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The Ottoman Empire Part 13
During the century spanning the reigns of Sultans Mehmet and ¨Suleyman, some sense of an “Ottoman Empire” perhaps began to emerge among administrators and subjects. Although the frontiers were still expanding, a general sense was developing of living in the sultan’s world, of being in the sultan’s lands as opposed to those, for example, of the Habsburg king or the Safevid shah.
At its most fundamental, those within received the sultan’s protection from enemies and that outside were tacked by him. But more was involved. The sense of being inside of an Ottoman commonwealth in part also derived from the innumerable actions of the sultan to cement subjects’ loyalties (chapter 6).
On another level, the regularization of taxes and the repeated appearances of Ottoman officials on the local scene similarly reinforced subjects’ sense of belonging to the same universe. Moreover, both Mehmet and S ¨Suleyman promulgated codes of law that set the sultanic standards, the norms, for
behavior. Thus, the presence of a common system of justice, taxes, and a
shared ruler who offered protection to every subject served to foster the
wider sense of participating in a common “Ottoman” project. This was
no small achievement and helps to explain the longevity of the Ottoman
Empire.
Let us return now to the narrative of evolving political power within
the state. The evolution that exalted the power of the sultan, described
above, continued. Thus, later in the reign of Sultan Suleyman, power began passing from the person of the monarch to others in his household.
Generally, this sultan’s reign ended a nearly unbroken line of warrior
kings going back to the founder of the Ottoman Empire. In this maturing empire, statecraft was changing as the wars of conquest slowed and then halted.
As expansion faltered, administrative skills of both men and
women became more important than those of the warrior: not fighting
sultans but legitimizing sultans were needed. Hence, between the later
sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the mothers and wives of sultans
came more visibly to the fore in decision-making, wielding considerable
if still informal political power.
In the seventeenth century, actual control rested only rarely in the hands of the monarch who, overall, reigned but did not rule. Sultan Murat IV, unusually for a seventeenth-century ruler,
personally commanded during the latter part of his 1623–1640 reign.
But during the earlier years his mother, K ¨osem, ably restored the state’s
finances after a period of severe inflation.
Overall, sultans who ran the military and the state faded from Ottoman history until the nineteenth century and the reigns of Sultan Mahmut II and Abdulhamit II.
Sultan Mehmet IV (1648–1687) could be a sultan although a child because
he was not needed to rule. Instead, he served as a symbol of a
system that functioned in his name.
Power rested with his mother (the same Kosem) and other members of his household and, by that date, with
members of important Istanbul households outside of the palace. Thus,
between c. 1550 and 1650, policy-making and implementation shifted
away from the sultanic person; but the central state in its Istanbul capital
still directed affairs.
