Ebussuud Efendi, who lived from 1490 to 1574, served as Sheikh-ul-Islam, the supreme religious and legal authority of the Ottoman Empire, from 1545 until his death, under Sultans Suleiman the Magnificent and Selim II. Working closely with Suleiman, he reorganized Ottoman jurisprudence to bring it under tighter central control, building a unified legal framework that joined sharia with the Ottoman sultan's own administrative law code, the qanun, in place of the greater interpretive freedom judges had previously exercised. Under the system he shaped, judicial authority was understood to derive from the Sultan, and judges were required to apply the law in line with the Sultan's official decrees, a lasting shift toward centralized legal authority that preserved Islamic legal principles while subordinating their application to state policy.
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