Download PDF | (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization) Kaya Şahin - Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman_ Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman World-Cambridge University Press (2013).
314 Pages
Empire and Power in the Reign of Sileyman
Kaya Sahin’s book offers a revisionist reading of Ottoman history during the reign of Siileyman the Magnificent (1520-66). By examining the life and works of a bureaucrat, Celalzade Mustafa, Sahin moves beyond traditional, teleological approaches and argues that the empire was built as part of the Eurasian momentum of empire building and demonstrates the imperial vision of sixteenth-century Ottomans. This unique study shows that, in contrast with many Eurocentric views, the Ottomans were active players in European politics, with an imperial culture in direct competition with that of the Habsburgs and the Safavids. Indeed, this book explains Ottoman empire building with reference to the larger Eurasian context, from Tudor England to Mughal India, contextualizing such issues as state formation, imperial policy, and empire building in the period more generally. Sahin’s work also devotes significant attention to the often-ignored religious dimension of the Ottoman-Safavid struggle, showing how the rivalry redefined Sunni and Shiite Islam, laying the foundations for today’s religious tensions.
Kaya Sahin is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research and writing have been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Newberry Library, and the Social Science Research Council.
Acknowledgments
As a political science major at Bogazici University, my curiosity about Ottoman history was initially spurred by debates around the transition from the empire to the republic. I was fortunate enough to take Ottoman language lessons with Metin Berke and Yiicel Demirel, who instilled in me a more holistic view of Ottoman history and culture. At Sabanci University, Metin Kunt, Hiilya Canbakal, and Tiilay Artan, with their focus on early modern Ottoman history, were the best teachers I could hope to find at a critical juncture in my academic formation. I should also mention, among my first and formative influences, Halil Berktay’s lectures and conversations on historiography and comparative history. At the University of Chicago, thanks to Cornell Fleischer, I was able to further concentrate on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within a perspective that placed the Ottomans into a larger geographical, cultural, and political environment. Everything I write is, in a way, a dialogue with Professor Fleischer’s own writings, lectures, and personal conversations.
I am eternally grateful for his sage advice, unflagging encouragement, incomparable intellectual stimulation, and, above all, infinite patience. Robert Dankoff’s help and guidance were instrumental in unlocking Celalzade Mustafa’s dense prose and eventually enjoying his style. Next to being members of my dissertation committee, Constantin Fasolt and Fred Donner have encouraged and supported me over the years, and I continue to aspire to the scholarly example they have set in their own works. Courses taken with John Woods, Rachel Fulton, Adrian Johns, Constantin Fasolt, and Tamar Herzog helped me rethink various issues related to Ottoman history. The Early Modern Workshop was a fertile meeting and debating ground for early modernists of all stripes. Although the process of writing is often a lonely pursuit, I developed many ideas through ongoing conversations with my fellow Chicago graduate students and now colleagues Mehmetcan Akpinar, Nikolay Antov, Abdurrahman Atcil, Evrim Binbas, Snjezana Buzov, Ertugrul Okten, James Tallon, James Vaughn, and Niikhet Varlik.
The research and writing for my dissertation and book were supported by grants from the University of Chicago’s Department of History and its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Tulane University’s Department of History, and the Newberry Library. I would like to thank Nevzat Kaya and Emir Es at the Sileymaniye Library, Ayten Ardel at the Prime Ministry Archives, Ulkii Altindag at the Topkap: Palace Archives, ilknur Keles and Melek Gengboyaci at the Millet Library, Esra Miiyesseroglu at the Topkap1 Palace Library, and Ayda Percin at the Tiirkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Baskanligi for their help during my research and with publication permits. I used the collections and interlibrary loan services of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the ISAM Library in Istanbul, the Northwestern University Library, and the Newberry Library.
