This paper will analyze the career of the Grand Vizier Mahmud Pasha (c. 1456-74), who became a famous patron but also had a significant impact on early Ottoman historiography as someone who supported the careers of most of the historians of Mehmed the Conqueror's time. The presentation will highlight his and his protégés’ careers, as well as his enduring legacy, not only as member of the Ottoman governing class but also as a popular public figure. Mahmud Paşa was enslaved as a child from a distinguished Serbian family, converted to Islam and educated at the Ottoman court. In 1456 he became the Ottoman Grand Vizier and was ranked above all other bureaucrats of his time in terms of public charities, financing nine mosques, three medreses and two mektebs. He also emerged as a well-known poet who composed a divan in Persian and Turkish, under the pen name of Adni. Mahmud Paşa influenced the careers of a number of bureaucrats who became the earliest Ottoman historians. They were Şükrullah, who wrote a version of his Behçetüttevarih specifically for Mahmud Paşa; Enveri, who composed his controversial Ottoman history titled Düsturname for him; and Nişancı, who wrote Risale and Tursun Bey who composed Tarihi Ebul-Feth. Additionally, historians Kritoboulos, Chalkokondyles, Aşıkpaşazade, Kemalpaşazade, Saadeddin and Latifi wrote explicit praises about Mahmud Paşa in their works. And, historian Kabuli was a member of Mahmud Paşa’s court for a time being. Among these historians, Nişancı and Tursun Bey were Mahmud Paşa’s protégés, and they too achieved remarkable success during their careers. Nişancı became a grand vizier (1477-1481) and Tursun Bey was appointed as the secretary of the Ottoman imperial council, during Mehmed II’s reign. In 1474, Mahmud Paşa was executed due to a conflict which involved Ottoman prince Mustafa and Mahmud Paşa’s wife. Afterwards, his legacy and tragic end gained a literary life of its own, as it was incorporated into an anonymous novella titled Menakıbnamei Mahmud Paşa. The novella re-imagined Mahmud Paşa’s dramatic rise and his tragic demise, as someone who was loved by people but victimized by the state.

This paper argues that patronage networks among seafarers who spent their early careers in North Africa had a profound impact on their later success in achieving prominent positions as leaders of Ottoman naval forces. These networks existed from the period when Piri Reis sailed as a client of his uncle Kemal Reis in the 1490s through the admiralship of Venedikli Hasan Pasha, died 1591. Seafarers who had the misfortune to lose powerful patrons before their success was secure, often faced insurmountable opposition which threatened their lives or careers. For example, Kemal Reis or later Hayreddin Pasha attracted other naval captains who joined in corsair attacks from their bases. Hayreddin submitted his base to the sultan in exchange for military support and was designated governor of Algiers. Rarely, governors from North Africa were made grand admiral, but when this happened they arrived in Istanbul with their own retinue of captains who then received salaries and official positions in Ottoman naval forces. These captains might then earn promotion to higher positions based on their own achievements. Individuals had the opportunity to advance if they were both talented and successful in creating personal bonds with a patron. This benefitted naval forces and clients, as well as increasing the power of patrons. In Ottoman naval forces, some client corsair captains achieved equally high ranking positions after the death of their patrons but this only occurred in exceptional circumstances such as after the disaster at Lepanto. Analyzing the highest echelon of Ottoman naval leadership in the sixteenth century using the concept of patronage to trace the careers of these men contributes to a greater understanding of how certain individuals came to the attention of sultans and viziers who were in a position to reward their accomplishments with the office of admiral. Talent was not sufficient; one had to find a powerful patron if one wanted to flourish in the world of the Ottoman navy. Ottoman and Venetian authors produced sources that describe patronage networks. They include Piri Reis’ maps and Kitab-ı Bahriye, the second part of the Gazavat-ı Hayreddin Paşa found in a unique manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Katib Çelebi’s Tuhfetül’l –Kibar fi esfari’l-bihar, Alberi’s Relazioni, and the Calendar of State Papers Venetian.

