The Ottoman way of power

Slavery + conversion + meritocracy

Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566).

The Book:

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs
By Marc David Baer
Basic Books
2021

The Talk:

In the preindustrial world, a kingdom needed three things above all: Loyalty, stability, and talent.

By default, family was the institution that provided these things. Family relationships provided instinctual loyalty. Passing on property to children provided the stability. And talent could be passed on by parental apprenticeship and heredity.

The family was both the foundational social institution and the organ of business. Relations between families were political, with marriages serving like diplomatic alliances. Families weren’t for fun; they were necessities for accruing wealth, safety, security, and stability.

However, family didn’t perfectly solve these three primary needs. Internal family rivalries are as old as Cain and Abel. Infertility and sudden death put stability in doubt. And history is rife with stories of a gifted leader followed by his less-than-gifted son.

What were the alternatives?

In his 2021 book The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs historian Marc David Baer gives a comprehensive history of the Ottoman Empire. Baer’s main thesis is that the Ottoman Empire should be considered part of European history, not merely relegated to “Eastern” or “oriental” history.

However, what fascinated me most about the book was the unique way the Ottomans attempted to solve the preindustrial needs of power by bypassing the family to maximize loyalty, stability, and talent. In so doing, they built an empire much larger and longer lasting than the Romans, with aspects that feel surprisingly modern from today’s point of view.

The deviant dervish

The first chapter of Baer’s book, which covers the cultural foundations of the Ottomans, includes one of the most bizarre passages I’ve ever read in a history book.

Thirteenth Century Anatolia was a hub of Sufism, a radical and mystical tradition of the Islamic faith that centered around charismatic teachers. But there was a subset within the Sufis that took things in a way more radical direction, the “deviant dervishes,” as Baer calls them.

[These nihilist dervishes] went about stark naked or with a few leaves covering their private parts, symbolizing Adam’s fig leaf. Some wore loincloths or woolen sacks, furs, or animal hides. They went barefoot. Contravening Muslim male practice, which held that hairlessness was affiliated with a lack of honour and status, some shaved their hair, eyebrows, beard, and moustache. … Along with their outlandish outfits, they marked their bodies in shocking ways: wearing iron rings, metal earrings, neck collars, bracelets, anklets, and genital piercings.

Especially outrageous were those who wore their cloaks open to expose the iron rings hung on their pierced penises. Some sported tattoos of Ali’s sword, the name of Ali, or snakes. They carried strange paraphernalia: hatchets, clubs, bones, and horns. All groups openly consumed marijuana and hashish and were frequently intoxicated and screaming.

Baer goes on to described their raving parties where they drummed and sang loudly and danced ecstatically. What’s worth noting here is that the men that made up these groups included “adolescents who had broken ties their parents” and “upper-class youth who had dropped out of society, the young offspring of respected Sufis, military commanders, elites, rulers, and royalty who were rebelling against their fathers.” Their behavior expressed a rejection of all social norms, especially family relations.

According to Baer, the earliest Ottoman chroniclers “connected the royal house to Sufis, both to the conformist orders and to the orders of deviant dervishes.” These radical and ultra-radical mystical sects would remain popular among the Ottoman military ranks for centuries, bonding them together while also sometimes driving rebellion and unrest. This seems to have contributed to Ottoman society’s unique flavor, a religious vision that was ambivalent about family.

The collection

The first sultan, Murad I, was the originator of “the collection,” in which one out of every 40 young Christian boys in a conquered land would be taken away from their families. They would be forced to convert to Islam, and they would be trained together into an elite military corps known as the Janissaries. They were slaves to the sultan, with shaved heads (like deviant dervishes). Baer writes:

They were deemed more trustworthy than native Turkish Muslims, who served competing principalities and might come from rival powerful families.

Everything a Janissary had came from the Sultan, and their primary relationships were with their fellow Janissaries. The ultra-radical Sufism must have also provided a powerful religious identity in which family did not play a part.

Perhaps equally important, within the slave army of Janissaries anyone could rise up in the ranks. A poor Christian goatherd’s son from some regional backwater could rise to the highest positions in the empire if they proved themselves. This allowed talent to rise to the top.

The aim was that they should remain always devoted to the dynasty and the empire that had brought them from a life of obscurity in a remote village to a privileged position at the heart of power.

Baer notes that, by modern standards, the Collection “was an act of genocide,” forcing children from one group to another and stripping them of their community, family, and cultural ties.

According to an Ottoman chronicler, by the end of the sixteenth century, more than two hundred thousand Christian youth had been made into Muslim servants of the sultan in this fashion.

The Janissaries created a formidable state. During the Renaissance, Machiavelli argued that it would be very difficult to conquer the Ottoman Empire because one couldn’t bribe any noble families to raise up their armies or split the soldiers against the king. When the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire inspected the Janissaries he left impressed:

The thousands of Janissaries stood so motionless that he thought they were statues until they all bowed to him simultaneously.

The harem

The sultan’s harem was another essential institution in the Ottoman Empire, and it functioned in some ways like the Janissary corps.

The harem was a government institution, not a private sexual playground for the sultan. As in most cultures from Europe to the Middle East up until the 19th Century, same-sex pederasty was considered normal, even celebrated, among elite men in the Ottoman Empire¹. The sultan spent most of his time in the all-male quarters of his palace, where the young counselors-to-be were. Mehmed II wrote erotic love poems about boys. Suleiman I (“the Magnificent”) was known for his deep devotion to his young male lovers. Sufis had a practice of gazing at boys as a method of spiritual contemplation. And it would’ve been normal to watch an Istanbul parade of dancing boys putting on a show for the crowd.