I turned my dissertation into a book thanks to a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Newberry in 2010-11, and as an affiliate of the Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. Daniel Greene, Diane Dillon, Carmen Jaramillo, Paul Gehl, and the Newberry fellows created a stimulating intellectual environment that made me rethink many an argument. At the Buffett Center, Andrew Wachtel, Hendrik Spruyt, Brian Hanson, and Rita Koryan provided a vibrant academic hub. The book took its final shape in the spring of 2012, thanks to the suggestions of two anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press, and under the guidance of my editor, Marigold Acland. Sarika Narula and Anuj Antony greatly facilitated the production process and kindly answered every question. Christopher Markiewicz prepared the book’s index, and offered several helpful suggestions at the proofreading stage. Especially in the writing and proofreading stages, I often remembered, and relied upon, the guidance I received from Miige Giirsoy and Semih S6kmen as a junior editor at Metis Publishers in the late 1990s.
During my research in Istanbul, I benefited from the hospitality of Kerem Uniivar, Setrak Eryazi, the Koryan family, and my sister and brother-in-law, Aysegiil and Ulas Giiveng. Istanbul, a city of many attractions, is particularly enjoyable in the company of Burak Onaran and Mehmet Besikci. In New Orleans, the Brancaforte family (Benito, Charlotte, and Elio) gave me a home away from home. At Tulane and in New Orleans, I enjoyed the friendship and support of Thomas Adams, George Bernstein, James Boyden, Donna Denneen, Eli Feinstein, Kenneth Harl, Jana Lipman, Colin Maclachlan, Elizabeth McMahon, Lawrence Powell, Samuel Ramer, Randy Sparks, Eric Wedig, and Ferruh Yilmaz. Several friends and colleagues read parts of the manuscript and offered suggestions, helped with my research, and answered my queries about various issues. I would like to mention here Meltem Ahiska, Sebouh Aslanian, Giinhan Borekci, Erdem Cipa, Emine Fetvaci, Hakan Karateke, Sooyong Kim, Kivang Kogak, Baki Tezcan, and Kahraman Sakul. At Indiana University, Iam grateful for the warm welcome I have been given by my colleagues and the staff at the history department.
Despite the emotional cost of physical distance, since the day I left my hometown of Burhaniye for boarding school, my parents Fatma and Hasan Sahin never failed to express their faith in me and the work I do. I wouldn’t find much comfort and pleasure in my research and writing without the constant presence and support of Rita Koryan, who kindly allowed Celalzade Mustafa to become a mainstay of our everyday life since 2005. I am eternally grateful to her for showing me that there is a whole life to be enjoyed beyond the issues and personalities of the sixteenth century and outside manuscript libraries and archives.
Introduction
Revisiting Celalzade Mustafa
On a torrid August day in 2009, I visited Celalzade Mustafa’s final resting place in Istanbul’s Eyiip district, in a neighborhood called Nisanca. The chancellor (nisancz) is buried in the cemetery adjoining the small mosque built for him by Sinan, the chief imperial architect. His brother Salih, a teacher, judge, and religious scholar, is buried nearby, but the sepulchers of poets who received plots from this patron of poetry have disappeared. The mosque, adorned with glazed tiles, has changed significantly since the mid-sixteenth century. It was damaged in a fire in 1729 and was rebuilt following a more devastating fire in 1780.' The mansion where Mustafa composed his works, welcomed fellow literati, and provided advice to young and aspiring secretaries is long gone, probably destroyed in the fire of 1780, if not before. The bathhouse and dervish lodge he had commissioned do not survive either. After reaching one of the highest administrative positions of the empire and enjoying the unanimous respect of his fellow administrators and literati, Mustafa now sleeps in a modest working-class neighborhood, away from the bustling avenues, familiar landmarks, and popular locales of imperial and republican Istanbul.
