Sanjak
This page is about districts of the Ottoman Empire; for the region in Serbia and Montenegro, see Sandžak.Sanjak and
Sandjak (other variants:
sinjaq, sanjaq) are the most common English transliterations of the
Turkish word
Sancak, which literally means "
banner". In
Arabic the sanjaks were also called
liwas.
Sanjaks originally were the first level subdivisions of the
Ottoman Empire. They arose in the mid-
14th century as military districts that were part of a military-
feudal system. In addition to the paid professional army, the Ottoman army had corps of cavalry soldiers (called
spahis or
sipahi) who performed military service in return for estates granted by the Sultan (larger estates were called
zaim or
zeamet, smaller ones
timar). Spahis gathered for war according to the Sanjak in which they lived, and were led by an official called a
Sanjak-beg or
Sanjakbey (roughly equivalent to "district governor").
With the formation of new first-level divisions, the
beylerbeyliks (later
eyalets and
vilayets), in the late 14th century, sanjaks were mostly second level divisions.
The number of Sanjaks in the Empire varied greatly. The
Tanzimat reforms of the
19th century saw the number climb to over 400, but more usually it was around 150.
Not all sanjaks were part of a province; some were in newly conquered areas that had yet to be assigned to a province and others such as
Benghazi and
Çatalca remained independent of the province system with their leaders reporting directly to the
Porte.
The contemporary name of the
Balkan region of
Sandžak derives from its former status as the Ottoman
Sanjak of Novi Pazar.
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Subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire
