Imperial Ottoman

Government · In depth

The Provinces and the Millet System

The Ottoman provincial system — eyalets, beylerbeyiliks, sanjaks, beys, pashas — and the millet framework that gave religious communities internal autonomy.

The Ottoman state ruled, at its height, a domain of more than five million square kilometers and some thirty to forty million subjects. The administration of such an empire required a sophisticated system of territorial government, a flexible framework for the management of the religious and ethnic diversity of the subject population, and a steady flow of revenue, military manpower, and political information between the capital and the provinces. The system that emerged, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, combined the territorial organization of the eyalet and the sanjak with the confessional organization of the millet, and it served as the basic framework of Ottoman government for nearly four centuries. The system, however, was constantly evolving, and the most dramatic transformations came in the nineteenth century, when the Tanzimat reforms imposed a new administrative uniformity on the provinces and the millets began to dissolve into the new nationalisms of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia.

The Eyalet: The Provincial Government

The principal unit of Ottoman provincial government was the eyalet (also called beylerbeyilik, vilayet, or, in the European provinces, paşalık). The eyalet was governed by a beylerbeyi — literally “lord of lords,” usually translated as “governor-general” — who held the rank of pasha of the three tails (üç tuğlu paşa) and was appointed directly by the sultan. The beylerbeyi was responsible for the civil administration of the province, for the maintenance of order, for the collection of the central taxes, and for the muster and command of the provincial military forces in time of war.

The beylerbeyi was appointed for an indefinite term, often of only a year or two, and could be transferred or dismissed at the will of the sultan. A career of beylerbeyi service was, in the sixteenth century, the most common path to the Grand Vizierate: perhaps two-thirds of the Grand Viziers of the sixteenth century had previously served as beylerbeyi of one of the major provinces. The beylerbeyi was assisted by a divan modeled on the imperial divan, and he was supported by a small household of officials drawn from the imperial household school or from the local gentry.

The classical system established about thirty to forty eyalets, of which the most important were Rumelia (the European provinces), Anatolia, Karaman, Rum (Sivas and north-eastern Anatolia), Diyarbakır, Damascus, Aleppo, Egypt, Baghdad, Yemen, Budin (Hungary), and Basra. By the seventeenth century, the system had grown to include more than fifty eyalets, of which several — Egypt, Basra, Algeria, Tunis, Tripolitania, the Kurdish principalities of the east, the Greek and Serbian principalities of the Balkans — were in practice autonomous. The eyalet system, as a coherent framework of imperial administration, was progressively replaced by the vilayet system of the Tanzimat.

The Sanjak: The County

The eyalet was divided into sanjaks (also called liva), each of which was governed by a sanjakbeyi (also called mirliva) who held the rank of pasha of the two tails (ikili tuğlu paşa). The sanjakbeyi was appointed by the sultan on the recommendation of the Grand Vizier, served a term of one to three years, and was usually transferred at the end of his term. The sanjakbeyi was responsible for the civil administration of his sanjak, for the maintenance of order, for the collection of the haraç, the öşür, and the local taxes, and for the muster of the sipahi cavalry of his jurisdiction. The sanjakbeyi of a small sanjak was a much more modest figure, a junior officer of the sipahi class with a small household and a relatively modest income. The sanjakbeyi of a major sanjak, by contrast, was a powerful figure, often a member of the senior Ottoman aristocracy and a future beylerbeyi or even grand vizier — a pattern visible in the careers of the great sultans, most of whom served as provincial governors in their youth.

The sanjak was, in the classical period, the basic unit of Ottoman provincial administration. The most important sanjaks, such as those of Sivas, Ankara, Salonica, Sofia, or Bosnia, were significant commands; the sanjakbeyi of a major sanjak was a powerful figure, often a member of the senior Ottoman aristocracy and a future beylerbeyi or even grand vizier. The sanjakbeyi of a small sanjak was a much more modest figure, a junior officer of the sipahi class with a small household and a relatively modest income.

The sanjak was divided into kazas (judicial districts), each of which was administered by a kadı (judge) appointed by the Kazasker of the relevant jurisdiction. The kadı had charge of the judicial administration, the maintenance of order, the supervision of the market, and the assessment and collection of the principal taxes. The kadı’s court was the principal court of the kaza, and the kadı’s office was the principal point of contact between the subject population and the imperial administration.

