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The state apparatus continued its intensive transformation during the seventeenth century. First of all, as seen, sultans became reigning not ruling monarchs who legitimized bureaucratic commands but themselves usually did not initiate policy.
For example, during the second half of the seventeenth century (1656–1691), the remarkable K ¨opr ¨ul ¨u family truly directed state affairs, often serving as chief ministers (grand viziers). Second, by 1650, new elite groups in Istanbul outside the military (sipahi and asker) classes, called vizier and pasha households, began making sultans
and running affairs. A new collective leadership – a civilian oligarchy –
had emerged and the sultans provided the facade of continuity as new
practices were replacing old ones.
The central state, it is true, still commanded but others besides the ruler were in charge. This was the
opposite of events in western and central Europe where monarchs were
consolidating power.
These vizier and pasha households had new fiscal underpinnings,
sources of wealth autonomous of the state that included, after 1695,
lifetime tax farms as well as illegal seizures of state lands. Also important
were the revenues based on the so-called pious foundations. These foundations (valid or waqf) played a vital role in the economic life of Ottoman and other Islamic societies.
These were sources of revenues set aside by male and female donors for pious purposes, such as the maintenance of a mosque, school (medrese), students, soup kitchen, library, or orphanage. The revenue source might be cultivable lands or, perhaps, shops and stores.
The donor prepared a document that turned over the land or shop to the foundation. Properly speaking, immediately upon the formation of the foundation or on the death of the donor, the revenues would begin flowing to the intended purpose. But another form of foundation
emerged, in which the revenues nominally were set aside for the pious
purpose but in reality continued to go to the donors and their heirs under
various and dubiously legal pretexts.
Pious foundations (even such shady ones) could not be confiscated because of the provisions of Islamic law,
jealously guarded by the religious scholars, the ulema. Thus, they offered
a revenue source that was secure in a way that wealth from timars or tax
farms could never be. Tax farms and timars derived directly from state
action and therefore could be taken back from the holder in a moment.
From its origins in 1683 35 Pious foundation revenues, however, did not and were safe from confiscation. Setting up such a pious foundation meant that the possessions of a person – who as a member of the bureaucratic or military elite theoretically was the slave of the sultan – could not be seized, a remarkable turn of events in Ottoman history.
During the sixteenth century, pious foundations had been the preserve of the state and the prerogative of those
under sultanic control. But, by the eighteenth century, this monopoly of access had faded and the formation of pious foundations had spread to newly emergent groups. This was part of the process that weakened
the power of the sultans. The financial security that these foundations offered likely stabilized the respective positions of the vizier and pasha households and the ulema as the new economic and political power forces of the late seventeenth century.
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