This chapter presents both a general overview and trans-dynastic interpretation of the power elites of fifteenth century Islamic West-Asia, their institutions and practices, and the many transformations that marked their trajectories across the rough political landscape of the time.
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As far as that overview is concerned, the chapter retraces the general contours of these many crisscrossing trajectories of trans-regional, regional and local empowerment that distinguished the landscape from Nile to Oxus and from Bosporus to Indus between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries ce (or the end of the eighth and the beginning of the tenth centuries ah). In a rather traditional fashion, the chapter focuses in particular on describing specific trajectories of trans-regional empowerment. These appeared in the format of dynastic and non-dynastic hegemonic constellations of power elites that engaged in competing politics of conquest, integration, reproduction and exploitation, or of war-making and state-making, on a trans-regional or even West-Asian scale. The chapter will of course also have to consider other trajectories of empowerment as equally meaningful components of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asiaâs political history, even when they did not necessarily involve or relate to any identifiable processes of state-making. The latter trajectories range from those on the more local level of non-complex social groups related to a town, village, urban neighborhood, tribal pasture or small-scale community to regional ones, operating within more complex composites of social groups,
This chapter also invites specialists of the histories of these different trajectories to rethink their understanding within the wider frameworks of West-Asian connectivity and state formation. To this end, it adopts an entangled and thematic approach to these histories. This means that this chapter crosses the boundaries that tend to continue to divide West-Asiaâs history into separate, dynastically-organized research traditions in particular amongst Ottomanists, Mamlukologists and Timurid-Turkmen specialists. The chapter aims to integrate those dynastic boundaries more explicitly into its explanations and interpretations, seeing these as markings of variations on deeply interconnected trans-dynastic phenomena and as common sources of meaningful distinction in particular historical and historiographical contexts. In order to do so, this chapter reconstructs those phenomena and contexts into meaningful descriptive and interpretive units. The choice of units is informed by current (especially minimalist and practice-oriented) theoretical understandings of premodern states, of how they become, and what they do (and not do), as detailed in the following chapter.
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The first part of the current chapter consists of introductory
1 Situating Agents and Agencies of State Formation in Fifteenth-Century West-Asia
The late fourteenth century reign of the Central-Asian ruler Temür (r. 1370â1405) was a kind of matrix moment for the histories of Islamic West-Asiaâs main fifteenth-century polities and political elites. Temür, also known as TÄ«mÅ«r in Arabic and Persian, or as Tamerlane in European languages, certainly had a remarkable career. Remembered especially for his feats of conquest, plunder and fearsome havoc on a Eurasian scale, Temür also stands out for the unique level of personal empowerment, cultural efflorescence and successful state formation that he achieved in the Mongol, Turkish and Muslim contexts of
This important moment in West-Asiaâs history indeed brought to power an entirely new, mostly peripatetic trans-regional power elite in Transoxiana, Khurasan and Iran (see map 2). This new elite was composed of two different groups. On the one hand there were Temürâs many descendants who grew into a new dynasty of Turko-Mongol royal status known as the Timurids. On the other hand, there were the military leaders of Temürâs armies, who stemmed from various Turko-Mongol Chagatai origins. Tried, tested and bred in the personal entourage of Temür, these princes and commanders continued to dominate these eastern regionsâ politics for many decades after Temürâs death, and in varying constellations and associations that included also their own descendants. In Transoxiana and Khurasan this highly dynamic Timurid domination even lasted up to the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries (see map 4).
Beyond these core areas of Timurid leadership, Temürâs conquest politics of undermining or annihilating the authorities of regional and trans-regional rivals created political opportunities for various local power elites, including tribal leaderships and messianic movements, especially in the regions stretching from Iraq and Azerbaijan to Anatolia (see map 1). Throughout most of the century, these regions, with their ideal winter and summer pastures, their
First subdued by Temürâs passage through Anatolia and Syria in the opening years of the fifteenth century and then all but annihilated by subsequent years of territorial fragmentation and internecine warfare, the Ottoman and Syro-Egyptian polities only re-emerged as strong trans-regional power centers from about the mid-1410s onwards (see map 2). In the process, as will be detailed below, newly composed politico-military elites rose to power in both Sultanates, and both had in common their origins of enslavement (mostly in the Balkans and in the Caucasus respectively), socialization in royal military and court service, and acculturation to particular Turkic-Muslim political identities. In many ways, these power elites thus became more alike than would be suggested by their organization around the century-old Ottoman dynasty in the Northwest and the even older Sultanate of Cairo in the Southwest. In the course of the fifteenth century a scramble for West-Asian control and influence regularly pitted these elites and their sultanic rulers against each other. Initially this conflict mostly happened indirectly, through local and regional
Before that re-orientation of the political landscape of West-Asia, however, this gigantic poly-centric zoneâconnecting in myriad ways Egypt, Northwest Anatolia, and Khurasan and Transoxianaâoperated very much as a laboratory of fifteenth-century political (and cultural) experimentation. This involved various local and regional elites and their shifting loyalties as much as the more remote and continuously contested trans-regional leaderships of Timurids, Ottomans, Turkmen and âTurksâ (as the Syro-Egyptian Sultanateâs politico-military elites were identified by their contemporaries).
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In the historical regions of Southern and Eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Diyar Bakr and Iraq in particular, various old and new movements, networks, communities and chieftainships benefitted, with varying degrees of success and sovereignty, from the renewed local political opportunities created by both
In this way, the Karamanid dynasty was first subdued by the Ottomans but then restored to their fourteenth-century regional primacy by Temür, and eventually claimed priority from the ancient Anatolian capital of Konya throughout much of the South-central Anatolian mountain lands and plains. Especially during the long and expansionist rule of Ibrahim Beg Karamanoglu (r. ca. 1423â64), the Karamanid leadership vied variously and in alternating ways with other Anatolian chiefs as well as with the Ottoman and âTurkishâ sultans for local and regional sovereignty. The Karamanids had two main competitors among these Anatolian leaderships: the Ramadanids who sought to impose some form of regional authority and control over the Cilician coastal plains from the towns of Tarsus and Adana, and the Dulkadirid lineage, similarly claiming priority on the Anti-Taurus plateau from their seats of power in the towns of Elbistan and MaraÅ (KahramanmaraÅ) (see maps 2 and 3). From the late 1460s onwards, external pressures on these so-called âTurkmenâ dynasties in South-central Anatolia increased at a varying but unrelenting pace to the extent that they were all eventually subdued by, or fully integrated into the trans-regional claims to power and sovereignty that were emanating ever more intensely from Ottoman Constantinople in particular, as well as from Cairo (see map 4).
In the regions of Diyar Bakr, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iraq competition for local and regional priority and assets was dominated by two other Turkmen tribal groupings (see map 2). These groups seem to have maintained a higher level of transhumant activity than their Dulkadirid, Ramadanid and Karamanid peers. The chiefs of the Qara Qoyunlu (the Clan of the Black Sheep) were among the few fourteenth-century regional leaderships that managed to survive Temürâs onslaught and they eventually even regained priority status in and beyond their former east-Anatolian territories. This was above all thanks to their charismatic Qara Qoyunlu chief Qara Yusuf (d. 1420), whose military
In 1467, when Jahan Shah was captured in battle and executed, the story of Qara Qoyunlu trans-regional leadership in Eastern Anatolia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Iran proved to be short-lived. However, more consolidated Turkmen rule in these regions continued along very similar lines, when Uzun Hasan (r. 1457â78), leader of the Aq Qoyunlu (the Clan of the White Sheep), seized the opportunity to step into Jahan Shahâs footsteps. This led to the accommodation, absorption or integration of Qara Qoyunlu (and formerly Timurid) relationships, balances, and achievements into an adapted trans-regional order, now dominated by the Qara Qoyunluâs longstanding Anatolian rivals of the Aq Qoyunlu. It also meant that the Aq Qoyunlu tribal group and its leaders finally extended their influence beyond the mere control of the trade routes and the transhumant network of Diyar Bakr and Southern Armenia (see maps 2 and 3). This zone until then had defined their area of operation, competition and relationships since the days of the alliance between Temür and one of the Aq Qoyunluâs most charismatic early chiefs, Uzun Hasanâs grandfather Ê¿Uthman Beg Qara Yuluk (d. 1435). Uzun Hasan and his immediate successors now took Tabriz in Azerbaijan as their seat of power and they maintained for more than three decades at least some level of sovereignty over the highly diverse chain of lands, people and resource flows that connected the Caucasian mountain lands, the Iraqi lowlands and the Iranian plateau (see map 4). In that enormous frontier zone of fifteenth-century trans-regional politics these territories thus increasingly became a more or less coherent political space that was organized around Turkmen leadership in Tabriz. In the Southwest, the expansion of this new political coherence was curbed by Syriaâs ancient dominance from Cairo. In the Northwest its reach was limited by an equally increasingly coherent Ottoman sovereignty and Anatolian dominance, sealed
2 Situating Practices and Institutions of State Formation in Fifteenth Century West-Asia
In some ways these competing leaderships of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, from Ottoman, Syro-Egyptian and Timurid sultans to various Turkmen leaders and rulers, all have similar profiles, marked by the marginality of their social origins, the martial nature of their socio-political identities and the âTurkishnessâ of their linguistic and cultural idiom. Given the common setting of their political action amidst Islamic West-Asiaâs settled Arabo-Persian environments, the historical profiles of these sultans, leaders and rulers are all also marked by the same experimental creativity and hybrid mix of memories, practices and institutions that they and their entourages used to explain and reproduce the messy and often violent political realities that emerged from these marginal, martial and Turkish contexts. Across Islamic West-Asia, these diverse fifteenth-century realities of leadership and their explanations all remained deeply rooted in longstanding interconnected imaginations and traditions of trans-regional political action. This type of political connectivity is often labeled as the Turko-Mongol factor of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. This is a shorthand for capturing the combined features of nomadic (or semi-nomadic) roots and Perso-Islamic, Turko-Saljuq and Mongol-Chinggisid precedent that determined in multivalent structuring ways these realities and explanations of political action across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia.
The second part of this chapter will provide an overview of those Turko-Mongol features that are central to understanding fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asiaâs history and the politics of its leaderships. These involve particular practices and institutions of socio-political reproduction and transformation, of socio-economic accumulation and redistribution, and of political organization and state formation. These main practices and institutions of Turko-Mongol politics are discussed here only in a general way. As announced above, the purpose here is to frame these features from trans-dynastic perspectives and informed by state formation studies. As such an approach is not very common within the field of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asian history, it has to be stressed that the occasionally more unorthodox interpretations that are
2.1 Turko-Mongol Socio-political Praxis
The presence and impact of the Turko-Mongol factor as outlined above have been generally regarded as being most visible through the widespread ancient appanage and tanistry practices that continued to regulate the distribution and reproduction of power, status and resources within elite lineages and political communities. These practices operated in diverse and multivalent ways between Cairo, Constantinople, Tabriz and Herat, and they continued to reinvigorate centrifugal tendencies and to obfuscate or even obstruct the pathways towards political stabilization and centralization, albeit with varying levels of success. Appanage and its cognate tanistry refer to the fact that the Turko-Mongol mindset considered entitlement to privileges and social distinction, as well as succession to status, wealth, power and authority, as collective elitist arrangements. At the same time, these arrangements were nowhere organized in any straightforward hierarchies of individual rights, priorities and obligations. Rather, they always had to be acquired in highly competitive social circumstances, and agnatic kinship and seniority were only one asset among many here, alongside highly individualized qualities such as ambition, charisma, political acumen, coercive prowess and even longevity. Political participation in this context of regular dynastic fragmentation and violent succession to leadership was not just a matter of birth or choice, but also of social survival and necessity, and power elites were left with no choice but to partake actively and continuously in political action. As a result, this politicization of all social relationships continued to favor the individual expertise and personal clout of successful military entrepreneurs among the members of those elites. â[Tanistry] politicized society, and it personalized monarchyâ, as one of the pioneers of the study of Inner Asian and Turko-Mongol politics, Joseph Fletcher, put it.
