Changing perceptions of the Ottoman empire: The early centuries

Changing Perceptions of the OttomanEmpire: The Early Centuries

LESLIE PEIRCE

This article surveys twentieth-century historical scholarship devoted tovarious aspects of the first four centuries of Ottoman history. It openswith the end-of-the-century 'good news' of an increasing number ofstudies accessible to wider audiences. The article then goes on to notethat archivally based social and economic history writing quantitativelyoutperformed work on facets of Ottoman cultural history. Religious andlegal studies, art history, and, to a lesser extent, Ottoman historiographyflourished to a greater degree than literary history. The article closeswith some reflections on major preoccupations of the twentieth-centurystudy of the pre-modern Ottoman Empire, namely, Ottoman origins, theabsence of the empire from comparative studies, and the question ofdecline.

For most of the twentieth century, historians paid a good deal of attention tothe early centuries of Ottoman history. This attention came at the expense ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth although not of the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, theperiod from 1300 to 1600 became a historiographically endangered species asa result of a shift in interest to the second half of the long Ottoman life span.It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the conveners of the conferencegenerating these essays, working in 2002, shaped the conference from an end-of-the-century perspective and allotted only one paper to discuss thehistoriography of four centuries, a period that encompassed two-thirds of theOttoman lifespan. Because interest in the early centuries generated asubstantial body of history writing during the 1900s, this essay can only beginto scratch the surface,'

To treat the period from 1299 (the conventional starting point for theOttoman state) to 1700 as an undifferentiated block of 'early centuries' is toview it merely as a backdrop to a more nuanced recent past. But this was not aneat 'package of centuries'. One of the dangers in lumping them together isthat it reinforces the notion of a 'classical' empire, with stable and effectiveinstitutions, that gave way in the seventeenth century to a cycle of disorder

Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.19, No.l , June 2004, pp .6 -28ISSN 0951-8967 prinl/ISSN 1743-940X onlineDOI: 10.1080/0951896042000256625 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 7

and recovery lasting 300 years. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenthcenturies were also marked by conflict, by transformations that were ongoingand often challenging, and by growth that came at the expense of differentsectors of society. One might in fact argue that the Ottoman enterprise did notgenerate a consolidated empire until the mid-sixteenth century, two-thirds ofthe way through the period assigned to this essay.

Given the salience of the Middle East and the Balkans in events of thetwentieth century, it is perhaps inevitable that the majority of scholarlyattention to the area these days is devoted to the 'modem' and its 'origins'. TheMiddle East is far from the only field shaped by the chronological teleology ofearly-modem/modern/post-modern that currently dominates historiographicalepistemology. While the current fascination with the post-modern ought to beputting paid to these chronological categories, it is perhaps too soon to expectthe dismantling of the mental scaffolding on which our training was built.

One problem with this chronology is that it gets in the way of acknowledgingthe complexity of the pre-1700 period. An important consequence for historiansof later centuries is that they risk mistaking for new much that is not. Anexample is the alleged 'rise' of local notables in the eighteenth century. While itis indisputable that urban notables gained importance in this period, theirdominance was also salient in earlier times - in the later Byzantine period,for example, and in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when waningMamluk authority had yet to be replaced by Ottoman control. The questionmight just as easily be why local notables lost power in certain periods or whatcombination of factors shaped access to and control of financial resources andthus the shifting composition of local elites.

Another problem with treating these centuries as an undifferentiated blockis that important twentieth-century historiographical debates regarding earlierOttoman history are unfinished business. They can benefit greatly fromengagement by scholars of the later Middle East and Balkans, and at the sametime they should matter to these scholars because the latter's work is built tovarying degrees on assumptions about the pre-1700 period. At this point, letme simply name three major twentieth-century debates or trends that are farfrom resolved:

• The tenacious preoccupation with the empire's origins and its implicationsfor (mis)conceiving 'ethnic politics' of the early centuries and, linked tothis, the fixation on 1299 as the Ottoman start-up date and its implicationsfor (mis)conceptions of continuities with the late medieval history of theeastern Mediterranean/western Asian region.

• The limited role that Ottoman studies have played in comparative or worldhistorical studies, an effect of an historiography that has, for most ofthe twentieth century, emphasized the uniqueness of the Ottoman Empire.

8 MEDITERRANEAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

• The for-now debunked narrative of a 'classical' Ottoman paradigm thatbecame corrupted around 1600 and launched the empire down the long anduneven slope of decline into collapse (the more challenging question beinghow to frame change following (from) the reign of Suleyman I).

Some caveats: I use the excuse of the territorial/temporal vastness of myassignment to account for the fact that there are many more contributors ofvaluable scholarship than I am able to name; those who are named serve asillustrations, not necessarily exemplars. Although many authors cited belowhave published several works, I generally cite only one or two representativeworks for each. My biases here include a greater knowledge of English-language scholarship than of work in other languages, a neglect of militaryhistory,- and a weakness in scholarship on the Balkans. Finally, I cannotoveremphasize that this essay is merely one person's perspective on a verylong and complex period in history, a perspective moreover that is confined bythe obvious limits of print space.

SOME RELATIVELY GOOD NEWS

A look at the popular press will provide one answer to the topic of myassignment - whether perceptions of the Ottoman Empire are changing, andif so, how. Since the publication of Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries:The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire in 1977, popular writing about theOttoman Empire has been a growth industry in which the early centuries figureprominently. The Ottoman Centuries is still selling. Two newer histories of theempire are Andrew Wheatcroft's quasi-scholarly The Ottomans and JasonGoodwin's breezy, anecdotal U)rds of the Horizons: A History of the OttomanEmpire. Other popular works include Philip Mansel's Constantinople: City ofthe World's Desire and John Freely's Inside the Seraglio: Private Livesof the Sultans in Istanbul. Former academic art historian Godfrey Goodwin(author of a serious survey of Ottoman architecture) now writes popular bookswith titles such as The Private World of Ottoman Women.^ All these booksoffer the general public accessible and readable narratives. But are views ofthe Ottoman Empire changing? Not much, it seems. As in centuries past, it isstill largely the exoticism of the sultan's palace and his capital that attractsreaders. We scholars have disdained such popularizing works; we like to tot upthe errors their authors make and the outmoded interpretations to which theysubscribe. But it has to be conceded that they sometimes see the forest for thetrees when we are still busy discussing the bark.

