Erken Dönem Osmanlı Yönetiminin Kanunlaşma ve Devletleşme Süreci / Legalisation and Statehood Process of Early Ottoman Administration

Ottoman law, as a field of study, has continued to attract the attention of both historians and jurists for a considerable time. In addition to historians such as Ömer Lütfi Barkan and Halil İnalcık, legal historians such as Coşkun Üçok, Ahmet Mumcu, Mehmet Akif Aydın, Ahmet Akgündüz have discussed Ottoman law both theoretically and in terms of sources. Thanks to the studies on thousands of volumes of legal texts that have survived to the present day thanks to the bureaucratic structure of the Ottoman Empire, we can follow the nature of Ottoman law, the relationship between şer' and customs, the course of development of statutes, and the way legal norms are implemented in the courts. However, despite all these researches, the issue of addressing Ottoman statehood and its connection with law at a theoretical and empirical level from a comparative perspective still seems to need to be discussed. It is worth considering a number of questions, especially regarding the early legal structure of the Ottomans. It is possible to list these questions as follows: What kind of opportunities and flexibilities did the Ottoman principality continue to develop by creating legal norms during its formation and development? While legal norms in the early Ottoman administration manifested themselves in the form of orders, decrees and prohibitions, through what processes did the bureaucracy ensure the dissemination and acceptance of these norms? What were the advantages and disadvantages of applying these principles? How did the norms and principles produced on issues that directly concern the public, such as administration, land, taxes and trade, affect the developments in the center-provincial relations of the state and nationalization over time? At the end of all these, how did the Ottoman Empire dominate a wide geography for hundreds of years and influence the course of society-state relations into legalization and transformation into a bureaucratic state? How did the Ottoman Empire become a state of law? Answering these questions raises important issues of discussion and inevitably deserves an explanation. In this study, we will try to find answers to the questions mentioned above and similar ones.