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In this context of Turko-Mongol political praxis, success was highly personal, and leaders such as Temür, Murad, Jaqmaq, Uzun Hasan and their peers and descendants had to constantly fight for their survival. Political order and stability were a widely shared responsibility as well as a highly volatile symbolic construction, which faced continuous pressures, both from within and from without. In fact, as will be detailed below, the Ottoman Sultanate in the Northwest, its âTurkishâ counterpart in the Syro-Egyptian Southwest, the Timurids in Khurasan and Transoxiana and somewhat belatedly also the Turkmen in Azerbaijan and Iran managed to check the returning centrifugal consequences of these practices and pressures, even though in most cases only in contingent ways and to a certain extent. The process of state formation in these cases featured the gradual appearance of a coherent central political apparatus and of the concomitant idea that there was one autonomous âTurkishâ, Ottoman, Timurid or eventually even Turkmen hegemonic political order. This process favored, in diverse ways, centripetal strategies that limited any effects of the elite fragmentations that were plaguing tanistric moments of succession in Cairo, in Edirne and Constantinople, in Tabriz, and in Herat and Samarkand. This never happened in any similarly stabilizing ways for other leaderships with trans-regional ambitions in fifteenth-century West-Asia, and the evaporation of Timurid authorities in Anatolia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq and West-Iran and the successive territorial expansions of the Qara and Aq Qoyunlu between the 1450s and 1470s had as much to do with these internal reproductive weaknesses as with the military successes of charismatic leaders like Jahan Shah and Uzun Hasan.
Most important for a proper understanding of the impact of Turko-Mongol socio-political praxis, perhaps, is the fact that, even under the latter Timurid and Turkmen umbrellas of unstable trans-regional leaderships, rapid political transformation had no more effect on the political practices and identities of most local and regional power elites in Eastern Anatolia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq and most of Iran than it did on their counterparts in the more stable political contexts of Ottoman Anatolia, âTurkishâ Syro-Egypt, or Timurid Khurasan and Transoxiana. Loyalties and allegiances shifted and sovereignties and regional priorities were constantly renegotiated, while political spaces and fields of power were incessantly redefined as a consequence of tanistric competition. In all of these regions, however, local and regional groups of political actors and their stakes and assets were far more enduring, changing primarily as a consequence of the many realities of social, cultural and physical mobility.
The towns from which the Timurids ruled their dominions were like an archipelago within a sea of semi-independent regions, over which control was a matter of luck, alliance and an occasional punitive expedition. 8
As illustrated by the different case studies of local and regional elites in Part 3 of this volume, this powerful archipelago metaphor is not just a very good approximation of the situation in West-Asiaâs Timurid East. On the ground, in and out of the limelight of trans-regional political power, all kinds of constellations of scholars, merchants, bureaucrats and local rural and urban leaders participated actively and often equally successfully in the translation and accommodation to local and regional realities of trans-regional claims to power and primacy. As will be detailed below, the social, cultural and financial entrepreneurship of these groups alongside their knowhow and access to all kinds of resources made them equally important, powerful and impactful both for the highly personalized and tanistric successes of all kinds of Turko-Mongol leaderships in West-Asiaâs more peripheral zones as well as for (or against) the more coherent processes of central state formation in the Ottoman Northwest, the âTurkishâ Southwest, the Turkmen North and the Timurid East of Islamic West-Asia. As it played out in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, Turko-Mongol socio-political praxis was therefore not just highly personalized, tanistric and violent. It also displayed a strong tendency towards fluidity and poly-centrism. All these Turko-Mongol qualifications therefore invite one to consider West-Asian power as a relational and circulating historical phenomenon that connected and disconnected local, regional and trans-regional social realities in myriad centrifugal and centripetal ways. The growing visibility
2.2 Turko-Mongol Political Economies
These diverse local, regional and trans-regional elites were actually connected through access to Islamic West-Asiaâs many resources in more defining and structuring ways than they were through Turko-Mongol socio-political praxis. It is therefore also appropriate to give some consideration here to this, and to the diverse but related sets of tributary, fiscal and proprietor relationships and of redistributive arrangements that distinguished fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asiaâs political economies. These have to be understood against the background of a brief contemplation of the regionâs wider symbiotic nomadic, agricultural and commercial economies.
The recurrent tendency in Turko-Mongol politics towards âinternecine warfareâ did âminimal damage to a nomadic economyâ, as explained Joseph Fletcher. â[T]o an agricultural economy, on the other handâ, Fletcher continued, âit was destructive, sometimes disastrousâ. 9 For many centuries, West-Asiaâs diverse, rich and longstanding agricultural economies had been forced to accommodate the many changes wrought, in more and less destructive ways, by the influx of Inner-Asian nomads and their tanistric politics. In the fifteenth century, that accommodation continued, due both to the pressures of the Turko-Mongol reflux from West to East and the impact of more particular socio-economic phenomena, not least the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death pandemic and similar, more restricted, epidemic cycles of pestilence, plague and depopulation. Throughout Islamic West-Asia, a transhumant nomadic economy, controlled by Arab, Kurdish, Turkmen and many other tribal leaderships, had thus come to occupy a much more prominent space, and these groups often functionally shared the diverse rural landscapes of the region with agricultural ventures of a reduced and mostly relatively modest local scale. This created a particular trans-regional economic context that, though fundamentally different from any earlier trans-regional situation, proved resilient enough to the political realities of endless warfare to maintain a reasonable level of sufficiency.
An important factor here also was undoubtedly the fact that these symbiotic nomadic and agricultural economies were supported by the fifteenth-century mercantile networks that increasingly strengthened connections amongst
Turko-Mongol political praxis in this post-Temür age, however, had also been shaped in many ways by those same socio-economic changes. The aforementioned appanage and tanistry practices of dynastic fragmentation and violent succession to leadership were not static normative devices that structured political action in unchanging or uniform destructive ways. They rather represented deep-rooted traditions that were constantly being re-invented and re-imagined according to the necessities of time and space, thus offering many potential solutions to all kinds of challenges. This was also true of the challenges posed by the new political and socio-economic realities of the fifteenth century, and of the great variety of more or less successful solutions pursued across Islamic West-Asia by the new, or renewed, elites of the post-Temür era. This pragmatic interplay between leadership challenges and solutions played out most directly on the local level, when political and socio-economic realities intertwined and Turko-Mongol elites everywhere tried again to tap into
Across fifteenth century West-Asia, Turko-Mongol elites attempted in many different ways to tap into the regionâs flows of resources and rhythms of exchange. Even though fiscal institutional precedents created a semblance of uniformity, these attempts were determined by local circumstances as much as by trans-local ambitions or centralizing initiatives. The most defining factor in all this, so it appears, was actually the changing contingency of a political centerâs distance from, and level of control over the economic assets in a locality. Territories and periods marred by political competition, warfare and campaigns of conquest and redress were hit most forcefully by the potentially destructive economic effects of Turko-Mongol politics. In such contexts, harvests, livestock, commodities or other resources were invariably looted, and then distributed as booty among campaigners and their followers along ad hoc hierarchies of military investment and political interest. After Temürâs endless campaigning, and throughout the fifteenth century, West-Asiaâs regions that continued to be most regularly plagued by these coercive politics of resource extraction were the politically unstable poly-centric zone of Iraq, Diyar Bakr, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Eastern Anatolia and their winter and summer pastures, fertile river basins and multiple commercial networks of towns and routes.
In many cases, however, mitigating arrangements between local and campaigning leaderships followed, or forestalled, such economically and politically disruptive moments. Often, precious gifts were exchanged and tributes in cash and kind were pledged to confirm such arrangements, generating alternative, more controlled mechanisms to provide a return on the investments required for military campaigning. Depending on the circumstances, and also on the extent to which promises could be enforced, such ad hoc settlements between local and central elites could transform into more structural arrangements, including varieties of what essentially were tax farming engagements. Indeed, throughout the fifteenth century, these fluid arrangements arguably shaped the majority of economic relationships between local and central elites across Islamic West-Asia, appearing from Egypt over Western Anatolia to Transoxiana as the means best suited to balance the continuities of local actors and practices against the volatilities of Turko-Mongol politics and socio-economic changes. Such arrangements required minimal investments from central elites and helped maintain some level of authority over more peripheral social or territorial spaces. At the same time, these practices integrated Arab, Turkmen, Kurdish or other urban, rural and tribal elites into the authority structures of a political center by giving them a stake in the maintenance of political and economic order. As suggested above, the nature and extent of those stakes, alongside the level of integration of local and regional elites, and even the identity of that political center remained the object of fierce competition, negotiation and transformation throughout the century and across the continent.
More direct and unilateral fiscal systems of resource flow tended to complement, marginalize or even displace tax farming and tributary arrangements in areas that were more stable politically such as Ottoman Anatolia, âTurkishâ Syro-Egypt or Timurid Khurasan and Transoxiana, as well as in the proximity and catchment area of powerful leaders, such as Jahan Shah and Uzun Hasan. In each of these West-Asian power centers, broadly similar invasive rural and urban tax regimes were in operation, inspired by longstanding local and regional fiscal traditions, and leading to greater integration of taxpayers, beneficiaries and financial administrators into centralizing economic and political orders. In all regions these more direct tax regimes derived from a combination of ancient Islamic taxes, most importantly the land taxâor kharajâand the poll taxâor jizyaâtogether with a range of customs duties and related, mostly urban, taxes and forced payments that were not similarly sanctified by Muslim scripture. For many centuries, especially the kharajâs tithe payments in cash and kind had provided a steady flow of income for the regionâs elites, and this did not radically alter in the fifteenth century. At the same time, however, the periodâs socio-economic changes certainly also affected the flow of those traditional
The redistribution of these fiscal and related resources among political elites in West-Asia was everywhere similarly organized as a regionally interconnected and dynamic practice of land tenure and remuneration rooted in a mixture of precedents. Most of the economic assets and activities in Islamic West-Asia that were somehow subject to more direct tax regimes were connected to lands and rights that legally (at least in theory) belonged to the ruler, in his capacity as the personification of the sovereign political order, or the state. This proprietorship was then parceled out in fiscal concessions and fiscal exemptions to his household, to his courtiers and military leaders, and to other relevant beneficiaries in return for their loyalties and services. In the Anatolian context the main type of grant in this practice of controlled, but devolved, royal remuneration and fiscal administration was known in Ottoman Turkish as a timar, and its holders, the timariot, were all cavalrymen (sipahi) with varying ranks, status and responsibilities. In âTurkishâ Syro-Egypt the Arabic noun iqtaÊ¿ was used to refer to a concession in the arrangements that organized and regulated the distribution of tax income to the Sultanateâs various military commanders (amÄ«rs) and their bands of horsemen. In Timurid and Turkmen lands similar arrangements prevailed among the entourages of rulers, but there these fiscal, administrative and proprietorship grants were referred to as soyurghal, or also as tiyul or ulka. The various forms, names and arrangements which this prebendal practice took in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asian courts were all rooted in shared local customs and traditions that often originated in the tenth-century history of the region. These forms, names and arrangements also overlapped everywhere in more or less explicit ways with the Turko-Mongol appanage practice of shared but segmented authority. Invariably, they confirmed military leaders of Turko-Mongol background in their role as receivers and beneficiaries in West-Asiaâs fiscal resource flows, as active partners and stakeholders in the regionâs economies, and as managers of their own socio-political, military and economic resources or estates, even during moments of accelerating central state formation. All over Islamic West-Asia this prebendal practice finally appeared as the normative way of organizing the political economy around successful trans-regional leaders and power
In order to understand fifteenth-century Turko-Mongol political economies, it is also extremely relevant to consider in more detail the intersections between this multifarious prebendal practice, the latter construction of Muslim religious endowments and centralizing regulations which appeared in some of the politically more stabilized parts of West-Asia. The land tenure system of fifteenth-century Egypt in particular has been demonstrated to have undergone a remarkable transformation, generally identified as waqf-ization. This notion of waqf-ization stands for the legal process by which the status of taxable land was changed to that of waqf-land, by incorporating the land and the income that it generates into the semi-closed, religiously sanctified and tax-exempted socio-economic circuit of a religious endowment (waqf). Institutions for religious practice and education, their salaried staff and students and related forms of expenditure were very often part of this specific socio-economic circuit. At the same time, in fifteenth-century Syro-Egypt, such circuit similarly often included amongst its main beneficiaries specific household and family members and the descendants of the private person who created the waqf and donated its main assets. For the latter reason in particular, the process of waqf-ization has also been likened to a process of de-centralization and privatization. Many, if not most, of the Sultanateâs courtiers and political leaders, very often also including sultans themselves, pursued all kinds of legal and financial strategies to subvert the centralized system of land tenure and fiscal redistribution. They alienated state lands traditionally parceled out as iqtaÊ¿ and acquired full control over their assets by assigning them to their religious endowments, and thus to the long-term benefit of particular religious institutions and, most importantly, of their family and household. As such, waqf-ization was an effective strategy for enabling the Syro-Egyptian Sultanateâs elite families in particular to anticipate, contain and very often also overcome, at least in socio-economic terms, the volatilities of Turko-Mongol politics and the many political changes that affected the Sultanate in the fifteenth century.
