part III
th through th Centuries
Upheaval and Transformation:
From Conquest to Administrative State
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time of immense upheaval
and transformation for the Ottoman Empire during which the empire reached
its territorial apex and transitioned a focus on conquest and expansion to ad-
ministering its vast territories and diverse populations. This was also a period
of serious internal and external challenges to Ottoman rule generally known
throughout Eurasia as the Seventeenth Century Crisis. This crisis in the Otto-
man Empire resulted from and even manifested itself in the sixteenth-century
price revolution; famine- and inflation-inducing climatic change known as the
Little Ice Age; Ottoman involvement in the wars of religion and Hundred Years’
War in Europe; continual warfare with European and Asiatic rivals; expanding
networks of trade and alliance throughout the Mediterranean and the Indian
Ocean; dynastic crises and political intrigue at the court, including regicide, a
Jewish messianic movement, and Orthodox Islamic retrenchment; and numer-
ous internal rebellions and uprisings. The effects of the Seventeenth Century
Crisis were far reaching; it not only resulted in the collapse of major Eurasian
powers, such as the Ming and Safavid dynasties, but also forced the Ottomans
to undergo major administrative, social, cultural, fiscal, diplomatic, and politi-
cal transformations to survive. The Ottomans indeed survived this long period
of crisis but emerged a very different empire as a result. So extensive were these
transformations that Baki Tezcan refers to the empire during this period as “the
Second Ottoman Empire.”
The Ottoman dynasty reacted to the Seventeenth Century Crisis with ad-
ministrative stabilization and resurgence as a result of practices and innovations
such as a proliferation of tax farming that was developed by the Köprülü family,
who provided a series of powerful grand viziers to the Ottoman dynasty. The
dynasty’s reaction to the Seventeenth Century Crisis set it on a different imperial
trajectory than some European states and helps account for its eventual decline
in power in comparison to these European rivals by the end of the eighteenth
century. Because the Ottoman Empire now relied more on tax farming than in