‘The Property is Mine’: Re-considering Mehmed II’s Absolutism as a Disruption of Medieval Legal Conventions on Ownership

Much ink has been spilled on Mehmed II’s centralization of the Ottoman state and the nature of his economic reforms. An important connection between two aspects of this process remains to be analyzed: Mehmed II’s issuance of a copious amount of legal decrees (ḳānūn-nāme) and his wholescale allocation of particular tax revenues in Istanbul to his personal Islamic foundation (vaḳf). Based on readings of Mehmed II’s decrees, foundation deeds, and Ottoman revenue registers, this paper argues that the common denominator of the political, economic, and cadastral reforms undertaken during his reign was a shift in the perception of any taxable asset as the sultan’s personal property. This hypothesis is then placed into comparison with practices of land ownership and religious endowments in late Byzantine and early Ottoman contexts, in order to propose that Mehmed II’s were much too radical a deviation from medieval legal conventions of ownership. This new emphasis on Mehmed II’s policies as a legal aberration offers a fresh explanation of their almost immediate reversals in the first years of the reign of his son, Bayezid II.