This article is a case study of silkworm production in Bursa in the nineteenth century. This case was chosen mainly to discuss the relationship between scientific agricultural knowledge and peasants’ knowledge. The article argues that neither type of knowledge was static and that hybrid knowledge was the product of the interaction between scientific and peasants’ knowledge. Furthermore, it analyses

This article discusses a newly found Ottoman document. It concerns the oldest—to date—patriarchal diploma of investiture (berat), which was issued for Patriarch Raphael i (1475–76). This and the other two known berats from that epoch constitute a successive set of such documents, and give scholars the opportunity to study the mechanisms of production of patriarchal diplomas of investiture that were

The Ottoman state authorities tried to prevent çiftlik formation in all parts of the empire. Yet, they also tried to keep this valuable and cash/kind-producing economic commodity under strict surveillance. The tax-farming and confiscation systems served as two important mechanisms of state control and ensured the state’s redistributive/reallocative role. Having the right to confiscate and redistribute

According to Ottoman historiography, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottoman state adopted the European civilizing mission and discourse towards the nomadic tribal population in the empire. This phenomenon was usually referred to as ‘borrowed colonialism’. However, recently, new studies began to challenge that view, arguing that officials used civilizing discourse to justify

This article examines the relationship between the Turkish government and the Turkish press by taking the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36 as a case study. The Turkish press attached much importance to the conflict and covered two main issues: the increasingly insecure environment in world politics and how Turkey should position itself in the face of these changing dynamics. Emphasising the divergences

Despite a growing interest worldwide in the history of emotions, the topic has attracted the attention of scholars of Ottoman history only recently. In an attempt to understand the motivations underlying political undertakings, this article explores emotions, with a specific focus on mahabbet (love) and merhamet (compassion). It examines the social meaning attached to and the cultural importance of

The historiography of Turkey has until recently exhibited a solid state bias in the study of the formative years of the republic. Conversely, the intersection of the state with local power networks has been understudied. This paper studies the dynamics of local political networks as exemplified in the case study of Esat Adil Müstecaplıoğlu, an exceptional case of a local political broker with leftist

Ottoman urban revolt has been the subject of many studies, but most of them consider either the janissaries or political factions of the elite as the main actors. However, Ottoman sources point to the marked participation of what can be called the ‘urban mob’, people without any strong professional or military affiliation. The article seeks to explore the type and scope of this participation, the composition

Résumé La promotion de Hayr ed-Dîn Barberousse alimenta des polémiques. Pouvait-on se fier à ce pirate au passé douteux qui n’avait pas suivi le cursus honorum normal ? Les Ġazavât-ı H ayr ed-Dîn Paşa répondent à ces accusations : corsaire et non pirate, roi d’Alger qui s’était mis au service de la Porte, Hayr ed-Dîn avait une compétence exceptionnelle de marin et de spécialiste de l’Occident. Pourtant

Ali Saim Ülgen (1913–63), a preservation architect, architectural historian, author, bureaucrat and educator, was a leading figure in the nascent field of heritage conservation during the early decades of the Republic of Turkey. This was a time when the Republican leaders sought to establish the national character of art and architecture by interpreting the “Turkishness” and uniqueness of the Ottoman

The article concentrates on the reign of Sultan Mehmed Reşad (1909–18) to discuss the last phase of the Ottoman sultanate. Notwithstanding the significance of the Second Constitutional Period, Mehmed Reşad’s reign itself is often mentioned merely as representing the twilight of the Ottoman sultanate, when it became devoid of political power. By using a variety of primary sources, archival, printed

Focusing on the revenue and expenditure records of the treasury of Ottoman Cyprus during the last decades of the sixteenth century, this article examines the tax farm of the salt-works and port customs created by the Ottomans during the first quarter century of their rule on the island. In doing so it seeks to underline the importance of the Cyprus budget records (ruznamçe) for understanding the financial

The Amasya Treaty (1555) ended a half-century of Ottoman-Safavid military and ideological rivalry during the sixteenth century. My paper focuses on why the Ottoman and Safavid empires made this treaty despite a long-standing ideological and political divide. It has been widely held that the Safavids could not afford such a costly rivalry and, tired of the Ottoman military campaigns, they pleaded with

