Ottoman Government — The Structure of Power in a Six-Century Empire

The Ottoman state endured for more than six centuries, ruling at its height a domain that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the highlands of Yemen and from Algiers to the Caspian. The system that administered it — sultan and household, the kanun and the sharia, the Divan and the tımar, the ulema and the millets — was recognizable to an Ottoman of 1400 and to one of 1700. Then, in the nineteenth century, the same system was transformed almost out of recognition by the centralizing reforms of the Tanzimat and the constitutional experiment of 1876. This article traces the whole arc: the sultans, the household, the central administration, the provinces, the millets, and the long, contested move toward constitutional government.

Key dates

1453 — Mehmed II takes Constantinople; the empire becomes a Mediterranean power.
1520–1566 — reign of Suleiman, the high classical age of the kanun and the household.
1603–1617 — Ahmed I ends the practice of fratricidal succession; the Kafes replaces the sword.
1699 — Treaty of Karlowitz; the empire begins to lose territory by treaty rather than by battle.
1839 — the Gülhane Decree opens the Tanzimat.
1876 — the first Ottoman constitution (Kanun-ı Esasi) is promulgated.
1908 — the Young Turk Revolution restores the suspended constitution.
1922 — the Grand National Assembly abolishes the sultanate; 1924, the caliphate.

The Sultan: Shadow of God on Earth

The Ottoman state was, in its own ideology, a single, undivided sovereignty. The sultan was the supreme ruler, the source of all authority, the commander of the armed forces, the protector of the faith, and — in classical theory — the sole legislator for his Muslim subjects. The full title used in chancery documents, kayser-i Rum (Caesar of Rome) and Zill Allah fi’l-alem (the Shadow of God on Earth), signalled an ambition that reached back to the universal caliphate of the early Islamic centuries and forward to the gunpowder empires of the early modern era.

The sultan’s authority was constrained in practice by custom, by the sharia, by the household institutions that produced him, and — particularly in moments of crisis — by the senior officials of the state. A weak or absent sultan did not paralyse the system: grand viziers such as Köprülü Mehmed Pasha in the seventeenth century governed for years on end in the name of an acquiescent monarch. A strong sultan such as Suleiman the Magnificent could dominate the same apparatus so thoroughly that the distinction between sultan and state appeared to dissolve. As the contemporary jurist Lutfi Pasha complained in his Âsafnâme (1544), “the affairs of the world are not to be administered by one man alone” — a remark aimed squarely at the kanuni sultan he served.

Succession and the dynasty

Ottoman succession was famously violent by European standards. Until the early seventeenth century, fraternal succession was the norm: when a sultan died, his male relatives competed for the throne, and the winner usually had his brothers and half-brothers executed or quietly strangled. The practice was justified by the need to prevent civil war and to place the most able prince on the throne. From Bayezid I (1389–1402), the first Ottoman sultan credibly recorded as having his brother put to death on accession, to Ahmed I (1603–1617), whose accession in 1603 spared his brother Mustafa, the dynasty alternated between fratricidal succession and the principle of seniority (ekber-i erşed), codified in a firm regulation in the early eighteenth century. Halil İnalcık’s reading — that the fratricidal principle was a pragmatic answer to the interregnum of 1402–1413, when civil war nearly destroyed the dynasty — has not been seriously challenged.

The full list of rulers is given in the list of Ottoman sultans, but it is worth noting here the range of personalities: conquerors such as Mehmed II the Conqueror, lawmakers such as Suleiman, poets such as Mehmed IV, reformers such as Mahmud II, and the constitutional monarch of 1876, Murad V, whose reign was curtailed by mental illness after ninety-three days.

The sultan’s daily life

The classical Ottoman sultan lived a tightly choreographed life inside the inner enclosure of the Topkapı Palace, receiving officials at fixed audiences, attending Friday prayer at a designated mosque, presiding at the divan, and spending time in the harem — a term that, in Ottoman usage, designated not a sensual preserve but the domestic quarters of the imperial household. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the harem had become a powerful political institution in its own right. The valide sultan (the mother of the reigning sultan) often dominated court politics through her stewards, her eunuchs, and the network of patronage she controlled. Leslie Peirce’s The Imperial Harem (1993) reads this institution as a “household of status” — a domestic establishment whose internal hierarchy was structured not by blood but by seniority and fertility; the older reading, of the harem as a “service institution” managed by slave women, has largely given way in Ottomanist scholarship.

