176 | The Identity of the Ottoman Elite
Another characteristic of true Ottomans that Ali constantly reiterated was
their freedom from corruption; they did not pervert the proper order by bribery
and extortion. He abhorred the promotion of the wrong kind of people to high
office on the recommendation of their superiors, who were, as he said, “not disin-
terested.”Timars were granted, for example, to “the men of the glorious vezirs,
of the officers, and of the provincial governors,” who could be mercenaries or
slaves of unknown origin. Such promotions, which must have resulted from brib-
ery, generated patronage and factionalism. The outsiders could advance to high
office, sometimes over the heads of regular sipahis: “Within four or five months
they promote a person who does not have a salary of one asper to the rank of a
za’im [a sipahi whose timar was worth over 20,000 aspers].” Moreover, regular
soldiers not promoted had to earn their living by agriculture or commerce and
lost their military (tax-exempt) status; to them the sultan “should, no, must give
high positions in accordance with his magnanimity.”
The social hierarchy suddenly was losing the rigidity it had acquired in the
previous few decades. Warfare with both Iran (1579–1590) and Austria (1593–
1606) reduced the military class through death in battle and lowered the number
of sons born to sipahis, so it was necessary to recruit outsiders in any case. The
period’s expansion of opportunity due to urbanization, military and economic
growth, and governmental bureaucratization drew applicants from everywhere,
and records show that most recruits were men whose fathers were not important
enough to mention. People like Mustafa Ali, disappointed in their hope to profit
from their position and education, resented these unknowns, but they blamed
official corruption rather than the period’s socioeconomic and military changes.
Such promotions, Ali thought, went against all three of his conditions, promoting
the uneducated, overturning the social hierarchy, and engaging in corruption;
these upstarts were not true Ottomans. Because his advice work was so famous
and so attractively written, his analysis was accepted as valid for the entire post-
classical era, both by Ottoman critics at the time and by many modern scholars.
The next two authors, writing at the turn of the century, shared his concern
for the social hierarchy and the condition of the military. Hasan Kafi (1544?–1616)
was born in Akhisar (Prusac) in Bosnia and is called Akhisari or Bosnevi. He
too had a religious education and started his career working under the judge of
Bosnia but spent most of his working life in Istanbul. He went on campaign with
Sultan Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603) during the Long War with Austria and was then
posted to his hometow n of A k hisa r. He w rote a n adv ice work in Arabic before t he
campaign and translated it into Turkish after his return. He, like Mustafa Ali,
saw maintaining the Ottoman social hierarchy as the key to the empire’s success:
The first class is those appointed to the sword; the families of this class are the
sultans and viziers; the sultans’ substitutes, that is, the district and provincial