Of the nearly fifty extant collections devoted to the beauties of [the city of Edirne], only one describes women. Sixteenth-century Ottoman writers found that work to be the anomaly and considered it strange because it did not describe beloved boys. Of the poet, an author wrote disparagingly, “He was a lover of women, but then only God is without fault.”

Even in the 1700s, some boys would wear veils so that older men would not desire them.

The harem, in contrast, was for producing heirs. The concubines of the harem were, like the Janissaries, slaves taken from Christian areas and forced to convert to Islam. This meant that the sultan could have heirs that had no connection to any other family. At the same time, concubines—who came from all regions of the empire—had the potential of becoming the mother of the next sultan, known as the valide sultan, one of the most powerful roles in the government. While not a meritocracy in the same way as the Janissaries, the harem was a system that allowed enslaved women of varied backgrounds to “advance” in status and influence.

Eunuchs, too, (who were considered neither male nor female) held significant political influence and power. It’s also worth thinking about eunuchs as government officials without any possible families and thus incorruptible, undivided in their loyalty to the government.

Another reason that the harem was not a “pleasure playground” is that Ottoman succession followed a very particular tradition: Upon the death of a sultan, the first son to make it to the capital would become the next sultan. And it was then the new sultan’s duty (backed by law) to murder all of his potential rivals, mainly his brothers, regardless of age. 👀 Thus loyalty to the sultan would be undivided, and the stability of the dynasty would be secured².

This meant that the sultan should produce enough sons to secure the dynasty—while also not producing too many sons. This happened. One particular sultan was given a bad reputation in posterity because he fathered so many sons, who simply had to be murdered right after his death. The cultural understanding, it seems, was that some sons had to be murdered (obviously), but to produce so many doomed sons was in poor taste.

The fall

As you may have predicted, both the harem and Janissary class eventually eclipsed the power of the sultan. By the seventeenth century, sultans were mostly ceremonial, and the empire was de facto run by valide sultans and grand viziers.

Some sultans attempted to reassert their power with bad results. Loyalty gradually became loyalty to the state, not to the actual person of the sultan. And the Janissaries became less of a corps and more of a social class. Some outside observers of the early modern period described the Ottoman Empire more or less as a constitutional monarchy, with the grand vizier playing much of the role of a prime minister today.

For this reason, ironically, it would take a sultan to eventually abolish the Janissaries in order to enact modernizing state reforms. Baer writes:

In 1826, [Mahmud II] ordered hundreds of men to be taken out of each unit and made into a new elite army corps based on new drills, tactics, training, uniforms, and weapons. In June, the Janissaries revolted in Istanbul, but the sultan had planned for their disobedience. … An estimated six thousand Janissaries were massacred. Having made up the elite backbone of the Ottoman military for five centuries, the Janissaries were wiped out in less than half an hour. Surviving Janissaries fled, thousands of provincial Janissaries were hunted down, and the entire corps was abolished.

Internationally, the new modern model of the nation-state generated different forms of legitimacy and group identity, often along ethnic and racial lines. By the time Atatürk dissolved the sultanate in 1922, the old system had long since lost its relevance. Atatürk means “Father of the Turks” — a new era was born.

The mirror

Parts of Baer’s history of the Ottomans felt strangely contemporary because of the ways that we also look skeptically at family influence.

We look down on nepotism. We define corruption as using one’s position to benefit one’s family. When someone achieves something, we discount it if their parents helped them out. We feel something is wrong if students get into elite colleges because their parents went there. We feel like presidents shouldn’t come from the same families, over and over. We draw a line between “work life” and “family life.” We don’t assume our children will pick the same career as us. We think adolescents should rebel against their parents. (It’s traditional!) We think that people should move away from their original communities for personal advancement or opportunity.

Our greatest hope is that our children will become “fully independent,” as the natural way of things, and we feel like we (or they) have failed if they are not “fully independent.” We see the correct path to mature adulthood as being one where we find our own identities separate from our parents and extended families.

In other words, we do a lot of what the Ottomans did—bypass the family—without the slavery part. Of course, family still matters a lot in life and society, as it did in the Ottoman Empire. It wasn’t a perfect system³. It was an ideal. But we uphold our own way of life because we get something out of it (or are, at least, promised something). Society must get something out of it too.

Related:

Blurred lines: Sex, God, and poetry in the gardens of Shiraz

Plato has no philosophy of love

The world Avicenna made

‘Apocalypse’: Turkiye wildfires reach key northwest city as hundreds flee (Al Jazeera, 7/27/25)

1. This is the fourth time misogynistic same-sex pederasty has come up in my reading—in Rome, in Greece, in Anatolia, and medieval Persia. Its vestiges can even been found in Afghanistan today. The segregation of men and women in society seems a likely contributor. All these cultures also have Indo-European roots, for whatever it’s worth.

2. The “race to the capital, winner gets to be Sultan” seems kind of wild, but it too is weirdly meritocratic, in that there’s an open competition and any son could potentially win. The murderous game may select for the most cunning, strategic, ruthless, ambitious leader (or mother).

3. Some Janissaries and concubines did keep ties with their original Christian families. Sometimes Christians and Jews continued their religious identities in secret after “conversion” to Islam. And over the centuries the collection system became less strict.