The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 345
the authors to be studied here, Dürri Mehmed Efendi may be described as a
follower of Na’ima’s vision for peace as a prerequisite for reform. As for Canikli
Ali Pasha and Süleyman Penah Efendi, they both begin with a specific mili-
tary situation of a provincial nature, which they describe in detail, before then
trying to make the best of their own experiences and (in the case of Penah
Efendi) their readings. Interestingly, they both place significant emphasis on
non-military matters, from the economy to town-planning, in sharp contrast to
the “Westernizers”, who preferred to focus on army reforms. Penah Efendi even
looks to the Spanish experience in the Americas for policy models, in another
example of the blurred borders between “traditionalist” and “Westernizing”
authors.
Dürri Mehmed Efendi was born around 1734 in Kayseri. In 1751 he entered
the chancellery bureaucracy and served in various positions, and in 1774 he was
in the retinue of Abdülkerim Efendi, who had been sent to Bucharest to negoti-
ate the peace with Russia. He participated in another peace delegation in 1790–
91, when he was sent, together with the reisülküttab Abdullah Birri Efendi, to
a meeting between the envoys of Prussia, England, and the Netherlands to ne-
gotiate another peace with Austria. Dürri’s career reached its zenith in 1794,
when he was appointed reisülküttab, only to die the same year. His Nuhbetü’l-
emel f î tenkîhi’l-fesâdi ve’l-halel (“Selected wishes for the emendation of mis-
chief and disorder”) was composed in early 1774 and is preserved in only one
copy; interestingly, the same manuscript also contains various embassy re-
ports (including the famous report of Ebubekir Ratıb Efendi; see below, chap-
ter 9), Humbaracı Ahmed Pasha (Comte de Bonneval)’s treatise (see below,
chapter 9), and even the translation of a letter by Louis XVI to the French
National Assembly.43 The very composition of the collection, therefore, high-
lights the blurred line between “traditionalist” and “Westernizing” authors. In
Dürri’s treatise, as will be seen, references to the “old law” sit alongside a cri-
tique of the tax-farming system and the emphasis on reordering the army that
is typical of the eighteenth century.
Not all political treatises of the period were composed by bureaucrats. An
outstanding example of an active ayan who was deeply involved in both war
and politics and who also cared to record his views on the contemporary prob-
lems of the Ottoman Empire was Canikli Ali Pasha (1720/1–85). He was born in
43 Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi, E.H. 1438, ff. 281b–296a. For a description of the
manuscript (which, however, omits an account of Azmi’s embassy, following Dürri’s
treatise) see Karatay 1961, 1:311 (no. 966). Atik 1998 gives a detailed synopsis of the text
(with several mistakes in the identification of the manuscript, based on a faulty reading
of Karatay’s entry). On the treatise, cf. Menchinger 2014a, 124–126; Menchinger 2017, 85,
88–89.