Part of the problem, in other words, is of our own making. Few Middle Eastscholars have bothered to write for a public audience. When they have, it is clearthat there is a ready audience. Bernard Lewis's The Muslim Discovery of Europe,


a fairly dense work, still sells well. Clearly name-recognition is at work here:Lewis has become a public intellectual in the United States. However, writing forthe public is becoming an easier prospect these days because the level and qualityof interest in the Middle East and its history are rising. The reasons are obviousand numerous; they include recent global events, greater awareness of the extentof Muslim populations in Europe and North America, growing recognition thatthe history of Europe is not merely the history of France and England, and culturalevents such as museum exhibitions and foreign-film festivals."*

The good news is that some historians of the Middle East have moved intothe breach by providing accessible narratives of our period. French scholars areahead of English-language scholars: take, for example, Histoire de I'empireottoman, a single-volume history edited by Robert Mantran, with leadingscholars (including Nicolas Vatin, Jean-Louis Bacque-Grammont, and GillesVeinstein) contributing the pre-1700 chapters. Is this in part the product of alarger reading public for history than the English-speaking world is used to?The same could be said regarding the greater appetite for history among thereading public of Turkey, where publications on the Ottoman past and on Islamhave simply exploded in number in recent years, and quasi-popular journals andencyclopedias such as Tiirkiye Diyanet Vakfi Islam Ansiklopedisi and IstanbulAnsiklopedisi have flourished. Fortunately, academically 'responsible'English-language works designed to be accessible to non-specialist audiencesare either recently out or in the pipeline: Daniel Goffman's The OttomanEmpire and Early Modern Europe and Colin Imber's The Ottoman Empire,1300-1650: The Structure of Power appeared in 2002 (both reviewed in thisissue), and Caroline Finkel's comprehensive treatment of the whole Ottomanperiod is expected shortly.'

Such works are critical not only for a general public but also for the historyacademy, with its increasing commitment to world history and comparativehistory. In North America, comparative conferences and panel sessions abound:for example, the 2002 annual meeting of the American Historical Association,whose theme was 'frontiers'. The comparative Journal of Early Modern Historyhas featured articles aimed at a broad audience by a number of Ottomanists, forexample, Rhoads Murphey's provocative account of Ottoman-Europeanrelations in the sixteenth century. Right now Europe and the Mediterranean arethe regions on which Ottomanists most often engage in comparative comment,although in recent years Asian contacts and comparisons have been drawing moreinterest. What is still missing is the inclusion of the Middle East and the easternMediterranean as foils in challenging the Eurocentric narrative of post-medievalhistory. Challenges are coming from scholars studying China, for example,Kenneth Pomeranz and R. Bin Wong.'

To sum up, the Ottoman Empire is gradually emerging as more than anexotic and inscrutable player on the world stage. The fact that researchers at


the start of the twenty-first century are reasonably prepared to meet audienceinterest is in no small part the result of the accomplishments of the twentieth.Let us turn now to some of those accomplishments.

THE ARCHIVAL TURN

The archival turn was arguably the twentieth-century methodological shift thatwas most significant for the pre-1700 period. (By 'methodological shift' I meana shift in the kinds of sources we read and what we take to be a text.)The opening of the Prime Ministry Archives after World War II coincided withthe wider vogue for quantitative studies in the more socially and locallyconscious historiographical world of the postwar era. Simultaneously, FernandBraudel's epic La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a I'epoque dePhilippe II (1949) was an invitation for students of the eastern Mediterraneanto bring the Ottoman case into dialogue with other histories. Because of thenew archival option, that opportunity was embraced by such scholcirs as IsmailHakb Uzungargili, Omer Lutfi Barkan, Halil Inalcik, Bernard Lewis, andStanford Shaw. Many of us are their students, either directly or indirectly.That archival research was once novel is hard to remember, but it was as late as1966 that an article by Jon Mandaville brought archival holdings in Syria andJordan to the attention of English-speaking scholars.'

During the 1980s, historiography based on archival research began to beaffected by new questions that were being posed in a number of scholarly fields,including our own: for example, how the agency of ordinary people is realized,how marginal populations affect majoritarian cultures, how gender andsexuality are constructed in different contexts, how law and similar discoursesreflect social and political contestation. Moreover, in the 1990s, advanees intextual studies outside our field suggested that documentary materials could notbe read as culturally unencumbered 'data'. This is particularly true when itcomes to representing 'ordinary people', whose voices were almost alwaysarchived through institutional translation. Given that we are overwhelmed withstate-generated documentation in the Ottoman field, this is an importantcaution. Amy Singer's study of Palestinian peasants and Ottoman officialsnoted that using tahrir data together with court records could partiallycompensate for the limitations of state-generated 'data'. Huri Islamoglu hasused an archival base to engage in theoretical debates regarding economicdynamics and sociopolitical relations. It is likely that we will becomeincreasingly sophisticated in our use of the archival option. Indeed, we must."

