342 chapter 8
conditions by action from outside the corps. Absolutely without question
it can come about only through the trustworthiness and uprightness of
the persons mentioned above ... But in this affair consultation and de-
liberateness are extremely essential. The corps in question is impatient
both of being too much troubled and oppressed and of being treated
with boundless kindness (U87–91, W113–115).While Defterdar had seen with his own eyes what angry janissaries could do
since he was present at the 1703 rebellion, as he writes more than a decade
later, it is more probable that such caution and circumspection was more relat-
ed to an acknowledgment of the newly-established reality: he was aware that
the janissaries had, by then, their say in palace and government politics and
that this situation was legitimate enough to be taken into account in political
discourse as well as in practice.38
We postulated that Defterdar was sympathetic to Mustafa II’s absolutism
but that he preferred to suggest a sort of sharing of power with the very rebels
who overthrew the sultan. The key to understanding this apparent contradic-
tion appears to be the second point in which he differs from earlier advice,
and this is his emphasis on the need for longevity in appointments. Although
such a demand was a recurring issue in many seventeenth-century treatises,39
in these early eighteenth-century works it forms a key theme: governors and
governor-generals should keep their posts for life, judges should stick to their
appointed term durations, and defterdars and their clerks should feel secure
in their posts. One may see a reflection of the bitterness our authors appear to
have experienced as regards their careers: having complained that there is no
longer any friendship in this world, Defterdar asserts that high offices are like
hot baths, as those who enter want to leave them and those who leave want to
enter (U49, W85; an almost contemporaneous echo of such thoughts can be
seen in Nabi’s Hayriyye). Similarly, Nahifi notes bitterly that there is no end to
the villainies of this time, and gives several morality-based reasons. However,
personal experiences aside, the emphasis on long terms in bureaucratic posts
may be seen as a plea to link continuation of policies with continuation of per-
sonnel. The financial and tax reforms clearly followed the same lines as those
of the last decades of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth
century, despite viziers and other administrators continuously changing.
Defterdar’s shifting allegiances, therefore, conceal his belonging to a scribal
tradition that was experiencing an extraordinary continuity along policy lines.
It was only natural that they should also advocate stability in their directing
38 Cf. Tezcan 2010a, 224–225.
39 Terzioğlu 2010, 270–271, 307; Sariyannis 2013, 105–106, fn. 91.