The Imperial Household (Enderun and Harem)

The Ottoman ruling class was, in its origins and in its formative centuries, recruited not by birth but by talent. The system that supplied the state with its administrators and generals was the palace school, the Enderun, and the related but more controversial devshirme system — a levy of Christian boys who were converted, educated, and drafted into either the Janissary corps or the palace service. The most gifted of these recruits rose to the highest offices of the empire. Many became grand viziers; a few — such as the Bosnian-born Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who served Suleiman and his successors — became more powerful than any blood-born noble of the realm. Suraiya Faroqhi has rightly insisted that the devshirme is not to be read as a single institution: from the seventeenth century on, the palace was stocked as much by voluntary presentation and by gift as by coercive levy, and the gap between the early Ottoman system and the later practice is wider than is often acknowledged.

The Enderun was a sequence of three ascending schools, each more selective than the last, where boys of Christian origin were trained in Islamic sciences, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic literature, music, calligraphy, mathematics, and the arts of war. Graduates emerged as members of the kalemiye (the scribal service) or the seyfiye (the military service), and a few of the most distinguished were admitted to the has oda (the private chamber) of the sultan himself — the pool from which viziers were drawn. The harem, sitting behind a single guarded gate in the third courtyard of Topkapı, housed the female relatives of the dynasty, the concubines of the sultan, and the children of the lineage. The harem was administered by a hierarchy of black eunuchs (kızlar ağası) and, from the seventeenth century on, increasingly by white eunuchs from the Caucasus. The chief black eunuch became one of the highest officials of the state, with a salary, a seat in the divan, and a degree of political influence that often exceeded that of senior viziers.

The Ulema: Doctors of the Law

The second foundation of Ottoman government was the ulema (singular: alim), the class of jurists, judges, and teachers who interpreted the sharia and staffed the empire’s religious and judicial institutions. Unlike the members of the kalemiye and seyfiye, the ulema inherited their positions rather than being recruited by the palace. A graduate of a medrese could rise through the ranks of the scholarly hierarchy to Şeyhülislam, the chief mufti of the empire, whose fatwas authenticated the sultan’s acts and whose authority over matters of personal status was effectively absolute.

The ulema staffed the kadı courts that adjudicated marriage, divorce, inheritance, and most ordinary disputes; they staffed the medreses that trained their successors; they served as imams in the great imperial mosques; and they controlled the pious foundations (vakıfs) that provided much of the urban social services. The sultan could dismiss a grand vizier; he could not appoint a kadı without reference to the scholarly hierarchy, nor could he overturn a fatwa of the Şeyhülislam on a matter of religious law. The relationship between the political and the religious arms of the state was often tense. Sultans who wished to promulgate secularizing legislation had to obtain the cooperation of the Şeyhülislam or find ways to legislate outside the sharia by means of kanun. A great deal of Ottoman legislative history turns on this duality.

The Divan-ı Hümayun: The Imperial Council

The supreme organ of government in classical Ottoman practice was the Divan-ı Hümayun, the Imperial Council, which met four times a week in the domed chamber of the second courtyard of Topkapı. The council was presided over by the Grand Vizier and included the Kazasker of Rumelia and the Kazasker of Anatolia (the chief military judges), the Nişancı (the chancellor who affixed the imperial tuğra, the calligraphic monogram, to documents), the Defterdar (the chief financial officer), and — after the seventeenth century — the chief black eunuch of the harem.

The divan heard petitions from subjects, supervised the execution of sultanic orders, and debated the major questions of war, peace, taxation, and provincial administration. Its decisions were recorded in the Divan-ı Hümayun Mühimme Defterleri, the registers that constitute one of the principal archives of the empire. The Grand Vizier communicated the council’s decisions to the sultan at the end of each session in a private audience that took place through a grilled window, the Kubbealtı, in the third courtyard. As Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador, observed in the 1550s, the sultan “hears everything, sees everything, but reveals himself to no one” — a shrewd description of the Kubbealtı arrangement.

The divan was, in the early centuries, the principal organ of government; by the seventeenth century, its importance had been eclipsed by the informal councils of the sultan, the valide sultan, and the grand vizier; and by the eighteenth century, the divan existed largely as a ceremonial body. It was effectively abolished in the 1838–1839 reforms of Mahmud II, and the Grand Vizier was reconstituted as a modern prime minister by the 1839 Gülhane Decree.

The Grand Vizier

The Grand Vizier was, in classical theory, the sultan’s deputy and the head of the divan. As the sultans withdrew behind the walls of the harem, the office grew in importance; by the seventeenth century the Grand Vizier was effectively the prime minister of a vast bureaucratic monarchy. The title carried almost unrestricted authority, symbolized by the privy seal that the sultan placed in his hands at the ceremony of appointment. With that seal, the Grand Vizier could sign death warrants, issue orders to the provincial governors, and command the armed forces in the field.