The Vilayet and the Tanzimat

The Tanzimat reforms transformed the Ottoman provincial system. The 1864 Vilayet Nizamnamesi (Provincial Law) and the supplementary 1871 İdare-i Umumiye-i Vilayat Nizamnamesi (General Administration of the Provinces Law) reorganized the eyalets as vilayets (provinces), governed by valis (governors) appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. Each vilayet was divided into sanjaks (sanctuarys), each sanjak into kazas, and each kaza into nahiyes. The vali was assisted by an Idare Meclisi (Administrative Council) and a judiciary drawn from the reformed secular courts; and the law attempted to provide for the participation of non-Muslims in the local administration.

The vilayet system was an attempt to impose a uniform administrative pattern on a diverse empire. It worked reasonably well in some provinces — the *vilayet of the Danube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danube_Vilayet) was a model of the new system — and it worked badly in others. The autonomy of the *mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lebanon_Mutasarrifate), established in 1861, was a partial exception; the status quo in the Holy Land, the international administration of Crete, and the long struggle of the European powers to limit Ottoman sovereignty in the Balkans were the most important exceptions. The vilayet system, in its broad outlines, survived into the Turkish Republic and provided the framework of the modern Turkish province.

The Millet System

The confessional counterpart of the territorial eyalet was the millet, the framework by which the empire’s non-Muslim religious communities — Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews, and others — were organized and governed. The classical formulation of the system, popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, attributed to Mehmed II the Conqueror a deliberate charter granting the Greek Orthodox community a wide-ranging internal autonomy under its own patriarch. Modern scholarship has questioned the precision of this narrative, but the broad facts are clear: the empire recognized the corporate existence of its non-Muslim communities, permitted them to maintain their own religious hierarchies, courts, schools, and charitable institutions, and assigned a senior ecclesiastical figure to act as the intermediary between the community and the Ottoman state. The patriarchs and the chief rabbis were, in effect, provincial governors of a special kind, comparable in some respects to the beylerbeyis who administered the secular eyalets — and they were recognized as such by the sultan and the imperial court.

The major millets of the empire were the Rum (Greek Orthodox) millet, the Armenian millet, and the Jewish millet; in the nineteenth century, the empire also recognized a number of smaller millets for the Syriac, Chaldean, Coptic, and other Eastern Christian communities, for the Druze of Mount Lebanon, and for the Yezidis of the upper Tigris. Each millet had a head — the Ecumenical Patriarch for the Rum, the Armenian Patriarch for the Armenians, the Chief Rabbi for the Jews — who was appointed by the sultan and who served at the sultan’s pleasure. The head of the millet had charge of the personal status of the members of his community, of the religious courts that adjudicated marriage, divorce, and inheritance, of the schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions of the community, and of the representation of the community before the imperial authorities.

The millet system is treated in greater detail in the dedicated article on the millet system, and it is discussed in its broader institutional context in the overview of Ottoman government. It is worth noting here that the system was not a charter of religious liberty in the modern sense: the millets were subordinated to the state, they paid a special poll tax, they were subject to various legal disabilities, and they were unable to build new places of worship without permission. The system, however, gave the non-Muslim communities a substantial measure of self-government in matters of personal status and education, and it provided a framework for the management of religious diversity that was the most sophisticated of any pre-modern Islamic state.

The Tımar System and the Sipahi

The Ottoman provincial system was, in the classical period, closely linked to the tımar (prebend) and the sipahi (provincial cavalryman). A tımar was a grant of the right to collect the taxes of a particular village or group of villages, in return for the obligation to maintain a horseman, his horse, and his equipment out of the income and to bring a fixed number of armed retainers to the imperial army on campaign. The holders of tımars were the sipahis, the provincial cavalry that formed the backbone of the Ottoman army from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The tımar system integrated military mobilization, fiscal administration, and land tenure into a single institution, and it was one of the most distinctive features of the Ottoman provincial government.

