Janissaries and Urban Notables in Local Politics: Struggle for Power and Factional Strife in the Late Eighteenth-Century Anatolian Town of Adana

Abstract

The transformations that occurred in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, summarized by one author as more army, more taxes, more bureaucracy, and more state intrusion in the Ottoman provinces, radically changed provincial life in the Ottoman domains. Growing tax and manpower demands not only increased socio-economic pressure on the provinces but also redefined the sultan’s relationship with local authorities. Accompanied by the increasingly frequent stationing of the Janissary corps in the Ottoman provinces, especially in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman cities and towns saw new elite configurations and new types of power struggles and came under greater economic pressure. The rising number of registered Janissaries changed the internal dynamics of the towns, shaped local politics, and created new struggles for power in the cities where corps regiments were stationed, pushing the Janissaries into local politics, whether as rivals or allies of the local elite. As elsewhere, the southern Anatolian town of Adana witnessed such changes in its social structure, local politics, and relations with the imperial authority. Although similarities are to be seen with the eighteenth century provincial power struggles in the Anatolian and Arabian cities of Gaziantep and Aleppo in terms of intense factional strife and the active involvement of the Janissaries and their pretenders in local politics, the power struggle in Adana was between several Janissary officers, one of whom subsequently managed to become the urban notable (ayan) of the town.