Government, Administration and Law Colin Imber

7 Government, administration and law Colin Imber The functions of Ottoman government were, in essence, to raise revenue with which to support the sultan’s army and court, to conduct war and rela- tions with foreign powers, to uphold law and order, and to support what the ruling elite regarded as the right religion. Most day-to-day public functions – for example, the construction and maintenance of mosques, education, wel- fare of the poor, the provision of a water supply in towns and the upkeep of bridges and cemeteries – were the responsibility of vakıf s (endowments of land or other sources of income used for the charitable purpose dei ned by the founder), established through the private benei cence of individuals. The founders of the greatest vakıf s were, it is true, the sultans and their ministers, and their foundations – notably the imperial mosques in Istanbul – served to project the grandeur and munii cence of the dynasty. Nonetheless, they were legally autonomous institutions and, strictly speaking, outside the realm of government. The scope of Ottoman government was therefore limited but in this respect no dif erent from the governments of other pre-modern states. Furthermore, while the problems which the Ottoman government faced between 1453 and 1603 may have grown in scale and complexity, the basic functions of government remained unchanged. Equally, the institutions and oi ces that were in place during the reign of Mehmed II (r. 1451–81) were still in place and, in appearance, largely unchanged in the reign of his descen- dant Mehmed III (r. 1595–1603 ). Nonetheless, between 1453 and 1603, the Ottoman Empire underwent a transformation and, despite its apparent conservatism, Ottoman government adapted to the change. In 1453, the Ottomans were a regional power with lands in the Balkan peninsula and in Anatolia. By 1550, the empire was a major international power whose territories encompassed most of south- eastern Europe south of the Danube and Sava rivers, Anatolia, Iraq, Greater Syria and Egypt. To the north of the Danube, the central portion of the old kingdom of Hungary was a directly ruled Ottoman province, while the 205 Colin imber realms to the east – Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia and the hanate of the Crimea – were tributaries of the sultan. In North Africa, Algeria and, from 1551, Tripoli were semi-autonomous Ottoman enclaves. Campaigns in the early 1570s added Cyprus and Tunis to the empire, and the long war with Iran between 1578 and 1590 added territories in the Caucasus and western Iran, all of which the Safavid shah ‘Abbas I was to re-conquer between 1603 and 1606. After the mid-sixteenth century, the nature of Ottoman campaigns changed. Between 1453 and about 1540, Ottoman armies had made their conquests usually within the space of a single campaigning season between April and October, and often under the leadership of the sultan in person. After about 1540, the age of large-scale conquests within a single season’s campaigning was past. This was a change which the Habsburg ambassador Busbecq was to observe when in the early 1560s he compared S ü leyman I’s rapid conquest of Hungary in the Belgrade and Moh ács campaigns of 1521 and 1526 with his subsequent failure to advance his territories in central Europe.1 Campaigns against the Safavids on the eastern front par- alleled this pattern. Between 1514 and 1516, Selim I (r. 1512–20) followed his victory at Ç ald ı ran over the Safavid shah Isma‘il with the conquest of much of south-eastern Anatolia. His successor, S ü leyman I (r. 1520–66), seized Baghdad from the Safavids in 1534, together with more territory in eastern Anatolia. However, S ü leyman’s later campaigns against Safavid Iran, like his campaigns against the Habsburgs in Hungary, were – set against his earlier conquests – failures. The war with Iran from 1578 ended with large-scale, if short-lived, conquest, but only after 12 years of continuous warfare. The war against the Habsburgs in Hungary was to last 13 years, from 1593, and produce no signii cant gains for either side. The changing pace of conquest and the prolongation of campaigns were factors inl uencing the Ottoman practice of government. So, too, was the changing nature of the enemy. For much of the i fteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had grown at the expense of local Anatolian and Balkan dynasties and of the Italian maritime colonies. From the 1520s, however, the empire faced the power of the Habsburgs in central Europe and the Mediterranean and of the Safavids along its eastern border. The rivalry with the Habsburgs had, in terms of practical politics, the ef ect of draw- ing the Ottomans into international alliances and so into the political system of western Europe. The rivalry with the Safavids likewise drew them into 1 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq , trans. Edward Seymour Forster (Oxford, 1927 ), pp. 240–1. 