Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, 13th to 20th Centuries by Christine Isom-Verhaaren & Kent F. Schull

Author:Christine Isom-Verhaaren & Kent F. Schull
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-04-10T21:00:00+00:00

The reality was that there was no going back to the conditions of Süleyman’s time. Murad IV, after coming of age and putting down a Janissary rebellion, wanted to strengthen the timar holders in the provinces to balance the Janissaries in the urban areas, as Koçi Bey recommended. He therefore reformed the timar system but not in the direction that Koçi Bey specified. He did not restore its original composition but deliberately recruited outsiders and tried to make sure that, whether or not they were “true sons” of sipahis, they had military experience or at least a fighting spirit, resided in the district where their timar was located, and showed up for the call to arms.29 In subsequent years his administration tried to find possessors for all the vacant timars whose revenues were lowered by peasant flight and to resettle peasants who had left the land.30 Murad then ordered an empire-wide resurvey of the villages for tax purposes, to record the actual number of taxpayers and to reach a realistic figure for taxes due.

This period marks a definitive split between romantic views of the true Ottomans of the past and realistic Ottoman conditions. The timar holders never again embodied the central Ottoman identity. The last advice work in this series, Katib Çelebi’s Principles of Action for the Rectification of Defects (Düstûruʾl-Amel li-Islahiʾl-Halel) of 1653, did not even discuss the timar holders, although they continued to exist until the end of the empire. Katib Çelebi made a very pragmatic analysis of that year’s financial crisis, including the reasons for the army’s increasing cost and the treasury’s diminishing balance. Like the timar holders, the Janissaries were losing their military excellence and their military role as the sultan’s bodyguard. Their actual condition and behavior grew farther and farther away from the image they had established (or that the advice writers established for them). Nevertheless, they emerged from this process as the carriers of Ottoman identity. They became an element of the urban elite, an element that represented the common people’s call for justice against powerful political figures, and they maintained that role for nearly two centuries.

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