Ottoman Identity, Part III (17th-18th C.): Transformation to an Administrative State
Panel 138, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
This multi-panel session seeks to investigate the creation, projection, reception, negotiation, contestation, and transformation of Ottoman identity over the long history of the empire's existence. The Ottoman Empire offers the rare opportunity to trace the transformations of identity from the pre-modern to the early-modern and then to the modern era. Identity is a slippery concept that must be determined empirically on a case by case basis and is anything but static. As a polyglot and incredibly heterogeneous empire, the concept of being Ottoman experienced many changes and adaptations. The purpose of this multi-panel session is to trace the development, transformations, and expansion of Ottoman identity not only from a central imperial perspective and ideological projection, but also to see how this identity was adopted, adapted, rejected, and contested by subjects, rivals, allies, and foes alike in the Ottoman sphere of influence.
Panel III investigates the transformation of being Ottoman during the 17th & 18th centuries when the Ottoman Empire shifted from being a conquest to an administrative state. Paper I focuses on 17th century advice literature regarding the qualities of the ideal Ottoman bureaucrat as a result of the discontinuance of the Ottoman devsirme system and the transformations brought on by the 16th Century Price Revolution and the Military Revolutions of the 17th century. Paper II investigates the identity dichotomies found in the poetics of 17th century historical writings regarding the deposition and execution of Sultan Osman II. These identity dichotomies include Istanbul versus the provinces, Istanbul bureaucrats versus provincial administrators, and Janissaries versus Sekban (provincial irregular forces). Paper III deals with the inception and transformation of the office of Chief Black Eunuch in the Ottoman Empire (16-18th century) and how these individuals were both Ottoman insiders and outsiders. An insider inasmuch as he possessed access to the highest levels of the Ottoman administrative power and outsider because of his East African origins and emasculation. Paper IV looks at the construction of Ottoman-African identity through the investigation of the life of Mullah Ali who was Ethiopian born; presented as a gift to the Ottoman Chief Black Eunuch; received a comprehensive Islamic education; and served as one of the highest ranking Ulema in the empire. Finally, Paper V examines the construction and projection of non-Muslim institutional identity in Ottoman Cyprus during the 18th century and the manipulation of official titles usually reserved only for Muslims dealing with the Ottoman administration.
The sixteenth-century Ottoman bureaucrat and historian Mustafa Ali complained that he could not be promoted to the offices he desired because the government was employing unqualified outsiders and promoting them in return for bribes. For him, a real Ottoman had a certain kind of education and properly followed a specific career path. Because his advice work, *Counsel for Sultans,* was so famous and so attractively written, his analysis was accepted as valid for the entire post-classical era of Ottoman history. According to the stereotype, the classical Ottoman meritocratic system, "The Ottoman Way," which took promising young boys from Christian families and educated them int he palace to become military commanders and state officials, broke down in the late sixteenth century, and something not truly Ottoman took its place.
This paper counters that construction of Ottoman identity by studying the advice works written after Mustafa Ali's to determine how their authors saw this problem Father than substituting a class analysis, as Rifaat Abou-El-Haj did in *Formation of the Modern State,* it seeks to determine how the advice writers themselves described these newcomers to Ottoman officialdom. Changes in the authors' concepts of who was Ottoman enough to obtain an official position and just what qualifications were necessary and sufficient reflect changing definitions of Ottoman identity at the upper levels of society during the first half of the seventeenth century. Drastic technological and economic changes, known as the Military Revolution and the Price Revolution, were forcing Ottoman institutions to adapt to new conditions, resulting in the replacement of timar-holding cavalrymen with infantry paid in cash, shifts in the state's taxation and procurement systems, readjustments in administrative employment, and the increasing importance in Ottoman administration of households other than the sultan's. Complaints in the advice literature reflect the ways elites profited from government service, and ultimately the identities of those elites and their qualifications for their jobs. These changes can be tracked through the standard advice works, some anonymous and some by writers such as Kochi Bey and Katib Chelebi. by examining these works in chronological order, this paper will build up a picture of changes in Ottoman official identities in the period 1580-1653.
Abstract
One way to understand what we, historians, do is to look at it as a negotiation between our concerns, questions and language, and those of the actors of the past whom we study. The ideal result of this negotiation is that we do not self-indulgently impose our world upon theirs, yet at the same time we prudently take the liberty of asking questions and using terms that do not emanate from the past we study in a simple way. Identity in the Ottoman world is a site where this tricky negotiation is played out. The concern, and sometime obsession, with identity labels stems from our post-modern capitalist world. It is not clear how much this mattered to Ottomans, and even if it did, they obviously used an entirely different language to express it.
My paper attempts to figure out a set of identity dichotomies prevalent among state servants in the early part of the 17th century. I do this by looking at the poetics of Ottoman historical writing in a corpus of texts that represent the deposition and killing of Sultan Osman II in 1622. Reading this textual corpus I shall show that this assortment of identitarian dichotomies was underlain by the poetic garden/wilderness distinction. I then identify various dyads emanating from it: Istanbul versus provincial cities and Istanbul versus the Anatolian provinces; state servants in the capital and imperial palace versus provincial governors; and Janissaries versus Sekban. To return to the said negotiation, my paper uses an interpretative approach that is our own, but reconstructs possible 17th century identity chasms in the Ottomans’ own words.
An important new corpus of studies on communities throughout the Ottoman Empire has shed considerable light on the mechanics of collective representation and communal organisation. At the centre of these discussions is the well-known legal principle of the Hanefi school of Islamic jurisprudence whereby corporate entities are not recognised. Yet, as with so many instances from any conceivable context, legal principle and actual practice were not necessarily coinciding. Ottoman bureaucrats and legal scholars proved flexible and pragmatic enough to work round this conundrum, and the institutional evolution of structures of representation largely took place along the grey zone that lies between formally recognised and actually functioning modes of communal organisation that may transgress legal principle either in letter or spirit.
This paper contributes to this discussion by examining the projection of institutional identity in eighteenth-century Ottoman Cyprus. This entailed a great deal of experimentation, the stretching of the meanings of titles, and arbitrary declarations. Through an examination of the usage of terms like kefil (guarantor) and reaya vekili (representative of the people) in Ottoman bureaucratic parlance, as well as the image of leadership projected by claimants of these titles, it is possible to delineate certain ‘official’ semantic boundaries, the flexibility of which allowed the claimants of such titles to draw legitimacy, power and authority as representatives of both the Ottoman state and local communities, by virtue of an institutional position.
The creation and manipulation of such ambiguities (both by provincial and imperial actors) were fairly common in the administrative and institutional history of Ottoman Cyprus. In an attempt to elucidate these issues, this paper examines imperial orders, legal, fiscal or administrative documents, probate records, and Greek and Ottoman chronicles.
