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.
"The center lost control of the provinces" is a description (which is not exactly accurate from a historical sense, but let’s ignore that) "The Empire was in decline" is a value judgement. These do not automatically connect. To get from one to the other, you need an additional premise: that centralized authority is the measure of a successful state. That premise is a nineteenth-century European assumption. More specifically, it is the central the assumption of the post-revolutionary nation-stat that wasn't shared by most early modern polities, including the Ottoman Empire itself in its mature form. The Holy Roman Empire was extraordinarily decentralized, yet nobody calls the eighteenth century its period of "decline” as far as I know. The Mughal Empire was a constellation of regional authorities, while the language of decline applied to it is similarly a colonial-era inheritance.
It kind of depends of what we mean by centralized authority. There is a difference between having a federal state and having to beg for aid from abroad because your rebellious egyptian vassal is overrunning your empire.
The problem was not the existence of local elites, they have always existed like the Crimean khans and romanian princes, but that many local rulers were de facto independent of Constantinople like those of Algiers and Egypt while vast areas fell into ruin because of the rebellions and raids of violent warlords like Ali Pasha of Yannina or Osman Pazvantoğlu.
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?
"The center lost control of the provinces" is a description (which is not exactly accurate from a historical sense, but let’s ignore that) "The Empire was in decline" is a value judgement. These do not automatically connect. To get from one to the other, you need an additional premise: that centralized authority is the measure of a successful state. That premise is a nineteenth-century European assumption. More specifically, it is the central the assumption of the post-revolutionary nation-stat that wasn't shared by most early modern polities, including the Ottoman Empire itself in its mature form. The Holy Roman Empire was extraordinarily decentralized, yet nobody calls the eighteenth century its period of "decline” as far as I know. The Mughal Empire was a constellation of regional authorities, while the language of decline applied to it is similarly a colonial-era inheritance.
It kind of depends of what we mean by centralized authority. There is a difference between having a federal state and having to beg for aid from abroad because your rebellious egyptian vassal is overrunning your empire.
The problem was not the existence of local elites, they have always existed like the Crimean khans and romanian princes, but that many local rulers were de facto independent of Constantinople like those of Algiers and Egypt while vast areas fell into ruin because of the rebellions and raids of violent warlords like Ali Pasha of Yannina or Osman Pazvantoğlu.