The office was extraordinarily dangerous. Sultans whose authority was challenged by powerful grand viziers often moved to dismiss or execute them; and even the most competent grand viziers were vulnerable to the intrigues of the harem, the rivalry of the household officers, and the perpetual suspicion of the sultan. Sokullu Mehmed Pasha, who served three sultans, was assassinated by a dissatisfied Janissary in 1579. The long-lived Köprülü family of the seventeenth century was exceptional in passing power from father to son without immediate disaster. Carter Findley counts, in Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire (1980), some 140 Grand Viziers of the classical period; more than half were dismissed by force, and a third were executed.

The Tanzimat reforms transformed the office into something closer to a European-style prime minister, with explicit ministerial portfolios, a council of ministers, and (after 1876) constitutional responsibility to a parliament. The post of Grand Vizier survived in name until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, but the function had been radically altered.

The Ministries and the Scribal Service

Beneath the grand vizier, the central administration was organized into a series of increasingly specialized offices. The two chief defterdars (finance ministers) of Rumelia and Anatolia handled revenue and expenditure; the nişancı (chancellor) headed a chancery that issued patents of appointment, treaties, and other formal instruments of state; and a proliferation of lesser offices — the kethüda bey (chief of staff), the reîsülküttâb (foreign secretary), the bâb-ı âli officials of the Sublime Porte — handled the day-to-day business of government.

The nineteenth-century Tanzimat added an explicit ministerial hierarchy modelled on European precedents: a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1836), of Finance (1838), of the Interior (1836), of War (1846), and others. These ministries were reorganized, merged, and subdivided repeatedly over the next century, and the resulting structure provided the framework for the governments of the early Turkish Republic after 1923.

The Provincial System: Eyalets, Beylerbeyiliks, and Sanjaks

The Ottoman provinces were organized, from the late fourteenth century onward, into a hierarchy of territorial units that mirrored the central structure. At the head of each major province stood a beylerbeyi (literally “lord of lords”), holding the rank of pasha of three tails (üç tuğlu paşa) in the largest provinces and pasha of two tails (ikili tuğlu paşa) in the smaller ones, commanding a beylerbeyilik, later called an eyalet. The largest of these — Rumelia, Anatolia, Egypt, Baghdad — covered vast territories. Each eyalet was divided into sanjaks (also called livas), governed by sanjakbeys (also called mirliva) — provincial cavalry officers of the sipahi class, not pashas in the classical system. A sanjak was in turn divided into kazas, governed by kadıs, and the kadıs administered nahiyes, which were further subdivided into villages.

The provincial governors were appointed by the sultan, served terms of limited duration, and were forbidden by law to govern in the province of their birth. The system was designed to prevent the formation of regional power bases, and it worked remarkably well in the classical period. By the seventeenth century, however, large provinces such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and the lands of the Kurdish and Arab frontier had become effectively autonomous, governed by dynasties of local pashas who transmitted office within their own families and paid only nominal tribute to Istanbul. The derebeyi system in Anatolia, the Mamluk households in Egypt, the deys and beys of North Africa — this phenomenon of provincial autonomy is one of the keys to understanding the long nineteenth-century crisis of the empire. The eyalet system was progressively reformed during the Tanzimat and replaced by the vilayet system of the 1864 law.

The Timar and the Sipahi

A distinctive feature of the Ottoman provincial system was the tımar, a prebendal grant of the right to collect the taxes of a particular village or group of villages, in return for military service. The holder of a tımar was a sipahi, a provincial cavalryman who had to maintain himself, his horse, and his equipment out of the income of his tımar and who was obliged to bring a fixed number of armed retainers to the imperial army on campaign. The tımar system integrated military mobilization, fiscal administration, and land tenure into a single institution, and it formed the backbone of the Ottoman cavalry from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century.

The tımar system began to break down in the seventeenth century, as the cost of war rose and the state increasingly switched to cash-paid, mass-recruited infantry armed with muskets. As the tımars collapsed, so too did the sipahi cavalry; and as both collapsed, the central government lost its primary means of controlling the Anatolian countryside. Koçi Bey, in his Risale presented to Murad IV around 1631, made the standard diagnosis: “the tımars have been usurped, the soldiery has ceased to obey, the peasantry has been ruined.” Reform of the tımar system, or its replacement by alternative fiscal arrangements, was a recurrent theme of Ottoman reform from the seventeenth century onward.