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At the same time, however, recent research has begun to make clear that this is not just a question of decentralization or of socio-economic privatization and survival. It is also a story of a substantial political transformation in the fifteenth-century Sultanate. This was due to the fact that, over time, control over some of the largest and most profitable waqf-estates in the Syro-Egyptian realm was actually transferred back to the central state, in particular to an increasingly clearly defined small number of the highest court offices. Positions such as those of the âchief commander of the armiesâ (atabak al-Ê¿asakir), âsenior head guardâ (raʾs nawba kabir), and âgrand chamberlainâ (hajib hujjab) came to be directly associated with the financial management of major waqfs. In ways that warrant further research, these major waqfs had often been endowed by previous sultans and they were linked to the upkeep of Cairoâs main religious infrastructures, such as the Mansuri hospital, the Ashrafi religious complexes inside and outside the city walls, or the Muʾayyadi congregational mosque next to the Southern gate. This meant that any military leaders who occupied these powerful offices at Cairoâs court also automatically acquired control over these important estates and their resources. These leaders were then given the opportunity to transfer to their own households the substantial surplus generated by these waqf-lands in Egypt and Syria. They thereby moved from the administration of one set of waqf-estates to another as they made their careers at court and accumulated ever more resources. In the meantime, most of these leaders also used the riches they assembled in this way to set up their own religious endowments, continuing the afore-mentioned waqf-ization process and working to the socio-economic benefit of their own households and families.
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In many ways, therefore, the accelerating transformation of Egyptâs land tenure system through waqf-ization and the paradoxical re-integration of waqf-estates in the state apparatus were related factors. They both contributed to, but were also partly generated by, the formation in Cairo of a small but particular set of state actors. As will be discussed in more detail below, these figures all rose from very humble origins, distinguished themselves through many years of military and court service, and eventually managed to accumulate substantial political and economic resources in the process. Different sets of these particular state actors, and their huge personalized resources, continued to influence successions and the political stability within the Sultanate throughout the fifteenth century. A handful of these men, including figures such as Jaqmaq (r. 1438â53), Inal (r. 1453â61), Khushqadam (r. 1461â7), Qaytbay (r. 1468â96) and Qansawh (r. 1501â16), even managed to
Elsewhere in Islamic West-Asia, the waqf institution also continued to play an important role in structuring socio-economic and political relationships. In the Ottoman and Timurid territories, as well as in the more fluid zone of Eastern Anatolia, Armenia, Diyar Bakr, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Iran, this infrastructure similarly enabled the structural patronage, cultural promotion and political integration of wide varieties of particular religio-cultural communities and their leaders, followers and practices. In these parts of Islamic West-Asia, the waqf institution also provided for a legal and socio-economic mechanism to protect elite families, households and other social groups against the vicissitudes of Turko-Mongol politics. However, only some of these endowments were integrated or linked with the political apparatus of these regionsâ rulers. As semi-closed local or regional circuits of agricultural, manufactural and commercial estates and assets, of expenditure for specific religious and communal purposes, of sovereign provisions prescribed by Islamic scripture and the law, as well as of rural and urban expertise, the majority of waqf endowments in Islamic West-Asia actually operated as an alternative, unusually stable, set of socio-economic arrangements for various elite groups to participate in the endless negotiations of local and regional relationships and balances of power. The semi-closed, sovereign and communal character of the waqf institution actually made it into a very powerful centrifugal instrument in the hands of power elites. It facilitated the intersection of centripetal ambitions and relationships emanating from Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul, from Tabriz, Herat, and Samarkand, and even from Cairo and Damascus with other equally powerful, institutionalized relationships, which had substantial socio-economic, cultural as well as political impact on a local or regional level. As explained above, in fifteenth-century Cairo this centrifugal dynamic was somehow complemented by a more constructive participation of waqf endowments in the state formation process. In the East, Timurid rulers and their entourages started pursuing a parallel re-integration and more centripetal operationalization of the waqf (vaqf in Persian) institution within the politics of the central court.
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In Anatolia, however, the Ottoman state pursued a different policy, changing the legal status of rural properties and endowments (vakıf in Ottoman Turkish), or even seizing them. This happened to increasing numbers
2.3 Turko-Mongol Political Apparatuses
These diverse redistributive arrangements in the political economies of Islamic West-Asia were all also interrelated as far as the administrative and authority structures that appeared to organize them are concerned. At this point it is therefore necessary also to briefly outline the organizational appearances of Turko-Mongol political power in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia and to consider their differing levels of complexity and penetration in and beyond the main centers of Ottoman, Syro-Egyptian, Turkmen and Timurid power, and also to explore how they transformed throughout the century.
As suggested above, these organizational arrangements all operated along devolved and even atomistic modes of power and control that remind us of the appanage practices of Turko-Mongol politics. These arrangements and their varying degrees of political integration often also coalesced with those practices and provided them with a more structured, institutionalized, appearance. Most of the princes, courtiers, military commanders, cavalrymen and other urban, rural and tribal leaders and elite communities of fifteenth century Islamic West-Asia were all very much left to their own devices with regards to organizing access management for the resources they controlled or which had been assigned to them. Even holders of a timar, an iqtaʿ and a soyurghal had to attend to their own economic and military needs and responsibilities, and they
This segmentation of how fiscal relationships were organized in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, even in the vicinities of strong rulers and expanding states, is another function of the personalized nature of Turko-Mongol politics. The remaining instability and volatility of political realities across the region regularly cut across processes of more intense trans-local political integration and subordination of elites, even in the more stabilizing political orders of the Ottoman Northwest, the âTurkishâ Southwest, the Turkmen North and the Timurid East. In the latter statist contexts especially, leaders continued to pursue a more coherent administrative level of integration and central control through the enforcement of particular regulations, such as the temporary and non-hereditary allocation of prebendal grants, the assignment of territorially dispersed prebendal lands, the rapid transfer of grant holders between estates, or alternative remunerations from central repositories. However, centrifugal tendencies to subvert these regulations remained equally strong, as in the waqf-ization process, as well as more generally in the atomistic and diverse practical organization of the management of grants, tax farms, tributes, endowments and estates. For this reason, the costs of enforcing these regulations for central authorities often proved extremely high. As a result, rulers and elites throughout fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia continued to favor a diversity of ad hoc and middle-ground solutions serving a variety of local and centralizing needs and interests, even in the increasingly stable contexts of the Syro-Egyptian and Ottoman Sultanates. 18
Overall during this period, these devolved, segmented and negotiated ways of organizing fiscal relationships were actually part and parcel of the rather light and messy wider arrangements that accompanied the political fortunes of the regionâs Turko-Mongol rulers, dynasties and power elites. Just like redistributive practices, these organizational arrangements throughout the region were rooted in various hazy combinations of longstanding bureaucratic precedents, local managerial requirements and particular types of expertise and opportunity. Basically, every man of status and every leader high or low had to find his own solutions to the challenges of collecting and paying his dues, of communicating with sovereigns, peers and subordinates, and of safeguarding his patrimony. Across the region, solutions to these challenges were largely
Everywhere, relationships of power, whatever their level of complexity and authority, coalesced around basic organizational units of groups of people bound together through multivalent sets of personalized ties. As in preceding centuries, these bonds ranged from various kinship arrangements to mutual loyalties acquired through social action. As far as the diverse Turko-Mongol leaderships of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia are concerned, there was a range of more or less structured formats in which these organizational units of people and social ties could appear, depending on a manâs power. Peripatetic warbands of military leaders and their associates and personal retainers were one, often more short-lived, format that continued to make its mostly violent appearance in particular in Islamic West-Asiaâs frontier zones and peripheries. Urbanized households of sultans, princes, courtiers and their personal bodyguards, women, children, servants and administrators were another, heavily structured format, occupying the other extreme on this continuum of core relationships of power. 19 In the devolved, segmented and negotiated realities of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, most relational power constellations wavered in dynamic ways between these two extremes of social complexity. As suggested above, only a handful of these constellations attained and maintained a high level of organizational complexity, transforming with varying levels of success into the regionâs central courts in Cairo, Constantinople, Tabriz, Herat and Samarkand.
Throughout Islamic West-Asia, scribes (Ar. katib, pl. kuttab) of various provenance and expertise were hired to perform duties of tax collection, of household and military expenditure, and of letter writing in Arabic and Persian (and, increasingly, Turkish) for these diverse power constellations. Whenever, and wherever, the scale of a patronâs power required it, specialization and diversification generated, or regenerated, more complex administrations. This process involved the structuration of larger sets of scribes and their different tasks following the ancient bureaucratic unit of the diwan and along hierarchies topped by traditional positions such as that of the vizier (Ar. wazir) or its Persian or Turko-Mongol equivalents. Similar processes affected the military entourages
In Egypt, as elsewhere in West-Asia, this process of bureaucratic specialization and diversification had actually been ongoing with ups and downs for several centuries. Following long-standing regional traditions of Arabic writing on epistolary and accountancy practices, this processâ trajectory during the fifteenth century, in the service of the âTurkishâ Sultanate, was captured and reproduced in a handful of very detailed and informative literary texts. Describing the rules and regulations of the Sultanateâs court and power apparatus, these books were written by scribes as manuals and as instruments both of the Sultanateâs bureaucratic practice and of that practiceâs structural coherence across time and space. In these literary repositories of fifteenth-century protocol and epistolary modelling the Sultanateâs apparatus actually appears as far from light. Indeed, these texts rather portray a powerful and coherent bureaucratic structure set up to penetrate and organize local power relationships as efficiently as possible. This impressive contemporary appearance has substantially informed many modern imaginations about the Sultanate, painting a picture of a highly rationalized bureaucratic state, organized and performed along a neatly devised triple hierarchy of âthe men of the sword, the men of the pen and the men of the turbansâ. In modern scholarship, these contemporary categories are generally referred to as the âmilitary-executiveâ, the âfinancial-secretarialâ, and the âjudiciary office holdersâ of âthe Mamluk governmentâ.
