Darling|173After the mid-fifteenth century, many viziers and advisors had backgrounds
as sipahis or devşirme recruits, and opportunities for people from nonmilitary
backgrounds (reaya), Muslim or Christian, to enter the Ottoman elite dimin-
ished. A tension developed among military needs, which sometimes demanded
the recruitment of reaya; the ongoing aspirations of the reaya themselves; and
the concern of existing elites to preserve their exclusivity and opportunity.
Actual recruitment varied according to the empire’s military needs. A pe-
titioner in the late fifteenth century, when wars were few, complained that even
noncombatants were being granted timars: “Any cook, musician, stableman or
some such servant of the pasha became a timar-holder and no timar was left
for the warrior.” Periods of warfare tended to restrict timar awards to fighters.
In 1515, when the eastern campaigns demanded increased recruitment, Sultan
Selim I (r. 1512–1520) enlisted “sons of timar-holders or deposed timar-holders or
anyone who wished to obtain timars through his valour.” The extensive wars of
Selim’s reign and the early years of Süleyman’s allowed many reaya to prove their
valor and win timars, and this must have bothered the sons of sipahis and the
Janissaries, who considered themselves the only ones qualified to receive them.
In 1531 Sultan Süleyman even had to issue an order forbidding anyone to quarrel
with a person on the grounds that he was an “outsider” (ecnebi).
In the sixteenth century the empire experienced favorable weather, eco-
nomic expansion, and population growth, which choked career paths. In 1544,
Süleyman was obliged to issue a contradictory order noting that reaya and other
“outsiders” had been “drifting” into military positions and specifying that he had
not ordered this. In 1545, former grand vizier Lütfi Pasha spoke out even more
strongly against allowing reaya to enter the ruling military class, calling them
“unqualified” (na-ehl), a word whose meaning suggests both the absence of a
good family background and the lack of education or skills. He insisted in an ad-
vice work for viziers (Âsafnâme) that “because everybody exerts himself to leave
reaya status and become a sipahi,” it was necessary not to award timars to reaya.
Although Lütfi Pasha himself had begun life in the reaya, he was collected in the
devşirme, attended the palace school, rose as a cavalry officer with timars of ever-
increasing size, served in multiple campaigns and as governor of several districts
and provinces, and then returned to the palace as a vizier, ascending at last to the
grand vizierate. His vehemence on the unsuitability of outsiders might have been
due to the threat they posed to the careers of men like himself: awarding timars
to warriors from the reaya left fewer for men from the Janissaries and palace
school. His excuse, however, was that if peasants left the farm to become soldiers,
they would not produce revenue and the sultan’s budget would suffer. The sultan
accepted this reasoning and ordered that timar recipients’ descent must be care-
fully checked; henceforth new timar awards noted when the recipient was the
“true son” of a sipahi.