The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 219
campaign; on the other, the inspections due in each campaign are not con-
ducted properly nor are their results registered and kept. Ayn Ali claims that,
as defter-i hakani emini, he himself tried to correct this last practice, but gener-
ally it has been 20 or 30 years since an inspection was carried out or registered.
The second treatise, Risâle-i vazife-horân (AA82–104; T111–123; A89–106),
seeks to register all the persons, high and low, who “take salaries from the im-
perial threshold” (AA85; T113; A91: atebe-i aliyye-i padişahîde her ay vazife ve ...
üç ayda bir mevacib ... alan havass ve avam); as such, Ayn Ali collected and list-
ed all the salaries paid in the final third of A.H. 1018 (1609) in order to present
a full and detailed image of the palace personnel and standing army at that
time. The treatise is divided into four parts, roughly following a course from
the outer to the inner service of the palace. First, Ayn Ali lists the numbers and
salaries of the janissary infantry and cavalry, then proceeds through the navy,
the arsenal, and the palace military personnel, before reaching the inner ser-
vices of the palace, including the scribes of the Imperial Council and the other
services (in the epilogue, he also lists the salaries of the higher ulema, praising
the Sultan for the care and respect he shows for this illustrious group).
Ayn Ali used imperial registers and kanunnames, and probably scribal manu-
als as well, and his work was widely imitated. It seems that after the early 1640s,
i.e. after the outburst of “declinist” literature that coincided with Murad IV’s
reign, a number of treatises sought to describe in detail the (now dying) timar
system, enumerating the provinces of the empire and their timariot structure
and revenues, as well as analyzing the terminology and categories of the vari-
ous timars. Two almost identical versions are the treatise copied by (and by
some scholars attributed to) Sofyalı Ali Çavuş in 1653 and another similar de-
scription, copied the same year.59 All these texts, including part of Ayn Ali’s
essay, seem to be based on a series of kanunname texts from the Süleymanic
era, with corrections and amendations reflecting more or less minor changes
in the structure of the empire.60 As Douglas Howard has put it, Ayn Ali used
such “scribal manuals” as “literary models”, copying them with corrections and
emendations and adding his own commentary and advice.61
Another version is Avni Ömer’s treatise, Kânûn-ı Osmânî mefhûm-i defter-i
hakanî (“Ottoman laws, or, the contents of the imperial register”), which also
contains an introduction on landholding status in Ottoman lands.62 Avnî
59 Hadžibegić 1947; Sertoğlu 1992; Ali Çavuş – Şahin 1979.
60 See Akgündüz 1990–1996, 4:455–527; Howard 2007, 156, fn 97; Howard 2008. Cf. also
Howard 1996 for an overview of the timariotic kanunnames.
61 Howard 2008, 95–98.
62 Avni Ömer – Uzunçarşılı 1951. See also Gökbilgin 1991, 212; Howard 2008.