20
Furthermore, in modern Ottoman studies there is an equally widespread tradition to understand the Ottoman Sultanate in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a similarly intrusive bureaucratic state. This mainly followed from the fact that from the early sixteenth century onwards, this state began to leave an impressive paper trail not just in comparable manuals and administrative
As will be detailed in the next chapter, since the early 1990s some scholars are also pointing to the pitfalls of teleology and anachronism in argumentations such as these, and alternative interpretations of the actual nature and meaning of bureaucratic practice and of bureaucratization in a context of Turko-Mongol politics are gradually being formulated. Considering the violent, volatile and personalized nature of those politics across the region, including in fifteenth-century Egypt, current scholarship is now certainly also contemplating the possibility that administrative texts and political realities could be two very different things. Indeed, the former texts may well have been one of the tools available to scribes and to their patrons to pursue more stable participation in, and control over, the fluidity of the latter realities in the face of continuous challenges. This approach tallies not just much better with what is known about fifteenth-century Turko-Mongol politics, but also with data from many other contemporary sources which points to the often incoherent and ad hoc nature of bureaucratic practice and also hints at the rather more limited success of central bureaucracyâs penetration of local communities across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. As suggested by the competitive nature of Turko-Mongol organizational arrangements, the structural integration of elites in centralizing sets of relationships was frequently contested, and the integration of diverse local and regional administrative practices and actors in centralizing claims to authority remained a haphazard enterprise. Wherever in Islamic West-Asia the scale of a leadershipâs power enabled administrative and military specialization and diversification, physical and political distance nonetheless continued to define, and confine, the extent of a localityâs bureaucratic penetration by the center and its organizational arrangements. Just as with the politics of fiscal administration, the administration of central authority in this wider sense also continuously intersected and competed with all kinds of local, alternative or rival authority arrangements. The combination of a need for costly investments of people and resources to face these challenges, alongside the infrastructural limitations of surveillance and communication, and also the volatility of Turko-Mongol politics and the recurrent recalibration of central powers in fifteenth-century West-Asia, all meant that substantial distances continued to separate political actors. All this reflects above all a historical reality of socio-political segmentation and of local continuity and
In fact, as suggested by Manzâ archipelago metaphor above, West-Asiaâs integration into the orbits of its main political centers in the fifteenth century remained a contested and diverse reality which often involved the ad hoc action of military agents and local representatives. Irrespective of West-Asiaâs diverse ecological systems, administrative penetration and integration were therefore primarily limited to the main urban centers and towns and their hinterlands and to the upholding of interrelated, but also locally accommodated, urban systems of taxation and justice. This urban prioritization can be seen most forcefully in the concentration of military and administrative representatives and agents of central courts, as governors, commanders, judges, scribes and tax collectors, in many of the urban centers and towns of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, Khurasan and Transoxiana. As explained before, this presence had a mixed impact on local relationships of power, depending on distances and loyalties, on central investments of expensive resources, and on all kinds of different local complexities. Wherever any urban penetration was achieved, however, the core business of any political apparatus was to focus on tapping into local resource flows via fiscal and other arrangements, the maintenance of social order to assure the steady flow of those resources, and at best also some local performance of the central courtâs claims to sovereignty and political order.
Any assessment of the nature of this central penetration of local relationships of power is complicated by not just the structuring bias of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish administrative textbooks, but also the general paucity of documentary and non-urban sources for the political history of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, however, another important set of bureaucratic texts emerged in Aq Qoyunlu and Ottoman contexts. These texts confirm in many ways this rather narrow bureaucratic focus on local urban systems of taxation and justice as outlined above. The sources in question are the interrelated Law Books (Kanun Name) of Uzun Ḥasan and of the Ottoman sultan Bayezid. 21 As Ottomanist Rhoads Murphey explains for the latter case, these and a related handful of surviving documents and texts confirm indeed that
it was from the narrow base of the more closely regulated urban space and urban markets that the Ottomans launched their first and most effective efforts aimed at modifying undesired market tendencies such as
hoarding and price speculation, and at creating the basis for a fair balance between mercantile profit and affordability for average urban consumers. 22
These Law Books integrated various local customary arrangements, complementing more general doctrinal regulations and legal advice formulated by specialists of religious law who tended to operate within alternative authority frameworks. As such, these Law Books announced comprehensive regulatory codification projects of later Ottoman sultans, but certainly did not mirror them. They actually pursued a more active central participation in particular local social, commercial and fiscal arrangements and solutions by proscribing and regulating the agency of the rulerâs own local agents and representatives. The production of these specimens of royal codification towards the end of the fifteenth century are therefore above all rare extant functions of the growth, specialization and diversification of the entourages of Uzun Hasan and Bayezid as these were trying to organize the expanding horizons of these rulersâ power.
In this way these Law Books actually only represent one particular moment in the formation and empowerment of such entourages and political apparatuses. Similarly formalized communication between courts and their agents in the form of decrees, orders, diplomas, missives, letters and reportsâmost of which have not been preservedâwere integral to bureaucratic expansion throughout fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, performing political authority as much as negotiating it. Other equally important aspects of this growth and expansion included all kinds of regulatory efforts, including the maintenance of social order and the ensuring of justice, related both to fifteenth-century West-Asian rulersâ symbolic apparatus as well as the daily performance of their claims to sovereignty and resources and therefore often recorded in contemporary narrative texts of history. Modern scholarship has even made the convincing case regarding the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate that the ruler and his bureaucratic agents managed to appropriate legal and judicial authorities traditionally only invested in more autonomous specialists of religious law.
23
This remarkable expansion of the authority of the sultan of Cairo and of his bureaucratic apparatus appears not to have been achieved by any other ruler in fifteenth- century Islamic West-Asia. Nevertheless, many certainly also deployed, or
3 Situating Trajectories of State Formation in Islamic West-Asia
In the wide range of predominantly urban bureaucratic practices, fifteenth-century leaders and their agents generally seem to have prioritized concerns for power and control over any expectations about the performance of government and of specific administrative tasks.
25
This prioritization involved first and foremost the power, control and level of local or regional participation of the leader or ruler in whose service an administrative and military apparatus operated. However, in many, if not all, cases it also involved the power and control that could be acquired by the bureaucrats themselves, and that could be wielded by scribes, by military commanders and by all kinds of other agents in the leaderâs service. Closeness and direct service to the ruler in varieties of advisory, financial, military, diplomatic, ceremonial or other capacities were certainly one strategic means by which an agent could acquire power and control, indeed this was a very important tool amidst the returning realities of Turko-Mongol personalized politics. But in certain political contexts, these capacities could also be transformed into power and control in other, more autonomous, and therefore also more structural ways. Whenever the scale of a leadershipâs political reach in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia enabled bureaucratic specialization and diversification, this also generated a lengthening of the virtual chains of authority and agency between a ruler and the increasing numbers of agents performing his rule. From these agentsâ perspective, with greater complexity thus also came a relative depersonalization of the ties that bound them to their ruler. This was accompanied by the transformation of the ruler from a mere powerful person into a more abstract idea and representation of correct political order. This form of state formation therefore brought
As suggested before, this classic state formation process of the mutual empowerment of a bureaucratic apparatus and of a centralizing political order topped by a particular leadership emerged especially in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia in the Ottoman Northwest, the âTurkishâ Southwest, the Timurid East and eventually also the Turkmen North. In each of these particular leadership contexts it did so only in qualified and circumscribed ways, as trans-regionally competing (and hence also co-constitutive) phenomena that were predominantly urban-centered realities and that were continuously challenged, intersected and renegotiated. Furthermore, the different leaderships of the more peripheral frontier zone in between these stabilizing political spaces also experienced an overlapping variety of more and less parallel moments of symbiotic empowerment. In all regions, military successes and expansions led by Turko-Mongol leaderships certainly generated some form of bureaucratic growth, diversification, specialization and state formation. In many cases, however, the same kinds of ongoing military action could also easily thwart this process of central or regional consolidation, and cause its regular regression to more personalized and contested relationships of power.
Having considered the general contours of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asiaâs politics, its power elites and its Turko-Mongol practices and institutions, let us now turn to a more specific interpretation of these patterns of state formation and transformation, in particular of the dynamics that appear to have defined these patterns throughout this long century in the Ottoman, Syro-Egyptian and Timurid-Turkmen contexts. The main historical dynamics that will be discussed here reflect convergences of key features of West-Asian state formation that distinguish the fifteenth century while at the same time marking its trans-dynastic entanglement. These include the contingency of centralizing longevity, the integration of distant power elites through multivalent processes of bureaucratic growth, the specificity of elite renewal by outsiders to West-Asian political realities, and the reproduction of central bureaucratic elites in highly competitive as well as parallel and continuous ways.
3.1 The Politics of Longevity
In the Ottoman, âTurkishâ and Timurid-Turkmen contexts, one of the main factors that tended to check the fragmentation of power constellations so typical
In contrast, this never happened in any similarly destructive ways within the Ottoman dynasty or for the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate in the fifteenth century, at least not after the first years of the century. Following Temürâs violent passages, these years had in both cases indeed been marked by a similarly radical loss of political authority, central control and coherence. In Cairo a kind of centripetal institutional force actually enabled the containment and then, throughout the fifteenth century, the stabilization and structuration of this recurrent centrifugal dynamic in the format of the Sultanateâs own successful trajectory of state formation. In the course of their long careers of military service, resource building (including through waqf-ization) and political leadership, the aforementioned successive sets of fifteenth-century state actors in Cairo decided successions to the sultanate and could even themselves rise to that position. As such they were both the products and the performers of that trajectory of continued bureaucratic growth, centripetal empowerment and political structuration, as Kristof Dâhulster also suggests in Chapter 3 of this volume. At the same time the Sultanateâs political elites, including these actors, continued to face regular and violent fragmentation in the context of succession struggles and other variants of Turko-Mongol internecine warfare. Unlike what happened among their Timurid or Turkmen peers, however, between 1412 and 1517 this never had any similarly destabilizing effects in the Sultanate on its territorial or socio-political coherence. This remarkable situation of bureaucratic growth and state formation in the face of endemic political violence and conflict in many ways was both a result and also a contributing factor of a kind of institutional inertia. This inertia was above all informed by the institutional longevity of the Sultanate in Cairo, which was unique, at least for fifteenth-century West-Asia. The Sultanate in Cairo originated with the Muslim championships of Saladin in the later twelfth and of a handful of mamlÅ«k sultans in the thirteenth centuries and, as a site of trans-regional power, arguably even with their predecessors in Cairo since the tenth century. It was this institutional longevity and subsequent inertia that stimulated, irrespective of any divergent realities, the reproduction of the coherent, timeless and natural appearance of the Sultanateâs political order in the aforementioned administrative texts as well as in all kinds of other contemporary imaginations and performances.
Nowhere else in post-Temür Islamic West-Asia were there any similarly longstanding and awe-inspiring continuities in Muslim sites, institutions, values and resources of power that could be claimed to complement and consolidate recurrent moments of personal centralizing longevity and its structuring effects on relationships of power. Nevertheless, all the fifteenth centuryâs Turko-Mongol leaderships regularly, and successfully, appealed to ideas of institutional continuity with local or regional Turko-Mongol, Perso-Islamic and
3.2 The Politics of Distant Integration
Whether cut short by the disruptive realities of Turko-Mongol politics or sufficiently embedded through different types of longevity to survive any such disruptions, there were various trajectories of state formation that made a marked contribution to the political landscape of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. Above all, these trajectories with their differing institutional qualities and quantities brought various levels of political autonomy to those involved in the regionâs complex chains of authority and agency, including to all kinds of non Turko-Mongol and non-military elites. In many areas of West-Asia, state formation thus offered a channel to integrate, in more than merely coercive ways, extant local political, administrative and military elites and elite arrangements into the expanding order of a successful center of Turko-Mongol power. It is all too easy to forget this phenomenon of the distant, occasionally resource-intensive and violent, and mutually-empowering integration of local leaderships into the bureaucratic apparatus of fifteenth-century West-Asiaâs more successful political orders. These different local elites and the politics of their political integration are equally important aspects of the trajectories of state formation in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. It is therefore relevant to consider them here in some more detail too.
