Turks in the Ottoman Imperial Palace

Abstract

To a non-specialist "Turks in the Ottoman Imperial Palace" may sound reasonable, even expected, certainly innocuous, but in Ottoman studies the expression comes with a question mark and an exclamation point. Both in terms of the underlying principles and in terms of actual practice there were supposed to be no Turks in the Ottoman palace, except in special circumstances. But from the late sixteenth century, as critics put it, Turks and Kurds and other riffraff penetrated the palace and so caused the deterioration of the venerable institution of the imperial household. 1 Any royal palace might be cosmopolitan to a certain degree but in Europe, except perhaps in the multi-ethnic Habsburg capitals, Madrid and Vienna, the main national element in a given polity would constitute the largest ethnic component in the royal establishment. In Islamic polities the reverse was true. Caliphs and sultans preferred to distance themselves from the main ethnic groups in society by developing household troops composed of outsiders. Furthermore, these outsiders were imported as enslaved, deracinated warriors owing sole loyalty to their masters: the perfect troops for dynastic empires. Slavs, Turks, Franks, pagan or Christian but always non-Muslim for they were slaves, were then trained to develop their supposed "innate" warlike qualities inherited from life in the Eurasian steppe, and served caliphs as highest commanders and loyal troops. They lived apart from the people as an elite corps with distinct dress, languages and customs. 2 In time some such mamluk slave-turned-commanders wielded * I thank Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study for a period of Fellowship in Spring 2008 which facilitated the writing of this article. 1 The most forceful statement on this is to be found in the work of Mustafa Âlî: see especially Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: the Historian Mustafa Ali, 1541-1600 (Princeton 1986) pp. 156-157. 2 For the early development of the mamluk phenomenon see, for example, Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: the Evolution of the Islamic Polit (Cambridge 1980).