ABSTRACT
The innumerable military humiliations suffered by the Ottomans from 1687 onwards also contributed to the weakening of central imperial authority over the provinces. As emphasized by Lewis (1961:37), however, it was not among the Balkan Christians but among the Sultan’s Moslem subjects in North Africa, Anatolia, Albania, Syria, Lebanon, Kurdistan and the Arabian peninsula that ‘provincial independence first appeared and went furthest’. In Egypt, Syria, Albania, Anatolia, Baghdad and Basra ambitious provincial governors, military commanders or adventurous pashas, mainly members of the ruling Ottoman or Mamluk (Arabic for slave) military classes, took advantage of ‘the remoteness and weakness of the Sultan’s authority to intercept larger shares of the revenues of their provinces and to transform them into virtually independent principalities’.
