Eyalet

The eyalets were subdivided into districts called livas or sanjaks,[3] each of which was under the charge of a pasha of one tail, with the title of mira-lira, or sanjak-bey.

[4] The pasha was invested with powers of absolute government within his province, being the chief of both the military and financial departments, as well as police and criminal justice.

[4] The term 'eyalet' began to be applied to the largest administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire instead of beglerbegilik from the 1590s onward, and it continued to be used until 1867.

In 1461, Mehmed II expelled the last of the Isfendyarid dynasty from Sinop, awarding him lands thus taxation authority near Bursa in exchange for his hereditary territory.

Similar considerations led to the creation of the Kanije Eyalet from the districts adjoining this border fortress, which had fallen to the Ottomans in 1600.

The purpose of this reorganisation, and especially the creation of the eyalet of Özi was presumably to improve the defences of the Black Sea ports against the Cossacks.

These were Adana, Aleppo, Anatolia, Baghdad, Basra, Bosnia, Childir, Crete, Constantinople, Damascus, Diyarbekir, Egypt, Erzurum, Habesh, Karaman, Kars, Dulkadir, the Archipelago, Morea, Mosul, Rakka, Rumelia, Sayda, Sharazor, Silistra, Sivas, Trebizond, Tripoli, Van.

Instead of collecting provincial revenues through sipahis, the beylerbey transferred fixed annual sums to Constantinople, known as the salyane.

Wallachia, Moldavia and the Khanate of the Crimea, territories which Mehmed II had brought under his suzerainty, remained in the control of native dynasties tributary to the Sultan.

The eyalets that existed before 1609 but disappeared include the following:[10] Conquests of Selim I and Suleyman I in the 16th century required an increase in administrative units.

Albeit China and Iran are legally unitary states, these countries' provinces may also occasionally be referred to as eyalet in Turkish.