An enormous amount of arehivally based work has been accomplished,especially for the sixteenth century. The list of scholars who have usedarchival data productively is so long that only a few representative exampleswill be given here. Many of us were weaned on Ismail Hakki Uzungarsili's


multivolume history of the empire and on his special studies of the navy, thereligious establishment, and so on, which made extensive use of archivalresources. There is simply no way to acknowledge the myriad contributions ofHalil inalcik, whose catholic use of a large variety of sources accounts for hisdominance of the field until recent years. Two landmark contributions for theperiod covered in this essay are Inalcik's publication of the very early (835 H.)cadastral survey of Albania and 'Military and Fiscal Transformation in theOttoman Empire, 1600-1700'. Omer Llitfi Barkan's study of the constructionof the Suleymaniye mosque complex is a foundational work in the economicsand management aspects of monumental building by the Ottomans. Beginningin the 1960s, Nicoara Beldiceanu and Irene Beldiceanu-Steinherr made signalcontributions to early Ottoman documentary history. In his comprehensivestudy of early-modern Egypt under Ottoman administration, Stanford Sbawwas one of the first Americans to use the Ottoman archives productively.The cities of Rumelia were comprehensively treated by Nikolai Todorov in hisThe Balkan City. The archives themselves have been an object of study byMubahat Kutukoglu, whose exquisitely illustrated volume on diplomacy ismainly devoted to a comprehensive typology of documents ranging frominternational treaties to personal copies of court decisions.'

A good deal of archival work, especially in Turkey, has taken the form ofpublished transcriptions. For example, we now have a legion of localeconomic/demographic data compilations based on the cadastral survey (taputafirir) registers so numerous in the sixteenth century. With caution, these cancontribute to the writing of local history. In various publications. Heath Lowryhas considered some of the problems in using these registers (defters). Theongoing publication by the Prime Ministry Archives of the miihimme registers(of orders dispatched by central government authorities to local authorities inIstanbul and the provinces) renders another kind of archival data available forscholarly consultation. Journals such as Vakiflar Dergisi and Belgeler areinvaluable for this period.'"

The list of studies that make notable use of archival documents to probelarger processes and more specific concerns is also notable. A relativelyearly example was Michael Cook's Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia,1450-1600. In The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of OttomanProvincial Government, Metin Kunt problematized military administration byexamining its reorganization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Linda DsxXing' s Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and FinanceAdministration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1660, is a later example ofcreative use of archival data. Another recent work is §evket Pamuk's masterfulA Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire. Among her numerous works onOttoman Cairo is Nelly Hanna's Making Big Money in 1600, a study of aseventeenth-century businessman. Scholars like Gilles Veinstein and Suraiya


Faroqhi have created a veritable treasury of riches from archival sources.Veinstein has written about Rumelian soldiers on campaign, Greek landedmagnates, and the Jewish community in Avlonya, and Faroqhi about dervishesand sainthood, markets and merchants, criminals and outlaws, and politicalconfiict and negotiation. Andre Raymond's peerless studies of Arab cities in theOttoman period are models for the combined use of archival sources, includingwa^deeds, and chronicles. Archives have been combined with chronicles inDoris Behrens-Abouseifs Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions,Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo, Jane Hathaway's The Politics of Householdsin Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis, and my own The Imperial Harem:Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire."

Despite the richness of these works, the archives have only begun toanswer the basic questions posed by Braudel and others and to offer up newquestions. Even published archival studies are waiting to be further mined.An example is Barkan's publication of local law codes (kanun), which is ripefor (re)contemplation in the context of present interest in legal history;moreover, these codes can yield important insights into Ottoman ideology aswell as into variations in regional conditions.'^

An important element in the archival turn that developed later in thecentury is the explosion of people working with Ottoman-period court records(now housed in the archives of various successor states to the empire).One reason for the popularity of court records, as well as of fatwa collections,is that they are amenable to the sort of questions enumerated above. RonaldJennings' pioneering publications in the 1970s, based primarily onseventeenth-century Kayseri, demonstrated that court records could supporta striking variety of historiographical approaches - for example, social,demographic, gender, and local political history as well as legal history basedon state-produced (as opposed to ulema-produced) texts. Ozer Ergen? usedcourt records innovatively to study processes rather than institutions in hiscomparative work on urban elites and urban economic and political life inAnatolia. Amnon Cohen's work on Jerusalem creatively used court records todepict the dynamics of a particular place and a particular community, asdid Haim Gerber's study of Bursa. Judith Tucker was also a pioneer inusing court records: her work on women in nineteenth-century Egypt(while beyond the scope of this essay) demonstrated how court records couldhelp to recast the narrative of an amply narrated century."

In recent years, court records have figured in a wide range of work on thepre-1700 period. One quite productive area is the local social and legal historyof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A short list includes Dror Ze'evi'sstudy of seventeenth-century Jerusalem, Rossitsa Gradeva's several articles onsixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rumelia, Yvonne Seng's work on Istanbul,and I§ik Tamdogan-Abel's on Adana. The 1990s collections edited by


Madeline Zilfi, Amira Sonbol, and Gavin Hambly are testimony to the boon thatcourt records have proven to the study of women, gender, family, and slavery.To a lesser degree, the same is true of studies of non-Muslim communities,whose use of the courts turns out to be more intimate and creative than ourstereotypes have depicted (the work of Najwa Al-Qattan on Damascus, whileoutside the chronological scope of this essay, must be cited here).'"

Once again, however, our use of court records has not been as criticallyaware as it ought to be in acknowledging that these documents are nottransparent. My own reservations include the caution that we have notsufficiently interrogated the circumstances surrounding the production ofthese documents or examined the dissymmetries of power inherent in legalnegotiations. Others, including Dror Ze'evi, have questioned the extent towhich we can trust the voices ostensibly 'quoted' in the records."

Has the archival orientation of the second half of the twentieth centurychanged the image of the Ottoriian Empire? For the public at large, no; as wehave seen, exoticism continues to be the narrative imperative. For theacademic community outside the Middle East field, yes. Certainly ourenhanced ability to talk about a range of questions has permitted us to engagein dialogue with colleagues studying other societies in other parts of world.The Ottomans, in other words, have been humanized through theircomparative availability. For our own academic community, a qualified yes- qualified because we have not subordinated all this new knowledge to largerquestions about the nature of the whole Ottoman experience. To use thelanguage of the sufi, we are stuck in the exoteric and have not progressed to themore subtle interpretive realm of the esoteric. For example, we have yet to askthe big question of what the very existence of all this archival documentationcan tell us. It also seems likely that our substantial investment in state-produced documentation has reinforced a prejudice that the sixteenth centuryin particular was 'well run', thus preventing us from problematizing it as wehave problematized the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In sum, a lot ofwork has been accomplished; now it needs to be assimilated.