The tımar system began to break down in the seventeenth century, as the cost of war rose and the state increasingly switched to cash-paid, mass-recruited infantry armed with muskets. As the tımars collapsed, the sipahis lost their economic basis; as the sipahis declined, the central government lost its primary means of controlling the Anatolian countryside. The reform of the tımar system, or its replacement by alternative fiscal arrangements, was a recurrent theme of Ottoman reform from the seventeenth century onward — and the issue was one of the principal concerns of the Grand Vizier and the Divan in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Pashas and the Provincial Elites

The provincial elite of the Ottoman Empire was, in the classical period, a service aristocracy drawn from the devshirme, the palace school, the ulema, and the timariot sipahis. The most senior of these officials, the beylerbeyi and the senior sanjakbeyi, were members of the kalemiye (the scribal service) and the seyfiye (the military service); they were appointed by the sultan and could be transferred or dismissed at the sultan’s will. The system was designed to prevent the formation of hereditary regional power bases, and it worked reasonably well in the classical period.

By the seventeenth century, however, the system had begun to fail. Large provinces such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, the Kurdish principalities of the east, and the Greek and Serbian principalities of the Balkans were in practice autonomous, governed by local dynasties of pashas, deys, beys, and voivodes who transmitted office within their own families and paid only nominal tribute to Istanbul. The most spectacular example was the Mamluk household of Egypt, which ruled the country in effective independence from the seventeenth century until the French invasion of 1798; the most enduring was the Husainid dynasty of Tunis, which ruled the regency from 1705 until the establishment of the French protectorate in 1881. The Köprülü family of Marmara, the Çapanoğlu of central Anatolia, and the Süleyman family of Sivas were the most prominent of the ayan — the provincial notables who came to dominate much of Anatolia in the eighteenth century.

The Tanzimat reforms attempted to reimpose central control on the autonomous provinces. The 1839 Gülhane Decree promised security of life, honour, and property for all Ottoman subjects, and the subsequent legislation attempted to abolish the abuses of the old provincial administration. The reforms were only partially successful: the vilayet system established in 1864 imposed a uniform administrative pattern on the remaining provinces, and the 1856 Islahat Edict extended the guarantees of 1839 to the non-Muslim communities — the same reforms that, in the millet system more broadly, attempted to modernize the relationship between the state and its non-Muslim subjects. The autonomous provinces, however, gradually slipped from the empire’s grasp: Algeria was occupied by France in 1830, Tunis followed in 1881, Egypt became a British protectorate in 1882, the Balkan provinces achieved independence in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Arab provinces were lost during and after the First World War.

The Cizye, the Haraç, and the Fiscal Privileges

The non-Muslim communities of the empire were subject to a separate fiscal regime from the Muslim majority. The principal tax was the haraç (or cizye), a poll tax paid by adult non-Muslim males in lieu of the öşür (the tithe on agricultural produce) and the military service required of Muslims. The haraç was, in theory, a redemption for military service, and it was forbidden by Islamic law to Muslims. The haraç was assessed on a sliding scale according to the wealth of the taxpayer, and it was collected annually by the local kadı and remitted to the central treasury. The institution was modified repeatedly over the centuries — most notably by Suleiman the Magnificent, whose kanunname codified the existing practice in a way that endured for the next three centuries.

The non-Muslim communities were also subject to a series of legal disabilities that were gradually relaxed in the nineteenth century. They were forbidden to bear arms, to build new places of worship, to ride on horseback in the cities, to wear certain colors or fabrics reserved for Muslims, and to marry Muslim women. The disabilities were inconsistently enforced, varied from region to region, and were largely abolished by the Islahat Edict of 1856.

The fiscal and legal status of the non-Muslim communities was one of the most hotly debated issues of nineteenth-century Ottoman politics, and the reforms of the Tanzimat and the Islahat were intended in part to satisfy the European powers, which had begun to claim a right to intervene in Ottoman affairs on behalf of the empire’s Christian subjects. The reforms were, in the event, one of the principal causes of the rise of Balkan nationalism: the strengthening of the Orthodox millet, the establishment of secular schools, and the increasing influence of the European powers all contributed to the emergence of the Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian national movements that ultimately dissolved the empire in the Balkans.

Conclusion

The Ottoman provincial system and the millet system were, in their long history, the principal instruments by which the empire was governed. The eyalet and the sanjak provided the territorial framework; the kadı court and the timar sipahi provided the local administration; the millet provided the confessional organization of the non-Muslim communities. The system was extraordinarily effective in the classical period, but it gradually broke down in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the autonomous provinces established de facto independence and the central government’s fiscal and military resources declined. The Tanzimat reforms of the nineteenth century attempted to reimpose central control, but the reforms came too late to prevent the loss of the empire’s non-Anatolian territories and the dissolution of the old millet framework into the new nationalisms of the modern Middle East.