Khaldunist Philosophy: Innovation Justified 283
experimental new landholding and cadastral methods based on private own-
ership of arable lands, and the extension of the tax-farming system to lifelong
leases (malikâne).13 On the ideological level, it was noted that these reforms
were more often than not justified not in terms of the “old law” but of correct
Sunna practice. On the social level, all these measures fully conformed to the
needs of a by-then highly monetized economy, not only on the part of the state
(which thus covered more and more of its needs in ready cash) but also on the
part of a new group of elite entrepreneurs. Tax-farmers, money-lenders who
now made loans to whole villages in order to render possible the payment of
taxes, and real-estate profiteers—they all benefited from financial experiment,
no matter what their legal justifications might be. As the “old law” argument
was, from the beginning, connected to the old feudal relations, market-oriented
reforms made recourse to the other prevalent juristic reasoning, the appeal to
the principles of the Sunna.14 Furthermore, these elite entrepreneurs were not
only newcomers, Christian and Muslim; a large part of tax-farming and money
lending was, by the late seventeenth century and increasingly so in the cen-
tury to come, effectuated by the janissary units, who had their own funds and
networks.15 Besides, vizier and pasha households, always in dire need of cash
in order to maintain their patronage networks, their retinue, and the ability
to buy governmental posts for their clients, began to be increasingly actively
engaged in the market (the famous example of Derviş Mehmed Pasha, so mas-
terfully studied by Metin Kunt, will be examined in detail later).16
In chapter 6, Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas showed the role played by Köprülü viziers,
such as Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha, in initiating some of these market-
oriented reforms (including the short-lived abolition of narh or fixed prices—
the reader might remember here Hezarfen’s defence of this institution) in
tandem with their Sunna-minded legitimization; she also remarked that this
the scribal bureaucracy, see also Sariyannis 2013, 103–111; on festivals and their symbolic
role, cf. Faroqhi 2008, 74ff.; Murphey 2008, 175ff.
13 On the poll-tax reform cf. Darling 2006, 125 (who remarks that with such reforms it ap-
pears that “a greater portion of the financial burden of empire was transferred to a shrink-
ing non-Muslim population”) and Sariyannis 2011b; on the landholding-cum-taxation
reforms, see Kolovos 2007; Kermeli 2008; Veinstein 2008; on the malikâne see Darling
2006, 126–129. The developments in the book-keeping of the imperial government attest
to the growing specialization of the central bureaucracy throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury, too: see Soyer 2007.
14 Cf. Sariyannis 2012.
15 Yi 2004, 132–143; Tezcan 2010a, 184–190, 198–212. Yannis Spyropoulos is currently under-
taking a research project on these janissary networks.
16 Kunt 1977; Faroqhi 1994, 547–549. For an earlier instance of such entrepreneurial prac-
tices by a pasha, see Gel 2013b.