My aim in this dissertation is to use the Ottoman discourse of the circle of justice as a wedge in an otherwise crippling debate that presumes a post sixteenth-century decline in the ability of the Ottoman empire to control and direct state affairs. While most scholars in the field acknowledge the ahistorical nature of this claim and seek new means to evaluate Ottoman dynastic longevity, we still lack a robust alternative narrative for the latter. My suggestion here is that this is largely due to a rather inconvenient truth: seventeenth-century Ottoman elites themselves generated a vision of decline and worked tirelessly to produce reform tracts and policies aimed at forestalling what they perceived to be inevitable collapse. We can't ignore this phenomenon without jeopardizing the integrity of Ottoman history as it was understood by those living it.

While my initial focus was on the seventeenth-century, I followed the gaze of imperial elites back to the early sixteenth-century dynamics of state building and constructed a narrative of transformation attentive to Ottoman genres of self-understanding. The circle of justice clearly stood out as a strategy for both analysis and rule from the early proclamation of land codes to the seventeenth-century reform treatises and so presented itself as an important discursive terrain for my own efforts to re-imagine the early modern Ottoman Empire.

I thus demonstrate how the circle of justice provides an alternative diachronic are for assessing the early modern period. Used initially as vocabulary of stabilization in law codes circulated after conquest, it then became a mode of administrative practice and negotiation between the Istanbul-based governing apparatus and diverse provincial terrains. Finally, and most critically for a re-assessment of the seventeenth century, reform treatises objectified the circle of justice and created an idealized portrait of an Ottoman system. It was this ideal that became enshrined as the "classical" period in early twentieth-century historiography thus hampering any attempt to assess change in terms other than decline. By contrast, this dissertation emphasizes the "classical" panoply as strategic political categories rather than systems or institutions, and argues that they were made rather than definitive.