Demand for Justice and Response of the Sultan: Decision Making in the Ottoman Empire in the Early 16th Century

Numerous typologies have been advanced by scholars seeking to capture the essential elements of the Ottoman political system and various efforts have been made to identify their relationship to decision making mechanism: in these efforts, either a definite theoretical model was chosen and findings of empirical studies were interpreted according to this modelor, topics suggested by Karl Marx or Max Weber were examined in the light ofhistorical sources1.Both approaches have generated a number of researches regarding the true nature ofthe Ottoman state. However, the research results to date seems somewhat inconclusive, pa.::tlybecause of the difficu1tiesof appropriately differentiating among the systems that fall into the same general category and, partly because of the lack of adequate empirical studies about the nature of the Ottoman polity, particularly for the earlier periods i.e. the period before the 16thcentury. Recent studies follow, to a great extent, the concept of patrimonialism advanced by Weber to define the characteristics of the Ottornan state. In these studies, the Ottoman state is referred to as an extremecase ofpatrimonialism cal/ed sultanism, characterizedby a complete reliance on military force, despotism and arbitrarypower.