Ottoman History Podcast - Deconstructing the Ottoman State

Episode Date: May 3, 2012

with Emrah Safa Gürkan hosted by Chris Gratien Although it is not uncommon when reading about the Ottoman Empire to see it portrayed as a monolithic, rational state apparatus serving a purported state interest, factions with their own interests and agendas played a major role in Ottoman decision-making. In this episode, Dr. Emrah Safa Gürkan explains the importance of disconglomerating state interests and examining factionalism when approaching politics in the Ottoman Empire. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton, and today I'm joined by Dr. Emre Safagurkan, a recent PhD from Georgetown University's Department of History. Emre, congratulations and welcome back. Thank you, Chris. It's good to be back. So today's topic of discussion is factions or factionalism in Ottoman politics. And I think this is a fascinating topic for our listeners. We don't normally talk too much about factions in Ottoman politics.

Emer, could you explain the relevance of studying factions? Well, I want to look at when we compare Ottoman historiography on Ottoman political history with those on European political history, we see this when we talk about the Ottoman, we'll see this difference. When we, the Ottomanists, talk about the Ottoman Empire, we generally talk about a monolithic state. And the result is a historiographical tradition that allows no room for internal divisions within a government and then fails to reflect the process of decision-making in terms of factional politics and negotiation between different actors that fight for power, not only in the capital, but in the provinces as well. So it, you know, impedes us from understanding these intricacies of Ottoman political history.

And this has, you know, received some criticism on behalf of, you know, a couple of recently written PhD dissertations, including mine. And this should be readdressed, basically. And so the argument here is that by ignoring factions and the role of factionalism in decision-making, the state itself becomes a rational, autonomous actor with its own sort of mentality. This is the problem,

because when you just ignore the concept, the aspect of factions in Ottoman political history, then the result is a monolithic state and a decision-making process where decisions have been undertaken with the best state interest in mind. While in fact, we know that this was not the case, and because also we have no reason to believe that this should be the case, because when you look at all the other empires, when you look at the modern decision making process, you always see this element of corporate interest, this power groups, pressure groups, these lobbies, these are all over the place. But for a couple of reasons, in the Ottoman historiography, this kind of an approach has never been developed. And one of these reasons were the nature of Ottoman sources, because what we have from the classical Ottoman period, pre-19th century Ottoman period, what we have are the government-produced documentation, which are succinct and brief compared to their European counterparts, and which affect no decision. For example, if you go to the Venetian archives and look at the Venetian documentation,

at least there is a voting process, so you know who's what for what, at least not within the Senate itself, but within the Council of Ten, for instance. So you know to what extent these have been opposed by a certain clique within the government. And in the public sphere, there is this myriad of documentation, like pamphlets or relations that have been published,

all these writings which senators secretly wrote down during Senate meetings and then published it for the wider audience. So we get to understand these factional differences and on which a good amount of studies have been made. Monographs have been written, for instance, in the beginning of the 17th century, these Venetian old and Venetian new factions. Or in the case of the Hapsburgs again,

we know that they have all these discussions in the Consejos and we have all these consultas, these written reports to the king. And in all these documentations, you get to see the differences, and who said what, who opposed whom. But in the Ottoman documentation, in the Ottoman archival documentation, you don't get these details. In the chronicles as well, the Ottoman Chronicles fail in being precise and detailed about these issues.

And they give some information, but it's not enough to come up with... It's not enough to be able to follow a faction or to give a detailed study of who is aligned with whom. Because mind you, these are also not strictly, somebody can belong to a number of factions or switch from one place to another, somebody can be neutral, so it's not easy to track those down.

And the third reason could be, this was the idea of, in Turkey, there's this one state, it's monolithic, it's sacred, so it didn't create too much enthusiasm to dig for internal divisions within a government because, especially in the 20th century, the Turkish state was not as, you know, at least until the 1950s, 60s, you know, there weren't too much of internals, you know, the state was also considered one big, you know, block. That's an interesting connection actually. And even if we look at the source

material, the typical source material for early modern ottomanists we can see how mhime how firman these aren't very good sources for seeing decision making process because they reflect either an event inscribed in the case of mhime or in case of a firman it's an order so the decision has already been made and it's not recorded there however we do know that factions existed. I mean, from my own experience, for the 19th century, during the reforms, the memoirs and the writings of people from the period reflect the factions within the government. Ahmed Jevdat talks about different camps and certain decision-making processes

that ended up critical, for example, in Tezakir. But these don't necessarily make their way into the archival record. So how do we understand factions? I guess your research focuses on the 16th century. So how do we understand factions and what are the main factions we're dealing with in the Ottoman state? Well, I mean, it's not only me who deals with these factions. There are a number of other historians like Kazale or Börekçi.

