442 conclusion
first instances of this reasoning is in Aşıkpaşazade’s history, when a reluctant
Osman I is finally persuaded to permit a market tax on the grounds that it
was an old and established custom. Bitlisi quotes the duty of the sultan to
abide by the laws ordained as a manifestation of the virtue of remembrance.
Furthermore, as was seen, sultanly decrees around the mid- or late sixteenth
century almost identified “the old law” with “justice”;34 in Ahmet Yaşar Ocak’s
view, the “old law” was considered identical to keeping the “circle of justice”
and the proper position of the “four pillars”, i.e. the social classes or estates.35
The law apart, even custom or usage was sanctified in terms of age, as when
monasteries or peasant communities claimed privileges arguing that they
were “an old custom” (adet-i kadim); and, as Nicolas Vatin and Gilles Veinstein
argue, by the early eighteenth century even practices such as the dethrone-
ment of sultans by rebels or high officials had somehow come to be considered
established custom.36
Mustafa Ali may, perhaps, be credited as the first to explicitly sanctify the
“old law”, although in some instances he even criticized Mehmed II’s regula-
tions. In chapter 4, we saw how, in his last work, he fell to a characteristic slip
of tongue, writing that Mehmed II “promulgated an old law” (meaning, more
accurately, “a just law that became old and established”). Later authors took
up this perspective: from Akhisari, who argued that the course of things must
continue according to “the right manner and the old law” (uslub-ı kavim ve
kanun-i kadim), to “Sunna-minded” thinkers, such as Münir-i Belgradi or
Kadızade Mehmed İlmi, who referred to consultation in the same terms. The
apogee of the “old law” concept came with the “declinist” literature of the early
seventeenth century, as seen in chapter 5; the 1606 Kavânîn-i yeniçeriyân was
an explicit attempt to record the “old laws”, while the word kanun appears in
the title of several similar works, such as Aziz Efendi’s treatise (Kânûnnâme-i
sultânî). In the Kitâb-ı müstetâb, the “old law” is explicitly inserted into the
“circle of justice” since it accompanies justice as a means of maintaining the
peasants, the treasury, and the army in a good condition.
As remarked in chapter 7, with Kâtib Çelebi the cult of the old law dimin-
ished and the idea of new practices fit for the present times gained weight. True,
the former notion continued to be used: for instance, Defterdar mentioned the
“old law” when copying Lütfi Pasha and, more emphatically, in his chapter on
timars. Yet even the authors described as “traditionalist” gradually ceased to en-
dorse the term, and when they did use it, they modified it along Kâtib Çelebi’s
34 İnalcık 1965; Sariyannis 2011a, 142.
35 Ocak 1988, 172.
36 Vatin – Veinstein 2003, 65.