CULTURAL HISTORY: AN UNEVEN REPORT CARD

On the other side of the balance from these accomplishments is a striking - andlamentable - paucity of intellectual and literary history in the later twentiethcentury. This absence is obviously linked in part to the transfer of energy toarchival studies. As a result, our grasp of Ottoman civilization will at bestremain partial so long as the immense resources of Ottoman libraries remainunderutilized. One obvious reason for this decline in intellectual and literaryhistory is its linguistic requirements; many academics today lack the languagequalifications (Arabic and Persian alongside Turkish) to work efficiently in


literary Ottoman. For this reason, Cornell Fleischer's fascinating study of thelate-sixteenth-century historian and intellectual Mustafa Ali is particularlyimpressive in that it is based on a reading of Ali's sizeable corpus of writings.Critical intellectual figures such as Kemalpa§azade (d. 1534), historian, poet,philosopher, and chief mufti, and the polymath Katip ^elebi (d. 1657) awaittheir own Fleischers. The writing of biographical studies has not been popular inour field, and Franz Babinger's monumental Mehmed der Eroberer und seineZeit stands nearly alone as a political-cum-eultural biography."*

As for literary history, E.J.W. Gibb's six-volume study and translation ofOttoman poetry is now awkwardly Victorian but still an indispensablecatalogue of Ottoman literary tastes and influences. One can only be gratefulto scholars such as Walter Andrews, Victoria Holbrooke, and Kemal Silay forboth their interpretations and their translations of Ottoman poetry. Andrews'Poetry's Voice, Society's Song is a marvellous reading of Ottomansensibility in this period, an important work that is perhaps not sufficientlyacknowledged among historians. Turkish oral literature and folklore havebeen captured for us in studies by Pertev Naili Boratav, Wolfram Eberhard,and ilhan Ba§goz. Among Andreas Tietze's several contributions to the socialhistory of the Turkish language are his publications on riddles and nauticalvocabulary and his studies of influences among Turkish and the languages ofvarious subject populations."

In contrast to Ottoman literature, the study of Ottoman historiography is oneaspect of intellectual and cultural history that has kept a respectable pace overthe course of the twentieth century. Initially a good deal of attention was paid toOttoman histories of the fifteenth century and the critical historiographicalquestions they raised. German scholars such as Friedrich Giese, FranzBabinger, and Franz Taeschner provided critical editions of early Ottomanchronicles, thereby opening up (and also writing about) a number of importantsocial phenomena, for example, the akhi confraternities. The probing work ofVictor Menage, focusing primarily on the historian Ne§ri, examinedrelationships among historians and the sources they drew on. More recently,Cemal Kafadar's Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman Statehas revisited these chronicles and provided perceptive commentary on thehistoriographical debate of the 1930s concerning Ottoman origins. These earlyhistories have maintained a hold on scholars' interest in part because of theircommentary on Ottoman origins, a vexed historiographical issue.'"

A different kind of history writing - that by official court historiographers -has been illuminated by Christine Woodhull. Bringing literary theory to bear onthe seventeenth-century historiography around the regicide of Osman II in1622, Gabi Piterberg has raised questions about the role of Ottoman historiansin mapping political ideologies. However, much work remains to be done, andmajor figures and historiographical movements await study. Lewis V. Thomas'


brief Study of Mustafa Naima is a handy introduction, but Naima is certainlyworthy of the kind of treatment that Heischer afforded Mustafa Ali."

The study of religion is another domain that has kept pace over the courseof the century, despite the secularist bias of the academy during much of thepast 100 years. Indeed, religious practices, religious organization, andreligiously-cast expressions of sentiment and identity currently seem to bethe topics of greatest attraction for younger scholars in the field, especially,it seems, for the seventeenth century. (It is hard to refrain from mentioning allthe exciting work in progress in this area.)

To employ an admittedly dubious distinction between sufism and theulema establishment, I would say that the former flourished to a greaterextent in twentieth-century academic study - perhaps because of its appeal,perhaps in part because of the greater accessibility of its texts. Rumi isreportedly the best-selling poet in the United States these days, and, while itis more because of Coleman Barks' 'translations' than because of the solidacademic work of scholars such as William Chittick, translations and studiesof sufi poets and thinkers are reasonably accessible. The study of sufism in theOttoman world got an early start in the twentieth century with Mehmet FuatKoprulli's magisterial Turk Edebiyatinda Ilk Mutasavviflar. Koprulu's studywas followed by the copious works of Abdulbaki Golpmarli on sufi orders andthe poetic literature of sufis. In English, the study of sufism and of heterodoxrenderings of the Islamic faith also began early, with F.W. Hasluck'sChristianity and Islam under the Sultans and J.K. Birge's Bektashi Order ofDervishes. For other sufi studies (using the term 'sufi' loosely) in the Ottomandomain, one must name Irene Melikoff, Michael Winter, Ahmet Ya§ar Ocak,and Ahmet Karamustafa, among others.™

As for the ilmiye, apart from the work of scholars such as Ismail HakkiUzungarjili, Hans Georg Majer, Richard Repp, and Madeline Zilfi, it awaitssystematic exploration. Repp's valuable study of the chief muftiship.The Mufti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman LearnedHierarchy, has not achieved the recognition it deserves, perhaps because of itsphilological bias in an age that embraces religion as sociocultural practice.The great and sometimes controversial figures of the early centuries - MollaFeneri and Sheikh Bedrettin come to mind - and their intellectual, spiritual,and political preoccupations await serious investigation. There is scandalouslylittle on the Safavid/Ottoman religious encounter of the 1500s, arguablythe most signal development of that century.^' It is puzzling that these gapsshould persist, and I can adduce as explanations only the relatively thinpopulation of our field in general and the drift of 'early modernists' to theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In short, in comparison with the richnessof Mamluk and Timurid religious studies, the early Ottoman field is far behind.When we get to the seventeenth century, however, the picture improves


dramatically. Hans Georg Majer used a variety of sources to tease outlinks among seventeenth-century ulema families. Madeline Zilfi'sstudies on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious groups, radical andconservative alike, have contributed to the growing interest in religious politicsand debates of the period.̂ ^