As mentioned before the process of political structuration through bureaucratic growth engaged various urban elites in particular within expanding power relations of a centripetal and simultaneously locally accommodated nature. From Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt and Gaza, Jerusalem, Damascus, Homs, Hama, Tripoli and Aleppo in Syria, and from Bursa, Iznik, Sinop, Konya, Ankara, Amasya, Sivas, Kayseri and Amid in Anatolia and Tabriz, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra in Azerbaijan and Iraq, to Isfahan, Yazd, Shiraz, Kerman, Herat, Samarkand and Bukhara in the regions of Iran, Khurasan and Transoxiana, West-Asiaâs diverse and fragmented urban realities were not only dominated by interrelated and competing local and regional social formations and their overlapping varieties of kinship, communal identity and professional specialization. The arenas of intense social interaction which gave birth to these and many more urban centers and towns in West-Asiaâs ancient urban networks were also shaped by more or less successful attempts at urban participation through bureaucratic expansion and integration by various, often competing, Turko-Mongol power centers. 27 Again, the urban penetration of these centers in this manner was extremely diverse and multivalent across time and space, defined by physical and social distances as well as by sliding scales of Turko-Mongol power and success. Moreover, even where that penetration was most successful, not all urban groups were necessarily touched by it in the same way, and not all local urban elites, including Coptic accountants in Egypt, administrative experts from various sectarian communities in Syria, Anatolia and Iraq, or Persianate scribes and scholars across West-Asia, were necessarily similarly transformed into bureaucratic agents of a political centerâs interests. However, as also suggested by Patrick Wingâs and Georg Christâs case studies of different merchant families and communities in Part 3 of this volume, many local actors went through an integrative process such as that of state formation and thereby became more deeply involved in the eraâs expanding political orders. Some certainly also became active shareholders in those political orders, as upholders of longstanding specialist solutions at the same time as being local or even regional political leaders.
Parallel to these urban technocrats and notables, Islamic West-Asiaâs rural and tribal elites were also in one or another way affected by the fifteenth centuryâs trajectories of state formation. Actually, along the many, constantly changing, fringes of the centuryâs intricate political orders many figures, including all kinds of Arab, Turkmen and other tribal leaderships and marsher
This type of distant, occasionally resource-intensive and violent, and mutually empowering integration of local leaderships into the bureaucratic apparatus of fifteenth-century West-Asiaâs more successful political orders was decisive for political relationships above all in the poly-centric zone that stretched from Azerbaijan and Iraq to Anatolia. It marked the unsteady political relationships that connected many petty lords and rulers in this more peripheral zone to the competing trans-regional trajectories of Ottoman, âTurkishâ and Timurid state formation. As John Meloy reminds us in his contribution to Part 3 of this volume, this was also true for the elites of the Hijaz on the Arabian peninsula, controlling the sacred centers of Mecca and Medina both in the name of the Sultan of Cairo and as powerful but contested patrons of local communities.
29
In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Timurid disappearance in Western Iran and the trans-regional empowerment of Jahan Shah Qara Qoyunlu and then Uzun Ḥasan Aq Qoyunlu, obviously re-oriented many relationships. Nevertheless, Eastern Anatolia in particular remained a genuine frontier zone, where trans-regional authorities were disputed, where political distances appeared as substantial, and where ambitions to stabilize or even structure political relationships continued to be resource-intensive and hazardous enterprises. Important moments here include the decisive victory of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed over Uzun Ḥasan in 1473 at the battle of Bashkent in the Anatolian East and the Ottoman conquest of the Karamanid capital of Konya in the South in 1468. These would prove key moments for the particular transformation towards a more structural Ottoman penetration of Anatolian power relationships.
30
Nevertheless, Karamanids, their local tribal supporters, Aq Qoyunlu followers and many other Anatolian groups continued to challenge and subvert that penetration after the end of the fifteenth century, as did competitors for trans-regional authority from Cairo and Tabriz. In fact, the hugely expensive and mostly ineffective military confrontations between 1485 and 1491 in Southern Anatolia between the troops of Mehmedâs successor Bayezid and those of the Sultan of Cairo, Qaytbay, were very much an illustration, a product and a confirmation of those Anatolian frontier conditions.
31
In many ways, therefore, throughout the fifteenth century the disputed politics of local state formation and distant integration persisted in Southern and Eastern Anatolia, as they did in the regions of Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan, at least until the beginning of Turkmen trans-regional empowerment with Jahan Shah Qara Qoyunlu.
Closer to West-Asiaâs main centers of political power, especially in non-urban contexts the political distances from local leaderships often equally remained substantial. This could be due to geographical circumstances hindering easy access to a nearby region or to the Turko-Mongol practice of regular political fragmentation obstructing stable relationships with local power elites, amongst other possible more local variables. In all of these contexts of wider social distance, various forms of these particular politics of distant integration also persevered in Western Anatolia, in Syria and Egypt, in Azerbaijan and in Eastern Iran and Transoxiana, despite the more successful trajectories of state formation in operation in and beyond those regions. Arab and Turkmen Bedouin, Anatolian tribal and rural associations, Iranian mountain dwellers and many more groups participated actively in local and, occasionally, regional politics. Across Islamic West-Asia, and across these different social formations, these politically relevant groups and people also included trans-local communities of scholars, mystics and their followers in largely unprecedented ways, with people often rallying around charismatic religious leaders and driven by heterodox and occultist ideas and apocalyptic fervor.
32
The actions of these groups had great political relevance on the local or even regional scale, and throughout the fifteenth century they therefore often informed central reports that either marked these groups as brigands and outlaws, as loyal state agents, or as both. These groupsâ political actions often indeed countered or subverted state formation trajectories, causing endless conflicts and disputes. Alternatively, such conflicts were equally often instigated by the different expectations and opportunities raised by the fiction of any attempts at these groupsâ distant integration into such trajectories. Besides such efforts, mainly in the form of diplomatic exchanges, at mutually beneficial integration into the military and administrative apparatus, central powers mostly resorted to costly punitive expeditions as their main mechanism for resolving these recurrent tensions with Bedouin and other nomadic and rural interests, or dealing with subversive
3.3 The Politics of Central Elite Renewal: mamluks, kul, and Turks
Islamic West-Asiaâs multivalent trajectories of Turko-Mongol state formation generated multiple new opportunities not only for the empowerment of ancient or distant local groups and elites. These trajectories also interacted along mutually defining pathways with all kinds of other social formations of more recent stock and specialization, similarly complementing or even joining the ranks of the Turko-Mongol leaderships of the post-Temür era at the very cores of its political centers. The complete integration of political, military and even social outsiders as new power elites was nothing new in the histories of Islamic West-Asia. However, as will become clear below, in the fifteenth century this happened with a variety, range and to an extent which were quite unprecedented, and therefore deserving of separate discussion, if only for the way they further illustrate the particular trajectories of Islamic West-Asian state formation.
In the final quarter of the fourteenth century, Temürâs enterprise sought to use a politics of endless conquest to create a new trans-regional West-Asian power elite composed of his family and of his comrades-in-arms, most of whom stemmed from minor leaderships in the Chagatai nomadic conglomerate of Central Asia. This radical social transformation thus generated the nucleus of
In the contexts of the Ottoman and âTurkishâ Sultanates, on the contrary, feats similar to Temürâs creation of a new elite appeared in more systematic ways than ever before, and can arguably even be seen as important functions of these Sultanatesâ particular trajectories of state formation. The historical trajectory that, in modern scholarship, tends to be most intimately connected with this notion of a socio-political reproduction through the repeated re-creation of Turko-Mongol elites is that of the Sultanate of Cairo in Egypt and Syria, today also known for this reason as the Mamluk Sultanate. For centuries the personal armies and warbands of rulers and leaders in Egypt and Syria had
Unlike in previous centuries in Syro-Egypt, and unlike elsewhere in Islamic West-Asia, that political order of the fifteenth-century Sultanate of Cairo acquired a highly meritocratic, socially transcendent and increasingly ideational flavor. The reason for this is that, amidst the realities of Turko-Mongol tanistric politics, recurring attempts to again make it a dynastic order like in preceding centuries never succeeded. This is also illustrated in the short-lived case of al-Nasir Muhammad (r. 1496â98), son and successor of al-Ashraf Qaytbay (r. 1468â96), presented in Albrecht Fuessâ discussion of this sultanâs dynastic endeavors in Chapter 4 of this volume. In contrast, the expanding bureaucratic apparatus, the military and political experts who manned this apparatus, and the flows of human and financial resources that supported them, endured, even if only in tense and conflict-ridden ways. A remarkable factor that illustrates this non-dynastic trajectory of Syro-Egyptian state formation through the fifteenth century concerns the transformation of the position of sultan itself into a bureaucratic prize to be won, and lost, by the highest bidder. Such a qualification needs to be weighed against the achievements, longevity and subsequent empowering royalty of sultans such as al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422â38), al-Zahir Jaqmaq (r. 1438â53), al-Ashraf Qaytbay (r. 1468â96) and Qaná¹£awh (r. 1501â16). However, as mentioned before, in most cases, including those of the latter four sultans, the embattled accessions to the sultanate tended to crown long careers of military and court service and of resource accumulation in the royal shadows of peers. Apparently, it took a long time to acquire the main political and financial competences necessary for gathering (and keeping) the support of royal mamluks and amirs-courtiers. Many sultans in the fifteenth century had enjoyed long default careers in the state apparatus meaning that most of them only managed to accede to the sultanate at a fairly advanced age. Whereas Barsbay, in 1422, had been in his forties, his successor Jaqmaq was in his sixties when he succeeded to the throne in 1438. Al-Ashraf Inal (r. 1453â61), like his two predecessors, was originally a talented horseman and Circassian mamluk brought to Egypt from the Caucasus in the 1390s. When he succeeded Jaqmaq, he was 73 and for him, this succession brought to a glorious close his long and eventful career of leadership as a military commander, as a governor in various Syrian towns and cities, and as an entrepreneur-courtier in Cairo. Similar stories of humble origins, service and empowerment have survived about most of Inalâs successors, belonging to new, younger generations of mamluk state actors. Al-Zahir Khushqadam (r. 1461â7) and Qaytbay were in their fifties when they became sultan, and just like the unsuccessful septuagenarian al-Zahir Yalbay (r. 1467) and his equally unfortunate successor
The absence of dynastic reproduction, and the regular competitive but coherent self-renewal of the Turko-Circassian political community more generally, seem unique for the âTurkishâ Sultanateâs trajectory of state formation in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. Nevertheless, the contemporaneous Ottoman Sultanate, which was obviously entirely constructed around the successful reproduction of the Ottoman dynasty, also experimented intensely with centripetal strategies of elite renewal that had a lot in common with those of the Southern Sultanateâs. Here too, complete outsiders were transformed into central state actors through a system of total re-socialization and centralizing entanglement. In fact, upon closer inspection even the Ottoman dynasty itself was a product, and a telling illustration, of this gradual construction of a new, specifically Ottoman, political community. The sultans Murad (r. 1421â44, 1446â51), Mehmed (r. 1444â46, 1451â81) and Bayezid (r. 1481â1512) were all born from unfree women, selected and brought to the Ottoman court as royal concubines for the sole purpose of the royal lineageâs successful reproduction. Only sultan Selim (r. 1512â20) was an exception to this rule, as the product of a marriage between Bayezid and the daughter of the Dulkadirid ruler of Elbistan in Southeast Anatolia. The latter, however, only represented an acute late-fifteenth-century moment in the Sultanateâs politics of distant integration, whereas the former cases were all part of a complementary, expanding practice of internal renewal and total integration. This was gradually generating a novel elite, even within the Ottoman royal household, gathering various sets of state actors whose competences and fortunes were intimately connected with the maintenance of the Ottoman dynastic order, and with the expansion of the apparatus that performed this order.
