Darling|175outsiders and promoted them in return for bribes. He did not attribute this prob-
lem to population growth among the elite, but he did feel that the classical Otto-
man meritocratic system broke down in the late sixteenth century and something
not truly Ottoman took its place. The outsiders of his day, however, were not
the same as those of Lütfi Pasha’s. Mustafa Ali’s indignation boiled over because
Janissaries were gaining elite positions as governors and commanders that were
formerly reserved for sipahis and the sons of sipahis. Not only did the Janissaries
come from peasant homes rather than “good families” that had served the sultan
for generations, but they did not have a good education. Since the Janissaries pro-
moted to governorships had all been educated in the sultan’s palace, what did Ali
mean by a good education? He wrote that an intelligent and well-educated boon
companion would speak the truth, would not be addicted to drugs, and would
not tell the sultan’s secrets. An intelligent and well-educated vizier would be just
and truthful, not a flatterer or bribe taker, and would treat the soldiers properly.
Intelligent and well-educated officials would not be tyrannical or corrupt, quar-
relsome or disloyal. Ali clearly had in mind a moral education, not merely an
intellectual one, one obtainable not in the palace school but in a madrasa, where
he himself had been educated.
The palace school taught Arabic and the sources of Islam; Persian, including
Sufi poetry and Persian histories; and Ottoman Turkish and the developing clas-
sic Ottoman literature, as well as military and household skills. The princes got
the same education; future sultans and future officials and viziers attended school
together. They had a common culture, which the elite saw as one of the three
marks of a true Ottoman (the other two were Islam and service to the sultan).
Mustafa Ali dissented, calling for less recruitment from the sultan’s Christian
subjects, greater adherence to Islamic principles, and an education producing
honest and trustworthy officials rather than corrupt and ambitious ones. In his
view, the real Ottomans maintained the proper hierarchy, each one “towering
over the lower and showing deference to the higher”; they were “in the places
where they belong.” The low were not promoted over the high, the ugly over the
beautiful, or the uneducated over the intelligent. Ali stressed the idea of a verti-
cal hierarchy in which everybody knew his place; he felt that people who were
not well educated and not from good families high in the hierarchy would not
do their jobs properly. People’s appearance and behavior indicated where they
belonged in the hierarchy: the high had angelic looks and character, alertness,
and experience, while the low were unbeautiful and therefore unwise, and they
behaved in an ugly manner, practicing extortion and bribery. Many besides Ali
believed in a strongly hierarchical society, but the contradiction between that
concept and the long-standing Ottoman practice of recruitment for skills and
abilities, which had brought common people to the upper levels of power since
the start of the empire, generated new levels of tension and competition.