If legal studies can be said to form a kind of sociopolitical branch of religiousstudies, then this area too is taking off, and Ottoman-period articles in journalssuch as Islamic Law and Society are starting to accumulate in near-respectablenumbers. For the pre-1700 period, the work of four scholars requires mention.On the theoretical side, Baber Johansen's Islamic Law of Tax and Rent drewattention to Mamluk and Ottoman manipulations of earlier legal interpretationsregarding land tenure and imperial claims. This question was one of the issuestaken up in Colin Imber's study of the jurist and chief mufti Ebu Su'ud Efendi(d. 1574), who has often been hailed as the reconciler of shariâ and kanun(imperial law): Ebu's-Su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition questions the extentto which this is a correct assertion. Uriel Heyd's Studies in Old OttomanCriminal Law has been a veritable bible for those interested in kanun. Varioushistorians (including Cornell Fleischer) have engaged in the debate overshari'â versus kanun, but the most sustained consideration yet has beenundertaken by Haim Gerber. In State, Society, and Law in Islam: OttomanLaw in Comparative Perspective, Gerber's methodological concerns focusedon (neo-)Weberian mischaracterizations of Islamic law and on testing theapproaches and arguments of legal anthropology against a complex historicalentity, the Ottoman legal system. However, it can only be said that study of thecritical relationship between kanun and shari 'â is still in its beginning stages.^'

Another relatively vibrant area, at least from the 1970s on, is art history.Several Turkish art historians - Oktay Aslanapa, Nurhan Atasoy, and Esin Atil- put the history of artistic production squarely on the map with theircomprehensive studies of architecture, book illustration, and the decorative artsand their publications of exhibition catalogues. In the study of Ottomanarchitectural history, the end of the century saw a shift of emphasis from formalquestions of aesthetics and construction to cultural questions of power,patronage, and representation. AptuUah Kuran and Godfrey Goodwin'sin-depth surveys of Ottoman architecture exemplify the older approach, whilethe work of Gulru Necipoglu provides an example of the latter. Necipoglu'sinterpretive treatment of palaces, crowns, and scrolls locates Ottoman artisticproduction in a broader Mediterranean and European context, demonstrating itsconnections to Italian artists and Renaissance influences as well as to Persianthemes and influences. Lucienne Thys-§enocak's study of the seventeenth-century Yeni Valide mosque and Tulay Artan's of eighteenth-centuryBosphorus palaces, of interest for the objects of their inquiry, also usequestions of gender to illuminate women's patronage.̂ '*


Other aspects of art history have had equally valuable scholarlyrepresentation. The Ottoman contribution to the rich miniature tradition inIslamic societies has been brought to public attention by the work of NurhanAtasoy and Filiz gagman. The decorative arts have been extensively studiedby Walter Denny, perhaps best known for his work on Anatolian carpets. TheOttomans' own writings about their architectural accomplishments have beenmade accessible by Howard Crane. Andre Raymond's and Doris Behrens-Abouseifs studies of Arab cities, mentioned above, have bridged fields bycombining urban history, archival documentation, and architectural history. Insum, later twentieth-century modes of studying art history have made it moreaccessible to ordinary historians - but this is, of course, a self-interestedjudgement.^'

What does all this mean for changing views of the Ottoman Empire in thisperiod? I would sum up by saying that political and social history dominated thetwentieth century. Historiographical, religious, literary, and art-historical studieswere located in a second, though amply visible, tier. Obviously these categoriesoverlap: study of elite production of artistic culture implies patronage, whichimplies political power relations and access to resources; the ubiquity of thewa^system links social, political, and religious history; and so on. But despitethe changes in emphasis in the century's last decades, our view of the 'early'empire is still dominated by processes of state-building. Perhaps the absence ofregional or provincial studies for these centuries contributes to this bias.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEBATES

In this section, I outline a few dominant preoccupations of twentieth-centuryhistoriography, focusing more on older trends than on newer ones - forexample, the interest in households as critical nodes of political and culturaldynamics - because the latter have not yet produced counter-reactions thatmove them into the realm of debate. The interrelatedness of the concernsoutlined below will, I hope, be obvious, as well as their impact on changingimages of the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Origins

The origins of the Ottoman dynastic state are only somewhat less elusive thanthe origins of Islam and the Muslim state in the seventh century, and the never-ceasing preoccupation with Ottoman origins bears a resemblance to twentieth-century debates over the emergence of Islam. The good news is thatthe competing mythologies and ideologies that have characterized discussionof the early Ottoman enterprise and the milieu out of which it emerged are nowbeing balanced with empirical studies.


Probably every reader of this essay is familiar with the still-infiuentialviews of two historians who truly dominated the twentieth century, MehmetFuat Koprulu and Paul Wittek. In different ways, each reacted to the racistviews of H.A. Gibbons, who argued in The Foundations of the OttomanEmpire - the opening historiographical salvo of the twentieth century - that itwas Byzantine Christian recruits and converts to the Ottoman cause and not'an Asiatic people' who provided its brains and its future success. In 1935,Koprulu, in Les origines de Vempire ottoman, put forth a variety of social andcultural considerations to argue that the Ottoman state drew its creative energyfrom the Turks and that it was largely the continuation of the Anatolian Seljukpolity. Shortly thereafter, in 1938, appeared Wittek's The Rise of the OttomanEmpire, known primarily for its argument - the 'ghazi thesis' - that thedynamic milieu of frontier fighters for Islam was the motor of Ottomanexpansion. In 1983, Rudi Paul Lindner revived the debate with his Nomadsand Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia, arguing against Wittek that religious zealplayed little part in Ottoman expansion; he also stressed the Ottomans' earlyabandonment of pastoralism, thereby questioning the idea of a tribal frontierethos. These debates have been intelligently analyzed in Kafadar's BetweenTwo Worlds, whose own commentary on early sources engages them withliterary sophistication. By no means impartial in this debate, Kafadar breathesnew life into the ghazi thesis, amending it in subtle and complex ways.̂ **

