Introduction 15
of its political ideas.51 As such, I follow Rifaat Abou-El-Haj’s suggestion that the
late seventeenth century marks the transition of the Ottoman Empire into an
early-modern state (with the state’s autonomy from the ruler being the central
feature); this view has recently been enhanced by Baki Tezcan, for whom the
expansion of the political nation (i.e. the groups that can legitimately partici-
pate in state power) and the limiting of the sultan’s authority by the ulema and
the janissaries were such developments, and that they can be traced to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.52 While it was emerging as an autono-
mous entity, the state gradually took more and more power from the hands
of the sultan himself and, at the same time, became a field of contest for an
extended “political nation”, one which tried to gain control of state power
instead of finding alternative loci of authority. This process may not have been
entirely successful, as it was full of regressions and shortcomings, but it was
at least evident in its degree of legitimization. The present book intends to
focus on the Ottoman case, and therefore it departs from the generalizations
of “Islamic political thought”; after all, the trend in Ottoman studies currently
is to consider the Ottoman Empire an early-modern state comparable to con-
temporaneous European empires and states rather than (or, more correctly, as
much as) a continuation of medieval Islamic political entities and traditions
(not to mention the ongoing debate over what is “Islamic” or “Islamicate”).53
This view became popular in the late 1990s: we can quote Linda T. Darling,
for instance, who argued in 1998 that “for most of the early modern period,
Middle Eastern history followed a similar trajectory, not an opposite one, to
that of the west”; almost simultaneously, Virginia Aksan, taking it as granted
that the Ottomans were an “early modern empire” similar to the Habsburgs
and the Romanovs, outlined the similarities and the common features those
states shared with the Ottoman Empire, especially militarily.54
51 My discussions with Antonis Anastasopoulos, Christos Hadziiossif, and Antonis
Hadjikyriacou were essential for writing this section.
52 Abou-El-Haj 2005; Tezcan 2010a. James E. Baldwin recently expanded this thought to
Ottoman provincial history, analyzing a military uprising in Cairo and finding that
“a public law emerged which ... was external to the Sultanate”, as “the authority to define
it no longer rested with the Sultan, and was instead claimed by other sections of the rul-
ing class” (Baldwin 2015, 157). Interestingly, a similar interpretation was recently offered
for the Byzantine Empire, where of course there can be no issue of “early modernity”
(Kaldellis 2013 and esp. 2015).
53 Ahmed 2016; Griffel 2017.
54 Darling 1998, 241; Aksan 1999; a broader comparison (including the Mughals) was
attempted by Subrahmanyam 2006. The term “early modern empires” may be seen as a
wider form of Marshall Hodgson’s “gunpowder empires”.