The final step in setting the stage for the emergence of the Qazdağli household is an assessment of the general trends in Egypt's military society during the period in which the household came to prominence. We have established that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were an era during which regimental officers attained unprecedented influence in Egyptian society. Indeed, the pendulum of household leadership, and therefore of influence, seems to have swung back and forth between beys and officers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the two groups were nominally connected through the possibility of an agha being promoted to bey, as he might have been in the imperial capital, this promotional line was never firmly established except as a means of removing influential officers from their bases of power. In actual fact, a certain tension existed between the two groups, quite apart from questions of factional loyalties. Each group had access to different sources of revenue: the beys to tax farms in the countryside, including the lucrative subprovincial governorships, the officers to urban tax farms such as the customs of the Red Sea and Mediterranean ports. Naturally, then, each group eyed the accumulation of wealth by the other with suspicion.