The Provincial Sipahi Cavalry

The sipahis were the provincial cavalry of the Ottoman state, the horsemen who, in the classical period, formed the mounted backbone of the army. They were drawn from the Muslim landholding class and supported by the timar system, a prebendal fief system in which a revenue unit, generally a village or part of one, was granted to a cavalryman in return for his service in the army. The sipahi was, in theory, a self-financing warrior, paid in land rather than in coin, and the system gave the Ottoman state a flexible and relatively cheap cavalry arm. A general account of the Ottoman military and warfare and of the Janissary corps provides the wider context for the sipahi’s role in the army.

Key dates

c. 1320s–1330s — The timar system emerges under Orhan, parallel to the rise of the sipahi cavalry.
1362 — Murad I’s sipahi levies fight at the battle of Sazlıdere.
1389 — Sipahis of Rumelia fight at the battle of Kosovo.
1453 — The sipahis of the centre are decisive in the pursuit after the fall of Constantinople.
1526 — Sipahi cavalry of both wings take part in the victory at Mohács.
1550s–1560s — Under Süleyman, the timar system reaches its greatest extent in the Balkans.
1590s — The Celâlî revolts begin; the timar system starts to break down in Anatolia.
1699 — Treaty of Karlowitz; the mukataa (tax-farm) has effectively replaced the timar in most provinces.

The timar system

The timar was a revenue unit, generally a village or a portion of one, granted to a sipahi in return for his service. The sipahi was obliged to appear at the muster with a horse, with arms and equipment, and with a certain number of armed retainers, the cebelu, depending on the size of the timar. The sipahi in turn was paid in the revenues of the timar, which the imperial administration assessed and re-assessed at regular intervals through the defterhane, the register office.

A senior timar, the zeamet, was generally granted to a sipahi of higher rank; a has was a larger revenue unit, reserved for the sultan and his senior officers. The whole system was carefully graded, and the assessment of timars was recalculated roughly every generation, in the great cadastral surveys (tahrir) that the Ottoman state carried out in the conquered lands. The sipahi was, in theory, paid only in wartime, and the timar reverted to the state if the sipahi failed to answer the summons or to perform his obligations.

The tugh, the horse-tail standard of the sipahi, distinguished his rank by colour: one, two, or three tails for the sipahi of the timar, the zeamet, and the has respectively. Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador at Suleiman’s court, described the timar system in the 1550s with the appreciation of a man who recognised a successful administrative machine when he saw one:

“The cavalry of the sultan is paid not in coin but in land; and the system is so well ordered that the empire can put into the field a greater number of horsemen than any Christian prince, at a tenth of the cost.” — Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Turkish Letters (1560s).

The cavalry in the field

The sipahi fought in the centre or on the wings of the Ottoman line, in the bölük (squadron) — the basic tactical unit of Ottoman cavalry, commanded by a bölükbaşı. At campaign level, sipahi regiments were organised in alay and tümen. The sipahi was equipped with a composite bow, a lance, a short sword, a mace, a kilij (the single-edged Ottoman sabre, of which the older pala is the direct ancestor), and, increasingly, with light armour. The sipahi was trained to shoot from the saddle, to charge in a wedge, and to fight in close combat. The sipahi’s tactical speciality was the feigned flight, the taktik that the Byzantines and the Crusaders had feared since the battle of Manzikert (1071) and that the Ottomans raised to a high art.

The sipahi served only in his home province, and the Ottoman army was a mosaic of provincial contingents. The sipahis of Rumelia, the European provinces, were considered the backbone of the army; the sipahis of Anatolia were generally considered somewhat less reliable. The sipahis of the frontier provinces — Bosnia, Albania, the Caucasus, the Crimean peninsula — were often irregular troops, and the akıncı light horse, the deli, the başıbozuk, and the various auxiliary formations of the empire were all part of the same broader picture.

The strengths of the system

The timar system had considerable strengths. It mobilised substantial numbers of horsemen at low direct cost to the treasury, since the sipahi was paid in land, not in coin. It distributed power and loyalty across the Anatolian and Balkan countryside, and it gave the state a flexible instrument of local administration. The sipahi was a local notable, embedded in the life of his village, and the system gave the Ottoman state a degree of social reach that the contemporary European powers could not match.

The system also had a flexibility that the European feudal levy did not. The sipahi was not bound to a particular lord or a particular estate; he was bound to the sultan, and his timar could be reassigned at any time. The system was therefore a state-levy system, not a feudal system, and the timar was, in this sense, an instrument of central control as well as of military mobilisation. Halil İnalcık’s argument in The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age that the timar was the administrative technology that allowed a small central elite to govern a vast and diverse empire is, on the whole, the standard reading.

The decline of the system

The timar system declined over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The cost of war rose, the value of the land grants declined relative to cash payments, and the sipahis themselves became more interested in tax-farming than in the field. The sipahis had become a much smaller, more localised, and less effective force, and the gap between the sipahi of the tahrir defter and the sipahi of the mukataa widened decade by decade. The Celâlî revolts of the 1590s and 1600s — large-scale bandit-armies in Anatolia led by displaced sipahis and rural dissidents — were both a symptom and a cause of the timar’s collapse. The breakdown of the timar system is part of the broader picture of Ottoman fiscal and military decline, and it is one of the underlying causes of the long series of military reverses of the late seventeenth century.

The breakdown of the timar system was not reversed by the military reforms of the nineteenth century. The new army, organised on European lines, was paid in cash, and the sipahi class had effectively disappeared. The word sipahi is still used in parts of the former Ottoman lands to refer to a local cavalryman or horseman, and in the Balkans the word survives in place-names and in folk memory. The classical sipahi, however, was a phenomenon of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the timar system is the most-studied single institution of the classical Ottoman state.

The sipahi of the early seventeenth century was a pale reflection of his classical predecessor. The sipahis, who had once been the mounted backbone of a continental army, were now a localised class of small landowners, more interested in the revenues of their timars than in the defence of the empire. The dissolution of the system was not, however, a single event: it was a long process, and the sipahi as a social type survived, in diminished form, into the nineteenth century.

Ottoman military and warfare — A general account of the Ottoman military, of which the sipahis were the provincial mounted arm.
The Janissary corps — The infantry that fought alongside the sipahi cavalry in the classical Ottoman field army.
The devshirme system — The “blood-tax” that recruited the Janissaries, but not the sipahis, who were drawn from the Muslim landholding class.
The siege of Vienna — The 1529 and 1683 sieges in which the sipahis played a major role, and which mark the high point and the decline of the classical timar system.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The siege tradition in which the sipahi cavalry played a critical supporting role, screening the army and protecting the lines of supply.

Sources and further reading

Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Praeger, 2009).
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Pearson, 2007).