Selected Books
Turkey in Europe & Europe in Turkey
Turgut Özal

The Ottoman Empire, It's Structure and Instutions

"There is no birth for anything mortal; there is no end by baleful death; there is only the combining and separating of the ingredients of a mixture. Birth is but a name given to this fact by man." Empedocles of Agrigentum

Legislation: The Organs of Government 45

The Ankara Agreement, which anticipated the eventual entry of Turkey into the EC as a full member, was signed in 1963. The Prime Minister at that time, Ismet Inönü, replying to reactions from Western quarters, remarked to the correspondent of an English magazine: `The Ottoman Empire was the continuation of Byzantium.'

I still remember the comments evoked by this remark. `The West is the West,' they said, `and Byzantium is the West. But the Turk is the Turk.' People of every era have in their minds prejudices of which they are unaware. This may be the result of intellectual laziness or of a conviction that one person must necessarily be different from, and superior to, another. Whatever the reason, such prejudices give our emotional and intellectual life stability and serenity. Discovery of the truth is frequently at the cost of the loss of this internal equilibrium.

The influence of Byzantium on the Ottoman Empire is a subject which has much occupied Western historians. In the sixteenth century Augier Ghislain de Busbecq spoke of it in the report of his ambassadorial mission to Istanbul. Pietro della Valle reported that the Turks regarded themselves as the successors and perpetuators of Rome. J. Leunclavius (in his Annals of the Ottoman Sultans in 1596) and du Cange studied the analogies between Byzantine and Ottoman institutions. The historian of Byzantine law, Zacharia von Lingenthal, considered that Ottoman law, far from being attributable only to the Turks, had been inspired and influenced by Roman and Byzantine law.

Lavisse and Rambaud, in their General History, also dealt with this question. According to Rambaud, after the conquest of Istanbul, Mehmet the Conqueror with his famous Kanunname (codification of law) proceeded to a virtual restoration of Byzantine institutions. Although bearing traces of the influence of Central Asian and Abbasid legislation, the Kanunname had its East Roman predecessor as its principal source of inspiration. Thus, for example, the administrative and governmental titles and functions were those which had existed in Constantinople. The Greek names were translated or adapted into Turkish, so chrysobull became firman (decree), theme became sancak (provincial administrative unit), and so on.

The Palace ceremonial, the costumes of certain highranking people, and even the veil worn by the women (tesettür) were inherited from the Eastern Rome. An example which can be cited is the ceremony during which ambassadors surrendered their weapons on their arrival at the Palace. A. Finlay likened the Sultan, going every Friday to the mosque, to the basileus attending church dressed as a private individual in order to reduce his distance from the rest of the faithful.

Oberhummer indicates that the Byzantine terms relating to the monetary system, measures, architecture, construction, and navigation passed into Ottoman Turkish. Among the institutions which survived under the Ottomans, Scala lists the municipality of Istanbul, the Chief Eunuch, and the Palace eunuchs. J. H. Kramers claimed that the Ottoman scholastic institutions were based on those of the Greek patriarchal establishment.

Several Turkish writers shared, at least in part, these opinions. Mustafa Pasha accepted that Byzantine protocol and customs had passed to the Ottoman Palace, and that the various uniforms of the Sultan's troops in the çapital, and even the words alay (troop) and efendi were of Byzantine origin.

Jean Deny claimed that the system of timar (fief) came in its entirety from the Byzantine pronoia. Sokolov underlined the analogies which existed between the various duties and taxes of the two regimes, the Ottoman names being direct translations of the Byzantine ones.

The Rumanian Byzantine scholar, Nicolas Iorga, held that, even before the conquest of Istanbul, Mehmet II was more `Byzantine' than the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine Dragases, who was half Serbian. He pointed out that the Byzantine concept of a `unique and universal' State was adopted by the Ottomans, and emphasised that, even prior to conquering Istanbul, Mehmet II had founded at Edirne an empire based on the principle of absolute monarchy and inspired by the Byzantine model. According to Iorga, it was Byzantine civilization, allied with Islam, that continued to reign in Istanbul. He further describes the Ottoman State as the `Muslim Roman Empire'. Iorga clearly saw a relationship between the Ottoman kanun (law) and the Greek canon.

There are numerous other examples. Those I have cited are sufficient to demonstrate the adoption of many Roman institutions. The question is whether, as the writers mentioned above maintain, these institutions were simply taken over or, in other words, copied by the Ottomans following the conquest of Istanbul, and whether the Roman institutions were intrinsic to this Empire, or whether they were general characteristics of the time, and already adopted and assimilated by the other countries and societies of the region. Thus the Ottomans were obliged to organise the Balkan territories taken from the Eastern Roman Empire in the reign of Mehmet I (that is to say before the conquest of Constantinople) into two provinces modelled on the Byzantine system.

The Divan (council) combined certain characteristics common to all contemporary governments with elements inherited from the Byzantines. Some of these were adopted without alteration, while others were adapted. The vezaret-i uzma (Prime Ministry) and the vezaret (Ministry) existed in other Islamic countries at that time. The kadyasker (Minister of Justice) was lower in rank than the vezir. The Reisülküttap, head of the nisanas, occupied a position lower than that of the Minister of Finance. The nisanct drew the tughra (royal seal), a tradition going back to the Oghuz. The post of Kaptanpasalrk (Minister of the Navy) appeared in the Kanunname of Mehmet II but remained vacant until after the annexation of Egypt and Syria. The fact that the post figured in the Kanunname without there being a title-holder seems to prove that this position was a borrowing from the Byzantines.

