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Author: Gulay Yilmaz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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This study examines the ways in which the janissaries were part of civic society in early seventeenth-century Istanbul. It is based on the premise that investigation of the relationship between military cadres and civilians in Ottoman cities will reveal how hitherto unnoticed or underestimated aspects of urban life was during the early modern era. Making use of the Istanbul court records (şer'iye sicils), probate registers (tereke defters), conscription (eşkal defters) and salary registers (mevacib defters) of the janissaries, and registers of central state decrees (mühimme defters), the study focuses on the economic and social roles of the janissaries in Istanbul, as they entered into an enhanced urbanization process due to the social and political transformations of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.By studying various aspects of janissaries' lives this dissertation reveals the extent of their involvement in seventeenth century Istanbul's civic ...
Author: Gulay Yilmaz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This study examines the ways in which the janissaries were part of civic society in early seventeenth-century Istanbul. It is based on the premise that investigation of the relationship between military cadres and civilians in Ottoman cities will reveal how hitherto unnoticed or underestimated aspects of urban life was during the early modern era. Making use of the Istanbul court records (şer'iye sicils), probate registers (tereke defters), conscription (eşkal defters) and salary registers (mevacib defters) of the janissaries, and registers of central state decrees (mühimme defters), the study focuses on the economic and social roles of the janissaries in Istanbul, as they entered into an enhanced urbanization process due to the social and political transformations of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.By studying various aspects of janissaries' lives this dissertation reveals the extent of their involvement in seventeenth century Istanbul's civic ...
Author: Gulay Yilmaz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Hülya Canbakal
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004154566
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
This monograph provides a fresh insight into society, urban government and elite power in a little-studied region of the Ottoman Empire bridging Anatolia and Syria.
Author: James Baldwin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474419070
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empires richest provincial cityWhat did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law religious scholarship and royal justice undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shariaa and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.Key featuresOffers a new interpretation of the relationship between Islamic law and political powerPresents law as the key nexus connecting Egypt with the imperial capital Istanbul during the period of Ottoman decentralizationStudies judicial institutions such as the governors Diwan and the imperial council that have received little attention in previous scholarshipIntegrates the study of legal records with an analysis of how legal practice was represented in contemporary chroniclesProvides transcriptions and translations of a range of Ottoman legal documents
Author: Malissa Anne Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536
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This dissertation investigates the governance of seventeenth-century Damascus by examining claims upon the productive capacity of land, and the collection and redistribution of agricultural taxes. The early modern Ottoman Empire--of which Damascus was a province--was a large agrarian empire wherein the interests of numerous groups and individuals converged around the land and its produce. In light of its centrality to both the subjects and the state, the management of land as a resource has much to tell us about what governance was expected to be in this period, at a time before religious, economic, political or social authority had been disembedded from one another. In this, Damascus is not much different from any other provincial town lying within the early modern empires of Asia and Europe; the issues raised here are not pertinent to the history of the Middle East alone but are relevant to other early modern states. The inquiry into what the state governs and how it does so starts with the observation that Ottoman political literature conceives of a unified political body wherein different groups of people play different roles in allowing the state to function. Through the lens of tax assessment and collection, the first chapter examines the role within the Ottoman state body that is played by the peasant cultivators in the villages surrounding Damascus. The first half of the chapter explores how the prerogatives comparable to other fiscal military states shaped Ottoman taxation policy in the seventeenth century. The importance of obtaining cash led not only to the imposition of new taxes and updated tax registers at the Istanbul finance bureau, but to a new responsibility of the villagers for tax collection. The chapter argues that where compliance with taxation was concerned, the most important governing authority in the village was the villagers themselves. Examining the interactions between villagers, judges, muftis and tax farmers, the chapter examines how individuals and groups that are not state agents strictly speaking, become authorized to exercise state power. The chapter concludes that peasant cultivators do not merely maintain a relationship with the Ottoman government, rather, in some sense they are the government and form an integral part of its machinery. The question of how the governing authority of the state intersects with the authority of Islamic law has long been a question in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic societies in general. However, the question of shifts in the configuration of religious and temporal authority in the seventeenth century is not an issue whose importance is confined to the history of the Islamic regions of the world. Rather, the question of expanding state power and the proper role of `religion' in the body politic is a widespread concern of the early modern period. With this question in mind, the second and third chapters explore the changing legal powers of the sultan