History Studies Volume 3/3 2011 Provincial Powers: The Rise of Ottoman Local Notables (Ayan) Eyalet Güçleri: Osmanlı Yerel İleri Gelenlerin Yükselişi (Ayan) Robert Zens * Abstract: The history of the ayan (local notables) is the socio-economic history of the Ottoman state from the late sixteenth until the nineteenth century. In recent years the ayan have been the subject of numerous studies; however, these works have either been very general in nature or micro-histories of individual ayan. This article studies the ayanlık as a whole by examining a variety of ayan in the Balkans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while comparing them to their Anatolian and Arab counterparts. The ayan’s rise to power, sources of revenue, relationship with the central government and other provincial authorities, and their interaction with the local community are central to this comparative study. In doing so, the paper investigates the possibility of creating a model ayan that would supersede geographical boundaries within the Ottoman state. Keywords: Ottoman Empire, eighteenth century, ayan, provinces, notables The history of the ayan (local notables) is the socio-economic history of the Ottoman state from the late sixteenth until the nineteenth century. In recent years the ayan have been the subject of numerous studies, however, these works have either been very general in nature or micro-histories of individual ayan. 1 This article studies the ayanlık (institution of the ayan) * Assoc. Prof. Dr.; Le Moyne College Department of History - USA 1 General works on the ayans include: Yücel Özkaya, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Âyânlık (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1994); Avdo Sucesko, Ajani: Prilog Izučavanju Lokalne Vlasti u Našim Zemljama za Vrijeme Turaka (Sarajevo: Naučno Društvo SR Bosne i Hercegovine, 1965); Deena Sadat, “Urban Notables in the Ottoman Empire: The Ayan,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1969); Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers, eds. Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 41-68; idem, “Rumeli Ayanları: The Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 343-63; Yuzo Nagata, Muhsin-zade Mehmed Paşa ve Ayanlık Müessesesi (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1976); Yaşar Yücel, “Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda Desantralizasyona Dair Genel Gözlemler,” Belleten 161-164 (1974): 657-704; Güçlü Tuluveli, “State and Classes in the Ottoman Empire: Local Notables in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 15:1 (2005): 121-47; Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 242-63. Suraiya Faroqhi (ed), The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) contains several excellent studies of the ayan and Ottoman provincial administration in the eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries, For an analysis of some of the existing literature on provincial elites, including ayan, see Dina Khoury, “The Ottoman Centre Versus Provincial Powerholders: An Analysis of the Historiography,” 135-56; Fikret Adanir, “Semi-autonomous Forces in the Balkans and Anatolia,” 157-85; Bruce Masters, “Semi-Autonomous