Darling|179loans or tax collection. Even the regular Janissaries accused these outsiders of
misbehavior, since they were rivals for higher offices formerly reserved for Janis-
saries with palace educations.
When the Janissaries heard that Osman II wanted to replace the entire Janis-
sary corps with more zealous troops hired from the countryside, they staged a
coup, putting Osman’s uncle Mustafa on the throne. This act gave the Janissar-
ies the reputation of upholders of tradition, law, and justice and defenders of the
Ottoman people against oppression. “When a Pasha abuses his authority,” wrote
a European observer, “they are always the first to erect the standard of sedition.”
Thus, the graduates of the palace school, who were the outsiders in Mustafa Ali’s
day compared to the descendants of known families in Ottoman service, fifty
years later were seen as the insiders, the real Ottomans, and the upholders of Ot-
toman identity.
The deposition of Osman roused a rebellion of the Celalis under Abaza
Mehmed, and the compromises involved in putting it down allowed Celalis into
government office, taking still more positions from their traditional holders and
creating further factionalism. Almost ten years after the coup, in 1630–1631, Koçi
Bey wrote Risale (Treatise) for the young sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–1640) to ad-
vise him how to control these divisions. Koçi Bey’s birth and death dates are not
known, but he came from Albania and was recruited through the devşirme, at-
tending the palace school and serving in the palace his entire career. Despite his
Janissary ties, his work pleaded for the rehabilitation of the timar-holding cavalry
to balance a Janissary force filled with outsiders who joined for wealth and status.
Back when the timar holders were the sultan’s victorious troops, he said, there
were no outsiders among them; they were all from military families, sons of sipa-
his or Janissaries, and appointing na-ehli men was cause for dismissal. Koçi Bey
accused Özdemir Osman Pasha of first granting timars to reaya in 1584 and then
allowing free persons into the Janissary corps in the same year. You can see the
mythmaking here: Mustafa Ali had said specifically in 1581 that there were already
outsiders among the timar holders by that time. Koçi Bey was creating an image of
pure and valorous sipahis of the past by which to denigrate the inefficient sipahis
and contaminated Janissaries of his day. The Janissaries were definitely Koçi Bey’s
second choice of elites, but he agreed w it h t he Kitab-i Müstetab that outsiders such
as Turks, nomads, gypsies, Laz, Jews, muleteers, camel drivers, porters, and athe-
ists had joined the corps illegitimately. Janissary positions should go only to Al-
banians, Bosnians, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Armenians, groups that recognized,
as Koçi Bey’s contemporary ɇAziz Efendi noted, that “willingness to sacrifice life
and soul in the service of the state and the sultanate is the way to earn admittance
to paradise.” Koçi Bey’s is perhaps the strongest statement that Ottoman identity
was established once and for all in the reign of Sultan Süleyman.