Taming the Governors: The Swinging Pendulum of Power over the Ottoman Provinces in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The struggle between provincial governors and the central government was defined by Halil fualcik as the most significant development of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. The measures undertaken to limit the governors' growing autonomy and to prevent their abuses were based on the tactic of creating countervailing forces. Although other instruments of provincial government like the kadl Gudge), the defterdar (chief treasury officer), and the muhasszl (tax collector) were strenghtened, in the eighteenth century it was the ayan (provincial notables) who mainly rose in prominence, using this prepared ground for decentralization.1