Administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire
|State organisation of
the Ottoman Empire
The administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire were administrative divisions of the state organisation of the Ottoman Empire. Outside this system were various types of vassal and tributary states.
The Ottoman Empire was first subdivided into provinces, in the sense of fixed territorial units with governors appointed by the sultan, in the late 14th century. The beylerbey, or governor, of each province was appointed by the central government. Sanjaks were governed by sanjak beys (sancakbeyi), selected from the high military ranks by the central government. Beylerbeyis had authority over all the sancakbeyis in a region. Kaza was a subdivision of sancak and referred to the basic administrative district, governed by a kadı.
It is considered extremely difficult to define the number and exact borders of Ottoman provinces and domains, as their borders were changed constantly. Until the Tanzimat period, the borders of administrative units fluctuated, reflecting the changing strategies of the Ottomans, the emergence of new threats in the region, and the rise of powerful Ayans. All the subdivisions were very unequal in regard of area and population, and the presence of numerous nomadic tribes contributed to the extreme variability of the population figures.
In English, Ottoman subdivisions are seldom known by a myriad of Turkish terms (vilayet, eyalet, beylerbeylik, sancak, nahiye, kaza, etc.) which are often eschewed in favour of the English-language denomination (e.g. "province", "county", or "district") that is perceived to be the closest to the Turkish original. These translations are rarely consistent between the works of different scholars, however.
Initial organization (pre 1362) 
The initial organization dates back to the Ottoman beginnings as a Seljuk vassal state (Uç Beyliği) in central Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire over the years became an amalgamation of pre-existing polities, the Anatolian beyliks, brought under the sway of the ruling House of Osman.
This extension was based on an already established administrative structure of the Seljuk system in which the hereditary rulers of these territories were known as beys. These beys (local leadership), which were not eliminated, continued to rule under the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultans. The term bey came to be applied not only to these former rulers but also to new governors appointed where the local leadership had been eliminated.
The Ottoman Empire was, at first, subdivided into the sovereign’s sanjak and other sanjaks entrusted to the Ottoman sultan’s sons. Sanjaks were governed by sanjakbeys, military governors who received a flag or standard – a "sanjak" (the literal meaning) – from the sultan.
As the Empire expanded into Europe, the need for an intermediate level of administration arose and, under the rule of Murad I (r. 1359-1389), a beylerbey ("bey of beys") or governor-general was appointed to oversee Rumelia, the European part of the empire. At the end of the 14th century, a beylerbeylik was also established for Anatolia, with his capital at Kütahya. He was always considered inferior in rank to the beylerbey of Rumelia, since large areas nominally under his control were given to the ruler's sons.
Following the establishment of beylerbeyliks, sanjaks became second-order administrative divisions, although they continued to be of the first order in certain circumstances such as newly conquered areas that had yet to be assigned a beylerbey. In addition to their duties as governors-general, beylerbeys were the commanders of all troops in their province.
There were two main eras of administrative organisation. The first was the initial organisation that evolved with the rise of the Empire and the second was the organisation after extensive administrative reforms of 1864.
Eyalet was the territory of office or a beylerbeyi, and was further subdivided in sanjaks.
During the first years of Bayezid’s reign, the first two eyalets were established: Rumelia Eyalet, comprising all the lands conquered in Europe, and Anatolia Eyalet, comprising all the conquests in Asia Minor. With the eastward expansion of Bayezid’s realms in the 1390s, a third eyalet, the eyalet of Rum, came into existence, with Amasya its chief town. This became the seat of government of Bayezid’s youngest son, Mehmed I, and was to remain a residence of princely governors until the 16th century.
In 1395, Bayezid I executed the last Shishmanid Tsar of Bulgaria, and annexed his realm to the eyalet of Rumelia. In 1461, Mehmed II expelled the last of the Isfendyarid dynasty from Sinop, awarding him lands near Bursa in exchange for his hereditary territory. The Isfendyarid principality became a district of the eyalet of Anatolia. In 1468, the Eyalet of Karaman was established, following the annexation of the formerly independent principality of Karaman; Mehmed II appointed his son Mustafa as governor of the new eyalet, with his seat at Konya.
