The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 221
they certainly do pertain to political thought. Together with the “declinist”
treatises, they represent the climax of a trend that dominated Ottoman policy
planning (regardless of its success) from the last decades of the sixteenth until
almost the mid-seventeenth century, a trend that sanctified not the will of the
ruler but the old and tested practice, considering it a sort of constitution bind-
ing actual political action. Sultans who tried to circumvent these old rules were
criticized and even (in Osman II’s case) deposed, on the very grounds that
they ignored this sanctified “old law”. On another level, such ideas were partly
aimed at fighting the causes of social forces, such as the timar-holders, who
had vested interests in the continuation of the feudal relations and of the di-
rect collection of rural taxes by this provincial military. On the other hand, they
sought to use these forces, and the force of their ideas, as a counter-balance to
the growing political power of the urban janissaries. In a way, therefore, these
authors shared with the janissaries the concept of a constitutional system, one
in which the sultan’s decisions would be checked and regulated by a “political
nation”, the extent of which could vary (and in which the janissaries included
themselves). Competition about who should be entitled to participate in and,
ultimately, to dominate this “political nation” was fierce and would become
even fiercer during the course of the century. By claiming the omnipotence of
the “old law”, the governmental bureaucracy (as its sole legitimate interpreter)
in fact advocated its own supremacy in the political field.
4 The Afterlife of the Genre: Late Seventeenth-Century Manuals
Calls for a return to “the old laws” grew weaker during the rest of the seven-
teenth century, as will be seen in the next two chapters; however, the “admin-
istration manuals” genre, offering compilations of rules and lists of provinces
and military guards or salaries, continued to flourish, with authors often copy-
ing each other. As will be seen in chapter 7, from the mid-seventeenth century
onwards and Kâtib Çelebi’s work new directions emerged, ones that consti-
tuted a complete vision for human society once more (this time influenced by
Ibn Khaldun’s ideas); therefore, the tendency to make compilations of older
sources predominated in authors continuing the tradition of the “old law”—a
cause which increasingly seemed lost.
A celebrated example of such late “administration manual” is Hüseyin
Hezarfen’s work. Hezârfen Hüseyin Efendi b. Ca’fer (c. 1611–91)65 was educated
65 Hezarfen’s birth and death dates are a matter of debate. Wurm (1971, 74 and 83) accepts
1611 (based on a Venetian account of his age) and 1691 (based on a marginal note recorded