The East Roman and Ottoman land-owning systems were almost identical. The fact that agriculture was of prime importance in both economies is enough to explain this similarity, but there are also convincing indications that timar was a Byzantine invention. Nevertheless, similar systems are encountered among the Sassanids, the Arabs, and the Turks, particularly the Arabs, who called it iqtá`. The Great Seljuk Empire developed a much improved system, later adopted by the Anatolian Seljuks.

The Ottoman system was the same as that of the Anatolian Seljuks. The Roman rules of the `timar of the war fleet' and the fixed value of the other timars were also passed down to the Ottomans from the Anatolian Seljuks.

The Eastern Roman Empire possessed an infantry force responsible for the protection of the Basileus and the city. There is a similarity between the Ottoman janissaries and this special militia.

The question of whether the system of devsirme, which islamicized Christian children, was in conformity with the principles of Islam was long debated. It is worth a brief explanation since it has become a widely exploited subject of reproach in the West. One has to remember that a large part of the Ottoman population was Greek Orthodox. The recruitment system made it possible to maintain the internal and external security of the country, and to employ the talents of its various communities in its Government, while obliging the minimum number of Christians to change their religion. It was Bayezit I who established the system of recruitment of Orthodox children for the army which had been initiated by his predecessor, Murat I. Heterodox Islam (Bektashi), adopted by the converted children, linked the two communities.

Recruiting first took place in Rumelia, and was then extended to Anatolia. It is not correct to claim that the Ottomans had to use force in order to recruit the janissaries. On the contrary, families tried every way, including bribes, to get their children recruited, because the careers available to them were much sought after. Recruitment was limited to between one and three thousand soldiers a year. The total number of converted recruits was less than ten thousand in 1475, and reached about twenty-eight thousand in 1527.

Neither is it true that children of five years old were recruited. The usual age was between fourteen and eighteen years old and, at a time when marriage at this age was widespread, only unmarried men were selected. Those chosen received a special training. The most successful became State officials, the others janissaries. This system allowed Christians, particularly Orthodox Greeks, to participate in the Government, as well as in the defence of the Empire.

Among the Great Seljuks, and among their Anatolian cousins, there existed a hassa corps of three to five thousand cavalry. There was also a hassa corps of infantry. It is therefore incorrect to say that the Ottomans were influenced solely by the Romans.

The Roman army included units coming from Pontus, Armenia, Georgia, Syria, from among the Petchenegs, as well as from other places. The Great Seljuk army was just as mixed as far as race and religion were concerned. Persians, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, and Franks, among others, fought in its ranks. The first Ottoman army, that is the uç or frontier army, consisted of cavalry. Later the janissaries, an infantry force, assumed a position in the Ottoman army similar to that occupied by the Christians in the Great Seljuk army.

Thereonamed at Baghdad, Sarajevo, Cairo, and Budapest. Again the mention of this vacant post in the Kanunname suggests that the position was borrowed from the East Romans.

It is not true that the first Ottoman seraglio was established after the conquest of Istanbul, though the seraglio of Mehmet II could hardly be compared with the East Roman palaces where splendout is true that the tradition of a `unique and universal' empire, adopted from the Romans by the Byzantines, remained valid during the whole duration of the Ottoman Empire. However, the same concept existed among both the Muslim Caliphs and the Persian Sassanids. Abbasid public law considered the Muslim world as a whole, based on the Amir al-Mu'minin; it was at the same time unique and universal, being both empire and religious community. Like the Eastern Roman Empire, which had at times defended without success the oneness and universality of the Church and the Empire, the Caliphs also struggled to safeguard `the oneness and universality' of the Muslim world. However, the divisions within the Muslim world itself greatly undermined the validity of these principles.

Nevertheless, Christians and Muslims were seen simultaneously asserting these two principles - oneness anduniversality-in the letter sent by a Patriarch of Istanbul to the Muslim Emir of Crete. He compared Eastern Rome and Islam to two stars in the sky, and wished that they could live like two brothers.46

The Great Seljuk Emperor, Tughrul Bey, having assumed the temporal powers of the Caliph when he conquered Baghdad, transmuted them into spiritual power. During the ceremony organised to mark the occasion, he received two crowns, symbolising his sovereignty over both the East and the West. Thus the whole of the Muslim world, with the exception of the Fatimid Shi'ites, passed under Turkish hegemony. The Abbasid concept of `unique and universal' sovereignty was therefore achieved by the Seljuks. The distinction between the corporeal person and the spiritual person, which was not in conformity with Islamic law, was suppressed during the reign of Sultan Selim I, the two being united in his person. It can be seen therefore that this concept of the State, considered to be inherited from the Eastern Roman Empire, also existed in the Muslim states of the time.

Neither is it correct to say that Greek officials made up the Ottoman administration following the conquest of Istanbul. The Great Seljuks, the Anatolian Seljuks, and the Il-Khans all possessed complex administrations. Among the Ottomans too, from the foundation of the Empire to the conquest of Constantinople, the officials were Turks. Christians were only secretary-translators. The administrative organisation, Divan included, of all Muslim countries was modelled on that of the Sassanids.

As Greek was the principal language of diplomacy at that time, the Seljuks corresponded in Greek, signed treaties drawn up in Greek with Constantinople and other Christian capitals, as well as addressing their Christian subjects in Greek. The Anatolian Seljuks had at their disposal numerous teams of translators.

The Ottomans retained this custom until the sixteenth century. The kanunname of Mehmet II concerning the population of Galata was drawn up in Greek, as were several other documents preserved in our archives. Bayezit II also issued firmans in Greek.

