1 A Glimpse at His Academic Life

İbrahim Metin Kunt was born in Ankara in 1942 into an upper middle-class family of state officials with historical connections to Ottoman provincial elites from both Albania and Damascus. He attended the prestigious secondary school Maarif Koleji in Ankara before moving to Istanbul to enrol as a Robert Academy student. After graduation from the Robert Academy in 1959, he continued his undergraduate education at Robert College, from where, in 1965, he received a BA degree in comparative literature.

Kunt then became an MA student of Ottoman history in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. While pursuing his MA studies, he took additional Ph.D. courses that would later inspire him to write his various masterpieces, including Sancaktan Eyalete (From Sanjak to Eyalet) and The Sultan’s Servants.² In the spring term of 1967, Norman Itzkowitz ran a seminar on nineteenth-century Ottoman history in which the works of British historian Lewis Namier were discussed. Namier’s reputation as a master of prosopographical methods gave Kunt the methodological horizons he sought to approach historical figures. A second seminar was given by Halil İnalcık, who at that time was a guest professor at Princeton. As Kunt recalled, İnalcık discussed what academic tools were needed to analyse Ottoman primary sources, which he found invaluable for studying archival documents. In the autumn of 1967 he attended the seminar of another guest professor, David Ayalon, a well-known authority on Mamluk history. This gave Kunt a new insight into Mamluk political structures at a time when the political-military slave institution was at its most elaborate. This seminar stressed the importance of the Islamic cultural context when comparing Mamluk and Ottoman polities.³

In 1968, Kunt received his MA in Near Eastern studies at Princeton and pursued his Ph.D. at the same institution. His dissertation was on the period of the grand vizierate of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, and his supervisor was Norman Itzkowitz, whose prosopographical studies on Ottoman ruling elites and ulema had so deeply influenced Kunt’s academic interests. Kunt widened his research on Köprülü Mehmed Pasha to encompass the social background of the statesman and, through this endeavour, gained deep insights into the ethnic and regional motives of members of the Ottoman ruling class.⁴

While working on his dissertation, in November 1970 Kunt attended the fourth annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), in Columbus, Ohio, at which he gave a presentation on regional and ethnic solidarities within the seventeenth-century Ottoman ruling elite. An abridged version of his paper, published in 1974,⁵ remains an important secondary source on the issue.

The title of Kunt’s Ph.D., which he received in 1971, was “The Köprülü Years: 1656–1661”. At this point, he returned to Turkey and became an instructor at Boğaziçi University, his alma mater which until then had been known as Robert College. In 1972/3 he joined the board of the newly-founded Boğaziçi University humanities journal – Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Dergisi-Hümaniter Bilimler – and remained an active member of its editorial board until 1980.⁶

Between 1971 and 1974 Kunt worked in the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives and in the Topkapı Palace Library to further his studies on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ottoman history. At that time, his aim was to complete a comprehensive study of pasha and bey households within the Ottoman political and social order. During his early explorations at the archives he often cooperated with renowned Ottomanists such as Cengiz Orhonlu and Halil Sahillioğlu and with historians like Itzkowitz, İnalcık, William K. S. Tobin, Engin D. Akarlı and Mehmed Genç.⁷

On 8–10 November 1973, he attended the MESA meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at which he gave a paper on “The Ottoman State and the Ottoman Household”.⁸ A revised and extended version of this presentation appeared in Turkish under the title “Kulların Kulları” (Servants of Servants) in 1975.⁹ In autumn 1974, Kunt was given a research grant by Boğaziçi University, which enabled him to return to Princeton for an academic year as a research fellow. There, he formulated the original Turkish version of his doçentlik thesis. In spring 1975, during his stay in the USA, Kunt gave papers on mid-seventeenth-century grand vizier Derviş Mehmed Paşa at Princeton, at the University of Michigan and at New York University, which formed the backbone of his 1977 Turcica article.¹⁰

In April 1976, he defended the doçentlik thesis, titled Sancaktan Eyalete, and became an associate professor. According to Kunt, this study was a by-product of his more general research on the households of the Ottoman ruling elite.¹¹ However, as discussed below, this book is the first analytical and detailed study of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman provincial administration in the Turkish language and it introduces the idea of transformation into Ottoman history. This thesis was published in November 1978 by the Boğaziçi University Press.