As Dimitri Kastritsis explains in great detail in Chapter 5, when he writes about the doomed fate of the Ãandarlı family of traditional Ottoman bureaucrats, this integrative reproduction of the Sultanateâs political community
By the mid-fifteenth century at the latest, the Janissary corps of unfree footmen and similar central military regiments, all directly rewarded for their service by their master, the sultan, were not just providing regularly renewed Ottoman manpower. As kul whose destiny was directly dependent upon that of their masterâs, the sultan, they also balanced the power and interests of the Sultanateâs traditional elites in important, centripetal ways. These included a wide range of military commanders, mostly belonging to ancient Turkish and Anatolian families of cavalrymen (sipahi) and spread all across the core Ottoman territories, as timar-holders with their own troops of horsemen, along separate hierarchies of power, status and resources. The substantial expansion of the Janissary corps under Mehmed, who managed to double its size to about 10,000 members by the 1470s, thus both represented and enabled a decisive shift in this traditional balance of military power to the sultanâs benefit. As part of the Ottoman trajectory of state formation, however, this expansion also went hand in hand with the growth of the Janissariesâ own political autonomy at the center of the Ottoman political order. With its ranks continuously being replenished from the kul and with its size steadily maintained at mid-century level, the Janissary corps acquired a reputation not just for causing havoc and turmoil at moments of political instability, but also for thus becoming a powerful actor
The kulâs transformative role in the expansion and empowerment of the Ottoman state apparatus in the fifteenth century also played out at other, more individual, levels of elite participation and reproduction. In fact, the gradual diversification and specialization of the bureaucratic apparatus were also replicated within the burgeoning ranks of the sultanâs unfree servants. Many of these kul came to be selected and trained for non-military duties, entering the service of the sultanâs household and its expanding administration. In due course, particularly starting from the mid-century reign of Mehmed, several of these courtier-bureaucrats with kul origins even succeeded in becoming members of the sultanâs leading advisory council, the imperial divan, or in obtaining the post of grand vizier, chairing the divan and acting as the most powerful Ottoman bureaucrat after the sultan. This remarkable wider employment and empowerment of individual kul at the sultanâs court again provided for important centripetal checks and balances on the power and expertise of traditional Ottoman elites. This peculiar aspect of Ottoman bureaucratic growth and state formation gradually, often violently, and mostly haphazardly pushed these ancient Turkish and Anatolian families (including that of the Ãandarlı) away from the center of Ottoman power. The Ottoman trajectory of state formation therefore eventually manifested itself in, and was indeed pursued by, the emergence of a very different, very Ottoman, political leadership. Consisting in increasingly exclusive ways of royal unfree or freed servants, this new political elite came to be dominated by regularly rejuvenated sets of military, administrative and court experts. These people were specifically selected and trained for the single purpose of service to a more and more abstract idea of Ottoman political order, and rose in the ranks of the expanding apparatus to positions of Ottoman authority and power through a combination of bureaucratic competence, royal favor and the elimination of competitors.
The expanding membership of the kapikulari thus gradually moved their field of action from serving in the sultanâs personal entourage to having a significant impact within, and upon, the military, administrative and political apparatus of the Ottoman political order. This new Ottoman leadership of kul bureaucrats saw its ranks regularly replenished from particular sources of
Whatever the violent, commercial or tributary arrangements that transformed these kul into unfree servants of the Ottoman sultan, they all obviously were entering the Ottoman household and, increasingly even becoming members of the Ottoman political community from backgrounds which were extremely diverse ethnically, socio-economically and culturally. Just like the Turkified mamluks in the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate, the aim of the preparation of these newcomers for Ottoman service was first and foremost to transform them into a more uniform community of loyal Muslim subjects of their master,
By the mid-sixteenth century the Ottoman military-administrative elite was made up of these new Turkish-speaking Muslim officers who called themselves not Turkish but âRomanâ or âOttomanâ; it was in this sense that Ottoman writers could comment that the âOttomansâ took the best qualities of many nations and blended them to a new, superior race [â¦]. The Ottoman dynasty, too, was as much a product of this new blend as their servitors. From the beginnings of the family of Osman, the beys made marriage alliances with neighbouring Byzantine or Serbian princesses. Later the sultans chose not to continue such marriages but sired their sons and daughters with harem favourites of various ethnic backgrounds brought up in the palace. The language of the dynasty as well as of the polity remained Turkish, but not, strictly speaking, as a mother tongue. 38
Half a century earlier, at the turn of the fifteenth century, the boundaries of the Ottoman political community were not yet so exclusively delineated by the kapikulari and their distinctive Turko-Ottoman identity. Nevertheless, as explained above, they certainly formed an increasingly formidable factor among the Sultanateâs central power elites, as they and their expertise, action and relationships infiltrated, monopolized and reproduced the expanding tentacles of the Ottoman political order in (and beyond) the Northwestern corner of West-Asia. In this capacity they displayed many obvious parallels and connections with the contemporaneous hegemony of the Turko-Circassian community of mamluk bureaucrat-leaders in the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate. Even the social reproduction of these fifteenth-century mamluk bureaucrat-leaders and of their kul peers and contemporaries was largely bound by similar practices and conventions. The increasingly distinctive kapikulari status at this time remained the exclusive domain of kul of non-Muslim origins who owed their
Several of the long careers in Turkifying palace service, bureaucratic specialization and, eventually, Ottoman leadership and authority during the long reigns of sultans Mehmed and Bayezid represent a strong illustration of, and defining factor in, the Ottoman trajectory of state formation and of the mutual empowerment of the kapikulari and of their master, the sultan. These careers also demonstrate how the politics whereby the central elite was reproduced by substantial renewal from within the Sultanateâs territorial boundaries enabled different kinds of remarkable continuity that intersected in successful ways with the politics of Ottoman integration. Out of the fifteen different individuals who occupied the courtâs leading position of grand vizier between the 1450s and the 1510s only three belonged to traditional Turkish families. All the other grand viziers in this period had Christian backgrounds, just like many other viziers, lower officials and commanders. They entered the Ottoman political order and embarked upon new, Ottoman, careers of authority and power as hand-picked devÅirme levies mostly collected from rural communities in the Balkans or as prisoners-of-war captured in the ongoing confrontations with (former) Byzantine and Balkan elites. These various coercive arrangements thus simultaneously allowed some of the experts, expertise and relationships of power of its former Christian adversaries to be directly integrated into the center of Ottoman power. This was one distinctive outcome of the unique situation of the Ottoman Sultanateâs substantial expansion into the Christian Balkans, and this remarkable phenomenon again empowered both the Sultan, providing him with a particular group of new loyal servants, and these new kul, including many of former Byzanto-Balkan noble stock who were now converted to Islam and Turkified. At the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries many of the latter became leading members of the increasingly powerful
3.4 The Politics of Central Elite Reproduction: Scholars, Scribes and Tajiks
This remarkable transformation-cum-integration of the Ottoman Sultanateâs political community through an ever more internalized and automated process of renewal was quite unique for fifteenth-century West-Asia. This singularity manifested itself especially in this processâ successful marginalization of traditional Turkish and Anatolian elites and their more centrifugal interests, and also in the way it converged various local experts, expertise and relationships of power in the sultanâs expanding household, palace and political order. Elsewhere, reproduction of power and status among central elites happened in more diverse and multivalent ways, which require a separate discussion.
In the Sultanate of Cairo, the regular renewal of military-bureaucratic elites certainly paralleled that of the âOttomansâ as a self-sustaining and centripetal practice. In the Sultanateâs case this determined the marginalization of dynastic trends even more, including in relation to access to the very top of its political order. At the same time, however, the Sultanate followed an entirely different path from that of the remarkable convergence of the Ottoman state formation trajectory in the kapikulari. In the latter Ottoman case the traditional bureaucratic distinctions between âthe men of the swordsâ, âthe men of the
In fact, in fifteenth-century Cairo several of the latter experts became extremely wealthy bureaucratic leaders in their own right, controlling the courtâs flows of resources, its symbolic apparatus and related sets of court relationships in highly empowering ways. Most of these non-military competitors for power at the top of the Sultanateâs political order actually came from a mere handful of families of administrators and scholars of (formerly) Christian or Muslim, and Syrian or Egyptian origins. After many years of engagement in local low-profile scholarship and scribal service, different members of these families had only entered Cairoâs court and its expanding bureaucratic apparatus in the 1410s and 1420s, as a function of their employment in the pre-sultanic, amiral households of the sultans al-Muʾayyad Shaykh (r. 1412â21) and al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422â38). Men (and women) from the most successful of these new bureaucratic elite families, such as the Banu al-Barizi from Ḥama, the Banu Muzhir from Damascus, and the Egyptian Coptic converts of the Banu Katib Jakam, continued to appear at court until the end of the Sultanate a century later. There, they would partake in the performance of its administrative, religious and sometimes even military apparatus, currying royal favor, gathering enormous wealth, and pursuing all kinds of relationships of power and expertise, including through royal, amiral and other highly political marriages. Dynastic tendencies therefore certainly determined the transmission of office and power within many of these families. Examples here include the Banu Katib Jakam, whose members held the top post of the supervision of the royal fisc (nazr al-khass) continuously between 1425 and 1458 and that of the army bureau (nazr al-jaysh) between 1466 and 1496, or the formerly Coptic Banu
Nevertheless, despite this apparent trend towards dynastic reproduction, a more centralizing practice of competitive renewal simultaneously imposed itself. This practice was defined by factors of competence, favor, resources and their opposites, rather than simply by any rights or privileges of kinship or lineage. Such qualities and competences were obviously rooted in particular, administrative skills and successes, which created opportunities and opened many doors, and which were certainly easier to possess or acquire for these and many similar familiesâ offspring than for any outsider. At the same time, however, just as with the Turko-Circassian community of royal mamluks and amirs, the acquisition of authority and leadership in the expanding state apparatus was a different matter from bureaucratic service. That acquisition instead had more to do with more generic qualities of entrepreneurship, charisma, distinction, brokerage and wealth. The ongoing growth of the Sultanateâs apparatus therefore continuously created new opportunities for ambitious in- and outsiders, as well as providing all kinds of new arenas of fierce competition along the Sultanateâs lengthening chains of authority and agency. As a result, at the pinnacle of the Sultanateâs fifteenth century political order, sometimes not just families, but also individuals of lesser and diverse professional and social originsâsuch as the infamous Abu l-Khayr al-Naḥḥas (âthe Coppersmithâ) (1412â59)âoccasionally emerged as new bureaucratic leaders. When this happened, it was often much to the dismay and horror of their competitors of more traditional stock, and with important mitigating effects on the reproduction of power for any more consolidated group of administrators at court. 43
Even among scholars and scribes, therefore, hierarchies of central leadership were not easily reproduced, but rather continuously challenged and renewed in often conflict-ridden ways. Participation and advancement in these hierarchies depended on bureaucratic skills and precedents, but it was even more contingent on an individualâs political and financial competences which they required for gathering (and keeping) the support of subordinates, peers and sovereigns. As a result, like the careers of sultans and amirs, those of some of the most prominent non-military leaders and courtiers of the Sultanateâs
As mentioned above, unlike their Turko-Circassian and Turko-Ottoman counterparts the Timurid and Turkmen politico-military communities in the North and East remained much more fragmented and determined by the tanistric political and economic interests of âTurkishâ military leaders, families and lineages. These mostly owed their continued regional empowerment to Temürâs construction of a new elite at the turn of the fourteenth century, and to its largely successful dynastic reproduction throughout the fifteenth century. At the same time, however, the highly contested trajectories of state formation that marked the reigns of Shah Rukh, Abu SaÊ¿id, Jahan Shah, Uzun Hasan and Sultan Husayn did not just continue to have to engage in mutually restrictive ways with these âTurkishâ elites and the reproduction of their mainly centrifugal interests. These trajectories certainly also interacted closely with the reproduction of particular Persian scribal and scholarly elites and their practices and skills, both benefiting from this reproductive process and stimulating it in
As Beatrice Manz also explains in detail in her chapter on the political involvement of Iranian landed elites in Part 3 of this volume, quite a few such âTajikâ leaders of Perso-Iranian origins thus became formidable political leaders in their own right, occasionally even engaging in military leadership and warfare with their own, personal troops. In these ways they managed to counter in significant and effective centripetal ways âTurkishâ competitors for central power and âTurkishâ challengers of that power and its political order. Among the most remarkable and powerful of these non-military leaders at the Timurid and Turkmen courts were undoubtedly Ghiyath al-Din Pir-Ahmad Khwafi (d. 1453), head of Shah Rukhâs finance office between 1417 and 1447 who later served at the courts of various other Timurid princes, and his son Majd al-Din Muhammad Khwafi, chief accountant at Sultan-Husaynâs court since its first installation in Herat in 1469, who was chief agent of the courtâs centralizing trajectory of bureaucratic expansion and specialization. Eventually, in 1494, after many years of competition and confrontations with the courtâs âTurkishâ memberships, Majd al-Din Muhammad was tortured, deprived of his allegedly fabulous wealth, and murdered.