Until recently, there has been little progress in uncovering what stakesactually underlay the historiographical debates of the later fifteenth century(other than the oft-cited discontent of frontiersmen displaced by the normativepractices of state building). The Ottomans did not begin to write their ownhistories in earnest until a century and a half after the alleged exploits ofOsman and his followers in the early 1300s. Moreover, early Ottomanhistoriography is (purposefully) tendentious, its inspiration being variouslypanegyric, political, or didactic. The basic project of reconstructingreliable chronologies and thus reliable historical contexts turns out notto be so simple. Drawing on Greek, Persian, Arabic, Italian, and otherlanguages as well as Turkish, Colin Imber painstakingly constructed achronological account in The Ottoman Empire 1300-1481. Stephen Reinert's'From Ni§ to Kosovo Polje' also demonstrates the linguistic capacitynecessary for such reconstructions."

Others have made notable contributions to the study of early Ottomansociety and culture. Speros Vryonis' magisterial study of cultural integrationand displacement demonstrated, among other things, that the Ottomanenterprise could not be understood without a grasp of the Byzantine andAnatolian Seljuk past. Claude Cahen's Pre-Ottoman Turkey is a valuablesource in this regard, particularly because of the author's rich understanding ofIrano-Islamic practices upon which the Seljuks drew. Recent creative work


has been accomplished by what I will call 'the Cretan school', by which I meanthe conferences and publications initiated by Elizabeth Zachariadou at theInstitute for Mediterranean Studies at the University of Rethymnon in Crete.The first volume in particular - The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389) - isuseful in bringing to light a recent spate of scholarship offering newinformation, new interpretations of old information, and new ideas.̂ *

To comment editorially on this new work: it suggests a need to challengeconventional chronology, namely, the focus on 1299 as 'the beginning ofthe Ottomans'. The thrust of The Ottoman Emirate, for example, is that thefourteenth century is 'Ottoman' only in its representation as such in laterOttoman tradition. As a number of contributors to this volume suggest, modemhistorians have tended to adopt this reverse teleology uncritically in theirpreoccupation with searching for 'the origins' of an empire rather than framingthe emirate in its own temporal context. Narrating Ottoman origins as a kind ofmiraculous virgin birth, as much current work continues to do, obscures thefascinating and fluid world of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and even fifteenthcenturies. As a consequence, the multiple organic connections of the nascentOttoman enterprise with Seljuks, Mamluks, Byzantines, Venetians, Genoese,Mongols, and even Catalan mercenaries are overlooked. For example, KateFleet's European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchantsof Genoa and Turkey not only demonstrates the density and intimacy of tradein the Mediterranean but also argues that the Genoese contributed to the'early development and success' of the Ottoman state. Conversely, it isimportant not to overlook the complexity of early Ottoman history writing:Kafadar has spoken eloquently to this tension in Between Two Worlds, andinalcik has suggested a methodology for not throwing the baby (confirmablefact) out with the bathwater ('early folk traditions and later eliteelaborations').^'

5M/ Ceneris Preoccupations

To a greater or lesser extent, almost all historians of the early Ottoman periodhave been influenced by the Turkish nationalist historiographic project thatbegan in earnest in the 1930s. Basically, the nationalist narrative privilegesthe 'ascendancy' of a Turkish state during a 300-year period of (militarily)vigorous upswing until it was corrupted following the reign of Suleyman.Islam plays a negligible role in this narrative (except as a 'holy war' spark forconquest), as do the contributions of non-Turkish players. As for the pathologyof corruption embraced by scholars worldwide, it is no doubt familiar:obscurantist mullahs, world-denying ecstatics, aggressive women and theireunuch allies, unnatural sex, bribery, factionalism, and general dis-enlightenment - all leading to military enervation.


The project of constructing an Ottoman past that was palatable to theaspirations of the new republic is understandable, particularly in the face ofself-aggrandizing European distortions of the dynamics of the early Ottomanentity. But Koprlilu's emphasis on the self-sufficiency of Ottoman evolution -the presence in Anatolia of everything the Ottomans needed for success - hadthe effect of launching a historiography that imposed on the Ottomans asui generis identity that is still with us. The result has been a narrative that islargely the story of a uniquely 'different' polity - one fuelled by ghazijihadism, ruled by an army of slaves, and financed through a system of militaryfiefs. It is also a narrative whose dominant motif is conquest. In other words,our subject acquired a kind of home-grown exoticism, as opposed to the exoticfabrications of European observers. It is perhaps no surprise, then, thatscholars for so long bought into burlesque representations of corruption oncethe age of conquest came to an (inevitable) end.

In an early draft of this essay I began by asserting that the most strikingabsence in the twentieth-century historiography of the 'early centuries' was anarrative framework that integrated the Ottoman Empire into world history oreven a regional history of the Mediterranean and the Near East, broadly defined.Such a framework did exist in the 1930s debate outlined above; it enabled theeminent Europeanist William Langer to co-author, as a young scholar in 1932,'The Rise of the Ottoman Turks and Its Historical Background'. One mighthave expected that the Braudelian moment would further energize comparativehistory, but, as noted above, the new accessibility of vast archival riches keptattention fixed on internal historical preoccupations and created a momentumtowards local social history. Recently that trend has been reversing itself. I amnot sure whether we as historians of the early-modern Middle East are of ourown volition locating ourselves in a broader historical framework or whetherthe growing interest in world history is causing our non-Middle East colleaguesto pull us out of our own preoccupations. What follows is merely brief mentionof recent work in the area of supra-boundary contacts.™