And there are other people who did it in the 18th century as well. It's an ongoing process of investigation. But most of the time, we the 16th century people, like Börekçi, Kazale and I, had to make the most of the Ottoman sources, excellent in Topkapı as well as the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Archivi. But again,

in the end, had to rely on foreign documentation, because mind you, in 16th century Constantinople, it was a center of information, right? So, all over the place, there is enemy spies, there are resident ambassadors starting with Venetians in the 16th century, later you know, the French, Austrians

and British, English all these people send regular reports in the case of the Venetians they're despatchi, right? So for one year you have 1,000 pages long of ambassadorial reports that talk about all these rumors and stuff. And

one big advantage was that these ambassadors were part of this factional game because they, by giving presence, by establishing a good relation with Ottoman grandees, they have been able to penetrate through the Ottoman decision-making system, which included a lot of renegades. For instance, we know that at the close of the 16th century,

there was almost a Venetian party in the Ottoman Empire, a lot of renegades. Probably one of the most important officials of the time, the chief eunuch was Ghazan Ferad. And he's a really important Ottoman who ruled the Ottoman Empire from behind the curtains for 30 years. He was a Venetian. His sister comes from Venice to visit him, and she becomes a Muslim, and she marries. So these are all extra state relations that actually help these ambassadors to, you know,

or like in the case of the Hofstra, for instance, there's this Spanish woman whose one daughter was married to the sultan, another daughter was married to an important officer. So, you know, via these links, they could gather enough information about what's going on. And there is another thing that we should mention. Some of these, you know, factions are ready to cooperate with these ambassadors because they provide certain business opportunities. Like if you're a pasha and you have, you know, mind you, the pashas, the Ottoman pashas, for instance,

gave one million, a huge amount of money as a loan to the French king. So they are all investing in international trade and finance. So they have men who, they are brokers, right? Merchant brokers. So all these guys have been working in a big environment of cooperation

in trade and finance. So Ottoman Grand Vizier like Sokolo would be happy to employ the Venetian ambassador's physician as his own man. And this man can actually be a go-between between the Venetian bylaw and the Ottoman Sultan

when the two powers were warring each other, exchanging gifts, exchanging information. And basically this helped the Europeans to get a grasp of what's going on and to get a balance of power within the Ottoman capital. And so as a result, we're able to glean more information about Ottoman factions from European sources as well, read in combination with Ottoman sources. You know, it has to be read with a special approach. You have to compare and contrast them because an ambassador has to exaggerate his own deeds. That's why probably accentuate more than necessary

these internal divisions or his role in these factional struggles. We have like, if you can compare five, six different ambassador reports and three talk about more or less the same thing, especially when they are also corroborated by hints that we found here and there in the Ottoman sources. With a rigorous scientific approach, this could be a very beneficial contribution. So give us an example of a faction

or a factional contention in the Ottoman Empire during the 16th century. The most important decision to be made should be related to the war and peace. I mean, because the state, the early modern state is mostly a war machine, right? Because the state

before the modern time didn't build schools, didn't build mosques. So most of its occupation was making war and peace. So let's take two examples from war and peace. One is the example of 1570 when the Ottomans actually decided to

start a war against the Venetians. There we see two camps. One is the Sokoly camp, so the omnipotent Grand Vizier who was opposed to the war because he has no Western interest. And he and his men had no Western interest

in fighting a war against the Venetians, with whom he entertained, you know, very good relations. And on the other side, we had his rival pashas, you know, the pashas who coveted his position, as well as influential, one of the most influential Jewish figures of the, you know, 16th century Europe, Joseph Nassi. And this is a really important guy, but I won't get into details.

So they want a war because Nassi has extensive, you know, business relations. And he wants to get, you know, he wants to invest in Cyprus. And he also has, you know, this thing going on with Venice and past grievances. So Nasi is a courtier. And with these pashas, they convince the Sultan to open a war. And so here we have a clear example where a major faction of the Ottoman state is opposed to war and another faction is essentially pushing for war. So what's the outcome?

The outcome is the Ottomans start the war. They conquered Cyprus, but they were defeated severely in the Battle of Lepanto, at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. And in the end, Cyprus remained in Ottoman hands, but Nasi lost power in the end because the Ottomans didn't actually get what they expected from the war. They lost the navy, they suffered a humiliating defeat. But the issue here was that everybody had its own agenda and war served Nasi's faction more than the Sokolov faction. And let me give another example how these things can actually be so tricky.

