The Ottoman Empire: a Historical Encyclopedia [2 Volumes]

by Kia, Mehrdad;

  As the viziers entered the divān, they sat in accordance with their position and status on a low sofa, which was attached to the wall and faced the main door to the audience hall. The kādiaskers of Rumelia and Anatolia sat to the left of the grand vizier, while the defterdārs of Anatolia and Rumelia sat to his right. The scribes sat behind the treasurers on mats spread out on the floor. Next to the treasurers sat the nişanci with a pen in his hand, accompanied by his assistants. The reisülkütab stood close to the grand vizier, who frequently requested his opinion and services.

  As an executive body, the imperial council conducted all manner of government business. It addressed foreign affairs, granted audiences to ambassadors, and corresponded with foreign monarchs. It oversaw the empire’s war efforts by issuing detailed commands regarding the use of manpower, munitions, and provisions. It also supervised the building of public works, notably fortresses and aqueducts in Istanbul and the provinces. In addition, the council dealt with any number of problems brought to its attention through the reports and petitions of governors and judges. Finally, the council appointed and promoted government officials.

  At times the council acted as a court of law, hearing cases that involved the members of the ruling class as well as complaints from ordinary folks. As one European observer noted, “The Pashas” first heard the most important cases, “and then all the others, of the poor as well as of the rich,” so that no one departed “without being heard or having” his case settled (Imber: 172). Once all the viziers had been seated, the petitioners were allowed to enter the divān and present their cases or complaints. There were no attorneys or representatives present, and the authority to make the final judgment on each and every case rested solely with the grand vizier. He was the only government official who spoke during the proceedings, unless he sought the opinion of one of his viziers.

  The deliberations at the divān continued for seven to eight hours. The members of the imperial council ate three times, first in the early morning, shortly after their arrival; then at noon; and finally after they had listened to petitions. At noon the grand vizier asked attendants to serve lunch. Ordinary people who were present at the time were asked to leave so that the cabinet could enjoy their meal free of crowds and noise. Large round copper trays set on four short-legged stools were placed in front of the grand vizier and other members of the divān. The grand vizier shared his food tray with two other officials. Other viziers followed the same pattern. They sat with a colleague or two around the large copper tray and they shared the meal served by the palace kitchen.

  Before they started their meal, all government officials spread a napkin on their knees to keep their garments clean. Then the servers placed freshly baked bread on the trays, followed by dishes of meat. As the viziers tasted from one plate, the servers brought a new dish and removed the plate that had already been tried. The grand vizier and his cabinet dined on mutton, “hens, pigeons, geese, lamb, chickens, broth of rice, and pulse” cooked and covered with a variety of sauces (Bon: 35). The leftovers were sent to the retinues of the ministers and dignitaries, although they also had their food brought from their own palace kitchens. Unlike the sumptuous meal served to high government officials, however, their lunch was bread and pottage, which was called çurbā. For drink, sherbets of all kinds, as well as water, were served in porcelain dishes. Meetings “ended in midday in the summer, when daybreak was early, and mid-afternoon in winter” (Imber: 172). On Sundays and Tuesdays the grand vizier met with the sultan after the meeting at the divān had ended. At times other ministers were called to the sultan’s audience chamber to provide reports. Aside from the grand vizier, the chief treasurer was the only minister who could speak directly to the sultan, while the other members of the divān merely stood silently with their hands crossed on their chests and their heads bowed as a show of their reverence and obedience. Having listened to these reports and deliberations, the sultan dismissed the members of the divān and the grand vizier, who departed the palace accompanied by a large escort of palace officials. The last to leave the palace was the commander of the janissary corps. On days when they did not meet with the sultan, the imperial council left as soon as their meeting at the divān had concluded.

