Celali Rebellions
A wave of rebellions tore through Ottoman Anatolia from the 1590s and did not fully subside for forty years. The name comes from a rebel sheikh of the 1510s, and it was applied afterwards to almost anyone in arms in the countryside. The causes were structural. The cavalry-and-land system that had organised Anatolia for two centuries was being displaced by musket-armed infantry paid in cash, which meant taxes in cash, which meant peasants borrowing. American silver flooding in through Europe halved the value of the currency. The long wars with the Habsburgs and Safavids demanded men and money continuously, and demobilised irregular musketeers — the sekban — went home armed, unpaid and unemployed. Add the extreme cold and drought of the 1590s, a climate episode visible in tree rings across the region, and the countryside had both a reason to revolt and men trained to lead it. The revolts were led by provincial governors as often as by bandits; Karayazıcı declared himself a ruler in 1600 and had an army of tens of thousands. The state alternated between crushing them and hiring them, which taught everyone that rebellion was a career path. The consequence was the Great Flight, in which peasants abandoned villages across Anatolia for the towns or for anywhere safer, and a good deal of the interior lost population it did not regain for generations. Murad IV restored order in the 1630s by methods that were remembered. The empire survived, with a different relationship to its provinces. Historians once read the whole episode as the beginning of Ottoman decline, and now more often read it as a violent adjustment to a fiscal and military revolution that every European state was going through at the same time and paying for in its own civil wars.
- Year: 1596 CE
- Category: Political