45
These two careers, spanning almost a century of Timurid rulership in West-Asiaâs East, represent a remarkable, personalized connection between these two distinct moments of Timurid state formation during the first half and final quarter of the fifteenth century respectively. In fact, connections such as these are anything but exceptional for political careers in the Timurid and Turkmen North and East, where the imperfect integration of âTurkishâ commanders and the balancing empowerment of âTajikâ administrative experts represented practical realities that connected individuals, groups and institutions across all kinds of regularly shifting boundaries of loyalty, service and political
4 Epilogue: The Trajectories of Fifteenth-Century Boundaries and Ideals
It is well known that of these many distinct trajectories of Turko-Mongol state formation in Islamic West-Asia, the Ottoman was the only one that continued more or less unaltered, indeed in increasingly coherent ways, into the sixteenth century. Key factors in this process undoubtedly included military and administrative expansion, personal and institutional longevity, internalized elite renewal and the reproduction of the Ottoman Sultanate as an increasingly autonomous, integrative and empowering bureaucratic order. But another defining factor was certainly also the strength and tenacity of the eraâs other trajectories of state formation in the Southwest, North and East of West-Asia. For the Cairo Sultanate this manifested itself from the late 1510s onwards in the rapid local integration of Syro-Egyptian elites and practices into this Ottoman process, in the continuation of much of the Sultanateâs political apparatus, now adapted to Ottoman political realities, and in the substantial recalibration of the latter realities to equally accommodate the definitive shift of the Ottoman political order towards the very center of the Muslim and Eurasian worlds. The latter shift, however, was a function not just of Ottoman expansion and appropriation of the Cairo Sultanateâs apparatus and elites, but also of the particular continuation of the more ambiguous Timurid-Turkmen state formation route in Islamic West-Asiaâs East, in Uzbek Transoxiana and Mughal Northern India as well as in Safavid Iran. Making its appearance on the West-Asian stage at the turn of the new century, Shah IsmaÊ¿ilâs (r. 1501â24) Safavid authority was personally, practically and institutionally in many ways one of the main heirs to this Timurid-Turkmen trajectory. At the same time, when that authority acquired a more coherent appearance in the course of the sixteenth century, this contributed to the emergence of new East-West frontiers that were also strongly
That early modern Ottoman social order was actually described by Malcolm Yapp as âcompartmentalizedâ, and as
a block of flats in which the inhabitants only met in the corridors [â¦] [and in which] each compartment had its hierarchy and the leaders of those hierarchies transacted much business together [â¦] [I]t was the people who bridged the compartments, qÄá¸Ä«s and notables, who made the system work. 47
This view certainly reminds one of above-mentioned statements about the segmented nature of Turko-Mongol politics and socio-economic organization in fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia. However, although the block of flats, with clearly defined compartments, corridors and inhabitants with clearly defined roles is attractive, it is not the most apt metaphor here, given the ongoing dynamics of expansion, fragmentation and circulation, recurrent attempts at political stabilization and administrative penetration, and, more generally, different trajectories of Turko-Mongol state formation. Even in the Ottoman North-West those dynamics, attempts and trajectories remained insufficiently fixed, structured or coherent to justify thinking of them in terms of clearly defined and delineated blocks, flats, compartments, corridors and roles. Nevertheless, some social phenomena in the foregoing survey may certainly be understood as multivalent compartments, autonomous corridor trafficking and multiple roles and hierarchies, even if they did appear only in very temporary, localized, premature or ad hoc formats, and in conditions of continuous negotiation, accommodation, contestation and experimentation. The metaphor therefore may still have some value, as it makes clear how old and new compartments continued to take shape and interact amidst the fluidity, volatility and incongruence of fifteenth-century West-Asian social order At this time the skeleton of certain blocks of flats even became visible, although their construction remained very much creative work in progress, and although the more coherent early modern appearances of some of that work were all but predetermined. Above all, this imperfect yet insightful metaphor certainly helps one to remain aware of the impact of Turko-Mongol trajectories of state formation on these constructions of social order, not least also reminding us of the limits of that impact. Driven by coercive power and integrative ambitions these trajectories generated a productive centrality for rulers, elites and political
Yapp also suggested that due to the âcompartmentalized natureâ of early modern Ottoman social order, âthe Muslim ideal of a stable society, based on justice and composed of the four classical pillarsâbureaucrats, soldiers, merchants and artisans, and peasantsâbore little relation to [â¦] reality [â¦]â.
48
Considering the differences between the âcompartmentalized natureâ of the early modern Ottoman order and that of fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, the latter fifteenth-century reality was even farther removed from that ancient ideal of one stable and just society. Nevertheless, the ideal was also very present across that realityâs unstable political landscape, perhaps even more actively than generally tends to be acknowledged. It informed widespread ideas about good rulership and legitimate socio-political order.
49
It permeated the aforementioned multiple pursuits to organize relationships of coercion and power along the labels of âthe men of the sword, the men of the pen and the men of the turbansâ and through legislation and legal action. It finally also guided many dichotomous explanations of the eraâs fluid and volatile roles and hierarchies, such as the binaries of âTurksâ and âTajiksâ, âPersiansâ and âArabsâ, âelitesâ (khassa) and âcommonersâ (Ê¿amma), tax payers and tax recipients, commanders and administrators, or Muslims and Christians. These and many similar ideas, labels, actions, binaries and explanations contributed to the many appearances of social order across West-Asia, amidst those complex realities of segmentation, fragmentation and competitive empowerment. Above all, they operated everywhere as highly fluid specimens of socio-cultural boundaries that were constantly crossed, challenged and reconfigured. In fact, the formulation of such boundaries with the aid of these and related ideas and explanations continued to represent important stakes in the endless negotiation, accommodation, contestation and experimentation from which both compartments and corridors emerged, stimulating communication across such compartmentalization and contributing to the appearance of larger skeletons and contours of order.
These fluid socio-cultural boundaries, and these ideas and ideals more in general, were always also highly political, constructing, and constructed by, all kinds of relationships of power across Islamic West-Asia. As such they were always also part of the ideologies of Turko-Mongol rule in fifteenth-century West-Asia, and of wider apparatuses of political communication and performance. Despite their importance for fifteenth-century West-Asiaâs diverse trajectories of state formation, these symbolic apparatuses have not been dealt with separately in this chapter. This is partly because that would go beyond the more socio-politically oriented focus of the current volume, but also because much pioneering work still remains to be done in this highly complex and intellectually sophisticated, but traditionally downgraded and even oft-neglected, domain.
50
Today these ideologies and discourses of power, and the highly intricate trans-regional webs of meaning-making and knowledge practices to which they pertain, are arguably even less well-known, studied and understood, in the more general entangled context of fifteenth-century Turko-Mongol state formation in particular, than Islamic West-Asiaâs power elites, its institutions and practices, and its socio-political transformations. Recent years have certainly seen a growing acknowledgement of the need for research into this field. Scholars are beginning to realize the potential value in investigating the nature and wide-ranging impact of the often very novel sets of ideas and ideals of legitimate rule and kingship that came to dominate West-Asian discourses of power with and after Temür. There is also a growing acknowledgement of the riches of this subject, and of the experimental creativity and the shared mix of memories, symbolic practices and cultural systems by which Turko-Mongol leaderships, Arabo-Persian courtiers and Muslim intellectuals of wide-ranging expertise and mobility engaged in legitimizing, explaining and disciplining the eclectic, violent and volatile political realities of the era. Models of leadership in West-Asia in the fifteenth century operationalized eclectic imaginations of social justice, divine favor, dynastic precedence, ideal rule, royal wisdom, millenarian sovereignty, charismatic sanctity and their like.
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Popper, William , Egypt and Syria under the Circassian Sultans. 1382â1468 a.d. Systematic Notes to Ibn Taghrî Birdîâs Chronicles of Egypt. Part two: Government (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1955).
Rapoport, Yossef , âRoyal Justice and Religious Law: SiyÄsah and ShariÊ¿ah under the Mamluksâ, MamlÅ«k Studies Review 16 (2012): 71â102.
Sabra, Adam , âThe Rise of a New Class? Land Tenure in Fifteenth-Century Egypt: a review articleâ, MamlÅ«k Studies Review 8/2 (2004): 203â210.
Subtelny, Maria E. , Timurids in Transition. Turko-Persian Politics and Acculturation in Medieval Iran (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2007).
Tilly, Charles , âWar Making and State Making as Organized Crimeâ, in P. Evans , D. Rueschemeyer & Th. Skocpol , eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 169â187.
Tilly, Charles , Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990â1990 (Cambridge (Mass.): Blackwell, 1994).
Vallet, Eric , LâArabie marchande. Ãtat et commerce sous les sultans rasûlides du Yémen (626â858/1229â1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010).
Van Steenbergen, Jo , âNomen est Omen. David Ayalon, the Mamluk Sultanate, and the Rule of the Turksâ (2013, pre-publication author version at https://www.academia.edu/4510845).
Van Steenbergen, Jo , âCaught between Heredity and Merit: Qūṣūn (d. 1342) and the legacy of al-NÄá¹£ir Muḥammad b. QalÄwÅ«n (d. 1341)â, Bulletin of the School for Oriental and African Studies 78/3 (2015): 429â450.
Van Steenbergen, Jo , ââMamlukisationâ between social theory and social practice: An essay on reflexivity, state formation, and the late medieval sultanate of Cairoâ (ASK Working Paper 22) (Bonn: Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg, 2015).
Van Steenbergen, Jo , Caliphate and Kingship in a Fifteenth-Century Literary History of Muslim Leadership and Pilgrimage (Bibliotheca Maqriziana. Opera Minora vol. 4) (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2016).
Van Steenbergen, Jo & Maya Termonia, âState Formation, Military Entrepreneurship, and Waqfisation in the Sultanate of Cairo: the case of the court office of the raʾs nawba, 1412â1468â (2021).
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Yosef, Koby , âDawlat al-AtrÄk or Dawlat al-MamÄlÄ«k? Ethnic Origin or Slave Origin as the Defining Characteristic of the Ruling Elite in the Mamluk Sultanateâ, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 39 (2012): 387â410.
This chapter has been finalized within the context of the project âThe Mamlukisation of the Mamluk Sultanate ii: Historiography, Political Order and State Formation in Fifteenth-Century Egypt and Syriaâ (UGent, 2017â21); this project has received funding from the European Research Council (erc) under the European Unionâs Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Consolidator Grant agreement No 681510). My sincere thanks go to Evrim BinbaÅ, Frederik Buylaert, Kenneth Goudie, Zacharie Mochtari de Pierrepont and Patrick Wing for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of this chapter. Needless to say, I take sole responsibility for the interpretations presented here as well as for any remaining inaccuracies.
For the sake of clarity, it is already relevant to refer here to Charles Tillyâs historicizing definitions of what states are and what they do. These will be explained (and problematized) in more detail in the next chapter. However, it is a deliberate choice to allow these definitions to substantially inspire the focus and organization of this chapter. Tilly sees states as âcoercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territoriesâ (Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 1). Elsewhere he outlines what he thinks these organizations did in the following minimalist terms: âUnder the general heading of organized violence, the agents of states characteristically carry on four different activities: 1. War making: Eliminating or neutralizing their own rivals outside the territories in which they have clear and continuous priority as wielders of force; 2. State making: Eliminating or neutralizing their rivals inside those territories; 3. Protection: Eliminating or neutralizing the enemies of their clients; 4. Extraction: Acquiring the means of carrying out the first three activitiesâwar making, state making, and protectionâ. (Tilly, âWar Making and State Makingâ, p. 181). See also Chapter Two in this volume, especially âIntroduction: Defining the âstateâ between Max Weber, Ê¿Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun and Charles Tillyâ.
