Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 451
While Ali and Akhisari lamented the detrimental results of this intrusion
for the taxpayers and the state revenue, in the early seventeenth century the
stress moved to the harm done to the army itself, i.e. to the increase in the
number and the salaries of the troops without any improvement in their effec-
tiveness. Nevertheless, even then there were several stages in how the damage
was assessed. In the Kavânîn-i yeniçeriyân and in Ayn Ali’s treatises, all dated
to the first decade of the seventeenth century, the notion of the corrupt janis-
saries vs. the valiant and virile sipahis is absent; in Ayn Ali’s work one may
even say that it is the timariot sipahis who are blamed the most. But in works
like Kitâb-ı müstetâb and Koçi Bey’s treatise, janissaries and, more generally,
“salaried slaves” are blamed for the decline of the sipahis, especially after the
intrusion of strangers.59 Furthermore, in Koçi Bey the prohibition of mobility
works the other way around as well: not only should peasants not enter the
military ranks, the sipahis should not do the work of the infantry or peasants.
Such views continued to appear, from Kadızade Mehmed İlmi (who lamented
the infiltration of peasants into the ranks of both the people of the sword and
those of the pen) to the eighteenth-century authors; from the latter, some, like
Defterdar, stressed the destruction of the productive base (Dürri even states
that the excess of intruders into the askeri class now meant the term “taxable
peasants” was the same as “non-Muslims”), while others (like Canikli or Penah
Efendi) stressed the military effects. Let us note here that we must not neces-
sarily take it at face value when an author laments the ruin of the land due to
these practices, as he may only be using a traditional trope (based on the prin-
ciple of justice) in order to criticize the intrusion of peasants into the army.60
Clearly, all this criticism targeted the janissaries’ increased political power,
achieved by their ranks being swelled with the lower urban strata.
At any rate, from the mid-seventeenth century on this understanding of
hadd gradually lost importance (the main target now being the janissaries as
an institution rather than how they were composed—all the more so since,
from the mid-eighteenth century, there were increased calls to recruit peas-
ants for a new army) in favor of the moral concept, i.e. the condemnation of
luxury and pomp.61 However, it is interesting that in the eighteenth century
such remarks occasionally targeted not only peasants-turned-military but also
the blurring of career lines in the administration. Such blurring had begun to
be common by the end of the seventeenth century; let us remember Köprülü
59 Cf. Abou Hadj 1988.
60 Gyula Káldy-Nagy notes sarcastically that “tens of thousands of Turkish re’ayas could thus
be carried off to the galleys of the fleet, but the wise advisors of state administration
failed to raise their voice against the decreasing number of agrarians, for they were only
concerned when re’ayas became timar-holders” (Káldy-Nagy 1987, 169).
61 See Sariyannis 2011a, 140–141.