Mustafa (ca. 1490-1567) entered the Ottoman scribal service in 1516, at a time when an embryonic corps of secretaries was about to expand considerably. He was initially taken on as a secretary of the imperial council (divan katibi). He became chief secretary (re’isiilkiittab) in 1525 and chancellor in 1534, a position he held until his retirement in 1557 and then briefly in 1566-67. He devoted the last decade of his life to his writing and produced, most notably, two major works on the reigns of Selim (r. 1512-20) and Siileyman (r. 1520-66)? and a treatise on politics and morals.* Thanks to a stellar bureaucratic career and widely respected, influential works, Mustafa was recognized by his contemporaries as well as by future generations as the ideal Ottoman litterateur who combined service to the dynasty, defense of the empire, and literary prowess under a single mantle.* Beyond these lauds, the function of Mustafa’s bureaucratic career and literary production is better understood within the global dynamics of the sixteenth century. Mustafa came of age in a time characterized, for the Ottomans as well as the inhabitants of the entire Eurasian continent, by sudden and radical changes in political organization as well as cultural and religious identity. The end result was the creation of new empires that have been characterized by Sanjay Subrahmanyam:
(1) as states with an extensive geographical spread, embracing more than one cultural domain and ecozone; (2) as states powered by an ideological motor that claimed extensive, at times even universal, forms of dominance, rather than the mere control of a compact domain; (3) as states where the idea of suzerainty was a crucial component of political articulation, and where the monarch was defined not merely as king, but as “king over kings,” with an explicit notion of hierarchy in which various levels of sovereignty, both “from above” and “from below,” were involved.°
The Ottoman polity was inaugurated by a small group of militarized nomads in northeast Anatolia around 1300, and it subsequently evolved into a frontier principality and a dynastic kingdom. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was a turning point in terms of dynastic prestige and political ideology, but it is only in the sixteenth century that we can fully perceive an imperial set of mind and a leap forward in institutionalization. Looking at this period through Mustafa’s career shows that, next to a few elements of continuity, new Ottoman administrative practices reflect an impressive level of invention and creativity. This is not the achievement of a particular political and organizational genius but, rather, the outcome of pragmatic measures, adopted under the pressures of a world-historical process of empire building and interimperial rivalry. In the Ottoman case, these pressures are represented by the near-simultaneous expansion of the Safavid (1501-1722) and Habsburg (1526-1918) Empires.
Selim’s contribution to these developments was the invasion of large territories in the Middle East. Siileyman continued his father’s anti-Safavid legacy and adopted an aggressive foreign policy on the European front. Military campaigns required the deployment of increasingly larger financial resources, which in turn necessitated a better management of various revenue sources. Revolts in the Middle East in the first decade of Siileyman’s reign exposed the weaknesses of Ottoman control in newly acquired territories and motivated the sultan and his men to develop better methods of management. While searching for the means to prevail over two fronts, field large armies and navies, collect taxes, put down rebellions, ensure the compliance of local elites and communities, and supervise their own ruling elite, the Ottomans contributed to a dialogical process of empire building by constraining their rivals to engage in similar activities. Secretaries were necessary for the creation and deployment of technologies and instruments of control such as land surveys, law codes, and various registers recording expenses, the distribution of land grants (tmar), the decisions of the imperial council, and so forth. Mustafa played aprominent role in the introduction of new administrative practices and attempted to control and manage both the realm and the members of the Ottoman ruling elite in the name of the sultan.
Imperial rivalries in this period involved a crucial ideological dimension and led to an intense political and cultural competition. The Ottomans competed with the Habsburgs over claims to universal monarchy and with the Shiite Safavids over the definition of true Islam and the leadership of the Muslim community. The Ottoman sultan legitimized his rule by claiming to provide justice, security, and prosperity to his subjects. Documents produced by secretaries in a relatively standardized and sophisticated idiom served the task of creating and propagating particular images of the sultan and particular notions about the Ottoman Empire. Despite the fact that they remained the smallest group within the Ottoman ruling elite, secretaries constituted a very vocal minority whose function was to act as the surrogate of the sultan in bringing order to the realm and in explaining and defending the new empire. In addition to the documents he produced or supervised as chancellor, Mustafa expounded his own ideas about empire and bureaucratic identity in his historical and political writings. He believed that his career as a servant of the dynasty qualified him over other historians who did not know the inner workings of the Ottoman administration.
