenures, as
narrated by Woodhead 2006, may be interpreted as the beginning of a similar autonomy
and self-reproduction in the chancery branch during the last two decades of the sixteenth
century.