The 16th century saw the greatest increase in the number of eyalets, largely through the conquests of Selim I and Süleyman I, which created the need to incorporate the new territory into the structure of the Empire, and partly through the reorganisation of existing territory. A list dated 1527 shows eight eyalets, with Egypt, Syria, Diyarbekir and Kurdistan added to the original four. The last eyalet, however, did not survive as an administrative entity. Süleyman’s conquests in eastern Turkey, Iraq and Hungary also resulted in the creation of new eyalets.
The former principality of Dulkadir became the Eyalet of Dulkadir at some time after its annexation in 1522. After the Iranian campaign of 1533–6, the new eyalets of Erzurum, Van, Shehrizor and Baghdad guarded the frontier with Iran. In 1541 came the creation of the eyalet of Buda from part of the old Kingdom of Hungary. The Eyalet of the Islands was created by Süleyman I especially for Hayreddin Barbarossa in 1533, by detaching districts from the shores and islands of the Aegean which had previously been part of the eyalets of Rumelia and Anatolia, and uniting them as an independent eyalet.
In 1580 Bosnia, previously a district of Rumelia, became an eyalet in its own right, presumably in view of its strategically important position on the border with the Habsburgs. Similar considerations led to the creation of the eyalet of Kanizsa from the districts adjoining this border fortress, which had fallen to the Ottomans in 1600. In the same period, the annexation of the Rumelian districts on the lower Danube and the Black Sea coast, and their addition to territories between the Danube and the Dniepr along the Black Sea, created the eyalet of Ochakov. At the same time, on the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea, the eyalet of Trabzon came into being. The purpose of this reorganisation, and especially the creation of the eyalet of Özi was presumably to improve the defences of the Black Sea ports against the Cossacks.
By 1500, the four central eyalets of the Empire, Rumelia, Anatolia, Rum and Karaman, were under direct rule. Wallachia, Moldavia and the Khanate of the Crimea, territories which Mehmed II had brought under his suzerainty, remained in the control of native dynasties tributary to the Sultan. So, too, did the Kingdom of Hungary after the battle of Mohács in 1526. By 1609, according to the list of Ayn Ali, there were 32 eyalets. Some of these, such as Tripoli, Cyprus or Tunis, were the spoils of conquest. Others, however, were the products of administrative division.
Beylerbey (Governors of Eyalets) 
The Turkish word for governor-general is Beylerbey, meaning ‘lord of lords’. In times of war, they would assemble under his standard and fight as a unit in the sultan’s army. However, as a territorial governor, the Beylerbey now had wider responsibilities. He played the major role in allocating fiefs in his eyalet, and had a responsibility for maintaining order and dispensing justice. His household, like the sultan’s in the capital, was the political centre of the eyalet. By the mid-16th century, apart from the principalities north of the Danube, all eyalets came under the direct rule of the sultan. The Beylerbeys were all his appointees, and he could remove or transfer them at will. Their term of office was limited: governorships were not hereditary, and no one could serve for life.
The office of Beylerbey was the most prestigious and the most profitable in the provincial government, and it was from among the Beylerbeys that the sultan almost always chose his viziers. There was also, it appears, a hierarchy among the governors themselves. The senior was the Beylerbey of Rumelia who, from 1536, had the right to sit on the Imperial Council. Precedence among the remainder, according to Ayn Ali in 1609, followed the order in which the eyalets were conquered, although he does not make it clear whether this ranking had anything other than a ceremonial significance. However, before 1650, there was another development. During this period, the practice began of appointing some Beylerbeys with the rank of vizier. A vizieral governor, according to the chancellor Abdurrahman Pasha in 1676, had command over the governors of adjoining eyalets who ‘should have recourse to him and obey his command’. Furthermore, ‘when Beylerbeys with Vizierates are dismissed from their eyalet, they listen to lawsuits and continue to exercise Vizieral command until they reach Istanbul’.