and his agents to control productive land and peasant labor. Chapter two notes a change in the meaning and scope of sultan's authority to legislate peasant access to the land in the seventeenth century. This expansion in the sultan's legislative role is absorbed into the jurisprudence of the empire's jurist-scholars, and creating a specifically `Ottoman' practice of Islamic scholarship. Starting in the sixteenth century, the sultan's enacted laws--known as `qanun'--regulate with far greater detail the rights and obligations of peasants and soldier-tax collectors. What emerges is a right of usufruct for the peasantry that is controlled by the dynasty's statutes rather than the interests of local military administrators or local custom. The fact that this concept of the usufruct right eventually comes to prevail in Damascene villages suggests that usufruct was an increasingly standardized right across the empire's rural communities. This is despite the fact that the Damascenes had their own local and juridical traditions that ran counter to the concept of usufruct being promulgated by the sultan. What we find in juristic discussion of usufruct is a very slowly changing idea of the boundaries of imperial authority and its legal consequences. While the second chapter demonstrates a growing consensus that the sultan had wider authority to legislate in matters pertaining to the lands of the state treasury, the legality of some land tenure practices sanctioned by the sultan remained controversial. The third chapter examines the limits of state power to pursue its need to fill the coffers, and how it was expected to treat the village taxpayers. There was no debate among Ottoman subjects that a solvent treasury was a necessity. Without exception, we find that keeping fertile land productive and distributing the revenues in appropriate ways are shared priorities. The common reference point defining the limits of the sultan's authority over production and taxation was the shari'ah, yet there was great disagreement on what the shari'ah enjoined, and in some sense, what the shari'ah was. When it came to what means of extraction the shari'ah permitted or the extent to which the state could coerce the villagers to produce, disagreement was rampant. It was not always the ulema (religious scholars) that opposed state actions on the grounds that such actions violated the shari'ah--as this chapter shows, the views of the ulema were sometimes more cooperative with the dynasty's decisions than those held by its temporal administrators. Both chapters address the question of the shifting configuration of state and religious authority in the early modern world, and examine its consequences on the lives and livelihoods of Damascene cultivators. The fourth and fifth chapters investigate two groups in Damascus who were frequent beneficiaries of the revenues produced in the villages, the ulema and the soldiers based in the city. The right of these groups to receive the tax moneys of the peasant cultivators was premised on the services that each provided for the political body as a whole. There did not appear to be much dispute about the nature of the services that each was to perform, but differences did spring up when the question arose of how or whether such services had been performed in specific instances. The chapter maintains that it is these conflicting interpretations of service, status, privilege and vocational responsibility that most clearly reveal how the provincial elites did or did not take part in the exercise of Ottoman authority in Damascus. The ulema earned their access to the revenue sources through their scholarship and teaching and the general duty of providing moral guidance to other Muslims. Part of this duty was to denounce oppression, and to protect the strong from abusing the weak. An argument arose among the ulema of how much honor or revenue one could seek from the state without compromising oneself in the process. Could one covet the sultan's largess and still be adequately critical if he or his agents overstepped their authority? Other ulema found that the dignity of their profession was an asset when their management of cultivators and taxes was called into question. They deflected the accusations of greed and fraud by invoking their dedication to pious works and scholarship. In all cases, the self conception of the ulema as a group with a particular function in the political body was critical to the way they responded to opportunities for gaining wealth and power. For the soldiers stationed in Damascus as well as the great military families of the countryside, access to rural revenues was contingent upon obedient military service. Increasingly, the entirety of the fiscal and military resources of the province of Damascus was oriented towards financing the pilgrimage to Mecca. The need for effective, reliable and obedient military leadership of the pilgrimage began to assume a higher priority for the Ottoman government. From 1660 to 1690, the Damascene janissaries dominated the office of pilgrimage leader, as they had a number of qualities to recommend them for the position: not only did know the routes from accompanying the caravan, but their capacity to create trouble as well as their expectation of reward was modest in comparison with the great military families of the countryside. Through investigation of their economic activities, it is clear that the question of which soldiers were considered `local' to Damascus had more to do with their involvement in the city's commerce rather than their origins or ethnicity. In turn, when the dynasty finally moved to destroy their leadership and punish them for insubordination, the question of how their `local' sympathies had affronted imperial prerogatives played out differently than might be imagined. While the issue of what constituted obedience might be read differently in Damascus than in Istanbul, it was clear that the Damascenes shared the belief that military men, even local military men, must be obedient to the sultan. This dissertation argues that Damascenes from all backgrounds play an important role in Ottoman governance of the province, and one that is comparable to that of other early modern subjects. It shows people trying to locate their place within the political body as a whole, while the limits of their duties and powers associated with different groups underwent great flux and were vigorously debated. It is this uneasy integration of these various groups into the body of state which best demonstrates the relations between the subjects and the state in the early modern Middle East.