206 Government, administration and law contact with the Shaibanids, who threatened the Safavids on their eastern border, and so into the politics of Central Asia. In brief, therefore, between 1453 and about 1540, the Ottoman government faced problems attendant on conquest, and in particular the questions of how to overcome resistance from supporters of the displaced regimes and the incorporation of the new territories within the political structure of the empire. From the mid-sixteenth century, the problems were rather those of how to maintain intact vastly expanded territories within stable borders and how to manage periods of prolonged and no longer proi table warfare. The authority of the sultan In his famous and perceptive comparison of the French and Ottoman mon- archies, Niccol ò Machiavelli noted that while a hereditary aristocracy limited the power of the French king, “the entire monarchy of the Turk is governed by one lord. The others are his servants and, dividing his kingdom into san- cak s, he sends these dif erent administrators, and shifts and changes them as he chooses”.2 What Machiavelli was describing in 1513 was a system of government where the sultan made all appointments to oi ce from among men who had grown up in his household and were completely dependent upon him for patronage and promotion, with no hereditary oi ce-holders to challenge his absolute rule. This was certainly the ideal model of Ottoman government, but it was one that was never fully realised since there were always restraints on the sultan’s authority and direct challenges to his rule. These came both from within the imperial family and ruling establishment and from local powers in provinces often far from the capital. In either case, the sultans had to confront the dangers either with violence or, where this was impractical, with political arrangements which compromised their own authority . The most obvious threat that any sultan faced was from dynastic rivals. In the period up to the end of the sixteenth century, there were two laws governing eligibility for the throne. The i rst was that females were inel- igible. The second was that descent was patrilineal. The son of a sultan’s sister, for example, could not inherit, although S ü leyman I threatened, during the dispute between his sons Selim and Bayezid in 1558, to break with tradition and i x the succession on his sister’s son, Osmanş ah. 3 In practice, however, between 1450 and 1595, the succession always went from father 2 Niccol ò Machiavelli, Il Principe (Milan, 1994 ), p. 19. 3 Ş erafettin Turan, Kanuni’nin Oğlu Şehzade Bayezid Vak’ası (Ankara, 1961 ), p. 52. 207 Colin imber to son, and it was civil war and fratricide that decided which son was to inherit. If any son survived his brother’s accession, he was a potential chal- lenger for the throne. Mehmed II in 1451 had only one surviving brother, an infant whom his i rst act as sultan was to execute. His son Bayezid II, by contrast, reached the capital before his adult brother Cem and claimed the sultanate, only to face a civil war and, when Cem escaped to Rhodes into the captivity of the Knights of St. John in 1483, the constant threat that his captors would release him as a claimant to the Ottoman throne. It was only after he had executed Cem’s sons, and after Cem’s death in Naples in 1495 and public burial in Bursa, 4 that Bayezid felt that his throne was secure. In the end, it was not his brother but his son Selim I who deposed him, in 1512, the competition for succession having broken out already during his lifetime. It culminated in Selim’s victory and the execution not only of his brothers Korkud and Ahmed but also of Ahmed’s sons, apart from one, Prince Murad, who escaped to Iran. 5 Having no brothers, Selim’s son S ü leyman I succeeded to the throne without bloodshed, but the succession of his own son, Selim II, was more troubled. As had happened in the reign of his grandfather, the succession struggle began before S ü leyman’s death, the competition between Selim and Bayezid leading to civil war and the victory – with the support of S ü leyman himself and the vezir Sokollu Mehmed Pa ş a – of Selim over Bayezid at the battle of Konya in May 1559. Prince Bayezid’s subsequent l ight to Iran threatened S ü leyman in the same way as the l ight of Cem had threatened Bayezid II, by putting a pretender to the Ottoman throne in the hands of an enemy.

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