The Ottoman eighteenth century is a period of decentralisation dominated by the emergence of peripheral semi-autonomous lords. This period is also marked by the spread of tax farming (iltizam), especially lifelong malikane contracts. This article is a case study of these two phenomena, through examination of the activities of minor/secondary notables in a remote corner of Ottoman Macedonia, namely

This article considers the transfer of medical knowledge from Europe to the Ottoman empire and argues that what was significant in such transfer was medical practice rather than textual transfer, that the Ottomans were open to adopting medical knowledge from the non-Islamic world, the deciding factor being not the origin but the successful nature of the treatment, and that if there was a border which

The paper analyzes the credit activities of the Voskopoja (Moschopolis) guild of tailors on the basis of a new dataset constructed from its credit lending transactions recorded in a guild register. The dataset was used to understand lending patterns and risk management in the local economy of Voskopoja and compare them with similar practices in other parts of the Ottoman empire. I found that interest

Suicide, a new issue in Crimean social history research, has not been dealt with in terms of the status of free persons and slaves. It is difficult to find reliable and detailed primary source about slaves’ private lives and their expectations apart from some cases which focus on slaves as merchandise to be bought and sold, and examples of their release and escape. However, the Crimean Shari’a court

In 1530 the Knights Hospitallers were granted the Maltese islands by Charles V. The administration of an archipelago on the Mediterranean war frontier required constant knowledge on the enemy. This article reconstructs Hospitaller Malta’s principal intelligence collection and transmission channels during the seventeenth century, particularly during the magistracy of Alof de Wignacourt from 1601 to

This article establishes the overarching principles of Iranian-Ottoman peacetime relations from the Treaty of Zuhab to the collapse of the Safavid rule. Based on previously untapped sources, it illustrates the hierarchical foundation of relations marked by the principle of seniority-juniority on every platform, explores the concepts of legal personality, actors, representation, and delegation in diplomacy

Focusing on Ottoman and Crimean policies and their involvement in the North Caucasus in the second half of the sixteenth century as a case study, this paper sheds light on the nature of the political arrangement between the Ottoman empire and the Crimean khanate in this period. Agreeing with scholars who argue that the Crimean khanate’s relationship with the Ottoman empire cannot be classified as vassalage

The Ottoman authorities explicitly allowed Westerners residing in the Ottoman empire to produce and consume wine in their own homes. But what if these foreigners lived in a pious endowment (vakıf) established by Muslims? And could Christian religious services be conducted in Muslim foundations without offending Islamic sensitivities? Islamic court records from Istanbul and Aleppo, as well as European

Using archival documents in the Ottoman archives related to British travellers in the Ottoman empire who were travelling under the protection of the capitulations, this article examines the yol emri (travel permit) issued to travellers by the Ottoman state and focuses specifically on the case of Edward Wortley Montagu. In so doing it seeks to highlight the importance of Ottoman archival sources for

This article examines evidence from plague outbreaks in Ottoman Anatolia and its environs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that psychological rather than religious factors explained people’s reactions to calamities such as plague epidemics. Ottoman archival and European accounts of responses to plague outbreaks indicate confessional boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims were

Although early sources for Seljuk history do not give specific information on the Seljuks’ religious beliefs and practices before their conversion to Islam, the names of the sons of the dynasty’s namesake – Mikail, Israil, Musa, Yunus, Yusuf – have long been a source of speculation on this subject. By comparing the names of Seljuk’s sons with the naming practices of regional Muslim, Jewish and Christian

This article investigates how Hanafi jurists responded to armed rebellion against local authorities in Mecca. I examine two understudied legal treatises that have been written about the sack of Mecca by armed rebel groups in 1632. These treatises provide important insights for studying how premodern Islamic legal discourses dealt with the issue of rebellion under Ottoman rule and sovereignty. I contend

Ottoman historians lost interest in timars a generation ago due to simultaneous intellectual and political crises, namely methodological skepticism and the end of the cold war. The archival methodology used in timar research was subjected to withering critique, and the underlying motivation for the research, land reform in East-Central Europe and Turkey, was dissipated. Renewed scholarly interest in