The provinces (eyalets) were divided into sanjaks (also called livas) governed by sanjakbeys (also called Mutesarrifs) and were further subdivided into timars (fiefs held by timariots), kadiluks (the area of responsibility of a judge, or Kadı) and zeamets (also ziam; larger timars).
The districts which made up an eyalet were known as sanjaks, each under the command of a sanjak-bey. The number of sanjaks in each eyalet varied considerably. In 1609, Ayn Ali noted that Rumelia had 24 sanjaks, but that six of these in the Peloponnesos had been detached to form a separate eyalet of the Morea. Anatolia had 14 sanjaks and the eyalet of Damascus had 11. There were, in addition, several eyalets where there was no formal division into sanjaks. These, in Ayn Ali’s list were Basra and part of the eyalet of Baghdad, Al-Hasa, Egypt, Tripoli, Tunis and Algiers. He adds to the list Yemen, with the note that ‘at the moment the Imams have usurped control’. These eyalets were, however, exceptional: the typical pattern was the eyalet subdivided into sanjaks. By the 16th century, these presented a rational administrative pattern of territories, based usually around the town or settlement from which the Sanjak took its name, and with a population of perhaps 100,000.
However, this had not always been the case. It seems more likely that before the mid-15th century, the most important factor in determining the pattern of sanjaks was the existence of former lordships and principalities, and of areas where marcher lords had acquired territories for themselves and their followers. Some sanjaks in fact preserved the names of the dynasties that had ruled there before the Ottoman conquest.
In 1609, Ayn Ali made a note on their formal status. In listing the sanjaks in the eyalet of Diyarbekir, he notes that it had ten ‘Ottoman districts’ and, in addition, eight ‘districts of the Kurdish lords’. In these cases, when a lord died, the governorship did not go to an outsider, but to his son. In other respects, however, they resembled normal Ottoman sanjaks, in that the revenues were registered and allocated to fief holders who went to war under their lord. In addition, however, Ayn Ali noted that there were five ‘sovereign sanjaks’, which their lords disposed of ‘as private property’, and which were outside the system of provincial government. Ayn Ali records similar independent or semi-independent districts in the eyalet of Çıldır in north-eastern Turkey and, most famously, in the eyalet of Van where the Khans of Bitlis ruled independently until the 19th century. There were other areas, too, which enjoyed autonomy or semi-autonomy. In the second half of the 16th century, Kilis came under the hereditary governorship of the Janbulad family, while Adana remained under the rule of the pre-Ottoman dynasty of Ramazanoghlu. In Lebanon, Ayn Ali refers to the Druze chieftains with the note: ‘there are non-Muslim lords in the mountains.’ There were other autonomous enclaves in the Empire, whether or not they received formal recognition as sanjaks but, by the 16th century, these were exceptional.
Most of the sanjaks throughout the Empire were under the rule of non-hereditary appointees, who had no permanent family of territorial connections with the area.
Sanjak-bey (Governors of Sanjaks) 
The office of Sanjak-bey resembled that of Beylerbey on a more modest scale. Like the Beylerbey, the Sanjak-bey drew his income from a prebend, which consisted usually of revenues from the towns, quays and ports within the boundary of his sanjak.
Like the Beylerbey, the Sanjak-bey was also a military commander. The term sanjak means ‘flag’ or ‘standard’ and, in times of war, the cavalrymen holding fiefs in his sanjak, gathered under his banner. The troops of each sanjak, under the command of their governor, would then assemble as an army and fight under the banner of the Beylerbey of the eyalet. In this way, the structure of command on the battlefield resembled the hierarchy of provincial government. Within his own sanjak, a governor was responsible above all for maintaining order and, with the cooperation of the fief holders, arresting and punishing wrongdoers. For this, he usually received half of the fines imposed on miscreants, with the fief holder on whose lands the misdeed took place, receiving the other half. Sanjak governors also had other duties, for example, the pursuit of bandits, the investigation of heretics, the provision of supplies for the army, or the despatch of materials for shipbuilding, as the sultan commanded.