The most vibrant area of research that aims at creating connections beyondOttoman borders has been the Mediterranean. The very title of Andrew Hess'The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-AfricanFrontier suggests the degree to which what we now like to call 'contact'studies languished during the middle decades of the century. In recent years,Daniel Goffman has been a leading figure in making connections outside theempire. In part the choice of the port city of Izmir as the subject of his firstbook directed his attention to the Mediterranean and Europe, a subjectelaborated in his later Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642-1660. PalmiraBrummett's Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age ofDiscovery studied Ottoman economic expansion in relation not only toMediterranean dynamics but also to developments in Iran. In A Shared World:


Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, MollyGreene focused on Crete, arguing that the island's experiences of Venetianand then Ottoman rule were not all that dissimilar in that rivalry andcontact among Latin Christians, Orthodox Christians, and Mushms wasnothing new in the Mediterranean. Contacts in the later fifteenth century havebeen brought alive by Nicolas Vatin in his work on Ottoman relations withthe Knights of Rhodes and with various European rulers over the affair of therenegade prince Cem Sultan.^'

Other boundary regions have not been neglected. The relations of theOttomans with the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean havebeen studied by Salih Ozbaran, while Bekir Kutukoglu and Jean-LouisBacque-Grammont have written about relations between the Ottomans and theSafavids. The Crimean Tatar Khanate and the Black Sea region in general aretreated in the work of Alan Fisher and Victor Ostapchuk, and Ottomanrelations with Poland have been explored by Dariusz Kolodziejczyk. Hungaryunder the Ottomans and its role as a frontier between central Europeand the Ottoman domain is probably second only to the Mediterranean frontierin the attention that has been devoted to it by scholars such as Gustav Bayerle,Geza David, Pal Fodor, and Gabor Agoston.'^

In several of these works, a more fiexible approach to the whole notion ofboundary appears to be taking hold. Indeed, it can be argued that Ottomanboundaries - both cultural and political - were distinctly porous untilthe middle of the sixteenth century and never fully hardened thereafter.Until the mid-sixteenth century, the legitimating discourse of the dynasty aswell as the empire's literary and artistic forms evolved in dialogue with globalstyles and paradigms. Specifically, the profound influence of Persianatecultural, political, and educational paradigms on twelfth-through-sixteenth-century Anatolia has yet to be fully acknowledged. The same can be said of thelong association with Byzantium and the intimacy of its influence followingthe conquest of Constantinople, and also of the competitive/cooperativeassociations with Italian city-states, particularly Venice. The global nature ofthe sixteenth century was more or less acknowledged in the late 1980s inthe French, British, and US catalogue publications and collected volumesissued around the travelling exhibition of Ottoman artefacts under the rubric of'the age of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent'."

The Question of Decline: More Work to be Done

The challenge to the paradigm of 300 years of Ottoman rise followed by300 years of decline - with the late sixteenth century as the turning point - wasone of the biggest shifts to occur towards the end of the twentieth century.Metin Kunt was among the first to propose a vocabulary of transformation in


The Sultan's Servants, After having mapped the 'rise' in The Ottoman Empire:The Classical Age, one of the prime expositions of the rise-deeline model,Halil inaleik somewhat modulated his views in 'Military and FisealTransformation in the Ottoman Empire'; in his reeent long eontribution toAn Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire he is sparing with thevocabulary of deeline (of eourse, he foeuses primarily on the 'rise' period in thispiece, but the vocabulary of valorization is also less evident). Recently, theseventeenth century has begun to be viewed on its own terms and in relation toproblems that were plaguing regions beyond the Middle East. Karen Barkey'sBandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization arguedthat the state's ability to manipulate 'bandit' peasants and pashas suggestedimperial strength rather than weakness. Darling's examination of thedeveloping financial bureaueraey begins only in 1560 and finds its naturalextension until 1660. Dror Ze'evi has remarked that, in Jerusalem, it is theseventeenth century that is the clearest manifestation of 'the Ottoman way'.In short, scholarship of the past 20 years has liberated the post-Slileymanieperiod from the straitjaeket of deeline in which every new phenomenon wasseen as eorruption of pristine 'classical' institutions.^"

There are, in my opinion, two reasons why the dismantling of this paradigmis unfinished business. The first is that we have not adequately addressed thenature of change in the post-Suleymanic period, and the second that the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries have yet to be liberated from the straitjaeket of the 'rise'framework. As for the first: my undergraduate students are not buying the storyof 'transformation' - it seems to them an apologist move, especially when theylook at the disaster-prone period from 1617 to 1656. In other words, we still donot have a convincing or even coherent narrative of what the empire is doing orbecoming. In a widely read essay, Rifa'at Abou-el-Haj has addressed thepreoccupations of this period; more such efforts to come to grips with theserocky times are needed. Perhaps the answer lies, at least in part, in comparativehistory that can point to the difficulties many polities faced in this period.The seventeenth century has come alive in cultural studies (at least in work inprogress) but less so in studies of governance or of local histories that might,show a different story of stability or new syntheses. Barkey's study andHathaway's The Politics of Households are admirable examples of the kind ofwork that is beginning to fill in the gap."

As for the second matter of unfinished business: golden-ageism has beenslow to recede from representations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,and even new works continue to treat the rise of the Ottoman polityuncritically, as a narrative of imperial successes. This valorization of the'heroic' age has not only ignored the costs of state-building but also renderedthis period inert, devoid of the dialectic of challenge and adaptation andthe possibility of a modernizing dynamic. In other words, there simply is not


enough tension in our study of the pre-1566 period. Part of the problem is theinert paradigm of 'systems' - the timar, kapikulu, and miri land-tenuresystems - that has been taken to be the heart of the story. This paradigm,which admittedly has a degree of truth (but only for a period of 150 years orso), has been overschematized to the point that it has obscured the repertoire ofadministrative solutions created in dialogue with local communities and theflexibility that was a sine qua non of a polity that underwent continualreformulation as it expanded simultaneously into both Europe and Asia. Weneed to parse this period for its violence, for its failures, for the cost ofrealigning elites and the stories of losers, and for the daily compromises thatgrass-roots imperializing required ordinary citizens to make.