He was also concerned about presenting what he believed to be the correct historical, religious, and cultural position vis-a-vis the Habsburgs, the Safavids, and other enemies and rivals. Although he proudly witnessed the sudden rise to prominence of secretaries in the midst of a newly centralizing early modern dynastic polity, he also worried about their vulnerability vis-a-vis the military class. In his political treatise, he claimed that a well-educated, freeborn service class could manage the empire better than the military men. Mustafa was one of the builders of a new imperial identity according to which the Ottoman realm, ruled by a lawabiding and justice-dispensing dynasty that protected Sunni Islam against enemies from within and without, constituted the epitome of Islamic civilization.
This powerful fiction was subsequently hailed as an Ottoman “classical age,” an idealized period that continues to occupy a privileged place in the rhetoric of Turkish political Islam. The Ottoman sixteenth century is widely accepted as a formative stage in the empire’s organization and cultural production. Apologetic approaches portray the reigns of Selim and Siileyman as the culmination of a march from tribe to empire. The proponents of the “decline theory” interpret Siileyman’s empire as an ideal construction and see the aftermath of his reign as the beginning of an inescapable descent into imperial dissolution.° These approaches have the merit of realizing that the first half of the sixteenth century is a critical period; however, they fail to explain its specificity. They refrain from developing more comprehensive models within which the sudden imperial expansion would become more meaningful. There is a “classical age obsession” among Ottoman historians. At the same time, there is a conspicuous absence of works studying the “classical age” with a critical eye.’
Studying Mustafa’s career and writings allows us to discuss the singularity of early modern empire building and emphasize the parallels and differences between the Ottomans and the other early modern empires. While Mustafa the bureaucrat worked to establish administrative institutions, Mustafa the litterateur, the historian, the political writer created, circulated, and debated universalist political ideas that ranged from claims to universal monarchy over East and West to messianism, from the promotion of Sunni Islam to Mongol/Timurid concepts of ecumenical sovereignty. These activities placed him on the same level with his peers from Henrician England to Mughal India. Despite the considerable differences in political outlook, educational background, and religious belief among individual cases, Mustafa was part of a Eurasian expansion in bureaucratic action, a trend that included his fellow Ottomans Ramazanzade Mehmed (d. 1571) and Feridun Ahmed (d. 1583), the Safavids Qadi Ahmad Qummi (d. after 1606) and Iskandar Munshi (1560/61-1633), and the Mughal Abu’l-fazl ibn Mubarak (1551-1602). On the Western part of Eurasia, this new era was represented by figures such as Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540) and William Cecil (1521-98) in England, Michel de I’Hospital (1507-73) in France, and Mercurino Gattinara (1465-1530), Nicolas Granvelle (1486-1550), and Francisco de los Cobos (1477-1547) in the Habsburg domains.*® In the sixteenth century, the number of secretaries and their purview increased throughout Eurasia; the volume and content of administrative records expanded; an imperial grand policy was formulated in the palace and put into practice on the battlefield; the political center began to infiltrate the lives of its subjects through law, architectural projects, politicized ceremonies, and the supervision of religion; quasi-sacral notions of sovereignty were created and circulated as part and parcel of imperial expansion. Mustafa’s life and career illustrate the objectives, yearnings, illusions, achievements, and failures of a group of Ottoman administrators and literati who are very similar in outlook to their English, French, Habsburg, Safavid, and Mughal peers. Sileyman’s empire is not the outcome of a Near Eastern/Islamic/Turkish historical Geist that realized its political and civilizational potential. Rather, it is a creative answer to a global crisis that radically changed the political, cultural, and religious landscape of early modern Eurasia.