For practical reasons firmans were drawn up in the mother tongue of the subjects concerned. In addition to Greek, Latin and Slovenian were also used in correspondence.

In the sixteenth century, after the conquest of Hungary, correspondence between the Ottoman Prefect and the Hungarian population was written in Hungarian. Following the conquest of Serbia, in the kanunname which was published concerning the colonies of Saxons who were employed to work in the mines, the mining terms appeared in the German language.

The firman concerning the Venetians, issued in 1220 by Ala al-Din Kaykubad, Sultan of the Anatolian Seljuks, with its inscriptions in gold, red, and indigo blue, closely resembled the chrysobulls of the East Romans. Respect for Muslim traditions in correspondence with other Muslim countries is also evident.

The organisation of the Ottoman Divan, of the secretariat (katip), and of the archives was excellent. The Turks, as has been seen, have always given great importance to their archives.

The Kanunname of Mehmet II mentions the eparchy (sehremaneti), without indicating the function of the person appointed to that position. Later, when there was an incumbent, his duties consisted of overseeing the seraglio of Istanbul. Later still, sehremini were named at Baghdad, Sarajevo, Cairo, and Budapest. Again the mention of this vacant post in the Kanunname suggests that the position was borrowed from the East Romans.

It is not true that the first Ottoman seraglio was established after the conquest of Istanbul, though the seraglio of Mehmet II could hardly be compared with the East Roman palaces where splendour, extravagance, and pomp were the norm. One great Ottoman seraglio was established before 1453 during the reign of Bayezit I, and the pomp and extravagance which prevailed there were indeed evocative of Byzantium. However, Roman influence is most evident in the seraglios after Mehmet II, notably in the palace of Bayezit II.

The donatium, a sum of money given by a new emperor on the occasion of his accession to the throne, which was customary in the seraglios, seems to be an ancient practice, firmly established in Muslim countries. It existed among the Abbasids, the Samanids, the Ghaznevids, and the Seljuks.

According to Hammer, the customary round of applause seems to have been borrowed from the Abbasids by the Romans.

The Basileus organised feasts at the Hippodrome. This practice continued during the reign of the Ottomans. It was an ancient religious tradition for an Emperor to provide feasts for his subjects. The custom existed in almost every community, and therefore naturally also among the Turks. There were popular disturbances when the feasts were discontinued. It was probably the topography of Istanbul which determined that these feasts took place at the Hippodrome.

The fetihname, sent by the Ottomans both to their enemies and their friends to announce their victories, resemble the litterae laureatae of Eastern Rome. However, the II-Khans, the Mameluks, and the Anatolian Seljuks also made use of letters both to reassure a friend concerned about the outcome of a battle, and to intimidate an adversary preparing for an attack. The Ottomans themselves also sent such letters before the capture of Istanbul.

The Ottoman hil'at and the East Roman clavus are similar irhstitutions, examples of the rights attaching to the sovereign. Faithful servants were rewarded with robes embroidered and ornamented with imperial writing. However, the same tradition is found among the Sassanid Persians, the Egyptians, the Chinese, and even among the Etruscans.

The absorption into the Ottoman language of technical terms of Latin and Greek origin shows that the Ottomans also came under Roman influence in a variety of other spheres. Such terms relate particularly to art, seamanship, construction, and metallurgy. A similar influence is evident in everyday clothing. The Greek scholar Kukules claimed that the custom of Turkish women wearing a veil when they go out is of East Roman origin, and reached the Ottomans by way of the Arabs.

The similarity between the two Empires seems to be even more marked with regard to concepts of the State and of the economy.

The economy of the Eastern Roman Empire depended on the direction and control of economic activities by the State, hence the State's control of prices, and its monopoly over the sale of objects of value, and even of goods for current consumption. These principles, upheld by the Christian Churches, were in conformity with the interventionist normal in the Middle Ages. The Ottoman Empire naturally carried on the tradition, in spite of the difficulty of reconciling these principles with the Islamic view of the economy.

Ottoman judicial practices were modified, at least to begin with, by the influence of Roman law. After the annexation of Iraq, Syria, and Egypt by the Sublime Porte, Islamic law took over. However, Islamic jurisprudence itself retained traces of the influence of Roman law.47

To claim that the code (Kanunname) of Mehmet the Conqueror, published after the fall of Constantinople, showed the Ottoman Empire to be a mere copy of the Eastern Roman Empire seems to me not to correspond to reality. The fact is that this code brought together into a single text the whole range of decisions and dispositions made by the Divan.

As I have described, when the Ottoman Empire was first established in 1299, Turks and Greeks had been living side by side in Anatolia for two centuries. During the reign of the Anatolian Seljuk dynasties the Turks had therefore been exposed to Graeco-Roman influences. That was only natural in view of the fact that the Anatolian Seljuks consisted of a minority who were living among Christian populations. According to some, these Christian populations were five or six times more numerous than the Muslims, though we consider this ratio excessive.

The vast migration of Muslims driven westwards by the Mongolian invasions established a new equilibrium in Anatolia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries - before these invasions - the Anatolian Seljuks could not avoid being influenced by the East Romans. On the other hand, one should not dismiss the possibility that some influence may have come from the Great Seljuks and the Persians.

From 1299 until the conquest of Istanbul, the Ottomans and the Romans continued to live in interdependence for a further century and a half.

The first imperial organisation was instituted at the end of the thirteenth century by Alaüddin Pasha, brother of Orhan. It adopted much from the Eastern Roman Empire. Gibbon held that between 1071 and 1453 Byzantine influence permeated gradually among the Ottomans through cultural exchanges-a reasonable supposition.