The Millet System

Few Ottoman institutions are more discussed — or more often misunderstood — than the millet system, the framework by which the empire’s non-Muslim religious communities — Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews, and others — were organized and governed. The traditional account, popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, attributed to Mehmed II a deliberate charter granting the Greek Orthodox community wide-ranging internal autonomy under its own patriarch. Modern scholarship — Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire (1982), Karen Barkey in Empire of Difference (2008), Selim Deringil in The Well-Protected Domains (1998) — has questioned the precision of this narrative. The appointment of Gennadios Scholarios in 1454 is well documented; a single formal charter is not. The millet system was the product of a long historical development rather than a single moment of foundation, and its institutional core — the berat issued by the imperial chancery — converted a religious dignity into an office of the Ottoman state. The system is treated in greater detail in the dedicated article on the millet system.

The Devshirme and the Janissaries

Closely related to the palace school was the devshirme system, the periodic levy of Christian boys from the Balkans who were converted to Islam, educated, and drafted into the palace school, the Janissary corps, or the senior service of the state. The Janissary corps, founded in the late fourteenth century under Murad I, was a standing infantry force equipped with muskets, paid in cash, and trained to fight in disciplined formations. For two centuries the Janissaries were the cutting edge of Ottoman military power. From the seventeenth century the corps began to admit native-born Muslims, to marry, to enroll their sons, and to use their corporate privileges to intervene in politics. Janissary revolts played a major role in the deposition of several sultans and in blocking reform.

The abolition of the Janissary corps in 1826 by Mahmud II — the so-called Auspicious Incident (Vaka-i Hayriye) — was the most dramatic single act of Ottoman centralization. The corps was destroyed in a single day in its barracks in Istanbul; a new modern army, trained and uniformed on European models, was raised in its place. Rhoads Murphey has called 1826 “the last successful praetorian revolt in world history” — a remark that captures both the scale of the destruction and the lacuna in the historiography of comparable events elsewhere.

The Treasury and the Fiscal System

The financial administration of the empire rested on three principal pillars: the cizye (the poll tax on non-Muslim adult males), the öşür (the tithe on agricultural produce paid by all subjects), and a variety of customs, excise, and monopoly revenues. In the early centuries, the mukataa (tax farm) was the principal instrument of revenue collection; from the seventeenth century, the more exploitative iltizam (a life grant of tax-farming rights) and, from the eighteenth century, the malikâne (a perpetual grant) became dominant. The shift from a prebendal to a tax-farming system was a major fiscal transformation that had profound effects on the countryside and on the central treasury. The Tanzimat abolished the iltizam in 1840. The empire remained chronically short of revenue until its final decades, when the Public Debt Administration established in 1881 took over a large share of Ottoman revenues to service the state debt.

The Ayan and the Local Notables

The long eighteenth century saw the rise of a new class of provincial notables, the ayan, who came to dominate local politics in much of the empire. Some were descended from tımar-holders; others were Janissary officers, merchants, or tax farmers. The ayan of particular regions — the Köprülü family of Marmara, the Çapanoğlu of central Anatolia, the Süleyman family of Sivas — were, in effect, autonomous warlords whose cooperation the central government had to court. The revolt of Pazvantoglu of Vidin in the 1790s was the most spectacular of the provincial revolts; the more typical pattern was a slow bargaining between the centre and the local notable, with both sides short of the means to prevail. Selim III’s Nizam-ı Cedid of 1793 attempted to circumvent the ayan by creating a new European-style infantry; Mahmud II returned to the project after 1826 and gradually reimposed central authority by a combination of military pressure, administrative reorganization, and selective accommodation. By the 1840s the ayan as a class had been substantially absorbed into the new provincial system of the Tanzimat.

Foreign Relations and the Sublime Porte

The Bâb-ı Âli — the Sublime Porte, as it was known in European diplomatic language — was the principal point of contact between the empire and the foreign powers. From the eighteenth century, resident ambassadors from European states became a permanent feature of Ottoman diplomacy, and a series of bilateral treaties, capitulations, and commercial conventions shaped the empire’s relations with the world beyond its borders. The Reisülküttâb (later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) conducted the day-to-day business; the Grand Vizier and the Sultan took the major decisions.

The Ottoman capitulations to foreign powers, beginning with the treaty with Venice in 1454 and culminating in the comprehensive privileges granted to France, Britain, and Russia in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, gave European merchants, missionaries, and (later) consuls extraterritorial rights and exemption from Ottoman law. The capitulations, originally a standard pre-modern diplomatic instrument, hardened over the nineteenth century into a kind of legal enclave that exempted foreigners from Ottoman jurisdiction and deprived the state of the ability to control its own customs revenues. Their abolition, between 1914 and 1923, was one of the major achievements of the late Ottoman state and the early Turkish Republic.

