180 | The Identity of the Ottoman Elite
***The reality was that there was no going back to the conditions of Süleyman’s time.
Murad IV, after coming of age and putting down a Janissary rebellion, wanted
to strengthen the timar holders in the provinces to balance the Janissaries in the
urban areas, as Koçi Bey recommended. He therefore reformed the timar system
but not in the direction that Koçi Bey specified. He did not restore its original
composition but deliberately recruited outsiders and tried to make sure that,
whether or not they were “true sons” of sipahis, they had military experience or
at least a fighting spirit, resided in the district where their timar was located, and
showed up for the call to arms. In subsequent years his administration tried to
find possessors for all the vacant timars whose revenues were lowered by peasant
flight and to resettle peasants who had left the land. Murad then ordered an
empire-wide resurvey of the villages for tax purposes, to record the actual num-
ber of taxpayers and to reach a realistic figure for taxes due.
This period marks a definitive split between romantic views of the true
Ottomans of the past and realistic Ottoman conditions. The timar holders never
again embodied the central Ottoman identity. The last advice work in this series,
Katib Çelebi’s Principles of Action for the Rectification of Defects (DüstûruɆl-Amel
li-IslahiɆl-Halel) of 1653, did not even discuss the timar holders, although they
continued to exist until the end of the empire. Katib Çelebi made a very prag-
matic analysis of that year’s financial crisis, including the reasons for the army’s
increasing cost and the treasury’s diminishing balance. Like the timar holders,
the Janissaries were losing their military excellence and their military role as the
sultan’s bodyguard. Their actual condition and behavior grew farther and farther
away from the image they had established (or that the advice writers established
for them). Nevertheless, they emerged from this process as the carriers of Otto-
man identity. They became an element of the urban elite, an element that repre-
sented the common people’s call for justice against powerful political figures, and
they maintained that role for nearly two centuries.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Abou-El-Haj, Rifaat A. Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth
to Eighteenth Centuries. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. The
author argues that the advice literature mirrors a conflict among the elite.
Darling, Linda T. A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The
Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization. London: Routledge, 2013. This
is a study of the concept of justice in advice literature and mirrors for princes.
Fleischer, Cornell H. Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian
Mustafa Âli (1541–1600). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. This book
is a study of Mustafa Ali and his work.
Mustafa Ali. Nushat al-salatin [Counsel for sultans]. In Mustafā ɇĀlī’s Counsel for
Sultans of 1581: Edition, Translation, Notes. Edited and translated by Andreas