In the decades following the conquest of Constantinople the Ottoman administrative and military system underwent a major reorganization in the direction of centralization. The effort to some degree assured the state control over the feudal-like timar system and gave it its exceptional characteristic. However, the same endeavour in the long run made the state lose control over vast agricultural production

This article aims to develop a new narrative of changes in the Ottoman timar system independent of the complaints of decline brought by advice writers like Mustafa ‘Ali. Based on the icmal defterleri, it examines the identities of timar-holders and their changes over time, a topic generally ignored in descriptions of the Ottoman military. Using data from earlier studies, it connects changes in timar-holding

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century Ottoman society, especially in cities suffered from a dichotomy. On the one hand there existed for several centuries the Bektaşi which was heterodox order. But in the eighteenth century there started to expand from India a new sufi order: the Naqshbandi – Mujaddidi order known to have been a shari’a minded and highly orthodox order. The result was a dichotomy

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s

This essay is a contribution to the study of provincial janissaries through the case of Crete. After a brief survey of the history of the janissary corps as the wider framework within which the janissaries of Crete have to be studied, the essay focuses on them, resolving the confusion between janissaries and other military groups, discussing the differences between imperial and local janissaries, and

This article focuses on Esma Sultan’s malikane-mukataa of Alasonya, which was among the estates of Istanbul Bahcekapusu Valide Sultan Vakfi, during c. 1780 to 1825. It aims to discuss the effects of the malikane system on the Ottoman provincial political-economy. It also highlights the institutional organization of a malikane in the province by focusing on actors and their relations in the case of

This article describes the career of John D. Cooper, an early American aviator and a leading test pilot for Glenn Curtiss. In the latter role he demonstrated a Curtiss flying boat in Istanbul in 1914 before a massive crowd. This aircraft was subsequently sold to Turkey and provided the primary stimulus to Ottoman naval aviation. It was also the first American aircraft sold in the Middle East.

This article elaborates on the history of a Greek club, the gazino, founded in Manastir during the 1850s. It dwells upon the gazino’s interaction with the city’s Christian population regarding the Tanzimat reforms and the expectations these raised among ordinary people for social justice. Such expectations contributed to the emergence of new forms of political negotiation with the Ottoman authorities

The paper tackles the issue of national politicization in late Ottoman Thrace through the case study of Stenimahos (Istanimaka, Stanimaka), a large mountainous village in Northern Thrace, whose Greek-speaking inhabitants initiated during the 1860s a long tradition of anti-Ottoman nationalist militancy and a close relation to independent Greece. The rapid national politicization and radicalization of

The aim of this article is to question and revise the dominant assumption that dissociates the revolutionary activities in late Ottoman Macedonia from the agrarian question that remained open throughout that period. Through the cross-checking of various Greek, Bulgarian, Macedonian and western primary sources, emanating from both the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and its adversaries

This article explores the spatialization of a collective memory in Turkey’s north coast city of Samsun. In 1919, Mustafa Kemal Pasa’s first step onto the Bandirma, the steamer that carried him from the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to Samsun, was also the first step of the Turkish struggle for independence. The dock that led him to the city and the hotel that accommodated him were also thus slated to

The purpose of this essay is to offer a contribution to the process of Levantinization of the Catholic community of Izmir, between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. The first part of the paper is about the detection of how the term Levantine has been used, both historically and by historiography, while the second is focused on the Catholic missionaries of Izmir, depicted in their

This article explores the dynamics of urban migration and the politics of integration in mid-eighteenth-century Istanbul, both on the government policy-level and through the unofficial grass-roots processes. With a special focus on an inspection register (dated 1158/1745) detecting immigrants physically dwelling in the neighbourhoods (mahalles), I reveal that whereas the government policy for migration

Based mainly on Turkish archival material and newspapers, this article argues that the short dictatorship of General Pangalos (1925–1926) in Greece not only stalled the solution of problems remaining from the Lausanne negotiations, but also heightened Turkish concerns over Greek expansionist ambitions towards Turkey in a way unlike any other period in early Turkish-Greek relations. Despite the General’s