Certainly both Ottoman and Byzantine institutions carried the seal of their epoch. Between 650 and 1453 the Eastern Roman Empire developed numerous relationships, first with the Arabs, then with the Turks. But the Muslim Arabs who migrated to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq had no judicial or bureaucratic tradition; in these areas the Umayyads drew inspiration from the Greeks, who represented -the Graeco-Roman tradition. In Egypt fiscal records were kept in Coptic; in Syria they were in Greek, and in Iraq they were in Persian. The embroideries of the hil'at were in Greek.

Later, after the Umayyad caliphate had been overthrown by the Abbasids, the influence of Sassanid institutions became perceptible in the Islamic Empire. This was because Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, had for a long time been under Sassanid influence, and the State was dominated by the Persian tradition.

It seems to me important to underline here the reciprocity of the influences exercised by the two great States of the pre-Islamic period. The influence of the Sassanids on the Roman Empire is clearly evident: the palace of Diocletian, for example, was constructed on a Persian model. Sassanid influences are also visible in the Eastern Roman Empire, not only in the organisation of the State, but in such diverse fields as art and clothing. It is evident that the Sassanids put their imprint on Roman, Seljuk, and Ottoman institutions.

Whatever their origins may have been, it remains no less certain that the Ottoman institutions were subject to Byzantine influence. However, the Ottomans were able to assimilate, adapt to circumstances, systematise, improve and, in the end, render original those institutions which they had borrowed.

As a result, the structure of the Ottoman Empire was tri-partite, as George Dumezil discovered in all IndoEuropean States, namely clergy, fighting nobility, and people (producers). The ruling élite comprised mostly the devsirme or converted Christians. Doctors of religion or ulema were born Muslims, and the producing and taxpaying masses were composed of Muslims, Christians, and others.48

Despite this structural likeness, the West has always looked for despotic and theocratic features in the Eastern states in general, and in the Ottoman Empire in particular, which should inherently differentiate them from the Western model. In this respect, the despotism of the Sultan was supposedly demonstrated by the existence of the slave household which was thought to rule the Empire in his name; by ulema who were instrumental in putting the religion at his service; by militarism as a political vocation and a source of economic wealth; by the absence of private ownership and the right of the Sultan to grant and confiscate land and wealth; by the rayah concept which was used to humiliate mainly Christian, but also Muslim masses; by the word `mülk' meaning equally the country and property, hence the concept of `patrimonial state', and the highly centralised state structure which prevented the emergence of individual; corporate, and local liberties.

Let us take them one by one. For the first, the opprobrious term `slave household', I would quote from Gibb Bowens's Islamic Society and the West (Oxford, 1959). Of the Sultan's kuls, the dictionary definition of kul being `slave', they say (I, 43):

It is unfortunate that we should be obliged to use the word `slave' for persons of this status. Slaves in Islam are, or were, the property of their masters, who had absolute rights over them. But their servitude carried with it scarcely any social inferiority. No distinction was made between the sons of slave women born to a free master and those whose mothers were also free. Indeed, most of the Abbâsid Caliphs. . . were born of slave mothers; and, from the mid-fifteenth century onwards, so were all the Ottoman Sultans. Moreover, the history of Islâm shows several examples of slave dynasties-that is to say, dynasties of monarchs either enslaved or born in slavery, from a slave father as well as a slave mother-the most celebrated being those of the Egyptian Mamlüki Sultans. . . In such a world little obloquy could attach to the status.

The autonomy of the Ulema has always been underrated in the West. In fact, the duality between the temporal and spiritual authorities was much better established in the Ottoman Empire than in its predecessor. In view of the built-in checks and balances in the political system between the Sultan and the Ulema, the Ottoman system cannot be called either theocratic or despotic in the strict meaning of the words.

As far as land was concerned, both private (mülk arazi) and public (miri arazi) ownership existed. Public land was to a great extent cultivated by holders of timar (fief) granted by the Sultan, and to a much lesser extent by himself directly. It is true that Sultans always sought to increase miri arazi at the expense of private property with the aim of increasing public revenues. One such attempt was made by Mehmet II, the Conqueror, but public unrest persuaded Bayezit II to return the land to its original owners. Such attempts were not repeated.

It is also true that the right of the rayah to land ownership was limited to the use of the land and entitlement to the revenue from it after paying taxes, while the sale of land was prohibited. Even so, the inheritance of land by the son from the father was common practice. As a result, the land tenure regime was more progressive than the serfdom which prevailed in the medieval West. What is more, extremely wealthy Greek and Jewish families always existed in the Empire, e.g. the Nassi, Mendes, Aben-Ayish, Palaeologi, and Cantacuzeni. The word mülk did not therefore mean that the land of the country was owned by the sovereign. The concept of patrimonial state is a product of the modern Western mind which acutely perceives the difference between the scope of the private property right today and the limited nature of it in the Ottoman Empire while too easily forgetting the land ownership regime in contemporary medieval Europe. Confiscations as an abuse of authority never became a legal practice despite the fact that Ahmet III (1729) attempted to legalise them with the help of the then Sheykh al-Islam, the head of the Ulema, but failed to do so due to an uprising.

Invoking centralism in the Ottoman Empire is the consequence of the analogy with the centralism in the modern state which is incomparably stronger. The Ottoman Empire loosely controlled a vast area out of which more than twenty new states emerged after its demise. As a result, the concept of centralisation in the Empire was less of an administrative but more of a political nature. Daily life in these remote regions naturally escaped the effective administrative grip of the central authority, thus giving great latitude to local forces in business and culture, provided that the political allegiance to Istanbul was maintained, in most cases nominally. Except in the European parts of the Empire where the population was partly Christian and partly Moslem, the socio-religious concept of umma united the vast lands of Asia and Africa whose financial revenues were mostly used locally. A centrally imposed oppression was consequently out of the question.

