174 | The Identity of the Ottoman Elite
Ottoman Identity in an Era of Change
Warfare in Süleyman’s later reign was often successful but, unlike his earlier
campaigns, did not increase his territory much. As the population continued to
increase, competition for governorships and timars intensified, and Süleyman’s
sons fomented rebellions, attracting landless sipahis and promising them timars.
Graduates of religious colleges (madrasas), lacking jobs in law and religion, also
created unrest in the countryside by extorting money and food from reluctant
villagers. The Janissary corps and palace cavalry, considered the more reliable
branches of the military, expanded but broke into factions whose leaders com-
peted for political positions. Success for officials meant jobs and salaries for their
followers and produced rapid turnover in the administration, which was inter-
preted as governmental chaos. At the same time, European exploration of the
seas created new problems for the Ottomans: to the east, Portuguese competition
intermittently disrupted trade routes in the Indian Ocean, and to the west, the
importation of silver from the New World to Europe contributed to inflation and
changes in economic relations.
The bureaucrat and historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1599), an Ottoman Muslim,
grew up in the midst of these changes. He had a religious training but was lucky
enough to obtain a bureaucratic job after graduation. However, he was unable to
attain the upper levels of the scribal service or to find a job in which his train-
ing would be in demand, although he wrote numerous works dedicated to the
sultans and other powerful people to bring himself to their notice. He wrote his
most famous advice work, Counsel for Sultans (Nushat al-salatin), in 1581, and for
two decades he held several more unsatisfying positions and continued to write
and complain. In those decades, drastic climatic, economic, and technological
changes forced Ottoman institutions to face new conditions, including ongo-
ing population growth, rapid and unstable coinage inflation, the introduction of
more accurate handheld gunpowder weapons and effective defenses against can-
non, and the intrusion of Western European merchants and ships into the Medi-
terranean and Indian Ocean. These conditions affected military organization,
structures of compensation, the state’s requirements, and the qualities needed
for success in the Ottoman system, resulting in the army’s replacement of timar-
holding cavalrymen with Janissaries and other infantry armed with guns, shifts
in the state’s taxation and procurement systems, readjustments in the bureau-
cracy, and the increasing importance in governance of households other than
the sultan’s. The reaction of the Ottoman elite to these events, and the changing
definition of the elite itself, can be tracked in the complaints of Ali and a series of
advice writers who imitated him.
In Counsel for Sultans, Mustafa Ali complained that he could not be pro-
moted to the offices he desired because the government employed unqualified