Author: Suraiya Faroqhi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857738585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
It has often been assumed that the subjects of the Ottoman sultans were unable to travel beyond their localities - since peasants needed the permission of their local administrators before they could legitimately leave their villages. However Suraiya Faroqhi's extensive archival research shows that this was not the case. Pious men from all walks of life went on pilgrimage to Mecca, slaves fled from their masters and craftspeople travelled in search of work. Faroqhi shows that even those craftsmen who did not travel extensively had some level of mobility. Challenging existing historiography and providing an important new perspective, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Ottoman history.
Author: Betül Başaran
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004274553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
In Selim III, Social Order and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century Betül Başaran examines Sultan Selim III’s social control and surveillance measures. Drawing mainly from a set of inspection registers and censuses from the 1790s, as well as court records she paints a colorful picture of the city’s residents and artisans. She argues that the period constitutes the beginnings of large-scale population control and crisis management and urges us to think about the Ottoman Empire as a polity that was increasingly becoming a “statistical” state, along with its contemporaries in Europe, and to go beyond mechanistic models of borrowing that focus primarily on military reform and European influence in our discussions of Ottoman reform and “modernity”.
Author: Aysel Yildiz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786731479
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
In 1807 the reformist Sultan Selim III was overthrown in a palace coup enacted by the elite special forces of the day-the Janissaries. The Ottomans were bankrupt and had been forced to make peace with Napoleon after Austerlitz, but it was Selim III's efforts to reform an empire that had suffered successive military defeats, and to reform along the lines of modern principles-with an end to the privileged 'feudal' position of many in elite Ottoman civil-military society-which sealed his fate. This book seeks to situate Turkey's reactionary revolutions of 1807 into a wider European context, that of the French Revolution and the outbreaks of revolutionary activity in the German states, Britain and the US. The Ottoman Empire was an interconnected and crucial part of this early-modern world, and therefore, Aysel Yildiz argues, must be analyzed in relation to its European rivals. Focusing on the uprising, and the socio-economic and political conditions which caused it, this book re-orientates Ottoman history towards Western Europe, and re-situates the late-Ottoman Empire as a key battle-ground of political ideas in the modern era.
Author: David C. Porter
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231559550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
China’s last imperial dynasty governed a vast and culturally diverse territory, encompassing a wide range of local political systems and regional elites. But the Qing empire was built and held together by a single imperial elite: the more than two million members of the hereditary Eight Banner system who were at the core of both the military and the bureaucracy. The banner population was multiethnic, linked by shared membership in a clearly demarcated status group defined in law and administrative practice. Banner people were bound to the court by an exchange of loyal service for institutionalized privilege, a relationship symbolically conceptualized as one of slave to master. Slaves of the Emperor explores the Qing approach to one of the fundamental challenges of early modern state-building: how to develop an effective bureaucracy with increasing administrative capacity to govern a growing polity while retaining the loyalty of the ruling family’s most important supporters. David C. Porter traces how the banner system created a service elite through its processes of incorporating new members, its employment of bannermen as technical specialists, its imposition of service obligations on women as well as men, and its response to fiscal and ideological challenges. Placing Qing practices in comparative perspective, he uncovers crucial parallels to similar institutions in Tokugawa Japan, imperial Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Slaves of the Emperor provides a new framework for understanding the structure and function of elites both in China and across Eurasia in the early modern period.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004413146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474
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Book Description
Blending micro and macro approaches, the volume covers topics from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries related to the Ottoman military and warfare, biography and intellectual history, and inter-imperial and cross-cultural relations.
