230 chapter 5

vardur). Then Dımışki proceeds to enumerate in detail the various corps and
groups of the army, in a careful hierarchy of divisions and subdivisions; he
begins with the palace personnel and describes at length the protocol of the
imperial council. Then he speaks of the servants of the palace, giving detailed
lists of their daily salaries. In the next section (16.B–20.B) Dımışki speaks of
the ulema, closely following Hezarfen’s categorizations (external and internal
ulema) and his account of the relationship between the şeyhülislam and the
grand vizier; as such, it seems that this addition to the genre by Hezarfen had,
by then, become classic.
In the section on governors (20.B–22.B), Dımışki, always copying Hezarfen,
stresses that the governor is the sultan’s proxy (vekil) and points out several
specific points regarding the governors’ retinue, the timariots, and so on, be-
fore giving a detailed enumeration of the governorships, their revenue, and
the number of soldiers owed by each one (22.B–23.B), as well as some rules
on the bestowal of timars. The next sections (24.B–36.B) deal with the sala-
ried army; here, Dımışki inserts an excursus on the creation of the janissaries
(25.B–35.A), where he almost places the point of their decline at the very be-
ginning of their existence: “Peasants heard this news and wanted to enlist in
the sultan’s service. Many men enlisted ... and as time passed they began being
seditious” (25.B–26.A). Allegedly, it was after this that the janissaries began to
be recruited via the devşirme. After describing their rules and structure in de-
tail, Dımışki describes the arsenal and the navy and summarizes the budget for
the year A.H. 1090/1679, just as Hezarfen had done for 1660/1 (36.B–37.A). Next,
he gives the rules and protocol for imperial campaigns, adding a short history
of the great Ottoman conquests (37.A–43.A). The rest (and indeed the largest
part) of Dımışki’s treatise is a concise but full description of Ottoman territory,
from Istanbul (43.B–49.B; with stories on its creation, conquest, buildings, and
population) to Egypt (126.B–134.A).

...

Thus, “administration manuals” continued to be produced throughout the sev-
enteenth century. However, their accuracy compared to the actual situation of
the empire grew weaker and weaker over time. If early seventeenth-century
texts were outdated or exaggerated, Hezarfen’s treatise is extraordinarily so: his
use of Lütfi Pasha, already 150 years old, for matters such as the function and
income of viziers, and of Ebussu’ud Efendi for land-holding regulations, shows
that his work was conceived more as a compilation than as an actual descrip-
tion or a political agenda. Why, then, should a late seventeenth-century author
copy mining regulations almost two centuries old? The answer may be found