The Ottoman Provincial System

The Ottoman state ruled, at its height, a domain of more than five million square kilometers and some thirty to forty million subjects. The administration of such an empire required a sophisticated system of territorial government, a steady flow of revenue, military manpower, and political information between the capital and the provinces. The system that emerged, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, organized the territory into eyalets and sanjaks, distributed the rural surplus through the tımar prebends, and layered over the whole a fiscal and judicial administration rooted in the kanun and the sharia. The system was constantly evolving: the most dramatic transformations came in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the çiftlik and the ayan replaced the tımar; and again in the nineteenth century, when the Tanzimat reforms imposed a new administrative uniformity through the 1864 Vilayet Law. The treatment of the empire’s non-Muslim communities, the millet system, is covered in the dedicated article on the millet system.

Key dates

1365 — Rumelia is organized as the first major beylerbeyilik, with its capital at Edirne.
1453 — Mehmed II reorganizes the conquered lands into the classical eyalet-sanjak system.
c. 1600 — the çiftlik begins to displace the tımar; the malikâne perpetual tax farm appears.
1699 — Karlowitz: the empire begins to lose the European frontier.
1839 — the Gülhane Decree and the abolition of the iltizam.
1864 — the Vilayet Law reorganizes the provinces on a French model; 1871 a supplementary law completes the system.

The Eyalet: The Provincial Government

The principal unit of Ottoman provincial government was the eyalet (also called beylerbeyilik, vilayet, or, in the European provinces, paşalık). The eyalet was governed by a beylerbeyi — literally “lord of lords,” usually translated as “governor-general” — who held the rank of pasha of the three tails (üç tuğlu paşa) and was appointed directly by the sultan. The beylerbeyi was responsible for the civil administration of the province, for the maintenance of order, for the collection of the central taxes, and for the muster and command of the provincial military forces in time of war.

The beylerbeyi was appointed for an indefinite term, often of only a year or two, and could be transferred or dismissed at the will of the sultan. A career of beylerbeyi service was, in the sixteenth century, the most common path to the Grand Vizierate: perhaps two-thirds of the Grand Viziers of the sixteenth century had previously served as beylerbeyi of one of the major provinces. The beylerbeyi was assisted by a divan modeled on the imperial divan, and he was supported by a small household of officials drawn from the imperial household school or from the local gentry.

The classical system established about thirty to forty eyalets, of which the most important were Rumelia (the European provinces), Anatolia, Karaman, Rum (Sivas and north-eastern Anatolia), Diyarbakır, Damascus, Aleppo, Egypt, Baghdad, Yemen, Budin (Hungary), and Basra. By the seventeenth century, the system had grown to include more than fifty eyalets, of which several — Egypt, Basra, Algeria, Tunis, Tripolitania, the Kurdish principalities of the east, the Greek and Serbian principalities of the Balkans — were in practice autonomous. The eyalet system, as a coherent framework of imperial administration, was progressively replaced by the vilayet system of the Tanzimat.

The Sanjak: The County

The eyalet was divided into sanjaks (also called liva), each of which was governed by a sanjakbeyi (also called mirliva) — a provincial cavalry officer of the sipahi class, not a pasha in the classical system. The sanjakbeyi was appointed by the sultan on the recommendation of the Grand Vizier, served a term of one to three years, and was usually transferred at the end of his term. He was responsible for the civil administration of his sanjak, for the maintenance of order, for the collection of the haraç and the öşür and the local taxes, and for the muster of the sipahi cavalry of his jurisdiction. The exact procedure for selecting a sanjakbeyi is not well documented for the seventeenth century; what the records show is that appointments were made by the Nişancı under the berat of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Grand Vizier and the beylerbeyi of the relevant province.

The sanjak was the basic unit of Ottoman provincial administration. The most important sanjaks — those of Sivas, Ankara, Salonica, Sofia, and Bosnia — were significant commands, and a successful sanjakbeyi could rise to a beylerbeyilik and from there, sometimes, to the Grand Vizierate. The sanjakbeyi of a small sanjak was, by contrast, a much more modest figure — a junior officer with a small household and a relatively modest income. The career path was well established: Halil İnalcık’s prosopography of the sixteenth-century provincial elite traces a steady progression from sanjak to beylerbeyilik, with promotion by seniority and the careful rotation of appointments designed to prevent the formation of local power bases.

The sanjak was divided into kazas (judicial districts), each of which was administered by a kadı appointed by the Kazasker of the relevant jurisdiction. The kadı had charge of the judicial administration, the maintenance of order, the supervision of the market, and the assessment and collection of the principal taxes. The kadı’s court was the principal court of the kaza, and the kadı’s office was the principal point of contact between the subject population and the imperial administration.

