During the 16th century the institutions of society and government that had been evolving in the Ottoman dominions for two centuries reached the classical forms and patterns that were to persist into modern times. The basic division in Ottoman society was the traditional Middle Eastern distinction between a small ruling class of Ottomans (Osmanlı) and a large mass of subjects called rayas (reʿâyâ). Three attributes were essential for membership in the Ottoman ruling class: profession of loyalty to the sultan and his state; acceptance and practice of Islam and its underlying system of thought and action; and knowledge and practice of the complicated system of customs, behaviour, and language known as the Ottoman Way. Those who lacked any of those attributes were considered to be members of the subject class, the “protected flock” of the sultan.

Social mobility was based on the possession of those definable and attainable attributes. Rayas able to acquire them could rise into the ruling class, and Ottomans who came to lack any of them became members of the subject class. Members of the ruling class were considered the sultan’s slaves and acquired their master’s social status. As slaves, however, their properties, lives, and persons were entirely at his disposition. Their basic functions were to preserve the Islamic nature of the state and to rule and defend the empire. By Ottoman theory the main attribute of the sultan’s sovereignty was the right to possess and exploit all sources of wealth in the empire. The function of enlarging, protecting, and exploiting that wealth for the benefit of the sultan and his state, therefore, was the main duty of the ruling class. The rayas produced the wealth by farming the land or engaging in trade and industry and then paying a portion of the resulting profits to the ruling class in the form of taxes.

Organizations and hierarchies were developed by the ruling and subject classes to carry out their functions in Ottoman society. The ruling class divided itself into four functional institutions: the imperial, or palace (mülkiye), institution, personally led by the sultan, which provided the leadership and direction for the other institutions as well as for the entire Ottoman system; the military (seyfiye or askeriye) institution, which was responsible for expanding and defending the empire and keeping order and security within the sultan’s dominions; the administrative, or scribal (kalemiye), institution, organized as the imperial treasury (hazine-i amire), which was in charge of collecting and spending the imperial revenues; and the religious, or cultural (ilmiye), institution, comprising the ulama (Muslims expert in the religious sciences), which was in charge of organizing and propagating the faith and maintaining and enforcing the religious law (Sharīʿah or Şeriat)—its interpretation in the courts, its expounding in the mosques and schools, and its study and interpretation.

To cover the areas of life not included within the scope of the ruling class of Ottomans, members of the subject class were allowed to organize themselves as they wished. As a natural manifestation of Middle Eastern society, their organization was determined largely by religious and occupational distinctions. The basic class divisions within the subject class were determined by religion, with each important group organizing into a relatively self-contained autonomous religious community usually called a millet (also taife or cemaat), which operated under its own laws and customs and was directed by a religious leader responsible to the sultan for the fulfillment of the duties and responsibilities of the millet members, particularly those of paying taxes and security. In addition, each millet cared for the many social and administrative functions not assumed by the Ottoman ruling class, concerning such matters as marriage, divorce, birth and death, health, education, internal security, and justice. Within the millets, just as in Ottoman society as a whole, there was social mobility, with persons moving up and down the ladder according to ability and luck. Individuals could pass from one millet to another if they wished to convert, but, because all the millets were extremely antagonistic toward those who left them to convert to another religion, the state discouraged such action as much as possible to preserve social harmony and tranquility.

The purpose of the millet system was to keep the different peoples of the empire separated in order to minimize conflict and preserve social order in a highly heterogeneous state. Christian hatred of Muslims (Islamophobia) and Jews (anti-Semitism), however, led to constant tension and competition among the different millets, with the Jews being subjected to “blood libel” attacks against their persons, shops, and homes by the sultan’s Greek and Armenian subjects. Those attacks intensified during the week preceding Easter, when Greeks and Armenians were driven into a frenzy by the old accusations, invented in ancient times by the Greek Orthodox Church, that Jews murdered Christian children in order to use their blood for religious rituals. The sultan intervened to provide protection for his Jewish subjects as much as possible, though the fact that many of his soldiers were Christians converted to Islam who retained the hatreds instilled in their childhoods made that intervention difficult.

In addition to the religion-based millets, Ottoman subjects also organized themselves by economic function into guilds. Those guilds regulated economic activities, setting quality and pricing standards that guild members had to maintain in order to continue in their occupations. In most cases particular occupations were monopolized by members of one millet, but, in some trades practiced by members of different religions, guild membership cut across religious boundaries, joining members of different religions in common organizations based not on class, rank, or religion but on mutually shared values and beliefs, economic activities, and social needs. Through contact and cooperation in such guilds, members of the different groups of Ottoman society were cemented into a common whole, performing many of the social and economic functions outside the scope of the ruling class and the millets, particularly those functions associated with economic regulation and social security. In many cases guilds also were associated intimately with mystic religious orders, which—providing a more personal religious experience than that provided by the established Muslim and non-Muslim religious organizations—came to dominate Ottoman society in its centuries of decline.

