Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 439
justice” (adaletname), i.e. circulars against the illegal practices of local officials
and notables.21 But even after justice had taken up a central place in the late
Middle Ages, few cared to define it: as Franz Rosenthal notes, “it was taken for
granted what justice was, and it was not subjected to searching interpretation”.22
Boğaç Ergene identified two alternative definitions of justice. One was used
by the “imperial center” and, following the Persian political tradition, was
viewed as the shepherd-like ruler protecting the reaya against the abuses of
the military elite. Another definition, used by some members of the ruling elite
(Ergene traces this definition to some passages by Mustafa Ali, Evliya Çelebi,
and Na’ima), understood justice as the recognition of the mutual rights and
obligations of the sultan and his servants. According to Ergene, while the first
definition was mainly adopted in state documents and regulations, the second
seems to have gained weight during the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. The struggle between the segments of the elite to secure or claim their
positions throughout the seventeenth-century crisis of society and state must
have been pivotal in this shift.23 However, as will be analyzed below, political
thought insisted (and even became more pronounced) in defining justice in
relation to peasants.
In works such as Aşıkpaşazade’s history, as seen in chapter 1, justice is gen-
erally conceived as the absence of greed, while the identification of justice
with generosity can also be seen in Ahmedi. For these early authors, those who
should be protected are the warriors rather than the peasants. Although the
sixteenth century abounds in texts assuming justice to be a personal character-
istic of the sultan, who has to protect the welfare of his flock, it has been noted
that the sultan as a person had, by the mid-sixteenth century, “largely retreated
from [many authors’] conceptions of justice and the social reality it tendered”
and that justice was viewed more as a “generalizable marker of the status quo,
representing stability via social hierarchy” rather than “a personal quality ema-
nating from the ruler”.24 Indeed, a group of more elaborate texts, mostly based
on the falasifa tradition, emphasize justice as the maintaining of a balance
between the various parts of society. Thus, for the Tusian authors justice has
three types, namely equity in distributing property or social rank, justice in
financial transactions, and justice in punishment. In all three, justice means
knowing and determining the middle way (evsat)—or, in Kınalızade’s word-
ing, the proportional treatment of all parts. These parts, in fact, are nothing
21 See İnalcık 1965; Abou-El-Haj 1991.
22 Rosenthal 1980, 101.
23 Ergene 2001; cf. Hagen 2005, 66ff.
24 Ferguson 2010, 97–98.