Introduction 25
Hırzü’l-mülûk) before focusing on the enormous work by Gelibolulu Mustafa
Ali (d. 1600), who expressed deep disappointment over what he considered to
be the decay of knowledge and of the imperial institutions, combining it with
an acute sense of Islamic history as a series of rising and falling dynasties. The
chapter then examines some similar works and ideas by other late sixteenth-
century authors, such as the historian Mustafa Selaniki and the Bosnian schol-
ar Hasan Kâfi Akhisari. In so doing, it will demonstrate that their sometimes
apocalyptic pessimism can be interpreted through the general climate of their
time, which was seen as a period of crisis that had to be overcome.
In the fifth chapter, the “decline theorists” and the form their work took in
the first decades of the seventeenth century (when the emphasis on institu-
tions and the departure from an ideal state took a highly standardized form)
will be further examined. These authors, while further deepening their prede-
cessors’ “Ottomanization” (by concentrating on specific Ottoman institutions
and practices, rather than citing general ideas and advice), focused on the
need to return to the glorious past: institutions of the early or mid-sixteenth
century were idealized and strict adherence to the “old law” was advocated. On
the one hand, we will examine works such as the anonymous Kitâb-ı müstetâb
(ca. 1620), Koçi Bey’s treatise (ca. 1630–1), the “Veliyyuddin telhis” (1632), and
Aziz Efendi’s essay (1633), all of which share the same view, namely that the
present situation was a dangerous deviation from the rules of Süleyman’s
Golden Era and that the solution was to return to those rules; most of these
authors seem to have been associated with Murad IV and his efforts to
impose discipline and order on the janissary army after the upheavals of the
1620s. On the other hand, there is a set of authors who went a step further and,
instead of comparing the shortcomings of the situation during their lives
against the standards of a “Golden Age”, they simply laid down rules they
believed the government should follow. The normative role of lists and of
kanun or “regulations” was clear by the late sixteenth century, but it reached
a peak in the first decades of the seventeenth. These works include Koçi Bey’s
second treatise (1640), the anonymous Kavânîn-ı yeniçeriyân (1606), Ayn Ali’s
(ca. 1610) and Avni Ömer’s (1642) descriptions of the janissary and timar sys-
tem, and some general surveys of the empire, such as the majority of Hezarfen
Hüseyin Efendi’s compilation (1675) and the anonymous Kavânîn-ı osmanî ve
rabıta-ı Asitâne (after 1688) as well as other, similar texts.
The sixth chapter (written by Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas) aims to follow the
seventeenth-century conceptualizations of an ideal political order based on
the double premise of the Sharia and the prophetic Sunna. A large part of the
Ottoman seventeenth century has been viewed as having been dominated by
three generations of “fundamentalist” preachers known as the Kadızadelis.