Within the Ottoman ruling class the most important unit of organization and action was the mukâṭaʿa, in which a member of the ruling class was given a portion of the sultan’s revenues along with authority to use the revenues for purposes determined by the sultan. The exact nature of the mukâṭaʿa depended on the proportion of the revenues that the holder remitted to the treasury and the proportion he retained for himself. Three types of mukâṭaʿa were found: timars, emanets, and iltizāms.

The timar, traditionally described as a fief, only superficially resembled European feudalism; it was part of a centralized system and did not involve the mutual rights and obligations that characterized feudalism in the West. In return for services to the state, the timar holder was given the full profits of the source of revenue for his personal exploitation and profit; those profits were independent of, and in addition to, those connected with the exploitation of the timar itself. For many military and administrative positions, timars normally were given in lieu of salaries, thus relieving the treasury of the trouble and expense of collecting revenues and disbursing them to its employees as salaries. Almost all of the 14th- and 15th-century Ottoman conquests in southeastern Europe were distributed as timars to military officers, who in return assumed administrative responsibility in peacetime and provided soldiers and military leadership for the Ottoman army in war. Many of the officers of the central government also were rewarded with timars in place of, or in addition to, salaries paid by the treasury.

A less common form of the mukâṭaʿa was the emanet (“trusteeship”), held by the emin (“trustee” or “agent”). In contrast to the timar holder, the emin turned all his proceeds over to the treasury and was compensated entirely by salary, thus being the closest Ottoman equivalent to the modern government official. The legal rationale for that arrangement was that the emin undertook no additional service beyond administering the mukâṭaʿa and thus had no right to share in its profits. Used primarily for urban customhouses and market police, emanets were closely supervised by the central government and its agents and did not need the profit motive in order to assure efficiency on the part of the holders.

The most common kind of mukâṭaʿa, and therefore the most prevalent type of administrative unit in the Ottoman system, was the tax farm (iltizām), which combined elements of both the timar and emanet. As in the timar, the tax farmer (mültezim) could keep only a part of the tax he collected and had to deliver the balance to the treasury. That was because his service consisted only of his work in administering the mukâṭaʿa, for which he was given a share of his collection instead of the emin’s salary. The tax farmer thus was given the inducement of profit to be as efficient as possible. Most of Anatolia and the Arab provinces were administered in that way because they were conquered at a time when the government’s need for cash to pay the salaried Janissary infantry and supply an increasingly lavish court required the treasury to seek out all the revenues it could find. As the timar-based sipahi cavalry became less important and as the Turkish notables who held most of the timars lost most of their political power during the time of Süleyman, the estates gradually fell into the hands of the devşirme class.

The legal and customary bases of organization and action in Ottoman society depended on a dual system of law: the Sharīʿah, or Muslim religious law, and the kanun, or civil law. The Sharīʿah was the basic law of Ottoman society, as it was of all Muslim communities. Considered to be a divinely inspired corpus of political, social, and moral regulations and principles, the Sharīʿah was intended to cover all aspects of life for Muslims, although it was highly developed only in the issues of personal behaviour that affected the early Muslim community and were reflected in the Qurʾān and early Muslim tradition. It never was developed in detail in matters of public law, state organization, and administration. Its general principles left room for interpretation and legislation on specific matters by secular authorities, and the Muslim judges of the Ottoman Empire recognized the right of the sultan to legislate in civil laws as long as he did not conflict with the Sharīʿah in detail or principle. The Sharīʿah, therefore, provided the principles of public law and covered matters of personal behaviour and status in the Muslim millets in the same way that the members of the Christian and Jewish millets were subject to their own religious codes. The Sharīʿah was interpreted and enforced by members of the cultural institution, the ulama, just as the laws of each non-Muslim millet were enforced by its leaders. The members of the ulama who interpreted the law in the courts, called qadis, as well as the jurisconsults, called muftis, had the right to invalidate any secular law they felt contradicted the Sharīʿah; however, they rarely used that right, because, as part of the ruling class, they were under the authority of the sultan and could be removed from their positions. The sultan therefore was relatively free to issue secular laws to meet the needs of the time, a major factor in the long survival of the empire. It must be noted, however, that, with the restricted scope of the Ottoman ruling class and state and the large areas of power and function left to the religious communities, guilds, and Ottoman officials who held the mukâṭaʿas, the sultans were never as autocratic as has been assumed. It was only in the 19th century that Ottoman reformers centralized government and society on Western lines and restricted or ended the traditional autonomies that had done so much to decentralize power in the previous centuries.