The Medieval History Journal

This article describes the history, features and functions of the Islamic law courts in the Ottoman Empire before the Tanzimat era. After briefly surveying of the roots of this institution in pre-Ottoman settings, the article focusses on how Ottoman administrators and juridical experts built on this legacy. Later, the article discusses the modern scholarly literature on the court in a way to reflect on its prevalent tendencies.

The Ottoman Empire had inherited the waqf (charitable foundation) as an institutionalized form of charity from the Near Eastern Islamic states, which had preceded it. Over time, new forms of charitable foundations emerged, while with the expansion of the Empire, waqfs grew in number and spread geographically. Donors created over fifty thousand charitable foundations, making them into the most widespread institution in Ottoman history. Some waqfs, the largest ones in particular, survived for many centuries. However, sometimes continued functioning was under severe threat, due to wars, epidemics, natural disasters, and rebellions.

To overcome financial straits, the waqfs resorted to a variety of measures. Occasionally, a royal waqf in difficulty received assistance from other foundations established by sultans and/or their relatives. Administrators reduced current expenditures, sometimes even suspending salaries and charitable services. Moreover, through long-term lease contracts involving substantial down payments by the lessees, waqf administrators often raised the money needed to restore damaged properties. In the present paper, we study Ottoman royal waqfs when exposed to adversities and financial hardships. As administrators reacted with considerable flexibility, the claim that the waqfs were rigid institutions is in obvious need of revision.

The role of non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire has been a topic of debate among scholars who approached the issue from various perspectives at different times. One thread in this debate focused on these communities’ role in Ottoman trade with Europe and emphasized their relations with western capital in explanation of their prominence in the Ottoman economy. This article attempts to explain the vitality of non-Muslim merchants through the centuries in the face of Western economic penetration of the Ottoman Empire, by focusing on transaction costs and market imperfections in North-western Anatolia. The article focuses on the trade in mohair yarn and cotton, which were the most important commodities exported to the Netherlands from the Ottoman Empire. Relying on data obtained from Dutch archives on cotton and mohair yarn consignments from Ankara and Izmir to Amsterdam, the article emphasises the diversity and complexity of the various transactions and expenses required to deliver these consignments to Amsterdam. It suggests that the local merchants were able to take advantage of the market imperfections and high transaction costs in North Western Anatolia while interacting with European merchants in the region.

Hitherto, no historian has attempted a comprehensive approach to the aims, instruments and practices of Ottoman diplomacy, nor have historians analysed the major claims and evolution of the latter over the longue durée. This article does take a long view, beginning in the 1290s and continuing to the end of territorial expansion, roughly at the turn of the seventeenth century. I propose an exegetic framework to interpret the Ottoman understanding of diplomatic practices, which evolved significantly over the three centuries studied. While changes in the balance of inter-empire power relations were surely a cause, one needs to take account of internal factors as well. As Ottoman sultans and their servitors redefined the political identity of their realm, they redesigned diplomatic practices in conformity with changing priorities.

This article investigates the close relationship between geographical knowledge and imperial politics in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through an analysis of an anonymous portolan chart from 1652 and geographical accounts of Katip Çelebi, Ebu Bekir b. Behram el-Dimaşki and Osman b. Abdülmennan, it examines the circulation of ‘geography’ and ‘geographical knowledge’ in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In doing so, it aims to integrate the Ottoman Empire into the recently developing historical treatment of Enlightenment as a response to cross-border interaction and global integration. According to the traditional understanding, Ottoman involvement with modern science and technology did not begin until the nineteenth century when the Ottoman state enacted a series of reforms in education, economy, and military. This article aims to challenge this traditional understanding and argues that Ottoman ruling elites and scholars did indeed participate in intellectual discussions and political developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The knowledge exchange between the Ottoman geographers and their European contemporaries during this period laid the foundations of what I call ‘the Ottoman Enlightenment.’ The works discussed in this article informed the Ottoman imperial court and literate urbanites of the changes in the spatial understanding of the world and of the universe while also helping them to reevaluate the role of the Ottoman Empire globally during a period typically regarded as the beginning of Ottoman decline.

The subject of our discussion is the travelogue of Evliya Çelebi, born in 1611 to a goldsmith of the sultans’ palace known as Derviş Mehemmed Zılli and who probably died in Cairo around 1685. It is intriguing for a multitude of reasons, one of them especially relevant for the present purpose: While Evliya’s work covers the entire Ottoman Empire and adjacent territories in ten substantial volumes, we do not know the patrons and/or other addressees that the author may have envisaged. While the author often mentioned two grand viziers and other figures of the highest levels of the Ottoman elite, who employed him and with whom he had good relations, by the mid-1680s they had mostly predeceased him, sometimes by several decades.

Time is the only phenomenon that encompasses the past, present, and future, giving vitality to all living beings. Throughout history, people have tried to understand this phenomenon by determining its cycles and dividing them into segments. In pre-modern societies, the powerlessness of people against nature made them view time and space as closely connected (time-space continuum).

In traditional Ottoman society, it was thus difficult to measure time. People made calculations using lunar movements. Court astrologers observed the moon and stars, advising sultans when to hold imperial accession ceremonies, celebrate princely births and weddings, or launch ships. In larger towns, at least the prayer times could be determined with assurance: However, villagers were mostly aware only of the day, month, season, and year. Hence, the understanding of time was quite different on the higher and lower rungs of the social ladder.

In this paper, I attempt to answer the following questions: To what extent is it possible to measure time by studying the phases of the moon? What were the meanings that the Ottoman ruling class attached to the moon? For what reasons did ordinary people try to document in the qadi court at what time they saw the new moon, finding witnesses and having the court scribes record their testimonies? My sources are the qadi court records of Anatolian and Crimean cities, with additional information from travelogues and chronicles.

Among the spaces conveying rich information on Anatolian social structure, mosques occupy a special place. In pre-modern societies, village and small-town mosques were not only places of worship, but served as foci of education and sociability, hosting visitors or travellers on occasion. While the architecture of village mosques is usually very simple, the furnishings can be elaborate, turning these modest structures into mirrors reflecting village culture, and thereby the culture of the Ottoman periphery.

The present article focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painted mosques in the Turkish province of Denizli and environs, which display a remarkable unity of style and iconography. In the secondary literature, these works of art usually appear as products of so-called ‘Westernization’. By contrast, this study argues that they are outputs of Ottoman popular culture. Tangible from the seventeenth century onwards, the sociocultural dynamics and life practices specific to the Ottoman periphery have given this artwork its peculiar form. Thus, this study encourages researchers to rethink Anatolian conservatism, as it demonstrates that in the pre-modern era, mosques were not the well-protected spaces, distant from everyday life that they are today. Rather, in the period under study, village mosques could be ‘ambiguous’ spaces seamlessly joining varying spheres of life and belief.