Another by-product of Kunt’s prosopographic interest in the Ottoman ruling elite in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries was the above-mentioned article on Derviş Mehmed Paşa.¹²

Kunt aimed to make his Sancaktan Eyalete study accessible to a wider, more international audience and to realize this goal, he conducted further research into the relationship between a governor’s official income and his administrative obligations, which he undertook during the academic year 1977/8 as a visiting associate professor at Columbia University, after which he went to Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University. During his stay at Columbia he had benefited from fruitful discussions with numerous Ottoman and European specialists, notably T. Halasi-Kun, J. C. Hurewitz, and R. Bulliet. At the Hebrew University, he enjoyed the support of Gabriel Baer and it was in Jerusalem that he completed The Sultan’s Servants,¹³ though it was not published for another few years.

Until then, Kunt’s academic life was characterized by his principal attachment to Boğaziçi University, but it witnessed a notable change after 1980. In the aftermath of the military coup of 12 September 1980 and the increasingly repressive measures being imposed on universities in the subsequent years, Kunt decided to teach and continue his research at universities in the USA, UK, Canada, and the Netherlands. Before leaving Turkey, however, he published Bir Osmanlı Valisinin Yıllık Gelir-Gideri: Diyarbekir, 1670–71 (Annual Income and Expenditure of an Ottoman Governor: Diyarbekir 1670–71).¹⁴

From 1982 to 1986, Kunt worked as a visiting scholar at various universities in the United States, starting at Yale in 1982/3. While there, his chapter on the “Transformation of Zimmî into Askerî” appeared in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis’s edited volume on Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.¹⁵ This was followed by Sultan’s Servants, published by Columbia University Press, which reflected a paradigmatic shift in the approach to Ottoman history and opened very different horizons with regard to its periodization. A Greek translation of it appeared in 2001. After Yale, Kunt taught first at Fordham University in 1984, then at New York University for the academic year 1984/5, followed by Columbia University.

Although active as an academic in the USA, Kunt did not sever his ties with Turkish academia. In the early 1980s, he joined Sina Akşin’s project to compile a general Turkish history. The military regime in Turkey at that time supported the existing tendency to use ancient and Ottoman Turkish history for nationalist indoctrination and inculcating an exclusivist view of Ottoman history at the level of public education. Akşin’s project, by contrast, aimed to offer an alternative horizon that would present students and the general public with a more global version of Turkey’s social history. As part of this project, Kunt contributed chapters on Ottoman political history from 1300 to 1789.¹⁶

In 1986, Kunt was appointed the Turkish government funded Atatürk Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Cambridge University. Kunt filled this position until 1998. Meanwhile, he continued to teach as visiting professor at universities such as Simon Fraser (Vancouver, Canada, 1991), Birmingham (UK, 1992), Harvard (1993), Leiden (The Netherlands, 1993), and SOAS (1994).

At Cambridge, Kunt and Christine Woodhead together edited the first English academic volume on Süleyman the Magnificent. The chapters in this volume show Sultan Süleyman in the context of Ottoman administrative, military and cultural institutions and take the contemporary political and cultural contexts of the Renaissance and the Mamluk sultanate into consideration.¹⁷ The book has been translated into Polish (2000) and Turkish (2002).

In 1999, Kunt joined the History Graduate Program of the newly-formed Sabancı University in Istanbul and, to a major extent, helped to shape its graduate courses, and he taught there until 2015. Among other subjects, he offered courses on Ottoman reading culture prior to the introduction of the printing press, which reflected his deepening interest in the sociology of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁸ The decades he spent at Sabancı were perhaps among the most creative periods of his academic life.

While at Sabancı, Kunt’s original research interest in Ottoman households took on a comparative aspect as he started to embrace other civilizations as well. With Jeroen Duindam and Tülay Artan, he organized a major conference in Istanbul called Royal Courts and Capitals (14–16 October 2005), which received support from both Sabancı University and an EU academic programme known as ‘COSTA 36: Tributary Empires Compared’. It was a first of its kind insofar as the courts, dynasties and households of diverse civilizations such as the Roman, early modern European, Ottoman, and Moghul empires were discussed in detail. This conference set a precedent for a series of similar conferences, and these in turn led to the publication of numerous volumes in the Brill series known as ‘Rulers & Elites’.¹⁹

The organizers of the 2005 conference, including Kunt, Duindam and Artan, edited the first volume of the Rulers & Elites series, Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires, which appeared in 2011. This book contains comprehensive descriptions of courts, households and ceremonies from Antiquity to early modern times and it includes Kunt’s chapter on “Turks in the Ottoman Imperial Palace”.²⁰

