Heper/CENTER AND PERIPHERY 83
immediately thereafter almost all the tools and the structures of
a centralized administration were adopted: periodic surveys of
population and land, a central treasury, a bureaucracy which
sought from the capital to regulate affairs of state throughout
the provinces, and a system of control through the sultan's own
slaves (Inalcik, 1976: 28; Szyliowicz, 1977: 105).
Whereas the absolute monarchs in the West had usually drawn
their servants from among the small rural nobility (Beloff, 1962:
101; Rosenberg, 1958: 67), the Ottomans, like the Indian sultans
(Thorner, 1965: 218), opted for a royal household full of loyal
slaves. By successful deployment of the members of this group
to all the critical posts both at the center and the localities, the old
Turkish aristocracy was gradually removed from its position of
a ruling class. Although they were retained as an influential group
so that the sultan could play them off against his slave group
(Shaw, 1976: 58), their status could now be determined by the
center, a fact which shows the beginning of the dependency
relationships
The Ottoman land regime, too, manifested patrimonial char-
acteristics. The whole country was a single oikos; the political
realm was identical with a huge sultanic manor (Weber, 1968:
1013).6 When the Ottoman administration was first established
in Anatolia, all agricultural land passed to the ownership of the
state. All local feudal rights which limited the state's control over
the land and the peasants were abolished. In 1475, a large part
of the land held by vakifs (religious foundations) and private
individuals was confiscated by the state and assigned as timars
(fiefs) to cavalrymen who, among other things, collected taxes in
the localities on behalf of the state (Inalcik, 1976: 34-35, 49).
Under the Ottoman fief (timar) system, the granting of benefice
in return for service to the sultan did not bring with it extensive
political-territorial rights. Furthermore, there was an element
of compulsion in this relationship. One component of the fief was
no more than a dirlik, or revenue granted as a "living." Each
timar holder was given a relatively small land, ifitlik, for his
personal use. He extracted his "salary" from this land as long as
he remained in that area. When he was assigned to another area,
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