~ INTRODUCTION ~
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~ Who, in which period, formed part of the Ottoman elite? In the present context the terms ‘Ottoman elite’ and ‘Ottoman ruling group’ will be used interchangeably, although strictly speaking one might regard the elite as broader than the ‘hard core’ constituted by the ruling group, the men who actually made the decisions. Unfortunately, it is not easy to delineate the contours of this set of people: quite obviously high-level dignitaries such as viziers, finance directors (defterdars) or provincial governors of whatever level formed part of it, and so did the often highly educated scribes who manned the bureaux of the central Ottoman chancery. Janissary officers also should be included, especially when we are concerned with a border province, and the same applies to the holders of tax assignments expected to perform military and/or administrative services (timar, ze’amet). Quite obviously, kadis were the backbone of local administration, and thus they, along with their hierarchical superiors the army judges (kadiasker) and the chief jurisconsult (şeyhülislam) figure prominently within the Ottoman elites.45 Whether dervishes should be considered part of this illustrious group is less easy to determine: an urban sheik of an order esteemed at court, who might even have had the ear of viziers and sultans, obviously had a good claim to form part of the ruling group. But this is not true of the head of a dervish lodge somewhere in the depths of Anatolia or the Balkans, who had trouble defending his modest tax immunities from the demands of provincial governors. In addition there is the problem of those people who qualified for positions within the ruling group by their family backgrounds and upbringing, but who for personal reasons avoided high office. Maybe the overall number of such men was quite small; but it so happened that the authors of two major source texts, namely the ‘world traveller’ Evliya Çelebi (1611–c. 1684/ 1019–c. 1096) and the wide-ranging scholar Kâtib Çelebi, (1609–57/1017–68) fell into this category for part of their lifetimes. For the purposes of our study, they will count as fully fledged members of the Ottoman elite. However, it must be admitted that this study does not deal with the views of high-level ulema as extensively as they doubtless deserve. In part this is due to the fact that we do not as yet possess many monographs on these people: if Süleyman the Magnificent’s chief jurisconsult Ebusu’ud Efendi has been referred to, this is due to the fact that his legal opinions have been published and analysed in some detail; and the same is true of certain seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul personages.46 Many more studies on other people of this stamp are urgently needed. Moreover, the Ottoman archival documents that form an important primary source at least for the section on foreign trade do not highlight the group-specific opinions of the ulema, but treat the kadis as state functionaries expected to carry out the sultan’s will obediently. Undeniably, this relative downplaying of the ulema constitutes a blind spot of the present study. But unfortunately it is difficult to encompass all aspects of our topic within a relatively limited number of pages; ‘I crave the reader’s indulgence’.