Sanjak governors also served as military commanders of all of the timariot and zeamet-holding cavalrymen in their sanjak. Some provinces such as Egypt, Baghdad, Abyssinia, and Al-Hasa (the salyane provinces) were not subdivided into sanjaks and timars. The area governed by an Aga was often known as an Agaluk. The term Arpalik (Turkish: Arpalık), or Arpaluk, refers to large estate (i.e. sanjak) entrusted to some holder of senior position, or to some margrave, as temporary arrangement before they were appointed to some appropriate position. The barleycorn was known as arpa in Turkish, and the feudal system in Ottoman Empire employed the term Arpalik, or "barley-money", to refer to a second allowance made to officials to offset the costs of fodder for their horses (for covering the expenses of keeping a small unit of cavalry).
The Vilayets were introduced with the promulgation of the "Vilayet Law" (Turkish: Teskil-i Vilayet Nizamnamesi) in 1864, as part of the administrative reforms that were being enacted throughout the empire. Unlike the previous eyalet system, the 1864 law established a hierarchy of administrative units: the vilayet, liva/sanjak, kaza and village council, to which the 1871 Vilayet Law added the nabiye. The 1864 law also specified the responsibilities of the governor (wali) of the vilayet and their councils. At the same time, the law left to the governors vast scope for independent action as well as responsibility, as part of a system intended to achieve a large degree of efficiency in ruling the provinces.
The Sanjak was governed just as a Vilayet on a smaller scale. The Mutesarrif was appointed by Imperial decree, and represented the Vali, corresponding with the Government through him, except in some special circumstances where the Sanjak was independent, in which case the Mutesarrif corresponded directly with the Ministry of the Interior.
See also 
- Imber, Colin (2002). "The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power". pp. 177–200.
- Sacred Obligations, Precious Interests: Ottoman Grain Administration in Comparative Perspective (p. 12)
- Southeastern Europe under Ottoman rule, 1354-1804 at Google Books By Peter F. Sugar
- Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire at Google Books By Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters
- System of universal geography founded on the works of Malte-Brun and Balbi
- Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire By Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters
- History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Volume 1 at Google Books By Stanford J. Shaw
- Europe and the historical legacies in the Balkans at Google Books By Raymond Detrez, Barbara Segaert
- Malcolm, Noel (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. Macmillan. p. 50. ISBN 0-330-41244-2.
- Zeʼevi, Dror (1996), An Ottoman century : the district of Jerusalem in the 1600s, Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 121, ISBN 978-0-585-04345-6, OCLC 42854785, retrieved 29. December 2011
- Houtsma M Th; Arnold TW, Wensinck AJ (1993). E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913-1936. Brill. p. 460. ISBN 90-04-09796-1.
- Turkish public administration: from tradition to the modern age at Google Books By Hamit Palabiyik
- Haifa in the late Ottoman period, 1864-1914: a Muslim town in transition at Google Books By Maḥmūd Yazbak
- Governing property, making the modern state: law, administration and ... at Google Books By Martha Mundy, Richard Saumarez Smith
- A handbook of Asia Minor Published 1919 by Naval staff, Intelligence dept. in London. Page 204
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire|
- Map of Europe in year 1500 with the subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire
- WorldStatesmen Turkey; see also other present-day countries
Further reading 
- Colin Imber. The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.)
- Halil Inalcik. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600. Trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.)
- Paul Robert Magocsi. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. (2nd ed.) Seattle, WA, USA: Univ. of Washington Press, 2002)
- Nouveau Larousse illustré, undated (early 20th century), passim (in French)
- Donald Edgar Pitcher. An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire. (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J.Brill,1972.) (Includes 36 color maps)
- Westermann, Großer Atlas zur Weltgeschichte (in German) (includes maps)