Századok – 2004

Tanulmányok - Fodor Pál: „Hivatásos törökök” – „született törökök”. Hatalmi elit és társadalom a 15–17. századi Oszmán Birodalomban IV/773

HATALMI ELIT ÉS TÁRSADALOM AZ OSZMÁN BIRODALOMBAN-791 "PROFESSIONAL TURKS" - "TRUEBORN TURKS". POLITICAL ELITE AND SOCIETY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE IN THE 15-17TH CENTURIES by Pál Fodor (Summary) The study consists of two parts. The first examines the elite-creating policy of the Ottoman dynasty, in which an outstanding role was played by statesmen of slave origin (devsirme-kul in Turkish). Contemporary Europeans refered to this elite, which had a decisive influence in the government of the Empire, as "professional" Turks, as opposed to the class of "trueborn" Turks. According to the classic formula of A. H. Lybyber the former constituted the "ruling institution", monopolising the political leadership, whereas the latter embodied the "religious institution" and controlled the religious sphere. New research undermined this rigid clasification, and proved that the different groups of the elite were distinguished from each other not in terms of birth and origin but according to their professions. Yet Lybyer was right in stating that the official Ottoman ideology viewed the leading elite as a dual structure: the political sphere belonged to the kul, whereas the religion was part of the dai. The second part of the study analyses the reactions of Turkish society to the emerging predominance of the slaves, to the rule of the kul-class. It proves with episodes taken from mainly narrative sources, dating from the 15th and the early 16th centuries, that at first the "trueborn" Turks, the middle classes and the society of the reaya protested with revolts against their own losing ground in favour of the kul. Yet by the beginning of the 16th century the religious lawyers, who had previously similarly disliked the growth of kul influence, acquiesced in what proved to be an unstoppable process, thus confining the antipathy towards the "professional" Turks in the lower strata of society. The study ends with the analysis of nine case studies, all taken from the registers of the sultan's council (miihimme defteri), which prove that in the provinces sometimes a real strugle went on between the timar-holder sipahi on the one hand and the yeniceri, representing the kul, on the other, and among the motives of the sipahi, who can be stated to represent the Turks, the anti-kul feelings of the "trueborn Turks" was not the weakest. Yet the relatively small number of these cases shows that the Ottoman state successfully suppressed such emotions and their practical manifestations and had come to extend its own osmanli identity to the entire Turkish society by the 17th century.