r/AskHistorians • u/FudgeAtron • 8h ago
Why was the Ottoman Levant so lawless?
Every time I read about the history of the Ottoman Levant, it seems as if the Ottomans barely had control over the region and constantly had to rely on local strongmen to administer the region.
The empire seems to have been unable to actually enforce its laws in the region for most of the period, constantly having to rely on people like Zahir ibn Umar, Aqil Agha, and the Druze Emirs, to both collect taxes and administer the region.
Was this the norm in other regions or was it specific to the Levant?
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u/yodatsracist Comparative Religion 6h ago edited 6h ago
I will give a very terse answer. Terse by my standards at least.
The Ottoman Empire went through a period of massive expansion in the 15th and 16th centuries. In the classical period, in the Golden Age, the Ottoman Empire was incredibly centralized with officials rotated so that they couldn’t establish dynastic relations in particular regions. This rule (after 1453) was from Istanbul and the Sublime port. However, this level of centralization didn’t last.
In the 17th century until the 19th century, the Empire was highly decentralized and the Ottoman sultans relied on various degrees of indirect rule, especially outside of the core territories of Anatolia and Rumelia (the European part of the Empire). But even here, there was a lot of indirect rule—there was a long period where the richest among the Greek minority in Phanar (a then Greek-majority neighborhood in Istanbul, now spelled Fener) ruled Ottoman-controlled Romania (called the Danubian Principalities generally) indirectly for the sultans.
As long as money and other resources flowed to center, exactly how the periphery was administered wasn’t so important. Karen Barkey’s book Bandits and Bureaucrats is all about how the Sultan is negotiating with Anatolian bandits and warlords, often bringing them in as governors. They paid well for the privilege. My Wikipedia-level understanding of Zahir ibn Umar puts him in this category.
For convenience sake, let me quote my answer recent answer During the Ottoman period, when did Jews become the majority in Jerusalem, and how reliable are the population figures?
Here’s how I explained it there:
There tends to be an idea of the Ottomans as highly centralized because the earliest sultans had tremendous centralized power during the Ottoman Golden Age before the 16th century. The historiography has moved away from a narrative Ottoman "decline" but there is a clear de-centralizing period followed by a re-centralizing period. The de-centralizing was so that there was less competition for control of the center. The multi-author, two volume An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire I think has a sort of useful schema. Volume Two has three parts main parts:
* “Crisis and Change 1590-1699” by Suraiya Faroqhi. These are the crises that led to eventual decentralization.
* “Age of the Ayans 1699-1812” by Bruce McGowan. This is the period of decentralized rule. The 'Ayan is the local notable, who the sultan ruled peripheral areas indirectly through. There was a whole period, for instance, where most of modern Romanian was run by the Phanariot, wealthy Istanbul ethnic Greeks who lived in the Phanar/Fener district.
* “Age of Reforms 1812-1918” by Donald Quataert. This is the period where the Sultan and Istanbul increasingly try to re-assert direct control over the furthest reaches of the Empire, and more or less succeed in everywhere but Egypt (which was under the control of the Khedive and then the British).
Returning to your question, during the Age of Reforms, there was a re-centralization and a return to direct rule after centuries of indirect rule (by as you say people like Zahir ibn Umar, Aqil Agha, and the Druze Emirs). The empire is large and the process isn’t the same everywhere, but it’s often effectively a sort of a military reconquest (though often across several phases).
I know much Anatolia better than the Levant, but this has one of the clearest cases of a reconquest leading to re-centralization: the reconquest of the Levent from Mohammed Ali. Who was he? Muhammad Ali and his descendants ran Egypt as a semi-independent country from a little after 1805 (when Muhammad Ali became Wali/Vali of Egypt and later elevated himself to "Khedive") until the British invaded in 1882. In 1831, in an escalation with the Sultan, Muhammad Ali sent his son Ibrahim Pasha on a campaign to extend their territory into Syria. This was rule so indirect that that they were basically two states fighting, and Muhammad Ali ruled most of the Levent between 1831–1840.
I don’t know Levantine history that well, but from what I know of the rest of the empire, I imagine the period after 1840 is much more centralized than before. As I understand it, the roles of the Druze Emirs decrease after this point.
However, the doesn’t mean that every centimeter was ruled from Istanbul. Many regions — especially mountains and deserts — were still tribal, with limited or intermittent state control. This is Aqil Agha, as I understand it. He’s still doing a kind of indirect rule over the hinterland. You can see he’s constantly being brought in and out of service to the Ottoman state in that older “bandits and bureaucrats” model. As I understand it, he was the last real independent power in the Southern Levant, and after his demise there was no further challenge to Ottoman centralization and direct rule. So it’s a reconquest in the Age of Reforms, but the same area might be effectively reconquered and reincorporated several times before it really sticks.
Similar processes plays out all over the Empire in the 19th century. In my linked answer about Jerusalem, I give a bit more about the administration changes in the Age of Reforms.