Kunt’s other major academic contribution during his Sabancı years was his role as the founding editor of the four-volume monumental historical series called The Cambridge History of Turkey. Spanning the period from the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 to what is now the contemporary Republic of Turkey, it successfully synthesizes the academic achievements of researchers of pre-Ottoman, Ottoman, and Republican Turkish history over the last two decades.²¹

2 His Contributions to Ottoman Studies

Metin Kunt can be said to have made at least three major and lasting contributions to Ottoman historical research in the areas of the sociology of power, transformation, and periodization. As mentioned, from his graduate years onwards, Kunt has always had a strong interest in households; his earlier works, like his Ph.D. on Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, or his article on Derviş Mehmed Pasha, concentrate on specific examples. The Sancaktan Eyalete, then the Sultan’s Servants, give us a more general outlook on the growing importance of households, for they expound on the structural changes of the Ottoman provincial administration in which eyalet governors and their extended households acquired unprecedented administrative autonomy. Paralleling this development were principles such as loyalty to the imperial centre and merit being increasingly replaced by patronage networks centred around households.²²

In his post-1985 writings, Kunt seems to understand households, especially the Ottoman imperial one, in a more appreciative light and even as a stabilizing political institution that could perhaps account for the longevity of the empire. The first sentence in his chapter on ‘Royal and other Households’ begins with the statement that “households were the building blocks of the Ottoman political edifice. Therefore the basic unit for the study of the sociology of political life is the household.” He also states that the formation of households was a deliberate policy of the central authority, as “he [the sultan] insisted that all his officers did the same, proportionate to their rank and allotted revenues”.²³ This piece points to the wide variety of political, economic, educational, and cultural functions performed by Ottoman households. In fact, through a child levy the imperial household would recruit Christian boys from the Balkans who would then receive a comprehensive education and be assimilated into Ottoman Islamic high culture. As Kunt pointed out, there was also widespread emulation of this practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both by the upper stratum of the ulema and by the civilian bureaucracy.²⁴

In other studies, Kunt showed how the resilience of the household preserved the integrity of the empire for centuries. He describes the Ottoman imperial household as already highly developed during the reign of Bayezid I when Timurlenk defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara (1402), and how the extensive network of the sultan’s servants played a major role in restoring the Ottoman realm following its dissolution between 1402 and 1413.²⁵

At the same time, Kunt remains ambivalent about this institution because it hinders the fully-fledged institutionalization of the Ottoman state apparatus and its autonomy vis-à-vis the Ottoman royal family. His relatively recent chapter called ‘A Prince Goes Forth (Perchance to Return)’ elaborates on the succession processes following the deaths of Süleyman I, Selim II, Murad III, and Mehmed III, each of which was accompanied by crises arising from the fuzzy borders between the imperial household and central state institutions. In fact, he concludes the chapter by underlining the critical importance of the Ottoman imperial household for politics as late as the First Constitutional Era. According to him, even as late as 1876, “the relationship between the ruler and his government remained ambiguous”.²⁶ It would be fair to state that, for Kunt, the imperial household, which the elite ones upheld, was one of the few institutional continuities in the Ottoman political structure from its beginnings until its demise.

Another historical continuity, which, according to Kunt defined the political culture of the Ottoman Empire was the ideology of gaza. In “State and Sultan up to the Age of Süleyman: Frontier Principality to World Empire”, the introductory chapter to a volume he co-edited with Christine Woodhead in 1995, he underlines the resilience of gazi ideology from the period of the Ottoman principality until the final decades of Ottoman existence. This ideology was a driving force for the state both in the early centuries of expansion as well as during the years of trying to defend the territorial integrity of the empire until its demise, as exemplified by the gazi titles of Abdülhamid II and Mustafa Kemal Pasha.²⁷ Here, Kunt seems to pay homage to Paul Wittek’s works.

Another of Metin Kunt’s lasting legacies to Ottoman studies is his achievement in integrating the notion of transformation into Ottoman history, which has revolutionized our understanding of changes in the late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centuries, hitherto interpreted merely as a degeneration of ‘classical’ institutions.