In the light of the above, the Ottoman Sultan was an absolute monarch but not a despot. Like European princes, the Sultan ruled the Empire with his advisers in Divan (the Cabinet). Later the Prime Ministry moved out of the palace into an independent building, as was also the case in the West. Right from the beginning the State budget and the personal budget of the Sultan were separated, another common point with Europe. One is led to the conclusion that the absolutism of European monarchs of the same period has always been minimised with a view to explaining the liberal developments which have taken place there more recently.

Certainly there were structural differences between European parochial states and a multi-religious and multiethnic empire ruling large parts of the globe. However, these were not differences of nature but of degree.

The Question of Ottoman Civilisation

As I said earlier, the Eastern Roman Empire was a universal state and as such was the direct descendant of the Roman Empire as the `Hellenic Universal State'. The only difference of importance between the two was the existence of Orthodox Christianity as the State religion in the former. Since Orthodox Christianity is the fully Hellenized version of monotheism, the Eastern Roman Empire should also be considered as the Hellenic Universal State.

While Toynbee does not recognise this fact, he defines the Ottoman Empire as the Iranic branch of the Syriac Universal State. In his view, `Iranic' `alien hands' supplied one universal state to the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the shape of the Ottoman Empire instead of constructing one for themselves. He continues: When a disintegrating society is thus compelled to admit some alien architect to furnish it with its universal state, it is confessing that its own indigenous dominant minority has become totally incompetent and sterile; and the inevitable penalty for this premature senility is a humiliating disfranchisement.49

My first objection to this statement is that the Ottoman Empire was not an Iranic universal state. The Persian language as an essential part of the Iranian culture and civilisation was used only in poetry and historiography, mainly in an outer circle of the palace in Istanbul. The great masses who founded the Empire spoke Turkish and had an acute sense of Turkishness. The religion of these Turks was not Shi'ite but Sunnite, another fundamental difference from Iran.

What is perhaps crucially important in this respect is the historic vocation of the Turks as universal state or empire builders, a trait missing in Iranians after the Achaemenidae. Turks founded a universal state in China, which was called the Wei Dynasty, and one in India, which was called, wrongly, the Moghul Empire. The Great Seljuks and the following Turkish dynasties in Iran, as well as the Mamelukes in Egypt, should also be considered as universal states.

Mahmut al-Kashghari perhaps anticipated when he wrote with some pride: `God gave them the name Turk and conferred on them dominion. He made of them the sovereigns of the time. He put in their hands the rule of the nations of the world. He placed them above other men.'

This vocation can be traced back to the steppe empires of the Turks. When the nomadic cycle was disrupted in ancient times by worsened climatic conditions, the demands on shrinking pastures and increasingly scarce water resources brought about fierce struggles between clans of the same tribes, and between different tribes. This civil war in the steppe was resolved with the emergence of a strong leadership in one clan which imposed internal peace on the others. In a parallel process, subdued clans and tribes were united through the worship of the divinity of the dominating one. This divinity metamorphosed rapidly into the Sky God, Tengri, as an all-encompassing divine force, a primitive monotheism without prophet or holy book. The steppe people, thus restructured sociopolitically, generated an energy of fusion and marched on to the sedentary regions where the same climatic conditions triggered a similar disintegration process. They instinctively restored their order and security, which helped them to resume their activities in trade and agriculture, while respecting the cultural characteristics of the subjugated majority.

This phenomenon has been encountered before.

Alexander the Great's vision of Homonoia or Concord never faded out of the Hellenic World so long as a vestige of Hellenism survived, and three hundred years after Alexander's death we find Augustus putting Alexander's head on his Roman signet-ring. . . Plutarch reports as one of Alexander's sayings: `God is the common father of all men, but he makes the best ones peculiarly his own'. . . Alexander realised that the brotherhood of Man presupposes the fatherhood of God. 50

Undoubtedly the `best' was the one who won the war with the help of God. Both the victorious and the defeated believed in it, as they believed in one and the same God. Did not Timur Lenk say in the aftermath of the Battle of Ankara (1402), in which he annihilated the Ottoman army and united the entire East that this world is not worth being shared by two sovereigns as there is one God in the sky? Let us also remember that Mehmet II assumed the title of Roman Emperor upon the conquest of Constantinople, and that both he and Süleyman the Magniñcent repeatedly read Plutarch's Alexander as their bedside book.

The historical experiences of Turks between the sixth and tenth centuries in Central Asia culminated in stable and durable empires, following their conversion to Islam. The central tenets of Islamic monotheism, together with their self-awareness as Turks acquired from their nationalistic attempts to survive in the volatile sedentary regions of Central Asia, prevented them subsequently from being assimilated by local peoples in other parts of the world. On the contrary, this strong self-identity enabled them to work out syntheses with the local cultures, relegating religious differences to a secondary place. Thus Turks, naturally geared to founding universal states, did not fail to create one in Anatolia together with its Orthodox Christian people. If there was anything humiliating in this enterprise, it belonged to the crusading co-religionists at whose hands the universal state of Orthodox Christendom was rapidly disintegrating.