  According to a European diplomat who visited the Ottoman court in the 17th century, the sultan gave audience to foreign dignitaries on Sundays and Tuesdays. There were several specific occasions when the sultan or the grand vizier received foreign envoys. The most common of these was when an envoy arrived at the palace to present his credentials upon first assuming his post or after he had been promoted. Another occasion was the arrival of a foreign envoy who was sent by his government to congratulate the enthronement of a new sultan. The decision about whether the envoy was received by the grand vizier or the sultan depended on the status of the envoy, the ruler and the state he represented, and the quality and quantity of the gifts he intended to present.

  When the sultan agreed to meet with a foreign envoy, the grand vizier dispatched government officials and a group of elite horsemen, made up of the sons of vassal princes and high government officials, to accompany the ambassador and his men to the royal residence. Once he had arrived at the palace, the ambassador was seated across from the grand vizier on a stool. After the exchange of customary niceties and formalities, lunch was served, with the grand vizier, the ambassador, and one or two court dignitaries sharing a large, round copper tray covered with a variety of delicately cooked dishes. Coffee and sweetmeats followed the sumptuous meal.

  After lunch the ambassador and his attendants were escorted to a place close to the imperial gate, where they waited for the arrival of the chief eunuch, who acted as the master of ceremony. Once he had arrived in the sultan’s audience hall, two designated high officials took the ambassador by either arm and led him to kiss his majesty’s hand, which in reality was a sash hanging from his sleeve. The same two court officials led the ambassador back to his place at the end of the room, where he stood and watched as the members of his delegation went through the same exact ceremony of being led to the sultan and kissing the royal sleeve. Early Ottoman sultans rose from their seats to recognize envoys who entered the imperial presence. As Ottoman military power reached its zenith in the 16th century, however, Ottoman sultans, such as Süleyman I, neither rose to their feet nor allowed envoys to sit in their presence. As late as the 18th century the sultan continued to be seated, but starting with the reign of Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839), Ottoman monarchs adopted a more respectful attitude toward foreign envoys, standing up to greet them. Once the ceremony had finished, the dragoman, or the interpreter, announced the ambassador’s diplomatic commission, to which the sultan did not reply because such matters were left to the discretion of the grand vizier.

  Until the 19th century the Ottoman government was small and “its tasks were limited to a few key areas: defense of the empire, maintenance of law and order, resource mobilization, and management and supply of the capital and the army” (Ágoston: 12). Other important concerns familiar to the governments of modern states, such as education, health care, and common welfare, were the purview of the empire’s religious communities and professional organizations such as pious foundations and guilds.

  In the 17th century one of the grand vizier’s most important weekly responsibilities was the maintenance of law and order in Istanbul. On the fourth day of every week he made his rounds of the city. He visited first the flour market, then the fruit market to fix the price of fruit, and from there he proceeded to the vegetable and meat markets and slaughterhouses, where he settled the going rate for greens and mutton. The grand vizier also used the occasion to punish all transgressors of the law. He was assisted on these rounds by a regiment of janissaries, officials of the palace in charge of conveying messages and executing orders, a captain of the palace guards, as well as a musketeer and a water carrier from the janissary corps.

  As the highest ranking member of the government, the grand vizier administered jus
tice and maintained public safety in the capital and the surrounding suburbs and villages. He relied on an army of officials who policed much of the city’s social life. These included the chief of the armed militia, who could apply bastinado but not execute violators and criminals; several senior members of the ulema, who could inflict bastinado and imprison individuals for debt; a group of judges who presided over courts of justice; and the market superintendent, who punished all those whose prices exceeded the legal limit or who used false weights and measures. The police officers were joined by executioners armed with whips and scourges. In addition, the commandant of Istanbul and the chief of palace guards visited the villages on the city’s shoreline. The colonels of the janissaries also inspected various city quarters with several hundred of their soldiers, identifying and detaining suspicious individuals.