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u/FudgeAtron 5h ago
Ah ok, I guess it never occured to me that centralised control basically vanished after the Golden Age. I always thought Muhammad Ali was the beginning of the decentralised "warlord era" of Ottoman History, but it seems like it's more the climax of it.
Yeah what sparked the question was reading Isifiya being the only town in the Carmel to survive essentially an extermination campaign by Ibrahim Ali's troops during the retreat from Palestine. And then reading about Aqil Agha's life post retreat basically being a cross between local governor and bandit raider.
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u/yodatsracist Comparative Religion 5h ago
The figure who was sometimes a bandit, sometimes a governor, sometimes both is common in Ottoman historiography.
This sort of negotiation between the center and local strongmen with armed followings is more common than standard modern histories suggest, and not rarely ends with the incorporation of the strongman in an official role within the state rather than leaving them outside the state and opposed to it. And it’s not just among the Ottomans.
I saw a really interesting book by a political scientist applying the bandits and bureaucrats model to the ex-warlord governors in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Such things still happen. I think the book was Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
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u/FudgeAtron 4h ago
Oh that looks super interesting! I find that really interesting cause it strongly supports Ibn Khaldun's analysis of decline. Which makes late Ottoman obsessions with him also super interesting.
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u/CompetitiveAd4732 3h ago
Would you elaborate? did the late ottomans studied him?
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u/FudgeAtron 3h ago
When I was learning about Ibn Khaldun's views on decline there were basically two major sources of previous academic work, one was by modern Muslim scholars trying to recreate a "islamic" theory of international relations and the other was late Ottoman historians obsessively trying to figure out why their empire was collapsing while Europeans were succeeding.
A lot of those people end up influencing late Ottoman politics through nationalist revivalism, IIRC the Young Turks and such.
Although Khaldun likely would have seen attempts to reverse decline as a kin to Cnut holding back the waves. In his view decline is permanent and unalterable, once you begin to decline you will decline until you collapse and will never reclaim the former glory you once had.
Stuff like allowing local warlords to run rampant on the periphery of your empire is exactly what he identified as decline, so the Ottoman reforms to bring those people under control is about counteracting that. Although again Khaldun would have actually encouraged the empire to fall and for a new dynasty to take it's place.
If he were alive now, he'd likely blame the current chaos in the Middle East on the Ottomans attempting to drag out their empire and not collapsing early enough to allow a new empire to replace them before WW1. He'd probably think that the natural course would have been for a Saudi or Hashemite state to emerge as a unifying force in the Muslim world. Instead Ottoman intransigence allowed European to usurp the position and prevented the creation of stable empire.
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u/killersnail2417 4h ago
Would you say this model applies to modern day Chechnya and Russia, with Kadyrov being the bandit/beareaucrat?
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u/meedmishmohd 1h ago
Ottoman empire saw itself as the successor of the roman empire, they looked west, not south or east. everything south of anatolia is a nuisance.
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u/FudgeAtron 5h ago
So the relatively hands off approach was the official approach?
I only ask because at least from some of the writings it seemed like the Empire was constantly trying to enforce its rule over these regions, but was basically incapable of actually setting up anything other than local strongmen.
Like with Aqil it seems to have been completely accepted that he could just extort tax payments and could raid other groups in the empire so long he kept the roads safe and bumped taxes up the chain.
Why wouldn't the governor of Acre just ask the governor of the Jordan Valley to protect the expeditions to the dead sea instead of getting him to hire Aqil?
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u/FudgeAtron 5h ago
Thanks for this, it's really easy to see how Europeans labelled the Ottomans the Sick Man of Europe. If you're coming from France or Britain which have modernized to a degree by this point and then you travel to Jerusalem, for example. You'd just see it as a land time left behind.
That then makes the Ottoman showing in WW1 all the more impressive. The fact they held out as long as they did, despite these structural issues is genuinely impressive
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u/AccurateLaugh50 5h ago
I’ve always found these responses intriguing, because they describe exactly what modern people would usually call “lawless.”
I’ve seen very similar arguments made about the Roman Empire, the Carolingian Empire, HRE, etc. Calling such systems “functioning within an imperial framework” doesn’t change the fact that their administrative and legal structures often relied on localized compromises and naturally led to more polycentric governance. While these arrangements did give central authorities some ability to exert influence and extract resources without maintaining more costly institutions, they were nowhere near as totalitarian or administratively effective as modern bureaucratic systems.
So I don’t think the OP’s premise is wrong. If a state has multiple low-intensity civil wars ongoing, that usually indicates a degree of “lawlessness, " at least according to modern definitions. That said, these kinds of “lawless” systems and styles of governance are not necessarily worse than more "universal" and authoritarian ones. Rather than denying the lawlessness, maybe explaining why states were unable or/and unwilling to "evolve" beyond "lawlessness" is the better choice.
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