The Reform Era: From Selim III to Mahmud II

The decisive break with the classical system came in the early nineteenth century. The military defeats of the 1770s and 1790s — by Russia, by Austria, by Napoleon — exposed the obsolescence of the Janissary-and-tımar system and the inadequacy of the financial administration. Selim III’s Nizam-ı Cedid of 1793 attempted to create a modern European-style infantry, financed out of new revenues and trained by European officers. The reform was blocked by a Janissary reaction supported by a coalition of ulema and ayan; Selim was deposed in May 1807 and killed in July 1808 in the course of the counter-coup led by Alemdar Mustafa Pasha at Istanbul. Mahmud II (1808–1839) completed the work that Selim had begun. The destruction of the Janissaries in 1826, the suppression of the ayan, the establishment of a modern army, and the suppression of provincial rebellions were the work of a single generation.

The Tanzimat Era, 1839–1876

The Tanzimat — literally “reorganizations” — is the conventional name for the centralizing, Europeanizing reforms of the empire between the Gülhane Decree of 3 November 1839 and the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution in 1876. The decree, read aloud in the rose garden of the Topkapı Palace, promised security of life, honour, and property for all Ottoman subjects regardless of religion, a regular and transparent system of taxation, a fair and public system of justice, and the abolition of tax farming. The decree was followed by a series of laws — on land, on commerce, on criminal procedure, on the status of foreigners, on the rights of non-Muslims — that together constituted the legal framework of the reformed empire.

The 1856 Islahat Fermanı (Reform Edict), issued under the pressure of the Crimean War and the diplomatic support of Britain and France, extended the guarantees of 1839 to non-Muslims in explicit terms: equality before the law, eligibility for military service, the right to hold state office, and the abolition of the cizye levied on non-Muslims. In practice, the reforms fell short of their promises: the fiscal and administrative machinery was too weak to enforce new laws in remote provinces; the ulema resisted the secularization of education; and the non-Muslim communities, far from being satisfied, were increasingly drawn into the nationalisms of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia.

The First Constitutional Era, 1876–1878

The constitution of 1876, the Kanun-ı Esasi (Fundamental Law), was promulgated on 23 December 1876 by Sultan Abdulhamid II as a strategic response to the threat of European intervention in Ottoman affairs. The constitution established a bicameral parliament — a senate appointed by the sultan and an elected chamber of deputies — and a system of ministerial responsibility. The first Ottoman parliament met in March 1877 and, in a session of less than two years, debated an ambitious program of legislation.

The constitutional experiment, however, was short-lived. In February 1878, using the pretext of the Russian advance on Istanbul in the war of 1877–1878, Abdulhamid II prorogued parliament and ruled as an autocrat for the next thirty years. The suspension was lifted only by the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which restored the constitution and ushered in the second constitutional era that lasted, in form, until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922.

The Young Turk Era and the End of Empire

The period from 1908 to 1918, dominated politically by the Committee of Union and Progress, saw a rapid intensification of political life: the return of parliament, the growth of an Ottoman press, and a bitter rivalry between the CUP, the Liberal Union, and a number of Arab and Albanian opposition movements. The losses of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 discredited the CUP; the coup of 1913 brought the triumvirate of Talat, Enver, and Cemal to power and inaugurated a more authoritarian phase that culminated in the empire’s entry into the First World War in November 1914. The military defeat of 1918 was followed by the British occupation of Istanbul, the exile of the last sultan, the formal abolition of the sultanate by the Grand National Assembly in 1922, and the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. With the abolition of the sultanate, the institution that had been the keystone of the Ottoman state for more than six centuries came to an end; and with the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, the last claim of the Ottoman dynasty to universal Islamic authority was finally extinguished.

The Long Shadow of Ottoman Government

The institutions of the Ottoman state have a long afterlife. The provincial system established in the 1860s and 1870s was the basis of the provincial system of the Turkish Republic until the early twenty-first century. The civil law of the republic, codified in the 1920s, owed a substantial debt to the late-Ottoman codes. The provincial units of the modern Arab world are in many cases direct continuations of Ottoman sanjaks and eyalets; the millet framework, for all the criticism it has received, remains the most influential pre-modern model of a multi-confessional state. Carter Findley has argued that the principal Ottoman contribution to the modern world is administrative: a model of how a state could govern religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity without the apparatus of the modern nation. That argument remains contested, but the model is the only one in the pre-modern world of comparable scale.