The Ottoman Empire's Syriac dimension as the heir to the Abbasid Empire, whose lineage Toynbee traced back one thousand years to the Achaemenids, the Syriac universal state destroyed prematurely by Alexander the Great, seems to me to be ambiguous, not to say dubious. Although they shared the same creed, the Ottomans were distinctly different from the Abbasids, not only racially, linguistically, and culturally, but also in term of the political structure of their empire. The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish-Muslim universal state. As superimposed on the Eastern Roman Empire, which had been a universal state combining Orthodox Christian religion with the Hellenistic dimension of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire was the continuation of both, but also something else. It is true that the more we move away in time from the classical period through Alexander and his heirs, the Roman and the Eastern Roman Empires to the Ottoman Empire, the less Hellenistic became the universal state. Along with Islam, the not fully Hellenized monotheist religion of the ruling people in the Empire, one needs to mention some other institutions which were allegedly peculiar to the Ottomans and alien to the Hellenic character.

One such institution was millet, the Koranic milla, which etymologically meant religion. Universal states have historically been much more tolerant towards minorities and ethnic groups than parochial states. This was true of the Ummayads and Abbasids who both had the millet system before the Ottomans.

Toynbee traces back this institution in the following manner:

Indeed, the millet system in the Ottoman Empire was merely an organised version of a communal structure of society which had grown up spontaneously in the Syriac world after the Syriac state-system had been pulverised and the Syriac peoples inextricably intermingled by the assaults of Assyrian militarism. The consequent re-articulation of society into a network of geographically intermingled communities in place of a patchwork of geographically segregated parochial states had been inherited from the Syriac society by its Iranic and Arabic Muslim successors, and had subsequently been imposed by Osmanli Iranic Muslim empirebuilders on a prostrate Orthodox Christendom. 51

In the Ottoman Empire, as in the Uighur and Khazar states, people of different religions lived together, each group inhabiting their own particular quarter in the cities. Furthermore, in the former each religious community was organised around its religious leader. These were Orthodox Christian, Armenian, and Jewish millets. In return for guarantees of loyalty, the Patriarch was given rights and privileges which went beyond the requirements of the Koran (Muslim tradition required that the Christians, like the Jews and the Zoroastrians of Persia, being `People of the Book' should be treated with special tolerance). The powers of the patriarch, and through him of the hierarchy, were laid down in a warrant conferred on Gennadius by Mehmet II. He was exempt from taxation and irremovable, from the patriarchate. It empowered him to control not only all the Orthodox clergy throughout the Empire, but to levy dues on laity and clergy alike. It guaranteed full religious freedom. It also invested him with civil powers, in particular to establish tribunals which could decide matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Consequently the position of the Church became extremely powerful. It also became an instrument of alien rule, while at the same time being the main vessel for preserving the culture, education, and traditions of Hellenism and other cultures.52

The concept of rayah, combined with the millet system, has created great confusion in the mind of Western scholars, for rayah literally means flock. Moving from the semantics of this word, Toynbee explained that the Ottoman system was a response to the superlative challenge which was the geographical transference of a nomadic community from its native environment on the steppe to a new environment in which it was confronted with the novel problem of exercising dominion over alien communities of human beings. Like Avars, Osmanlis also dealt with the sedentary populations which they had conquered as though they were a human flock and sought to transform themselves from shepherds of sheep into shepherds of men.

Unlike other nomad conquerors, the duration of the Ottoman Empire, however, was uniquely long due to the fact that `the Ottoman Padishahs maintained their empire by training slaves as human auxiliaries (as against non human auxiliaries of nomads such as dogs) to assist them in keeping order among their "human cattle".53

Let us take a closer look at this, I admit, brilliant intellectual speculation. In the Empire the concept of rayah was used to denominate the producing and tax-paying masses as against the tax-exempted ruling élite. The word covered not only Christians but also Muslims, including of course the Turks. There was another word which was applied only to Christians and Jews, namely zimmi, which had nothing to do with cattle. Furthermore, the proponents of the human flock theory miss the point that the word rayah is Arabic, not Turkish. Can you imagine a `nomadic people' using an alien word to designate an institution of purely nomadic origin? It is therefore obvious that rayah is a metaphor of a secular nature, similar to the religious one commonly used in the Syriac world, which we can also see in the New Testament.

As I explained earlier, the Turks, before founding the Ottoman Empire, had been sedentary for over half a millennium in Central Asia. In so far as rayah is related to the millet system, one should remember that the latter was the general practice in the Eastern Roman Empires4 as well as in the Umayyad and Abbasid empires, whose sedentary nature has never been denied. The only significant difference is that the Ottomans greatly systematised the millet system, broadening its scope and making it legally stable and durable. Evidently this undertaking required experience of statehood, rather than merely the expediency of a nomadic tribal people when faced with a challenge.

Everything needs to be judged within its historical context. In a period in which slavery was a legitimate practice both in the East and the West, it is difficult to understand the objections to the employment of kuls in the higher echelons of the State, while at the same time considering as normal the base exploitation of human beings in heavy labour. Is it not paradoxical to claim that the slaves in the West served civilisation by contributing to the capitalist accumulation of wealth, whereas the Ottoman kul-house is seen as being instrumental in arresting Ottoman civilisation? Does not this paradox arise from the fact that kuls were converts from Christianity who ruled, fought, and died for the interests of a Muslim empire, whereas slaves in the West were uncivilised, non-Christian `natives'?

I think it is high time to emphasise the merits of the millet system as an advanced institution of its time which fostered an ethnic and religious tolerance which the West lacked then, and still lacks, as events in this century have demonstrated. It would have been much wiser for those who approached Ottoman history with prejudice, to study the underlying humane concepts of the millet system in the universal state in order better to understand the `racist' tendencies of the parochial state.

