The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 339
such distortions and malfunctions of the system, and that the situation had
never been permanently corrected.
Similarly, he dwells on the question of fixed prices (narh). Partially copying
Hüseyin Hezarfen’s passage on narh (see above, chapter 5), he maintains that
the grand vizier must not be content to assign that task to judges and muh-
tesibs: he must control prices in person, because it is a public matter (umur-ı
külliye) and, as such, a matter of politics (or: of the administrative branch,
emr-i siyaset), i.e. outside the competence of judges (U31).37 In the same vein,
Nahifi copies the same passage on fixed prices and remarks that handing over
affairs to inappropriate people and tradesmen (I25: ehl-i dekakin) may cause
great harm; allowing tradesmen and men of the market (esnaf ve sukî) into the
line of service (tarik) is like allowing strangers into one’s private apartments.
Taking up a subject popular in seventeenth-century political thinking,
Defterdar speaks at length of bribery (U55–63, W87–93), which, unlike Kâtib
Çelebi but similar to Koçi Bey and his circle, he sees mainly as connected with
the buying of governmental posts (although he also criticizes bribes in judges’
courts, noting that friendly gifts are acceptable only if nothing is asked in re-
turn: U61, W92). When a post is given to someone unworthy by bribery, it is
as if he has been given permission to plunder the property of the reaya, as
he is prone to extract from them the same amount of money that he gave in
bribes to obtain his office. Bribery is the root of all evil in the state, Defterdar
stresses; it inevitably leads to the ruin of agriculture and rural life, and of the
income of the treasury. The solution he proposes is unique. On the one hand,
provincial office-holders should be constantly checked by spies. On the other,
however, it is not proper that a governor be removed due to one or two com-
plaints (the same passage can be found in Nahifi); in the same vein, judges
should stay in office for exactly as long as they were appointed. This emphasis
on the duration of office-terms was inherited from the seventeenth century
and was to be increasingly repeated in eighteenth-century texts. Similarly de-
tailed is Defterdar’s account of the treasury and the posts of the Imperial divan,
a subject he knew very well (significantly, this chapter is almost entirely de-
voted to financial administration; U65–83, W94–109, and cf. Nahifi, I24). Here,
again, the essence of his advice has to do with securing terms of long duration
(U69, W96).
Defterdar’s discussion of the reaya (U93–99, W116–120) is somewhat hasty
and old-fashioned; significantly, earlier in his treatise he failed to even mention
them when describing the “circle of justice” (“there is no state save with men
of substance and no men of substance save with wealth”: U9, W64), and he
37 Defterdar uses the same passage in his Zübde-i vekayiat, while criticizing Fazıl Mustafa
Pasha’s attempted narh reform of 1691 (Defterdar – Özcan 1995, 388).