You know, Sokolov's main man, Salomon Ashkenazi, who was also the Venetian ambassador's former physician, he was caught smuggling Venetian bylaws letters to be sent to Venice on his own galley. So he was put in the prison. He was about to be killed. And the Ottoman Grand Vizier actually had him out of prison. So now we have this weird example where the Ottoman Grand Vizier, you know, had this guy who betrayed the state, by the way, because Bailo wasn't supposed to be communicating with the outside world, let alone Venice. So he was caught smuggling, but twice. But, but twice. Sokolo had him out of prison. Obviously, this shows how

intricate these relations between different political actors were. Because it is not like, oh, there's this state interest, there's those people who are on the left side of it that do good stuff for the state and on the right side of it who do

bad stuff for the state. Another example, before the start of the Ottoman-Austrian War in 1593, the Austrian ambassador learned that the Ottomans were going to start the war from the Jewish Kira, which is a lady-in-waiting, of the Ottoman Empress.

And he was basically providing her with really good cloth and the Ottoman Empress found no harm or Ottoman Empress' lady in wedding found no harm in just betraying such an important state secret. And even the Ottoman Grand Vizier, for instance, when he confiscated the letters of the ambassador, he found letters incriminating the Ottoman Empress himself.

ambassadors, he found letters incriminating the Ottoman Empress himself. Visually, he destroyed them without causing too much trouble, but it is still there that personal and corporate interests doesn't correspond with an abstract notion of state interest. So on that note, I'd like to interrogate further the notion of the state. Are we just going to totally do away with the abstract notion of the state? Or perhaps to phrase this in another way, does this factionalism simply represent contending interests within the state apparatus? Or is there something to be said for a dialectical or dialogic relationship between different factions that actually leads to coherent, well-conceived state policy? It could be both. It depends on the particular circumstance.

But what I say is not that the state consists of, you know, different components totally unrelated to each other vying for power, trying to overcome the other in order to directly benefit themselves by getting the control of a big machine. What I'm saying is that we have to understand any decision at a particular moment is the outcome of particular circumstances, factional circumstances, how decision makers perceive political options available to them, and the internal stability of the empire. But the point was all these different interest groups came up with different agendas. And I think this created

rather a richness instead of, you know, this is a better strategy making. It is just poor historiography to fail on behalf of those who fail to understand that. It's not poor strategy. Inequality strategy is made with more than one option. If you only want one option, and everybody thinks about the same thing, it just creates, you know, less options for you. And, you know, there are also other benefits to it. For instance, every faction has its own information gathering system.

There's intelligence networks. At times we see that they disinform their own government, manipulate information in order to come on top. But this rivalry, if it's not my capitalist state of mind, this rivalry should have contributed

in the long run to more information coming up, more analysis, more effort invested in analyzing the information. And more options and more strategies have been created by these rivaling factions. I think it's a richness on behalf of the state. And one other thing, that there is still, if not a state, you know, a constant, an abstract notion of a constant state interest, there is still some sort of a state tradition. There is a fine line between furthering one's interest and betrayal.

So Sokolu might have done that, might have got Salomon Ashkenazi, the physician who smuggled the letters out of prison, but he used him in order to make sure the Ottomans signed an honorable peace treaty. So he may be against the war, but he didn't, you know, he walked a fine

line between, you know, working against the Ottoman war efforts and just going on with the war. So he managed to use this occasion in order to, you order to sign a preferable peace treaty and make the most of the situation

by benefiting both the state and his own faction. You have to, you know, there are certain lines. You cannot do everything, you know, based on your own corporate interests. So there's a limit to that. There's a scale. So how is a faction formed or what constitutes a faction? Is it a conglomerations of shared interests? Are they households with a kinship or patronage ties?

Is this exclusively on the most elite levels? How are factions made? Are they a unified block? A faction does not only consist of the Ottoman sultan, his immediate family, and the Ottoman grandees, the pashas. Not only the courtiers. Obviously, these are important part of it, but there are other, you know, depending on the situation, but there are other players that came to the fore. Like, it could be the military corps, like the janissaries, or you know, it may be provincial authorities because this is a centralized empire. You know, all these appointments have been made to the center. All the provincial authorities have, you know, connections in the center because they are bound to come back to the center and go back to another province.

And there are all these, you know, bankers that fund these projects and that also work in tandem with the Pashas because Pashas, you know, this is an agricultural economy, Pashas all get, you know, gather all these revenues, but they need somebody to run their money. So we have these bankers, we have these, you know, important merchants, we have foreign ambassadors as I told you that have been, who had been really important players who managed to penetrate to the decision-making by actually, you know, allying with one of these factions or by buying us sometimes important decision,

important Ottoman decision-makers. And we have Corsairs on the one hand and all these people who have something to lose or win from decision-taking tried successfully or unsuccessfully tried to be a part of the decision-making process. So how did they form a faction? A faction is mostly a concept.