While Kunt’s main interest in the early 1970s was in ruling elite households, the quality of the archival material he found and the complex aspects of household structures led him to concentrate on the ‘military class’ (seyfiyye) and its career opportunities in the century between 1550 and 1650.²⁸ In both Sancaktan Eyalete and Sultan’s Servants he concludes that during this period continuous changes took place with respect to three aspects of provincial administration – officials from central government taking over the higher provincial posts at the expense of local functionaries; the growing importance of provinces (beylerbeylik gradually to be called eyalet) at the cost of districts (sancak) and the eventual substitution of the latter by the former; and the predominance of patronage and household networks over merit and loyalty to the central authority.²⁹ These changes emerged in the context of the loss of the military function of provincial cavalry vis-à-vis infantry equipped with firearms, the Ottoman state’s growing need for cash and the capacity of eyalet governors to supply the central authority with the resources required to support its standing armies, and the relative efficiency of imperial and provincial households to train administrative and military personnel.³⁰

What makes Kunt’s study on the transformation of provincial administration so crucial is his verdict that these developments did not constitute a decline of the Ottoman Empire, but on the contrary, a transition from a feudally-arranged prebend-based structure to a monetary-based one with powerful governors. In this regard, this transition implies a process of modernization. According to Kunt, the imperial authority expected this transition would bring about the effective centralization of the provincial administration, which, for him, was additional proof of the modernizing nature of this transition.³¹ He uses the term dönüşüm to describe this major change in Sancaktan Eyalete.³²

Kunt’s interest in transformation was not confined to the provincial administration and decentralization, for he was also interested in concrete examples of individuals. In Bir Osmanlı Valisinin Yıllık Gelir-Gideri: Diyarbekir, 1670–71 (The Annual Income and Expenditure of an Ottoman Governor-General: Diyarbekir, 1670–71), he showed that in real value in 1670/1 the annual income of a governor-general was more than three times that of a governor-general in 1550. From the local revenue that the governor-general collected, Kunt concluded that in the mid-seventeenth century the power of a provincial governor-general was immense, in fact in line with that of Istanbul, thus signifying a power shift from the centre to the provinces.³³

Even more interesting is his article on the historical figure of Derviş Mehmed Pasha (d.1654), in which he discusses the impact of the late-sixteenth-century transformation on Ottoman political and economic thought in relation to Derviş Mehmed Pasha’s ideas, as reported by the chronicler Naima. According to this form of thought, the presence of a government official as head of a powerful household ensured that significant financial resources were distributed among the people. In other words, the commercial activities of an administrator with a large household would guard against an arbitrary tax burden being imposed on the population, yet provide welfare for the region he governed. Kunt detected basic similarities between Derviş Mehmed Pasha’s ideas and the socio-economic views in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah, as well as in the works of previous classical Muslim thinkers. However, unlike Ibn Khaldun or other classical Muslim authors who considered official or government interference in economics and commerce harmful to public welfare, Derviş Mehmed Pasha saw the government’s position on, for example, agriculture, handicrafts, or commerce, as a productive factor in a given economy. According to Kunt, this view constituted a major deviation from traditional Islamic political and economic philosophy. Also, the notion of justice (adl), an indispensable principle in the ancient political treatises of people like Nasiruddin Tusi, is absent from Derviş Mehmed Pasha’s views. In fact, the ancient belief that, to ensure justice, it was necessary to retain a social and political balance between groups such as agriculturalists, merchants, and artisans, is not evident in Derviş Mehmed Pasha’s thought.³⁴ Kunt concluded his article by placing Derviş Mehmed Pasha’s views in the context of the major changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and established a link between the changing political and economic conditions and the striking modifications in classical Islamic political thought as expressed by Derviş Mehmed Pasha, and formulated by Naima.

Another reflection of the overall transformation of the Ottoman social and political structure could, according to Kunt, be observed in the state’s strong identification with Sunni Islam, also known as the confessionalization of the empire. His 1982 article, the “Transformation of Zimmî into Askerî”, describes how the administrative transformation in the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth centuries included the phenomenon of Islamization at both institutional and ideological levels. In other words, the division between Muslims and non-Muslims gradually replaced the previous more or less ‘secular’ political and social division between the askerî stratum and the tax-paying reaya classes. This process was reinforced by the child levy used to recruit new sultanic slaves becoming obsolete, and by the gradual abandonment of expansionism leading to the disappearance of Christian members of the military elite. These factors contributed to the estrangement of non-Muslims from the now predominantly Muslim Ottoman state.³⁵

