ABSTRACT
If there is one element on which all researchers of Ottoman and Turkish history seem to agree, this is the assumption that the military institution has been the most important force behind the evolution of the social, economic and political structure of the Turkish state. ‘It was the military corps that named and the military prestige that sustained the leader – once a Sultan Caliph, now a President’, argue Lerner and Robinson about the role of the military institution in the political development of the Ottoman and the Turkish states. 1 Hence, any attempt to define the type of civil–military relations in post-war Turkey would be incomplete without observing and understanding the role of the military during the earlier periods.
