56 | Mahmud Pasha and His Christian Circle
and were dependent only on him; therefore, they were considered to be more
loyal than the descendants of powerful Muslim families. Moreover, symbolically,
they enabled the sultan to present his court as his own personal household run
by his slaves, thus enhancing his prestige and emphasizing the personal character
of his authority.
Another centralizing policy of the early Ottoman state in the conquest of the
Balkans was assimilation into the Ottoman ruling class (askeri) of Balkan Chris-
tian nobility, a policy that led to land grants (timars) to Christian cavalry officers
(sipahis) in the Balkans in the fifteenth century. These two strategies were com-
bined in the mid-fifteenth century by Sultan Mehmed II, “the Conqueror.”
After the conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II, profiting from the
immense symbolic significance of his possession of the imperial city, embarked
on a program of reforms aimed at transforming the Ottoman state into a cen-
tralized bureaucratic empire. At the highest level of administration, that of the
Ottoman court, the main aims of these reforms were the organization of a new
palace etiquette that would emphasize the imperial image of the sultan and the
formation of a palace hierarchy with fixed salaries and duties, which would form
the backbone of an imperial bureaucracy.
Mehmed II’s innovation in the formation of this imperial bureaucracy was
that some of its most prominent members were converts who were also descen-
dants of the most illustrious Byzantine aristocratic families. Heath Lowry calls
this “the last phase of Ottoman syncretism” and suggests that if the sultan used
slaves who were cut off from their roots to ensure his officers’ absolute faith and
loyalty, a slave hierarchy made up of the descendants of the Byzantine aristoc-
racy would have offered the least suitable candidates, because they and their con-
temporaries knew their family history very well. Thus, theoretically, they should
have been among the first to be eliminated as potential leaders of any attempt for
a Byzantine revival.
A typical representative of this new ruling elite was Hass Murad Pasha, who
served as governor general of the Balkans (beylerbeyi of Rumeli) and was killed
at a young age in Anatolia during the wars against the Akkoyunlu in 1473. His
brother, Mesih Pasha, was also an important general of the later years of the reign
of Mehmed II and served as grand vizier during the reign of Bayezid II. Accord-
ing to reliable sources, the two brothers were descended from the imperial family
of the Palaiologoi and were among the probable successors of the last Byzantine
emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos.
Mahmud Pasha in the Service of the Ottoman Dynasty
Mahmud Pasha Angelović was the most powerful and famous of these Byzan-
tine aristocrats in the service of the Ottoman dynasty. During a large part of the