The “Ottoman System”

Abstract

By the early sixteenth century most of the Balkan Peninsula’s Christians were submerged within the Ottomans’ Islamic theocratic society. In traditional Islamic civilization, no separation existed between religious and secular matters, and religious considerations predominated in all state affairs. The Ottomans injected a number of unique traits into the scheme. Historians often label their sociopolitical construct the “Ottoman System,” characterized by slave government administration and state power sharing between governing and religious “establishments.” That term, however, conveys a sense of structural rigidity that probably was nonexistent throughout the Ottoman period, since it uses as its specific model the state organization operating in the first half of the sixteenth century under Süleyman I. While the slave administration predominated after its inception in the second half of the fourteenth century, it was persistently opposed by powerful Muslim warriors, religious leaders, and bureaucrats. The idea that two separate “establishments” shared state power was developed by outsiders attempting to understand Ottoman society and probably never entered the minds of the Ottomans themselves, since theocratic notions tended to preclude such categorical distinctions. To avoid these clichés, a general overview of the “Ottoman System” operating in the Balkans best concentrates on its three fundamental sectors: The military-administrative, the religious-legal, and the social-economic.