The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 343
posts, obviously combined with enhanced self-reproduction: after all, this was
the era of efendis-turned-pashas, such as Rami Mehmed and Defterdar him-
self. We might perhaps see the same self-confidence displayed in the distrust of
pashas’ households found in the Anonymous history, when the author urges vi-
ziers not to make distinctions between their men and strangers in their house
(Ö37).
Thus, there was a group of administrators and writers at the beginning of
the eighteenth century who preferred to move away from the more theoreti-
cal and philosophical style of the post-Kâtib Çelebi Ottoman literature and to
make very specific proposals out of their experiences instead. As will be seen
in both this and the following chapter, such a focus on the concrete and the
actual was to become a standard feature of eighteenth-century political ad-
vice, unprecedented from the time of the early seventeenth-century “declin-
ists”. As this feature was much more intense on the “traditionalist” side (Resmi
Efendi of the “Westernizers” being a notable exception), one may say that they
saw themselves as continuing the “Golden Age” theorists even if they hard-
ly refer to a “Golden Age”. It will become clear in the next chapter that the
“Westernizing” side, on the contrary, based itself much more on Kâtib Çelebi’s
and Na’ima’s paradigm. At any rate, the significant presence of detailed admin-
istrative advice in this group of texts reflects the increased role of the financial
and other scribal bureaucracy in forming Ottoman policies from the late sev-
enteenth century.
3 The Last of the Traditionalists
As has been remarked, while the time from the end of the “Tulip Period” to the
Russo-Ottoman war in the late 1760s saw many attempts at reform, political
literature remained rather neglected. On the other hand, it should be noted
that the work of non-political essayists on quite specific administrative prob-
lems remains unstudied. A good example is the defterdar Atıf Mustafa Efendi
(d. 1742) and his treatise on the sıvış years, i.e. the problems emanating from the
discrepancy between solar and lunar years. In this work, Atıf Mustafa Efendi
boldly proposes that payments should also be made according to the solar
calendar, and characteristically bases his proposal on a number of Quranic
quotations, ranging from the people’s need for salaries to the legitimacy of the
solar calendar.40 The self-confidence that educated Ottomans seem to have
40 Âtıf Efendi – Gemici 2009; on the sıvış crises cf. Sahillioğlu 1968 and 1970. Efforts to make
a compromise between the two systems, in order to ease this problem, had begun in 1710
(Sahillioğlu 1970, 246–247); cf. Küçük 2017, 8–11.