  OTTOMAN IMPERIAL COUNCIL

  The divan-i hümayun (the Ottoman Imperial Council) or Divan for short, which was located in the Topkapi Palace, served as the administrative brain center of the Ottoman Empire. The Imperial Council met several times during the week to attend to the affairs of the empire. The grand vizier (vezir-i azam or sadr-i azam) administered the daily affairs of the empire from the divan-i hümayun, which served as the highest deliberative organ of the Ottoman government. The grand vizier was the head of the viziers and commanders and in all matters acted as the sultan’s chief representative. He appointed all officials in both the central and provincial administration. Beginning in the 17th century the grand vizier’s official residence or Bab-i Āli (High Gate), called the Sublime Porte by Europeans, was synonymous with Ottoman government.

  Others also helped the grand vizier maintain order. The city’s chief architect could demolish any building in the capital and punish the builder. The chief admiral guarded the waters surrounding the capital. The chief of archers, who served as the commander of a regiment of the janissary corps, was responsible for the security of the At Meydani (Horse Square, known in Byzantine Greek as the Hippodrome), which served as the sporting and social center of the capital.

  See also: Empire and Administration: Administration, Provincial; Janissaries; Primary Documents: Document 2; Document 20; Document 21; Document 22

  Further Reading

  Ágoston, Gábor. “Administration, Central.” In Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Gábor Ágoston and Bruce Masters, 10–13. New York: Facts On File Inc., 2009.

  Bon, Ottaviano. The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court. London: Saqi Books, 1996.

  Della Valle, Pietro. The Pilgrim. London: The Folio Society, 1989.

  Evliya Çelebi. The Intimate Life of an Ottoman Statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha, 1588–1662. Translated by Robert Dankoff. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

  Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

  Reindl-Kiel, Hedda. “The Chickens of Paradise, Official Meals in the Mid-Seventeenth Century Ottoman Palace.” In The Illuminated Table, the Prosperous House: Food and Shelter in Ottoman Material Culture, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann, 60–88. Würzburg: Orient-Institut der DMG, Ergon-Verlag in Commission, 2003.

  Administration, Provincial

  Along with the central government, the provincial administration played an important role in preserving the unity and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The “division of Ottoman territory into smaller administrative units can be traced back to the reign of Orhan and until the reforms of the nineteenth century these units were of two kinds: Civil and Judicial Areas,” which were “municipal or rural units of small size, known as kazas (each administered by a kādi), and subdivided into nahiyes, and Military Areas” or “the districts of the feudal cavalry, known as sancaks [sanjaks] or livas, and governed by a commander—the sancakbeyi or mirliva; the sancaks were grouped in eyâlets or beylerbeyliks, controlled by a beylerbeyi” (Pitcher: 124).

  To maintain an efficient provincial administration and a strong military force, the Ottomans had to create a financial organization that would collect taxes effectively and generate revenue. Under Ottoman rule, land constituted the most important source of wealth and income for the government. There were several distinct categories of land ownership. By far the largest category was miri (crown land), or land owned and controlled by the state (Inalcik: 109). Theoretically, all lands used for agricultural production in the empire belonged to the sultan. The central government also recognized vakif, or land controlled and supervised as a religious endowment, with its revenue providing support for charitable objectives (McCarthy: 116–118). Another category of land ownership was mülk or privately owned land (McCarthy: 118–119). The vakif and mülk could be transferred to crown lands by the order of the sultan. Ottoman sultans were always eager to increase their revenue base by confiscating vakif and mülk lands and converting them to miri. Under the Ottoman land tenure system, peasants enjoyed the hereditary right to cultivate the land, but could not sell it or transfer the title without permission from the central government (Inalcik: 109). The hereditary right to cultivate the land passed from father to son (Inalcik: 107).