See Loiseau, âLe siècle turcâ, p. 36, who takes this notion of a reflux from Woods, The Aqquyunlu, p. 3, who, in turn, explains that he took it from the pioneering studies of Minorsky and Sümer: âAmplifying the earlier view of Minorsky, Sümer notes the eastward reflux from Anatolia of the Mongol Oirot, Jalayir, and Süldüz after 1335/736 in addition to the three Turkmen âwavesâ composed of the Qaraquyunlu, the Aqquyunlu, and the Safavid Qizilbash that swept out of Anatolia over Iran in the fifteenth/ninth and sixteenth/tenth centuriesâ. (see Anonymous. Tadhkirat al-mulÅ«k: a manual of á¹¢afavid administration (ca. 1137/1725), V.F. Minorsky, ed. and trans. (e.j.w. Gibb memorial series vol. 16) [London: Luzac, 1943], appendices, p. 188; Faruk Sümer, Oguzlar (Türkmenler), tarihleri, boy teÅkilâtı, destanları (Ankara: Ãniversitesi Basımevi, 1967), pp. 143â153).
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, pp. 140â141; here he is speaking of Western Anatolia, but the definition works equally well for this frontier zone in the fifteenth century. For an illustration of frontier conditions in this zone in the 1420s and 1430s, see Adriaenssen and Van Steenbergen, âMamluk Authorities and Anatolian Realitiesâ.
In remarkable contrast European and modern historiography generally all refer to members of this Syro-Egyptian power elite as Mamluks (as a result of the mamlÅ«k, or military slave status of the majority of them) rather than âTurksâ. However, this is an external label that poses many interpretive challenges for significant but as yet largely unacknowledged reasons (see Ayalon, âBaḥrÄ« MamlÅ«ks, BurjÄ« MamlÅ«ksâ; Yosef, âDawlat al-AtrÄk or Dawlat al-MamÄlÄ«k?"; Van Steenbergen, âNomen est Omenâ; Van Steenbergen, âMamlukisation between social theory and social practiceâ). In the first part of this volume we will therefore use this traditional Mamluk label when referring to the field of âMamlukâ studies only, and not when referring to this Sultanate and its elites. When referring to the latter we draw on an interesting analogy (and synchronism) with standard references to the North-Indian Delhi Sultanate or Sultanate of Delhi (1206â1526) and its different ruling dynasties, including of mamlÅ«k and Turkish origins. We will therefore mostly use the signifiers âCairo Sultanateâ or âSultanate of Cairoâ and âSyro-Egyptian eliteâ in this volumeâs first two chapters (see e.g. Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate. A political and military history [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]; Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi, Composite Culture under the Sultanate of Delhi. Revised and Enlarged Edition [Delhi: Primus Books, 2016]).
See e.g. BinbaÅ, âDid the Hurufis Mint Coins?â, p. 139, which refers briefly to various âintellectual movements which acquired a political character and minted coins in the late medieval periodâ, as well as to âother cases in which the boundaries between tribal-cum-local elites and religious-intellectual networks are blurred or cannot be drawn accuratelyâ.
Fletcher, âTurco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empireâ, p. 240. See also Woods, The Aqquyunlu, pp. 19â23 (following Dickson, âUzbek Dynastic Theory in the Sixteenth Centuryâ) for a more nuanced (if limiting) consideration of the tensions between so-called corporatism and dynasticism that together constitute tanistry as it is conceptualized here. Whereas in the Ottoman context, as Fletcher argues, this practice gave rise to the well-known (and eventually codified) royal succession tradition of fratricide, its dividing presence in and impact on Timurid and Turkmen dispensations is also well known. (See also BinbaÅ, âCondominial Sovereignty and Condominial Messianismâ for an interesting corrective about shared notions of rule in certain Timurid contexts). This phenomenon is perhaps most tellingly illustrated by the ways in which the Qara Qoyunlu ruler Jahan Shah stepped into the footsteps of the Timurid Shah Rukh or how the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan stepped into those of Jahan Shah. For examples and discussions from the Cairo Sultanate in the Southwest, see Adriaenssen and Van Steenbergen, âMamluk Authorities and Anatolian Realitiesâ; Van Steenbergen, âCaught between Heredity and Meritâ.
Manz, Power, Politics and Religion, p. 2.
Fletcher, âTurco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empireâ, p. 242.
Apellániz Ruiz de Galarreta, Pouvoir et finance en Méditerranée pré-moderne; Inalcik, âBursa and the Commerce of the Levantâ; Inalcik, âḤarÄ«r. iiâThe Ottoman Empireâ; for wider commercial (and related political) connections east- and westward, see also Vallet, LâArabie marchande; Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade; Coulon, Barcelone et le grand commerce dâOrient.
The Russian historian Vasilij VladimiroviÄ Bartolâd (1869â1930) already made this point regarding Timurid history; in due course it was framed with the label of a Timurid ârenaissanceâ, see Barthold, Ulugh-beg; BinbaÅ, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, pp. 4â5.
This point is especially made in Apellániz Ruiz de Galarreta, Pouvoir et finance en Méditerranée pré-moderne; for a strong argument supporting the idea of very active early Ottoman participation in the Mediterranean commercial economy, see Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman Empire.
See Inalcik, âAutonomous Enclaves in Islamic Statesâ.
AmÄ«n, Al-AwqÄf wa-l-HayÄ al-IjtimÄÊ¿Ä«ya; Petry, âFractionalized Estates in a Centralized Regimeâ; Abu Ghazi, Tatawwur al-ḤiyÄza; Sabra, âThe Rise of a New Class?â.
Igarashi, Land Tenure and Mamluk Waqfs, esp. pp. 29â32, 42â45; Van Steenbergen & Termonia, âState Formation, Military Entrepreneurship, and Waqfisationâ.
Subtelny, Timurids in Transition, esp. Chapter Five: âPiety and Pragmatism: the Role of the Islamic Endowmentâ (pp. 148â191); McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia, esp. Chapters Two (âThe Origins of the Ê¿Alid Shrine at Balkhâ) and Three (âWaqf in its Political Settingâ) (pp. 21â70).
Ä°nalcık, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 126â131; Inalcik, âAutonomous Enclaves in Islamic Statesâ, pp. 118, 124.
Inalcik, âAutonomous Enclaves in Islamic Statesâ; Inalcikâs attempt to create a better sense of the meanings and roles of âTemlîks, Soyurghals, Yurdluḳ-Ocaḳlıks, Mâlikâne-MuḳÄá¹aÊ¿as and AwqÄfâ certainly leaves the reader with this impression of diversity and ad hoc solutions.
Crossley, âMilitary Patronage and Hodgsonâs Genealogy of State Centralization in Early Modern Eurasiaâ, pp. 105â108.
Popper, Egypt and Syria under the Circassian Sultans, pp. 90â110.
Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300â1650, pp. 244â251; Woods, The Aq Qoyunlu, pp. 108â109.
Murphey, âThe Ottoman Economy in the early imperial ageâ, pp. 28â30, esp. 28.
Rapoport, âRoyal Justice and Religious Lawâ.
See Burak, âThe Second Formation of Islamic Lawâ, for a wider, comparative consideration of the relationship between Turko-Mongol dynasts and Islamic law in the late medieval and early modern period, suggesting that âdifferent dynastiesâ adopting a particular Islamic school of law as their official state school [â¦] [represented] active attempts by the ruling dynasty to regulate the schoolâs structures, authorities, and doctrinesâ (p. 580) and that at least in the Ottoman case this process of expansion of dynastic authority began in the early fifteenth century and is especially notable from the sixteenth century onwards.
Miura, âAdministrative Networks in the Mamluk Periodâ; see also Chapter Two in this volume, especially âIntroduction: Defining the âstateâ between Max Weber, Ê¿Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, and Charles Tillyâ.
Van Steenbergen, Wing & Dâhulster, âThe Mamlukization of the Mamluk Sultanate?â.
Lantschner, âFragmented Cities in the Later Middle Agesâ.
For examples of this phenomenon, see Wing, âSubmission, Defiance, and the Rules of Politicsâ; Garcin, âNote sur les rapports entre bédouins et fallahsâ. On these atomistic and also distant power relationships across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia, see furthermore the (very different) local examples engaged with in BinbaÅ, âDid the Hurufis Mint Coins?â (for the Anatolian region of Erzincan) and in Walker, âThe âDisappearingâ Villages of Late Medieval Jordanâ (for the Transjordanian region in Southern Syria).
See also Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade.
Yıldız, âRazing Gevele and Fortifying Konyaâ.
Har-El, Struggle for domination in the Middle East.
BinbaÅ, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran. BinbaÅ actually argues that substantial diachronic change defined the space for political participation for networks of intellectuals, scholars and men of religion in the course of the fifteenth century, suggesting on the one hand that the state formation processes in the Ottoman Northwest and Timurid East of West-Asia in particular integrated such loosely defined networks more effectively from the mid-century onwards. On the other hand BinbaÅ believes that those same processes simultaneously empowered more complexly organized networks of Sufi masters and followers as active partners and agents and eventually as rivals, with the Safawiyya Sufi brotherhood and their Eastern-Anatolian Turkmen supporters transforming into the Safavid imperial polity.
Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane.
Levanoni, âRank-and-File Mamluks versus amirsâ.
Levanoni, âThe Sultanâs Laqabâ, esp. p. 82.
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, pp. 112â113.
Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300â1650, p. 258.
Kunt, âOttomans and Safavidsâ, pp. 197â199 (quote p. 199).
Lowry, The Early Ottoman state, pp. 115â130 (âChapter Seven: The Last Phase of Ottoman Syncretismâthe subsumption of members of the Byzanto-Balkan aristocracy into the Ottoman ruling eliteâ).
Lowry, âA Note on three Palaiologon princes as members of the Ottoman ruling eliteâ.
Barkey, Empire of Difference, p. 80; Lowry, The early Ottoman State, p. 118.
Martel-Thoumian, Les civils et lâadministration dans lâétat militaire mamlÅ«k (ixe/xve siècle).
Mortel, âThe Decline of MamlÅ«k Civil Bureaucracy in the Fifteenth Centuryâ; Elbendary, Crowds and Sultans.
Miura, âAdministrative Networks in the Mamluk Periodâ.
Subtelny, Timurids in Transition, pp. 79â99.
Woods, The Aqquyunlu, pp. 106â110.
Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, pp. 9â10.
Yapp, The Making of the Modern Near East, p. 9.
Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East, esp. pp. 113â118 (âPost-Mongol Polities (1335â1506)â).
See especially Watt, Islamic Political Thought and Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought. Despite the comprehensiveness suggested by these titles, these two authors generally prefer to neglect any detailed discussion of the later medieval period, due to their focus on the imamate. This was a religio-legal concept of Islamic sovereignty that appeared in the fifteenth century with substantially altered meanings that are difficult to comprehend from Wattâs and Croneâs strictly Arabo-Islamic genealogical perspective. See also Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought (who tellingly decided to entitle his brief survey of important fifteenth-century thinkers such as JalÄl al-DÄ«n Muḥammad DavÄnÄ« and Faáºl AllÄh KhunjÄ«-Iá¹£fahÄnÄ« âThe Decline of Classical Islamic Political Thoughtâ [pp. 183â188]).
See especially Woods, The Aqquyunlu, pp. 100â120; Manz, Power, Politics and Religion, pp. 178â244; Bashir, Messianic Hopes, pp. 31â41 (âThe Making of a Messianic Age in TÄ«mÅ«rid Iran and Central Asiaâ); Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, pp. 23â55 (âThe Lord of Conjunction: Sacrality and Sovereignty in the Age of Timurâ); Murphey, Exploring Ottoman Sovereignty; Lingwood, Politics, Poetry, and Sufism; Van Steenbergen, Caliphate and Kingship, pp. 90â104; Melvin-Koushki, âEarly Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacyâ; Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam.