The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ AT THE MARGINS OF EMPIRE ~ 79
both the Ottomans and the Crimean khans. But as the border with the Crimea ran
through steppe lands – which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
almost devoid of permanent habitation – these territories also may be regarded as
border zones. And the janissaries, sea captains and local rulers who held sway in
seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Algiers and Tunis certainly were located in a
border area far away from the imperial centre.
Something similar can be claimed for the sherifs of Mecca even for the period
between 1568/975–6 and 1632/1041–2, when the Ottomans held the province of
Yemen to the south. 16 For, between the oases and port towns of the Hijaz and the
Red Sea coast, or even the Ottoman provincial capital of Sana’a itself, lay broad
stretches of desert. Thus one might almost consider the province of Yemen as an
‘island’, separated from the Hijaz by a desert ‘sea’; in this perspective, the lands
ruled by the sherifs can be viewed as a remote borderland of the Ottomancontrolled
‘continent’. 17 Moreover, Ottoman control of Yemen in the end proved
quite ephemeral, and the transitory character of the sultans’ rule in this outlying
territory must have further stabilized the semi-independent position of the Meccan
sherifs.
Thus it makes sense to amend the model proposed by Inalcik in the following
fashion. While the sequence described in his seminal article was in fact characteristic
of many early Ottoman conquests, there also existed cases in which a
dependent but more or less autonomous principality was never instituted, but
direct Ottoman control established immediately after the conquest. By contrast,
in other instances a principality of this kind, once recognized by the sultans,
never was turned into a centrally administered province, but remained a dependent
but autonomous entity over many centuries. This was likely to happen
whenever a – within limits – stable frontier with a major state, such as the Safavids
or Habsburgs, was established in a given region, or if the territory in
question bordered on the desert, where the control of any early modern state was
limited at best.
More surprisingly, the process by which centralized government was established
in newly conquered areas quite often turned out to be easily reversible. At
least in the Muslim territories, centrally controlled administrations might well be
replaced by ‘dependent principalities’ informally recognized by the central government;
this occurred not only in outlying territories such as western and central
North Africa, but even in a province such as Egypt, essential both as a supplier of
foods and fabrics for Istanbul, and as a source of monetary revenues for the
Empire as a whole. Along the entire northern coast of Africa, military forces
established in these territories after the Ottoman conquest were able to subvert
central rule within a few decades, and establish what might be called ‘dependent
principalities’ of a novel type. Moreover, in certain provinces quite close to the
centre, government on the part of the authorities in Istanbul might even in the
sixteenth century be something of a façade, behind which locally powerful families
governed almost as if they had been dependent but autonomous rulers. And
once, by the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, ‘power magnates’ had