A Second Ottoman Empire
Reading the Seventeenth Century Without the Decline Narrative
A while ago, I reviewed Aslıhan Gürbüzel’s Taming the Messiah and argued that the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire was not the absolutist polity that many people assume it to be. In the book, Gürbüzel traces the underlying intellectual currents of that shift and demonstrates how the mystical and religious vocabularies that had legitimized sultanic authority in the sixteenth century were taken up, repurposed, and turned against the court by Sufi orders like the Mevlevis and the newly emerging political actors, who patronized them.
Intellectual shifts of this size do not happen in a vacuum, however. To understand why an anti-absolutist Ottoman public sphere could emerge in the seventeenth century at all, we have to examine the socio-political transformation that produced its actors, such as viziers and their households, the jurists, the Janissaries, and urban notables, who increasingly presented themselves as legitimate political figures alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, the sultan and the Ottoman court.
That transformation is the subject of Baki Tezcan’s The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (2010). In this influential work, Tezcan argues that what earlier historians called the “decline” of the Ottoman Empire after the sixteenth century was nothing of the kind. It was an economic, political, and social transformation that produced what Tezcan calls the “Second Empire,” which was qualitatively different from the patrimonial state that had reached its mature form under Süleyman I (r. 1520–1566). The Second Empire was more market-oriented in its economy, more open in its ruling class, more constrained in its monarchy, and more legally regulated than the First. This was, according to Tezcan, a story of “limited government” emerging in the Ottoman lands. (p.10)
It is a big claim, and the rest of the book is the long argument for it.
From Land to Cash
At the core of Tezcan’s argument are the economic changes that the empire went through. The most consequential development in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, he argues, was the monetization of the Ottoman economy. What this meant was a shift toward a more market-oriented structure that had been gathering momentum since the fifteenth century. (p.17, 21) When cash became the medium through which taxes were assessed, paid, and reinvested, the older land-based institutions of the “classical” Empire began to lose their importance.
The timar system is the clearest example. A timar was a land grant assigned to a cavalryman in exchange for military service. The revenue from the land supported the soldier, while the soldier showed up to fight when the sultan called. It was a way of converting agricultural surplus into military force without the state ever needing to handle the cash. As the economy monetized, this arrangement made less and less sense. Taxes were increasingly collected in cash, and timars themselves were converted into tax-farms, meaning leases sold off to investors who could come up with the money. (p.22)
Tezcan’s important contribution is to refuse to read this shift as decline. The timar system did not collapse because the Ottoman state grew lazy or because moral fiber had eroded. It became economically obsolete in a world where cash became ever more important. (p.23) An empire that had been organized around fiefs was reorganizing around capital, and that is a different kind of story than simple “decline.”
Moreover, the consequences of monetization reached well beyond the timar. As tax-farming became a lucrative form of investment, the askeri class (the Ottoman ruling elite, traditionally restricted to a particular military-administrative caste) began to admit outsiders. Anyone with sufficient capital could now buy their way in. (p.16–17) The political nation, in other words, was expanding. New people, drawn from outside the dynasty’s traditional client base, were acquiring a stake in the state.
The Rise of the Jurists
The expansion of the askeri class also created a new demand for legal regulation. A market economy with many actors, many transactions, and a growing pool of legally privileged elites needed rules, and not the kind of rules a sultan could simply rewrite at will. Tezcan argues that this was the structural reason for the rise of the ulema, the Muslim jurists, into something close to a constitutional check on royal authority, which was one of the most striking developments of the period. (p.30–31)
Two things were happening at once. The kanuns, which were the body of sultanic decrees that had regulated the classical Ottoman state, were losing relevance as the institutions they governed faded. (p.24) At the same time, the sharia-based law administered by the jurists was becoming indispensable for everything the new economy needed to do, such as regulating business deals in a market-based economy and settling disputes among the expanded elite. The jurists, as a result, accumulated enormous political and financial influence. In fact, Tezcan calls them the mevali, the “lords of law.” (p.36)
That said, he is careful not to overstate his case. Ottoman jurists, Tezcan notes, had less institutional autonomy from the dynasty than their counterparts elsewhere in the Muslim world. The state appointed them, paid them, and could remove them. Yet within that constrained framework, “they were at the same time more influential on the functioning of that apparatus, as well as on the dynasty itself” than is often recognized. (p.41) While the jurists did not rule, they could increasingly tell the ruler what he could not do.