Ottoman Empire Building and Early Modern Eurasia
The term early modern Eurasia provides a meaningful geographical and cultural space within which the histories of the new empires may be placed. Eurasia denotes a zone, from Western Europe to East Asia, which has been connected through various commercial and ecological cycles since the Bronze Age Revolution; this zone was even more thoroughly connected through economic and political/cultural exchanges from the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards.’ The appellation early modern was created by Europeanists seeking a label for the period between the Renaissance on the one hand and the rise of the nation state, industrial capitalism, and European modernity on the other. Jack A. Goldstone’s criticisms about the Eurocentric and modernity-centric limitations of the concept are still relevant,!° and certainly, the histories of non-European societies cannot be reduced to their progress toward European modernity or their failure to do so. However, it is also true that the early modern era can still be defined as a global moment that included the active participation of various polities that may or may not be geographically situated in Western Europe. By adopting the term early modern, my aim is not to subsume the Ottoman experience under the European one, but rather reinsert the Ottomans and, in comparison, other Eurasian polities, cultures, and societies, into a shared time and space that have been taken over and dominated by industrial-capitalist European imperialism and Eurocentrism. Discussing the onset of a global early modernity in the first half of the sixteenth century is a remedy against both Eurocentrism and various defensive, apologetic, proto-nationalist approaches that focus on the particularities (or merits) of non-European and non-Christian societies. In this book, it also serves the purpose of engaging the “global turn” in recent historiography through an analysis of the Ottoman case, !!
Indeed, there was a period of relatively integrated political and economic developments and relatively dialogical cultural exchanges in Eurasia from the late fifteenth century onward, until the supremacy of Western/European societies was dictated to the rest of the globe through the twin forces of industrial capitalism and new forms of imperialism after the last decades of the eighteenth century.'* Parallel and nearsimultaneous trends, such as “territorial consolidation; firearms-aided intensification of warfare; more expansive, routinized administrative systems; growing commercialization ... wider popular literacy, along with a novel proliferation of vernacular texts,” were observed.!’ These were supported, between 1450 and 1600, by a favorable climate, an improvement in agricultural production, and an expanding international trade, which allowed the expanding empires to have access to resources needed for administrative consolidation and militarism. In an article that traces the pedigree of the term early modern, Jerry H. Bentley identified three global processes that created an early modern ecology: “the creation of global networks of sea-lanes that provided access to all the world’s shorelines, global exchanges of biological species that held massive implications for human populations as well as natural environments, and the forging of an early capitalist global economy that shaped patterns of production, distribution, consumption, and social organization around the world.” These processes led to “demographic fluctuations, large-scale migrations, intensified exploitation of natural environments, technological diffusions, consolidation of centralized states, imperial expansion, and global cultural exchanges.”!* These cultural exchanges included the reformulation and circulation of ideas on universal/ecumenical sovereignty. !° Joseph Fletcher, one of the pioneers of global perspectives in history writing, adds to these trends the growth of regional cities, the rise of urban commercial classes, religious revival and reformations, and rural unrest. !°
The Ottoman polity deserves to be studied within the larger context of early modern Eurasia because it exhibits most of these transformations in the first half of the sixteenth century. Joseph Fletcher’s view that the early modern period has a “quickening tempo” is relevant for Ottoman history as well: if for nothing else, the first half of the sixteenth century is worth studying due to the palpably quickening pace of political, military, economic, and religious activity in the Ottoman realm. Next to the attempts at administrative consolidation and cultural competition, the Ottoman realm felt the impact of global ecological and epidemiological dynamics; the Ottoman ruling elite took an active interest in overland and overseas travel and communication and engaged in a veritable activity of expansion and exploration. !”