It is alleged that the Ottoman Empire was naturally geared to militarism. The concept of Dar al-Harb as against Dar al-Islam meant that a drive to infinite expansionism through war against Western Christendom was the raison d'être of the Empire. The war was not only a moral imperative, but also the backbone of the State treasury. In this respect the Osmanlis were likened to the Spartans, whose vocation was militarism. Therefore it was not surprising that the civilisation of an empire with such inhuman institutions, which degraded its peoples to the level of slaves and directed them to a senseless militarism, was regarded as being backward. Its attempt to adjust the nomadic past to the sedentary civilisation of the land it had conquered failed, owing to the `insuperable rigidity' of these institutions which seemed to serve them well while they were winning wars, but which collapsed when they were confronted with a series of defeats.

Indeed, an ex post facto analysis of Ottoman institutions and civilisation during the declining and dissolution phase of the Empire might lead to such an erroneous assessment, especially at a time when Western civilisation was in its ascending phase. But the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a universal state warrants a study of it as a unit of history without comparison with parochial states. Such a study should take into account the following points.

The Ottoman Empire, as the heir of the Eastern Roman Empire, aimed only to recover the land of the latter. The concept of Dar al-Harb, which has given an impression of constant expansionism against Christendom, should be understood within the framework of religion as the political ideology of the time. The Catholic Christian powers were also fighting in the name of Christianity against the Ottomans, even though the latter included the Orthodox Christians of the Empire. Dar al-Harb signified the region (the Balkans) where the demands of the two sides overlapped.

In this context one has to inquire into the concept of militarism. If what is meant by this was the frequency of wars waged by the Empire, I would challenge those who accuse it of militarism to prove that wars of other universal and parochial states were fewer in number than those fought by the Ottomans. If, on the other hand, the size of the armies was the point in question, one should then remember that the Ottoman armies in the growth period were particularly small, like those of the Muslim Arabs in their conquest of the Middle East, and unlike the Crusaders and the Christian armies in the religious wars of Europe. In fact, militarism in terms of a ratio between the size of the armed forces and the population available for war service is by no means valid. In the Ottoman Empire the professional army of Janissaries and the timar soldiers made up only a small fraction of the population, the majority of whom were left virtually unaffected by wars as far as their daily activities were concerned. Apart from the devsirme, the Christian members of the population were almost entirely immune from the vicissitudes of war. It is true that in the period of decline the Ottoman armies grew considerably for defensive purposes. But this cannot be an example of militarism which by definition is an aggressive concept.

Furthermore, it is doubtful whether one can claim that militarism is a factor which arrests civilisation, even when total war is the order of the day. Neither the Prussian nor the Nazi and Japanese militarism put an end to the civilising processes which were subsequently resumed in those countries, even though it caused the catastrophe of defeat. It might be interesting to note that the establishment of democracy (together with its political rights and liberties) and industrialism in parochial states paradoxically enhanced the frequency, ferocity, and scope of wars, 55 as if there existed an inverse relationship between the humanistic nature of the domestic system and the predatory nature of the international system.

As for the rigidity of the Ottoman institutions, I admit that they were not open to evolution in the sense of metamorphosis, but they were not immutable either. They certainly evolved in time and disintegrated with the decline of the Empire, which provided ample opportunity for improvement or remodelling.

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the Ottoman Empire was dissolved. I will venture in the following chapters an explanation as to the causes of its demise. At this juncture it may be more appropriate to find an answer to the question whether we can talk about an Ottoman civilisation. Since Toynbee classifiies the Ottoman Empire among the arrested civilisations, he must have in mind a civilisation which could be called Ottoman. On the other hand he defines the Ottoman Empire as a universal state which, he says, as a general rule cannot create a civilisation, but tries to prevent the disintegration of the previous civilisation which broke down in a suicidal manner.

If this approach to History was accepted, there could be no Ottoman civilisation. Like its predecessors, i.e. the Roman and Eastern Roman Empires, the Ottoman Empire was also supposedly destined vocationally to arrest the disintegration of the civilisation of the land (which was Hellenic in my view, Orthodox Christian in the view of Toynbee). As a result, we should dismiss the concept of the arrested Ottoman civilisation, since as a universal state the Ottomans could not have their own civilisation. Therefore the reference to the arrested nature of Ottoman civilisation right make sense as one of the thousand faces of prejudice, but is superfluous in reality.

Nevertheless, the question remains whether the Ottoman Empire had a civilisation of its own despite the fact that it was a universal state. This is the subject of the next chapter. I will dwell on it here only in general terms.

The history of civilisations, or History per se, would be rather short if universal states did not have their own civilisations. Only twice did the reasoning or theoretical mind emerge or the `individual was born' in History and each time as an extremely powerful and destabilising force. In the first instance, it successfully committed suicide. The second phase is still continuing despite the unsuccessful attempts at suicide in the Napoleonic wars in the last century, and in the First and Second World Wars hn this one. In the remaining long periods universal states reigned almost alone. Cannot we incorporate these periods into the history of civilisation just because the creative activity of the individual has slowed down, and individual rights and liberties have been restricted? There is no easy answer to this question. However, it seems to me that the universal state represents one of the two distinct and essential aspects of civilisation which have not yet been reconciled.

In the purer form of the universal state, the meditating mind with a synthetic bias holds a large vision, yet at the expense of the individual elements of the whole, thus giving way to an eclectic and overly generalised view. A holistic approach gradually results in a petrifying hierarchy in the social and the spiritual spheres, while the interaction and tension between the components fade away. An ecumenical divinity and its ecumenical state embrace and unite various races, religions, and regions, but their particular characteristics are de-emphasised in such a way that the universal state tends to incorporate more of others outside its frontiers, hence the contrast with its low density internal activity which is identified with peace and tranquillity.

