CORRUPTION AND NEPOTISM

Because the sultans no longer could control the devşirme by setting it against the Turkish notables, the devşirme gained control of the sultans and used the government for its own benefit rather than for the benefit of a sultan or his empire. In consequence, corruption and nepotism took hold at all levels of administration. In addition, with the challenge of the notables gone, the devşirme class itself broke into countless factions and parties, each working for its own advantage by supporting the candidacy of a particular imperial prince and forming close alliances with corresponding palace factions led by the mothers, sisters, and wives of each prince. After Süleyman, therefore, accession and appointments to positions came less as the result of ability than as a consequence of the political maneuverings of the devşirme-harem political parties. Those in power found it more convenient to control the princes by keeping them uneducated and inexperienced, and the old tradition by which young princes were educated in the field was replaced by a system in which all the princes were isolated in the private apartments of the harem and limited to such education as its permanent inhabitants could provide. In consequence, few of the sultans after Süleyman had the ability to exercise real power, even when circumstances might have given them the opportunity. But the lack of ability did not affect the sultans’ desire for power; lacking the means developed by their predecessors to achieve this end, they developed new ones. Selim II (ruled 1566–74), known as “the Sot” or “the Blonde,” and Murad III (1574–95) both gained power by playing off the different factions and by weakening the office of grand vizier, the main administrative vehicle for factional and party influence in the declining Ottoman state. As the grand viziers lost their dominant position following the downfall of Mehmed Sokollu (served 1565–79), power fell first into the hands of the women of the harem, during the “Sultanate of the Women” (1570–78), and then into the grasp of the chief Janissary officers, the agas, who dominated from 1578 to 1625. No matter who controlled the apparatus of government during this time, however, the results were the same—a growing paralysis of administration throughout the empire, increasing anarchy and misrule, and the fracture of society into discrete and increasingly hostile communities.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 884