Constitutionalists and Absolutists
This is where Tezcan reaches the crux of his argument. The expansion of the ruling elite and the rise of the jurists, he claims, produced an Ottoman political conflict that mapped onto categories drawn from early modern European political thought. On one side were the “absolutists,” who held that the sultan’s right to rule was unconditional and that he could change the law at his discretion. On the other side were the “constitutionalists,” who maintained that the sultan was bound by the existing legal order and could not unilaterally rewrite it. (p.48–49, 53)
The clearest illustration of this conflict between the “absolutist” and “constitutionalist” camps was the succession crisis of 1617. When Ahmed I (r. 1603–1617) died, custom would have dictated that one of his sons succeed him. Instead, his brother Mustafa was placed on the throne. He had no political training and would later be deposed and reinstalled twice in confused circumstances. The choice was driven not by the dynasty but by the şeyhülislam (chief jurist) Esad Efendi, who could arrange the accession because he had the institutional and political influence to do so. (p.63)
This was, Tezcan argues, an unprecedented event. Succession was the most jealously guarded prerogative of the Ottoman dynasty, the very heart of its claim to absolute authority. That a jurist could decide who sat on the throne meant that the jurists’ law had become the medium through which even the most fundamental political questions were now being settled. (p.64, 76) Tezcan calls this process “proto-democratization” and “civilization” of the Ottoman polity. (p.77) The terms are awkward, carrying too much modern weight to do the work he wants them to do, but the underlying observation is sound. Authority was no longer flowing in one direction, from the Ottoman court downwards. Now there were other power centers in the empire.
I find the framing that Tezcan presents both genuinely useful and a little uncomfortable. It is useful because it captures something real, which is the idea that a recognizable seventeenth-century Ottoman fight over the limits of sovereign authority had analogues in other European polities of the time. Uncomfortable, because the labels are imported and risk smoothing over what made the Ottoman version of this debate distinctive, especially the central role that religious-legal scholars played in this struggle. Tezcan knows this, and his argument does not depend on the analogy. But the labels do a lot of work in his book, and a reader should hold them at a slight distance.
The Court Strikes Back
The Ottoman court did not accept this redistribution of power passively. Beginning roughly with Murad III (r. 1574–1595), Tezcan argues, the dynasty began to reshape the imperial court into a counterweight against the expanding power of viziers and jurists. (p.99, 101) The original purpose of the kul system, meaning the corps of slave-administrators who were loyal to the sultan and the sultan alone, had been to give the dynasty a body of servants with no independent power base. (p.90–92) By the late sixteenth century, the senior kuls (especially the viziers) had themselves built vast clientele networks across the empire and accumulated wealth that rivaled the court’s own. (p.94)
The dynasty’s response was to multiply and elevate offices within the court itself. This included new palace positions, new ceremonial centers of authority, and new patron-client relationships that radiated directly from the sultan rather than through his ministers. (p.108) Tezcan reads the career of Gazanfer Ağa, a powerful palace official under Murad III and Mehmed III, as a paradigmatic case. Within the new framework that Tezcan describes, Gazanfer Ağa derived his power entirely from his proximity to the sultan and played a key role in reasserting the court’s prerogatives.
The peak of this absolutist counteroffensive was the reign of Osman II (r. 1618–1622). Tezcan sees Osman’s short reign through this lens. He argues that Osman’s appointment of Ali Pasha, who was a “creature of the court” in Tezcan’s phrase, as grand vizier, his attempt to curtail the influence of the high ulema by allowing a court-favored preacher to influence top judicial appointments, and his abolition of the arpalık system that had provided income to the senior jurists were components of a coherent absolutist program. (p.131, 136, 137) Even Osman’s plan to wage a major war against Poland fits this pattern. A successful campaign would have given him the prestige of a “warrior-sultan” like his ancestors and enabled him to push through a more complete consolidation of royal authority.
“In short,” Tezcan writes, “Osman II implemented policies that could well lay the foundation for a well-consolidated Ottoman absolutism, had the army delivered a victory against Poland, which the court circles had been taking for granted.” (p.137)
The Regicide
Unfortunately for Osman, the army did not deliver, leading to the deposition and killing of the sultan in May 1622. This was the single most dramatic event in seventeenth-century Ottoman history. It was the first time a reigning Ottoman sultan had been killed by his own subjects, and it announced that the political ground had shifted drastically. Tezcan’s analysis of the regicide is the centerpiece of his book.
He argues that the Janissaries were not urban riff-raff but serious political actors with a coherent set of economic and political interests, and they understood Osman’s program as a direct threat to those interests. (p.156, 190) Osman had floated the idea of raising a new army made up of sekbans, who were irregular, cash-paid soldiers drawn from the Anatolian provinces. (p.145, 151) This was, in effect, a plan to bypass the Janissaries entirely and to build a force loyal only to the sultan. From the Janissaries’ point of view, it was a declaration of war.