A corollary to this process could also be traced, according to Kunt, to changes in Ottoman Muslim personal names among members of the ruling elite. In “Ottoman Names and Ottoman Ages”, published in 1986, Kunt discusses changes in names in relation to political and ideological transitions throughout the centuries. Accordingly, in the first century of the Ottoman principality, the names of Ottoman princes were mainly of a pre-Islamic Turkic nature, which was when the Islamic character of the principality was not very pronounced. The expansion of the Ottomans in the Balkans after the 1350s, the emergence of the ulema influence, and the development of an Ottoman statehood in which the ascendancy of the royal household over tribal and group solidarity became pronounced, led to an increase of names of a Persian and biblical character among princes and members of the ruling elite. During this period, the Ottoman ruling establishment perceived the cultural heritage of the empire to be mainly Persian. After 1600, the ethos and prevalence of Islamic ideology in the empire led to a notable decrease among the governing elite of Persian and biblical names in favour of Islamic ones. During this era, when stagnation replaced expansionist dynamism, a universalistic Islamic heritage replaced the perception of a Persian and pre-Islamic one.³⁶

It is worth mentioning that Kunt also understood the issue of transformation at the level of the Ottoman palace. In “Royal and Other Households”, he discusses certain substantial changes that took place within the Ottoman imperial household after the sixteenth century, including the gradual disappearance of the child levy and the increase of ethnic Turks among palace members. In addition, palace pages began to remain in the palace until they reached a mature age, and senior members of the inner service (enderun) were sent to the provinces as full provincial governor generals without previous services as junior commanders or lower-level sancak governors. Also, the black eunuchs acquired prominence in the palace and turned into major political players.³⁷

Kunt’s final major contribution to Ottoman historical studies relates to the periodization of Ottoman history, itself an inseparable aspect and logical outcome of his discussions on transformation. In both Sancaktan Eyalete and Sultan’s Servants, Kunt demonstrates that the tremendous changes that took place between 1550 and 1650 created new structures and relations that cannot simply be seen as a degeneration of the previous institutions; indeed, as noted above, they signified a transition from a feudally-arranged prebend-based structure to a monetary-based one with powerful governors. In this regard, this transition implies a process of modernization. As a consequence of Kunt’s work, historians increasingly came to view Ottoman historical eras in terms of time frameworks, each with its own specific political, economic and social institutions and relationships rather than as an organic body with periods of youth, adulthood and senescence.

Although a few authors had already questioned the decline paradigm,³⁸ it was Kunt who was able to demonstrate on a factual basis and in an unmistakable way the implausibility of preserving the notion of a ‘decline’ attributed to the centuries after the late-sixteenth century. Thus, the long-lasting historiographical paradigm of decline, first articulated by contemporary critics of transformation like Gelibolulu Mustafa Âli, Koçi Bey and Kâtib Çelebi, then taken over by Orientalists like Hammer-Purgstall and Jorga, and reinforced during the Cold War era by proponents of modernization theory such as Bernard Lewis and Niyazi Berkes, has itself become a subject of intellectual history.

It needs to be mentioned that Kunt should be considered one of the pioneers of the prosopographical approach to Ottoman history. In Sancaktan Eyalete and Sultan’s Servants he acquired his data on the actions of provincial governors from four appointment registers located in the Maliyeden Müdevver and Kâmil Kepeci catalogues. On the basis of these sources, Kunt conducted statistical analyses of the governors’ administrative ranks, career backgrounds, location or geography of their appointments, durations and intervals of their services, and their incomes, and succeeded in detecting the structural changes discussed above.³⁹

Kunt has published work that is still of major importance to students of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and this needs to be considered separately. In one study, “Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment”, published in 1975, he discusses cins solidarity among the Ottoman ruling elite by providing intriguing examples from Ottoman historiography, the literary works of Veysî, and Evliya Çelebi’s travelogue. From this highly original article, Kunt, then a Ph.D. student, acquired notable fame among contemporary Ottomanists. The main thesis of this article is that, contrary to the hitherto predominant assumption that the child levy and palace education were rather successful in at least weakening the ethno-geographical identities of Ottoman statesmen and janissary commanders, these members of the ruling elite were in fact fully aware of their early ethnic origins; in fact, the resilience of this identity could sometimes lead to factions based on ethno-geographical origins. Furthermore, the presence of such factions could shape Ottoman political decisions.⁴⁰ Though Kunt wished, as expressed in this article, further research on this issue, practically no significant academic study has yet been produced. It might be argued that, despite more than forty years having passed, this study is still the only important academic source covering ethnic connections within the seventeenth-century Ottoman ruling elite.