The Vilayet and the Tanzimat

The Tanzimat reforms transformed the Ottoman provincial system. The 1864 Vilayet Nizamnamesi (Provincial Law) and the supplementary 1871 İdare-i Umumiye-i Vilayat Nizamnamesi (General Administration of the Provinces Law) reorganized the eyalets as vilayets, governed by valis appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. Each vilayet was divided into sanjaks, each sanjak into kazas, and each kaza into nahiyes. The vali was assisted by an Idare Meclisi (Administrative Council) and a judiciary drawn from the reformed secular courts; the law attempted to provide for the participation of non-Muslims in the local administration — a provision that, in practice, varied enormously by province.

The vilayet system was an attempt to impose a uniform administrative pattern on a diverse empire. It worked reasonably well in some provinces — the Danube Vilayet was a model of the new system — and it worked badly in others. The autonomy of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, established in 1861, was a partial exception; the international administration of Crete from 1898 was a more decisive one. The vilayet system, in its broad outlines, survived into the Turkish Republic and provided the framework of the modern Turkish province until the early twenty-first century.

The Tımar System and the Sipahi

The Ottoman provincial system was, in the classical period, closely linked to the tımar (prebend) and the sipahi (provincial cavalryman). A tımar was a grant of the right to collect the taxes of a particular village or group of villages, in return for the obligation to maintain a horseman, his horse, and his equipment out of the income and to bring a fixed number of armed retainers to the imperial army on campaign. The holders of tımars were the sipahis, the provincial cavalry that formed the backbone of the Ottoman army from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The tımar system integrated military mobilization, fiscal administration, and land tenure into a single institution, and it was one of the most distinctive features of the Ottoman provincial government.

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, the sipahis lost their economic basis; as the sipahis declined, the central government lost its primary means of controlling the Anatolian countryside. The reform of the tımar system, or its replacement by alternative fiscal arrangements, was a recurrent theme of Ottoman reform from the seventeenth century onward — and the issue was one of the principal concerns of the Grand Vizier and the Divan in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Çiftlik and the Ayan

The collapse of the tımar cleared the way for the çiftlik — the large, commercially worked estate absorbed by members of the local elite, military officers, Janissary retirees, and members of the rising ayan class. Çiftliks typically combined demesne agriculture with sharecropping (ortakçılık), and they often encroached on the fields of neighbouring peasant villages; the tımar sipahis, who depended on the surplus of the village, lost their economic basis at the same time. By the eighteenth century the çiftlik had become the dominant form of landholding across much of Anatolia and the Balkans, and the state was forced to find new fiscal instruments to replace the tımar — a problem that the malikâne perpetual tax farm and the mukata’a cash grants were only partially able to solve. The ayan, often the same families who held the çiftliks, came to dominate provincial politics: the Köprülü of Marmara, the Çapanoğlu of central Anatolia, and the Süleyman family of Sivas were the most prominent.

The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (the Danubian voyvodalık of the hospodar system) illustrate the same dynamic in the European provinces. From the late sixteenth century, the Porte granted the thrones of the two principalities to Greek and Romanian boyar families for renewable three-year terms, in return for tribute; the system of office purchase (ayarlık) institutionalized the flow of money to Istanbul and helped the Porte keep the principalities under indirect control. The Phanariot Greek families of Istanbul — the Mavrocordato, the Ypsilanti, the Mourouzi — monopolized the hospodar appointments from 1711 until 1821, when the Greek War of Independence ended the arrangement.

The Pashas and the Provincial Elites

The provincial elite of the Ottoman Empire was, in the classical period, a service aristocracy drawn from the devshirme, the palace school, the ulema, and the tımar sipahis. The most senior of these officials, the beylerbeyi and the senior sanjakbeyi, were members of the kalemiye (the scribal service) and the seyfiye (the military service); they were appointed by the sultan and could be transferred or dismissed at the sultan’s will. The system was designed to prevent the formation of hereditary regional power bases, and it worked reasonably well in the classical period.

By the seventeenth century, however, the system had begun to fail. Large provinces such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, the Kurdish principalities of the east, and the Greek and Serbian principalities of the Balkans were in practice autonomous, governed by local dynasties of pashas, deys, beys, and voivodes who transmitted office within their own families and paid only nominal tribute to Istanbul. The most spectacular example was the Mamluk household of Egypt, which ruled the country in effective independence from the seventeenth century until the French invasion of 1798; the most enduring was the Husainid dynasty of Tunis, which ruled the regency from 1705 until the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881.

The Tanzimat reforms attempted to reimpose central control. The 1839 Gülhane Decree promised security of life, honour, and property for all Ottoman subjects, and the subsequent legislation attempted to abolish the abuses of the old provincial administration. The reforms were only partially successful: the vilayet system established in 1864 imposed a uniform administrative pattern on the remaining provinces, and the 1856 Islahat Edict extended the guarantees of 1839 to the non-Muslim communities — the same reforms that, in the millet system more broadly, attempted to modernize the relationship between the state and its non-Muslim subjects. The autonomous provinces, however, gradually slipped from the empire’s grasp: Algeria was occupied by France in 1830, Tunis followed in 1881, Egypt became a British protectorate in 1882, the Balkan provinces achieved independence in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Arab provinces were lost during and after the First World War.