Defining the household

At its inception in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Qazdağli household was one of many military households operating in Ottoman Cairo. The military household was arguably the basic unit of Egyptian military society as it developed under Ottoman rule. It is therefore essential to define this phenomenon before proceeding to examine the rise of the Qazdağlis. The military household was not exclusively a kinship group, although it could and usually did include members of the household founder's family. Primarily, however, it comprised the household head and those who enjoyed his patronage, whether or not these were related to him. A group of households could ally with one another to form a faction. The Faqari and Qasimi factions, which dominated Egypt during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, were each a collection of allied households.

The secondary studies of Ottoman Egypt that have been published over the past thirty-five years customarily define these military households as Mamluk households and describe the society to which they belonged as a Mamluk or neo-Mamluk society. This is not to suggest that the military administration of Ottoman Egypt was an unaltered continuation of the Mamluk regime under Ottoman rule. Historians acknowledge the administrative changes outlined in the preceding chapter, as well as the influx of a diverse group of military personnel, both mamluk and non-mamluk, into Egypt.