Tezcan’s broader argument is that the Janissary corps had itself been transformed by the same forces transforming the rest of Ottoman society. Over the late sixteenth century, the corps had grown enormously, and its growth had been driven less by the sultan than by the viziers, who used wartime expansion to recruit clients of their own. (p.180–182) By the early seventeenth century, the Janissaries were no longer a homogeneous body of slave-soldiers. Their ranks included commoners who had bought their way into askeri status, who held tax-farms, who collected poll-taxes, and who ran businesses. They were no longer “soldiers” in any strict sense. (p.187)
That mattered for how the regicide of Osman II should be interpreted. The Janissaries deposed Osman because they understood that an absolutist sultan would dismantle the economic privileges that they had assembled. (p.190) The killing of Osman II was, in this sense, a political assertion. The seventeenth-century Ottoman polity had multiple legitimate stakeholders and the sultan could not unilaterally redefine the political order without consequences.
It is here that Tezcan is most persuasive, and here that his book connects most directly with Gürbüzel’s. The actors Gürbüzel finds in her sources such as Mevlevi sheikhs articulating a doctrine of multiple sovereignties, scribes commissioning illustrated books that depicted themselves alongside Rumi, and the military elite reading nasihatnames that recast partnership rather than submission as the proper relation to the throne, were operating in the political world that Tezcan describes. The intellectual history Gürbüzel articulates is the self-consciousness of a class that Tezcan shows us being born.
What the Second Empire Looked Like
The Second Empire, in Tezcan’s account, was an Empire that had absorbed the lessons of 1622. It did not return to the patrimonial absolutism of the sixteenth century. Instead, the dynasty came to accept, albeit reluctantly, that government had to represent a broader spectrum of social interests than before, and this included the merchants, the ulema, the urban notables (ayan), and above all the Janissaries, who increasingly stood in for the Ottoman political nation as a whole. (p.196, 226)
Tezcan reads the relative stability of the eighteenth century as a consequence of this accommodation. The political settlement that emerged after Osman II was unwritten but real. There was a recognition that the sultan ruled in partnership with multiple legitimate actors, that fundamental changes to the legal and institutional order required consent, and that the dynasty’s authority was bounded. He calls this the “relative democratization” and “civilization” of the Ottoman ruling class. (p.194, 197) Once again, the terms seem out of place since eighteenth-century Ottoman politics was not democratic in any modern sense, but the underlying point is that the political nation had expanded and stabilized in a recognizably new form.
Tezcan ends with the reversal of this trend. Mahmud II’s destruction of the Janissaries in 1826 is conventionally celebrated as the beginning of Ottoman modernization, the moment the Empire shook off a reactionary corps and embraced reform. Tezcan offers a different reading. The 1826 abolition, alongside the systematic weakening of the ulema and the centralization drive that followed, he claims, dismantled the constitutional settlement of the Second Empire. (p.240) Nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms, in this reading, were less a break with old absolutism than a restoration of it in modern dress. It is a provocative claim, but it is the kind of provocation that has shaped subsequent scholarship.
Conclusion
Tezcan’s argument is bold, broadly persuasive, and has reshaped how a generation of historians thinks about the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. It is also, in places, overdrawn.
The borrowed categories, including absolutism, constitutionalism, proto-democratization, and civilization, do real analytical work, but they also flatten differences that matter. Calling Esad Efendi’s role in the accession of Mustafa I “proto-democratic” is suggestive, but it papers over the fact that the political nation Tezcan is describing was still extraordinarily narrow. The “expansion” of the askeri class meant the inclusion of moderately wealthy Muslim men. The vast majority of Ottoman subjects (peasants, women, non-Muslims, the urban poor) had no more access to political voice in the Second Empire than they had had in the First. Tezcan acknowledges this in passing, but his framing repeatedly invites readers to forget it.
The book is also stronger on the political and military than on the intellectual and cultural. The constitutionalists and absolutists are political camps in Tezcan’s account, but their ideas are mostly inferred from their actions. This is the gap Gürbüzel’s Taming the Messiah fills, and it is no accident that the two books read so well together. Read on its own, Tezcan can leave a reader wondering whether the seventeenth-century Ottomans really thought in terms of bounded sovereignty, or whether that is a structure that historians like Tezcan have imposed on them in retrospect. Read alongside Gürbüzel, however, we see that they did think this way, but in their own vocabulary, using Sufi mystical categories and nasihatname conventions rather than the constitutional grammar of seventeenth-century Europe.
But these are calibrations, not refutations. Tezcan’s core insight has held up: the political turbulence of the seventeenth century was a polity remaking itself, and the actors of that remaking were political figures with interests and ideas, not the props of a state in decay. The seventeenth-century empire was not declining. It was learning to share power. Read together with Gürbüzel, The Second Ottoman Empire gives us the political and economic ground on which that learning took place.
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The reality is that the ottomans, be it the sultan himself, the High Porte or the judicial elite, gradually lost de facto central control of the provinces, first in North Africa and eventually by early 1800's everywhere, even in Anatolia and the Balkans.
How is this not decline?