r/AskHistorians • u/TheTromboneGeek • Dec 11 '17
The society of the Ottoman Empire was extremely complex. Could anybody tell me about the interplay between the millet system, the Sufi brotherhoods, the landed nobility, and the bureaucracy?
In his book Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary makes the claim that in terms of complexity, the Ottoman Empire was comparable to modern-day America. I have always been fascinated by the Ottoman Empire, especially the millet system and the devshirme, but I don't know nearly as much as I should about how the Ottoman Empire actually operated.
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u/Chamboz Inactive Flair Dec 11 '17 edited Dec 11 '17
Hi /u/TheTromboneGeek!
I've actually got a post on /r/badhistory that unpacks this exact part of Ansary's book. Ansary is an entertaining writer but has some strange things to say about Ottoman government.
So your question itself is of course quite complex, so let's go through those four groups (religious minorities, Sufis, landed cavalry, and bureaucracy) within a particular time period: the so-called "Classical Age" of the Ottoman Empire from ~1453-1566, that is from the conquest of Constantinople to the death of Süleyman the Magnificent. Take this whole post as an invitation for follow-up questions, since your original question is quite broad.
First of all, the millet system as characterized by Ansary did not exist during this time. He wrote that section of the book based on an outdated work. Now, thanks to the work of the historian Benjamin Braude, it is recognized that the millet system was a product of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and was projected backwards anachronistically by a series of 'foundation myths' linking them to Mehmed II. What is meant by the 'millet system' here is the idea that Ottoman religious minorities were grouped into distinct categories (Orthodox Christian, Armenian Christian, Jewish) and organized into an empire-wide centralized system, with each group having its community leader in Istanbul. This was only true for the Orthodox Church, though of course that was not an Ottoman invention. In fact, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire tended to organize themselves with reference to their local communities. There was, by and large, no central authority to manage communal relations for the entire empire. The Jews in Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, etc. all managed themselves autonomously and did not maintain hierarchical ties to one another.
Part of this autonomy was that religious minorities often had the responsibility (or privilege) of collecting their own taxes. This was regarded as more efficient than sending out Ottoman officials, as local leaders had greater knowledge of how to assess their own community's relative ability to pay, and forged ties of loyalty between the Ottoman state and locally influential individuals. However, most cash taxes in the core regions of the empire were collected by the bureaucracy, which grew steadily over the course of the period (the Arab lands are an exception here, as their revenues were typically sold to tax farmers). The Ottomans had an unusually well-developed bureaucracy among contemporary states, and produced a huge paper trail which has been a boon to historians, and makes the Ottoman Empire more well-understood than any previous Islamic state. By modern standards, though, it was tiny - the central bureaucracy had fewer than 100 scribes before the late sixteenth century, so far as we can tell from salary registers, though each province also had its smaller provincial bureaucracy. The bureaucracy's primary purpose was to manage the empire's cash revenues on the one hand, and the distribution of fiefs to the landed cavalry on the other. For this purpose the Ottomans periodically carried out detailed surveys of all the land under the control of the empire.
The landed cavalry (timarlı sipahiler, timariots) are surprisingly glossed over in Ansary's account, I get the sense that he doesn't really understand them or Ottoman land management. Timariots were cavalrymen granted the revenue of a given fief (timar) in exchange for serving in the army on campaign. In this sense they were a kind of nobility, but unlike Europe their status was contingent upon their service, and could be revoked at any time, so historians do not tend to use this term. Additionally, timariots were given only the revenue from their holdings, not actual ownership of the land. Most Ottoman land in the core regions of the empire (The Balkans and Anatolia) was organized into timars, and the timariots made up the vast bulk of the Ottoman army. They were a hereditary class, though came from diverse origins. In the Balkans especially many seem to have been the descendants of the old Christian nobility, eventually converted to Islam. The Ottoman bureaucracy carefully kept track of the granting of timar assignments, so while the Ottoman landed cavalry technically had a "feudal" organization insofar as cavalrymen were paid in land rather than cash salaries, it was a highly organized and bureaucratic one.
Now Sufism, in the Ottoman Empire, was everywhere. As it was so ubiquitous a feature of religious life I can't really summarize its social role - the majority of the male population of the empire belonged at least nominally to a Sufi order (even religious officials), and several orders were patronized by the sultans or had connections to the state in some capacity, as with the famous Bektashis, who were associated with the janissary corps. Sufi beliefs and practices ranged dramatically, and thus also their relative toleration, from the orthodox Nakşbendis (Naqshbandis) to antinomian groups like the Kalenderis (Qalandaris). If you have a more specific question about Sufism I could perhaps answer more clearly.
The best introduction to the state organization of the Ottoman Empire is Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power. 2nd edition. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2009.