We have to talk about, if we want to talk about the units, we have to talk about households and extended households, which you call kapu. Let's say, okay, to give you an example, let's say the Ottoman Grand Admiral Uluç Ali, right? He had like 3,000 slaves who was rowing on his behalf, so he has to find work for them. Obviously, Uluç Ali will always advocate for an active naval policy

because he has all these people to feed. He has all these corsair captains, you know, who each had their own kapu. So this is now a faction. Because now we see, even though Uluç Ali is not directly responsible, but all these people would be richer in case Uluç, you know, makes, Uluç can convince the Sultan to pursue more active policy in the Mediterranean because there is no more more offices you know more more payments from this from the center and more more plunder from these missions so this is a faction but you know this is a this is based on a share interest but sometimes these also have

parental relations like in the case of the for example Sokolov faction you see that the most Sokolov men are you see that most Sokolov's men are, you know, extended family. One is a governor general of Buda, the other is a governor general in Dalmatia. So when, for example, Ottoman-Venetian war came out, Sokolov was of interest in the Dalmatian frontier because this is where it is, you know, his adherence would make profit. And you see that these factional balances also create differences in allocating resources and making military decisions. To give another example,

when the Ottomans decided to wage war against Safavid, Iran, in 1578, the Sokol was against it. And the other wizards who were hawkish, when they became the commander of the Eastern Front, the first thing they did was to fill all these open positions with their own adherents. Because if you're a serdar, if you're a commander,

they give you the empty defter, empty book, and then you can make all the appointments because somebody dies, somebody has to be appointed. You do these appointments. It means that you will be the dispenser of this royal favor. And it was something really important and all these small figures were

pressurizing their respective leaders of the faction like the corsairs asking for a more active policy and Uluç was really frustrated when the Ottomans signed the truce with the Habsburgs. Or all these pashas who wanted to be richer. But for somebody

like Sokolu, who had all these good relations with ambassadors who was already rich, and who wanted the continuance of the status quo, a war was a gamble, so he basically opposed it. So, along the lines of the status quo, a war was a gamble, so he basically opposed it. So along the lines of this, we have to understand, you know, how people see, perceive political options available to them. And while this is recognizing divisions within the state apparatus,

in much the way of older narratives about warring households or tribal factionalism and these things, this is not what you're talking about. What you're talking about is loosely defined political blocks that come together around a combination of shared interests, patronage, and kinship ties, and they're often very pragmatic. Exactly. Okay, I understand a certain, in certain levels, if you're really linked, if you have kinship relations,

obviously these relations are harder to get rid of. So certain blocks will remain. But in the larger Santa faction, you can move from one to another. For example, we know of the so-called right-hand guy, Feridun Bey. After he was exiled, when the so-called faction was purged, after the Grand Vizier was assassinated in 1579, he managed to come back. And there were people whom we know,

like especially this power, what I call a power broker, these courtiers or bankers who, for example, they may be beneficial to both sides. Like ambassadors could be good with one faction and could be good with another, even though, you know, it's possible to, it's not as, you know as monolithic as we think it, because it's a rather large concept.

It's not like you have to get a membership from one of these factions or something. It is much more fluid, and sometimes you get contradictory, because this is a fluid thing, and also the reports are not 100% reliable, because all hearsay. It is really...

One has to really be careful when, you know, talking about this guy belongs to this faction because, you know, you have to find a large number of examples in order to be able to make sure, you know, who belongs to which faction. Sure, and we don't want to disconglomerate the state and go through all the trouble of removing this abstraction only to recreate, say, two factions that are equally monolithic. We should generally be aware of these fluidity and divisions. Exactly.

If we were to deconstruct the state, we have to deconstruct the, you know, if you don't want to be simplistic about state, we don't want to be simplistic about the factions as well. Yeah, in some way it makes the job harder and makes the narrative more complicated and nuanced, but on the whole, I think a new emerging way to view the Ottoman politics. It's, first of all, very much in line with our understanding of modern politics and European politics, but also may lend new insights into how decisions were really made in the past, moving away from the rational state model. Well, Amra, thanks for coming back on the podcast.

It was great to have you back. Yeah, my pleasure, actually. For those who are interested in finding out more on the topic, we're going to have a short bibliography on the website where you can also leave your comments and questions. Thank you for listening to the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care. Altyazı M.K.