  Akçe (akche), a silver coinage, constituted the chief unit of account in the Ottoman state. The Ottoman Empire frequently suffered from a scarcity of this silver coinage, which posed a serious challenge to the financial security of the central government. How could the Ottoman state collect taxes from peasant farmers who could not pay their taxes in cash? And how could the sultan pay his officials and troops their salaries? In response to these challenges, the empire was divided into numerous fiefs. A military fief with an annual value of 20,000 to 100,000 akçes was called kiliç zeamet (sword fief), or zeamet for short. A military fief smaller than that was called a timār (labor) (Inalcik: 217, 226). To each timār, or military fief, the sultan assigned a sipāhi, or cavalryman. The sipāhi did not exercise the right of ownership over the timār he held, but was responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining security in the area under his control, making sure that the cultivation of land would not be disrupted. He provided troops to the army during campaigns, thereby contributing to the central government’s cavalry force. Unlike the janissaries, who used firearms, the sipāhis and the men they recruited and organized were armed with medieval weaponry (Inalcik: 108). The cavalryman was simultaneously the tax collector and the army recruiter. The revenue generated by his timār paid for his military services.

  At the time of the conquest of each new territory, the Ottoman government sent agents to the newly acquired territory to identify and quantify taxable sources of income, such as crops, and assess the amount of tax that a particular district was to pay. These calculations were then entered into government registries. Every 20 to 30 years these tax assessments were revisited and, if necessary, revised. Instead of paying the salaries of military personnel from the sultan’s treasury, the state allowed the sipāhis to directly collect a portion of the revenue from agricultural production in lieu of their salary. The sipāhi, who lived among the rural population, collected taxes in kind, and it was his duty to convert it to cash (Inalcik: 107).

  Timār holders were grouped together under sancāks (sanjāks), or military-administrative units, which were run by a military governor, called a sancāk bey because he had received a sancāk, or a standard, from the sultan as a sign and symbol of his power and authority (Inalcik: 104). The officers positioned between the sancāk bey and the ordinary sipāhi were the alāy beys, who were subordinate to the sancāk bey, and the subāşi (subāshi), who acted as district commanders responsible for apprehending offenders and keeping the peace.

  As the Ottoman Empire grew in size and the number of sancāk beys increased, the central government created a new position, the beylerbey, or “bey of the beys,” responsible for the sancāk beys in his province. Each beylerbey ruled from a provincial capital, which had its own janissary garrison, religious judge (kādi), and administrators in charge of as
sessing taxes (McCarthy: 121). This system did not prevail in all provinces and territories controlled by the sultan, however. In many Kurdish- and Arab-populated regions, tribal chiefs were appointed as hereditary sancāk beys. They were responsible for collecting taxes—much of which they retained—and sending troops to Istanbul during times of war with foreign powers.

  There were also vassal Christian states, such as the Romanian-populated Wallachia and Moldavia, which were ruled by their princes, and Muslim principalities, such as the Crimea, that were administered by their khans (hāns). The Ottomans required an annual tribute from the vassal prince as a token of his submission (Inalcik: 12). At times they also demanded that a son of the vassal prince reside as a hostage at the Ottoman court and his father pay homage to the sultan by visiting the capital once a year and swearing allegiance to him. The vassal prince also was expected to provide military support for the sultan’s campaigns against a foreign enemy, and he was to treat the allies and foes of the Ottoman state as his own.

  Aside from the beylerbeys and the sancāk beys, who acted as the direct representatives of the Ottoman state, in all legal matters the sultan was represented by a kādi (judge), who came from the ranks of the ulema. The governors could not carry out justice without receiving a legal judgment from the kādi, but the kādi did not have the executive authority to carry out any of his religious rulings (Inalcik: 104). Until the second half of the 16th century kādis were appointed for life, but as the number of prospective judges increased, term limits were imposed by the central government (Bayerle: 97). The kādi settled disputes, “drew up civil contracts, did all the notarial work of the district, administered the property of orphans and minors, acted as registrar and officiated at important weddings” (Lewis: 29). The kādi applied the şeriat (Arabic: sharia), or the sacred law of Islam, as well as the kānun, or the laws issued by the sultan. He could also take into consideration the local customs when issuing his ruling. Applying both the şeriat and the kānun in criminal cases, the kādi punished murder, rape, and highway robbery with execution or mutilation, while adultery, physical assault, wine drinking, and theft were punished by fines or bastinado blows (Inalcik: 74).