In recognition of the wider world within which the Ottomans dwelled, Ottoman historians have utilized the term early modern to demarcate a historical period (ca. 1450 to ca. 1850) and raise questions about space, legitimacy, knowledge, and religious and cultural identity.'!* Cemal Kafadar was one of the first scholars who discussed affinities and differences between early modern European and Ottoman histories and noted the emergence of new forms of literature, identity, and sociality as the features of a distinct era.!? More recently, it has been argued that the Ottomans took part in a European or Mediterranean early modernity, especially with regard to the building of military and political institutions and the circulation of universalist politico-religious ideas.*? Under the impact of Marshall Hodgson’s global Islamic history vision or Marxian debates on the particularities of “Asian” societies, the Ottomans have also been studied together with the contemporary Islamic empires of the Safavids and the Mughals (1526-1857).*! In this book, on the other hand, sixteenth-century Ottoman empire building is presented both as a subset of the new Eurasian empires and as a hinge that connected (pace Sanjay Subrahmanyam and his concept of “connected histories”) the eastern and western parts of Eurasia. This process had two facets: the first consisted of practical attempts at establishing territorial and economic control from western Iran to the Hungarian plains, whereas the second involved the production of universal and transcendental political concepts that ranged from Timurid notions of divinely sanctioned sovereignty and European ideas of universal monarchy to a newly imagined Sunni identity.
Discussing empire building and administrative consolidation inescapably creates the risk of overemphasizing intentionality at the expense of contingency, or “efflorescence” at the expense of “crisis.”*” My aim is not to argue that Ottoman empire building was completed in this period or that it reached an “ideal” form. As shown by Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj, Karen Barkey and Baki Tezcan, the post-Siileymanic Ottoman polity continued to manifest a tremendous political and economic dynamism, a pervasive pragmatism, and an important level of social mobility and mobilization.”* Moreover, a large land-based empire such as the Ottoman subset is a collection of various mechanisms of adaptation that develop several vulnerabilities over time, especially when they fail to transform themselves according to new circumstances.** As Sam White has demonstrated, in the first half of the sixteenth century, Ottoman expansion was supported by a suitable ecological environment; the success of the Ottoman elite depended on its ability to develop creative ways to benefit from this environment. However, “as they grew in scale and scope, Ottoman systems of provisioning and settlement faced mounting problems. Just as the Ottomans proved especially precocious at building these systems, so they became particularly dependent on their stability and susceptible to their failures,” particularly when they began to feel the impact of “population pressure, inflation, and diminishing returns from agriculture” in the 1570s.”° The imperial subset that was imagined and created by Mustafa and his contemporaries thus entered, relatively soon, a period of severe challenges and major transformations. Nevertheless, the first half of the sixteenth century needs to be revisited to understand the dynamics behind the first relatively organized Ottoman thrust at establishing more expansive administrative structures and more sophisticated cultural and ideological discourses. This process is too rich to be confined to the straightjacket of nationalist and teleological approaches that interpret it as a prelude to the Turkish nation state or as the culmination of a Turko-Muslim spirit. At the same time, with its emphasis on rationality, rule of law, efficient government, government-controlled religion, and political economy, the first Ottoman experience of early modernity also proves that European early modernity, often defined alongside the aforementioned concepts, is not superior or unique, but part of global trends.
My book is not a work of comparative history but, whenever appropriate, it refers to other early modern Eurasian polities, because one of its objectives is to discuss the Ottoman case as a subset of early modern empire formation. This allows me to emphasize convergences and divergences and, more importantly, to render the “Ottoman experience” more meaningful and relevant within a larger context. This period could (and should) be discussed through the perspective of various individuals and communities and by using different methodologies. I bring together the perspective of the empire’s chief bureaucrat through a mixture of revisionist political history and a close reading of the chancellor’s works. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1 through 4) offers a revisionist reading of sixteenth-century Ottoman history that takes into account both internal tensions within the Ottoman ruling elite and the international context. Mustafa’s experiences and observations, gleaned from his works of history, form the main thread of the narrative in the first part. Part 2 (Chapters 5 through 7) discusses the evolution and functioning of the new empire’s institutions and the cultural and political discourse that accompanied them.
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