Ottoman historical scholarship produced several studies on patronage within the Ottoman ulama, emphasizing the close connections between high ranking ulama families, the relative monopoly certain families exercised on the mawali (the higher ranks of the ulama), and the relative openness of the lower ranks to outsiders. This presentation will focus on a selected group of Ottoman ulama, such as al-Lari (d. 1572) and al-Muhibbi (d. 1699), whose strong scholarly credentials failed to secure them patronage in the Ottoman ulama establishment. Al-Lari was a prolific Persian scholar who immigrated to Ottoman realms from India where he had tutored the Mughal Emperor. His treatises on various fields of learning, including the rational (aqli) sciences, the pursuit of which was not encouraged in the central Ottoman ulema establishment, left a considerable impact on the Ottoman reading public. When al-Lari sought patronage at the Ottoman court during the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-66), he could not find what he sought. He settled in Amed (modern Diyarbakır) and ended his days there in a provincial madrasa within the Ottoman imperial system of education. Al-Muhibbi was an Arab scholar who left us the great biographical dictionary of the seventeenth century Islamic World, the Khulasat al-athar fî a'yan al-qarn al-hadî ‘ashar. His father had secured him the patronage of an Ottoman jurist, Izzeti Efendi, who did protect al-Muhibbi in Istanbul. But as soon as Izzeti retired, al-Muhibbi’s fortunes in Istanbul turned around and eventually he returned to Damascus. This presentation will focus on the cases of al-Lari and al-Muhibbi, as well as a few others who originated either from the margins of the empire, such as the Arab provinces, or from other parts of the Islamic World, such as India and North Africa. As will be demonstrated with detailed evidence, in most of these cases, like that of al-Muhibbi, ethnic connections and proximity to Ottoman ulama networks of patronage seem to have played a role, in a few others, like that of al-Lari, the ideological boundaries of the Ottoman central ulama establishment seem to have acted as gate keepers for aspiring scholars.

Authors of advice works in the period between 1580 and 1653, such as Mustafa ‘Ali, Kochi Bey, and several others, complained that in that period Ottoman military recruitment systems were being “corrupted.” Unauthorized people were entering the cadres, in particular the retinues and followers of governors and men of state. Political pressure, bribery, and forged documents were also being used to slip “outsiders,” “riffraff,” and even nonexistent people into the ranks of the timar-holding cavalry and the Janissary corps. This alleged misuse of the patronage system was often considered to be one aspect of the notorious “decline of the Ottoman Empire.” This paper investigates those claims through a study of military compensation registers, the timar system’s summary registers (icmal defterleri) and the Janissary salary registers for the same period. Even though timar surveys were no longer being made on a regular basis in the seventeenth century, timar-holders still existed and lists of their timars were still compiled. Janissary salary registers, though not complete for the entire empire, provide a sample of Janissaries in a particular year and province. From the information in these registers it is possible to determine the origins and previous positions of many of the people listed. The “men” or followers of a particular official are designated as such. The paper will track changes over time in the proportion of military men belonging to the retinues of viziers, governors, and other high officials to see changes in recruitment and who was benefiting from them. Research in these registers shows that a relatively small portion of the military corps were listed as the men of prominent individuals. Unless a massive forgery operation was taking place and completely deceiving the empire’s administrators (but not the writers of advice literature), this suggests that the advice writers’ claims were vastly over-exaggerated. The paper will conclude with an attempt to explain the relationships that may have lain behind such an exaggeration.

This paper is part of a chapter in my dissertation on the Ottoman scribal community of the late seventeenth century. The main argument of the dissertation is that the late seventeenth century saw the emergence of a scribal discourse that defined scribes as an intellectual community. The critical figure behind this was the grand vizier Rami Mehmed Paşa (d.1708) who came from inside the scribal corps and was the first among his peers to attain such a high political rank. This paper will discuss how the idea of a scribal community, with its newly defined intellectual content, was actualized on the existing social networks. On the practical terrain of social relations, penholders had to build and maintain real social ties that would ensure their viability in the Ottoman political system. While the main setting for this was the grandee households, the key element in entering into the social networks was the panegyrics (kaside) written to honor the grandees often with expectations for political posts (mansıb). This paper will first examine the biographical dictionaries of poets (tezkire-i şuara) written in the early eighteenth century to reconstruct the scribal networks of the time. Rami Mehmed later in his career was able to transfer the political power he gained into an elaborate patronage network, which sheltered many lesser scribes. The paper will later focus on the panegyrics written in the second half of the seventeenth century by scribes to honor more senior bureaucrats including Rami Mehmed. Overall in these “scribal panegyrics,” scribes not only made the most of the literary arsenal of traditional metaphors and topoi related to scribal profession but also left us the most comprehensive pronunciations of scribal ideals in Ottoman history. In the discursive world of the panegyric, the scribe, as the embodiment of literary skills emerges as introducing a degree of sophistication to the political realm which had until then been crowded by “ignoramuses.”