Askeri

The askeri were the ruling class of military administrators of the Ottoman Empire, made up of three main groups: the military, the court officials and the clergy. Although the word literally means of the military, it covered all the higher levels of imperial administration, and anyone holding a political office in the empire's service, Muslim or non-Muslim, could rank as askeri. They stood apart from the reaya, the tax-paying lower class, and from the kul, the slave class that included the Janissaries. After Napoleon invaded Ottoman Egypt in 1798, a reform movement under Sultan Selim III sought to reduce their numbers.