Now let us see whether modern society, which basically lacks synthetic, holistic, and ecumenical characteristics, is the ultimate model of civilisation.

In the purer form of a parochial city or nation-state, the reasoning mind with an analytical bias destroys the divine while it creates science. It tends to be overspecialised, thus losing sight of the wholeness of truth. Its dialectical drive grows more and more sterile while political ideologies, as well as literary and philosophical movements, become polarised. The individual taking part in this extremely dynamic society, struggling and creating, develops an inexplicable sense of guilt, the cause of which has to be projected onto `others' in order to reunite the divided or atomised self, hence fratricidal wars, the persecution of ethnic groups, genocide, and holocaust.

Are these two models antithetical, and as such mutually exclusive? Despite important shortcomings, only once in history did the two instances of human civilisation coincide for a short period of time. That time was the Abbasid caliphate where intelligence created science while still revering God; naturalism and materialism coexisted with theology and Sufism; ecumenism overcame Arab ethnocentrism and prevented internal warfare, while not degenerating into expansionism.

The European Community came after the two suicidal attempts which aimed at creating a universal state by force. The peaceful process it started, namely the growth of political union through economic integration, is unique in history. Its working method is bargaining between parochial nation-states. The Europe-wide economic space once created is expected to give birth to Europe-wide integrative forces which will transcend the parochial boundaries. This process is similar to the process of nation-building in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though on an incomparably larger scale. Therefore, as it stands, it runs the risk of having the weaknesses of the nation-state, the effects of which could be commensurate to its size. Perhaps it can contribute to economic development, peaceful political relations between its members, and enhanced external security. It can also have a broader and more syncretic world view. But can that amount to a universal synthesis? It can definitely elaborate holistic theories through deliberate rational efforts. But, while living in a dialectical world of its creation, can it attain a holistic vision?

I believe that ultimately everything depends on developing an ecumenism. Without it the contribution of the European Community to a higher species of civilisation could remain in doubt, despite its emphasis on democracy and respect for human rights. In the absence of a true ecumenism, this emphasis could well be just a defensive mechanism against its own ethnocentric undercurrents.

At this point I think another brief summary of our history would be helpful.

After the overthrow of the Hittite Empire, Anatolia lost its independence. It then experienced several invasions, first by the Persians, then by the Macedonians, then by the Romans. The Eastern Roman Empire to some extent re-established Anatolia's unity and independence, at least initially, but it could not put an end to the succession of invasions. After the Persian and Arab invasions came the crusades. The Turks, who at that time dominated the Islamic world, also arrived and established themselves upon the foundations of the Anatolian civilisations. They thereby put an end to the thousand-year struggle for these lands between East and West, between Persia and the Graeco-Romans, and restored unity to Anatolia.

This conquest of Anatolia by the Turks was quite different from earlier invasions. The Turks absorbed the local culture inherited from very ancient Anatolian civilisations, and formed a new cultural synthesis. Their original culture had combined the philosophies of Greek antiquity -from the Anatolian Physicists to Plato and Aristotle-with the religious philosophy common to all monotheistic religions. The new synthesis therefore represented the blending of Central Asia, Islam, and Greek rationalism into a mystical humanism peculiar to Anatolia. This humanism created the strongest multinational empire of the past by uniting the different communities or `nations' in tolerance.

The juxtaposition of so many civilizations, and the coexistence of so many communities, enabled the Anatolian people to create a rich and original folklore. Legends and popular tales, modified a thousand times through the ages, were finally recounted in Turkish. In this way the Turkish language became enriched with thousands of words of different origins, including Indo-European and Semitic. Its music, among the most ancient in the world, developed new styles by skilfully combining the Irano Arabic tradition with the classical Greek and Byzantine. It became known as `musique savante'.

The composite character of Anatolian culture was to be seen not only in the language and the music but also in numerous Ottoman institutions such as the concept of the State, the organisation of the Palace as the centre of political power, the organization of the army, the administration, the landowning, fiscal, judicial, and social systems, and so on.

It is therefore not surprising that a such a profound and powerful cultural amalgam should have led to the creation of an empire which played so significant a role in European politics from the sixteenth century onwards.

The Anatolian cultural synthesis reveals that the Western vocation of the Turks began long before the reforms which westernized the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. It goes back principally to their conversion to Islam, and became progressively more accentuated as they established themselves in Anatolia. In founding the Ottoman Empire in 1299, the Turks showed themselves to be as Mediterranean and Western as the Graeco-Romans.

Today Byzantine culture is considered unquestionably to be a part of Western civilisation. In so far as we have shown that there were numerous similarities between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, one could conclude that Ottoman culture is also a part of Western culture.

In the past, however, this clear division between East and West did not exist, so it seems to us more accurate to consider these two Empires and their cultures as belonging to Mediterranean civilisation, or rather to the civilisation of the north-eastern part of the Mediterranean basin.

This Mediterranean civilisation achieved cultural continuity over a long period. However, certain interpretations of history claim that it came to an end. They do this by attributing to Western culture all the positive aspects of the Eastern Roman Empire, and to Eastern culture all the negative aspects such as absolutism, political intrigue, putschism, injustice, extravagance, and tyranny. Ultimately the Ottoman Empire came to be identified with all these negative aspects, and Turkish Anatolia later inherited the same reputation.

PREVIOUS PAGE                                                                                   NEXT PAGE