440 conclusion
but corporate entities, namely the four social groups (men of the sword, men
of the pen, traders, and peasants). The same understanding can be seen in
Celalzade’s adaptation, although in the preambles to the kanunnames, which
he seems to have written himself, it is peasants who enjoy the sultan’s justice.
In other texts from the same period, justice is seen as moderation, in a moral
sense or, more particularly, a “judicial” context: for instance, Tursun Beg seems
to understand it as fairness in punishment, while the historian Sâfî describes
Ahmed I’s justice as a “finely defined line between undue severity and unjusti-
fied clemency”.25 Together with authors following the Tusian tradition, Lütfi
Pasha also conceives of justice as keeping social compartmentalization.
On the other hand, there was an increasing emphasis on the protection of
peasants as the explicit aim of justice, although there is no visible shift; this
approach instead coexists with that on keeping a just balance among social
classes. As early as in Amasi’s adaptation of Tusi, one finds the famous circle of
justice, repeated by a host of political authors well into the seventeenth cen-
tury. From the late sixteenth-century adaletnames to the early seventeenth-
century “declinist” authors, justice was increasingly identified as meaning
following the old laws on taxation in order to protect the reaya: this was the
case with Kitâb-ı müstetâb, for example. One might even say that, in this pe-
riod, the Ottoman administration (and writers associated with the scribal
bureaucracy) defined justice as the following of the old laws without any in-
novations.26 Although a definition of justice was still elusive, more and more
authors made allusions to the excessive tax burdens imposed on the peasants:
the “circle of justice” became a recurrent argument for the protection of peas-
ants, from Hasan Dede’s treatise to Murad IV—in which the sultan is com-
pared to a shepherd, “his slaves” to lambs, and unjust judges and officers to
wolves27—to Kâtib Çelebi and Na’ima.28 At the beginning of the eighteenth
century, Defterdar reverted to the old distinction between real and nominal
wealth, i.e. between the peasants’ welfare and a full treasury. Defterdar argued
that the sultans of old managed to have military victories with much less in-
come, as they preferred justice to wealth; this argument, namely that state in-
come should not be sinful and that ultimately one should not place too much
importance on the treasury, is found in all “traditionalist” authors of the late
eighteenth century, such as Dürri and Canikli Ali Pasha. On the other hand, it
25 Murphey 2005, 9–10.
26 Sariyannis 2011a, 142.
27 Terzioğlu 2010, 295. In the same text, the Circle of Justice is implied by the phrase, “are you
then to fill the treasury from the air?” (hazine’i havadan mı cem’ idersin sonra?).
28 Ayn Ali 1978, 124; Kâtib Çelebi – Gökyay 1968, 156; Na ’ima 1864–1866, 1:37; Na ’ima – İpşirli
2007, 30. Cf. also Na ’ima 1864–1866, 6:152; Na ’ima – İpşirli 2007, 1653. On the various for-
mulations of the “circle of justice” in Ottoman literature see also Fleischer 1983, 201.