I close witb a thought or two about periodization. Because the Ottoman periodlooms so large in the history of the Middle East and southeastern Europe, it is easyto fall back on its 'start and end' dates to mark eras. Rejecting 1453 (the fall ofConstantinople) and 1798 (Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt) as Eurocentric era-markers, our field substituted 'authentic' local dating. Dating by dynasties oftenmakes sense in the case of Middle Eastem history, but it can also impose artificialwatersheds where continuities are more striking. This observation has been madeto good effect for the Ottoman end-point: for example, witb respect to confinuitiesbetween the late Ottoman regime and Turkey, we have the work of BernardLewis, Erik Zurcher, and now Michael Meeker, among others. If now we discardreverse teleology regarding origins, we can do more justice to the global nature ofinfluences and contacts in the late medieval world and begin to think about aregional chronology of eastem Mediterranean/western Asia. For tbe sake ofargument, the story might be cast as a broadly regional one, punctuated bymoments of organizational innovation principally due to imperial agency. Threesuch moments were the reorganization of Anatolia by the Seljuks in the twelfthand thirteenth centuries, that of the eastem Mediterranean by the Ottomansbetween 1453 and 1555, and the similar although less autonomous reorganizationby Ottoman elites and their successors between 1826 and, say, the 1930s. Each ofthese reorganizations represents an adaptation to new territorial and culturaldynamics and to new pattems of dominance and resistance. Each might arguablybe construed as a moment of modernization, with the periods in between beingseen as times during which the networks and hierarchies laid down during thesemoments were fiexed to different degrees by local as well as central players.'Modem', in other words, is a relative, not an absolute,

NOTES

1. For their heip with coverage and bibliography, I thank Suraiya Faroqhi, Jane Hathaway,Heath Lowry, Amy Singer, and Madeline Zilfi.


2. Important work on military history includes Vemon Parry and M.A. Yapp (eds.), War,Technology, and Society in the Middle East (London and New York, 1975), and, morerecently, Caroline Finkel, The Administration of Warfare: The Ottoman Military Campaignsin Hungary, 1593-1606 (Vienna, 1988), and Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare(New Brunswick, NJ, 1999). See also Gabor Agoston, 'Ottoman Warfare in Europe,1453-1826', in J. Black (ed.), European Warfare, 1453-1815 (Basingstoke and New York,1999), pp.118-44.

3. Patrick Balfour Kinross, Tlw Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire(New York, 1977); Andrew Wheatcroft, The Ottomans (London, 1993); Jason Goodwin,Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1998); Philip Mansel,Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924 (London, 1995); John Ereely, Insidethe Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans in Istanbul (London and New York, 1999); GodfreyGoodwin, The Private World of Ottoman Women (London, 1997).

4. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982).5. Robert Mantran (ed.), Histoire de I 'empire ottoman (Paris, 1989); Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman

Empire and Early Modem Europe (Cambridge, 2002); Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire,1300-1650: The Structure of Power (New York, 2002); Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream:The story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923 (London, Forthcoming).

6. Rhoads Murphey, 'Suleyman I and the Conquest of Hungary: Ottoman Manifest Destiny ora Delayed Reaction to Charles V's Universalist Vision', Journal of Early Modem History,5 (2001), pp. 197-221; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and theMaking of the Modem World Economy (Princeton, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed:Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, NY, 1997).

1. Fernand Braudel, La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a t'epoque de Philippe II(Paris, 1949); Jon Mandaville, 'The Ottoman Court Records of Syria and Jordan', Joumal ofthe American Oriental Society, 86 (1966), pp.311-19.

8. Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration aroundSixteenth-Century Jerusalem (Cambridge, 1994); Huri islamoglu-inan. State and Peasant inthe Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Rural Economic Development inOttoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century (Leiden and New York, 1994).

9. Ismail Hakki Uzun^arsili, Osmanli Tarihi, 4 vols. (Ankara, 1947-73); Osmanlt Devletininilmiye Te^kilati (Ankara, 1965); Halil inalcik, Hicri835 tarihli suret-i defter-i sancak-i Amavid •(Ankara, 1954); 'Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 16(X)-I7OO',Archivum Ottomanicum, 6 (1980), pp.283-337; Omer Lutfi Barkan, SUleymaniye Cami veImareti Insaati (1550-1557) (Ankara, 1972); Nicoara Beldiceanu and Irene Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Recherches sur la province de Qaraman au XVIe siecle: Etudes et actes (Leiden,1968); Stanford J. Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization of Ottoman Egypt,1517-1798 (Princeton, NJ, 1962); Nikolai Todorov, The Balkan City 1400-1900 (Seattle, WA,1983); Mubahat S. Kutukoglu, Osmanli Belgelerinin Dili (Diptomatik) (Istanbul, 1994).

10. Heath W. Lowry, Studies in Defterotogy: Ottoman Society in the Fifteenth and SixteenthCenturies (Istanbul, 1992).

11. Michael Cook, Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia, 1450-1600 (London and New York,1972); I. Metin Kunt, The Sultan's Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman ProvincialGovernment (New York, 1983); Linda Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: TaxCollection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1660 (Leiden and NewYork, 1996); §evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2000);Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Ismail Ibn Taqiyya, EgyptianMerchant (Syracuse, NY, 1998); Gilles Veinstein, 'L'hivemage en campagne, talon d'Achilledu systeme militaire ottoman classique: A propos des sipahi ie. Roumelie en 1559-1560 ',Studia Islamica, 68 (1983), pp.109-48; idem, 'Une communaute ottomane; Les Juifs d'Avlonya (Valona) dans la deuxieme moitie du XVIe siecle ', in Etat et societe dans I'empireottoman, XVIe-XVlIIe siecles: La terre, la guerre, les communautes (Aldershot, 1994);Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Anatolia: Trade, Crafts, and Food Production in anUrban Setting, 1520-1650 (Cambridge, 1984); Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under theOttomans, 1517-1693 (London, 1994); Andre Raymond, 'Les grands waqfs et 1 'organisation


de 1 'espace urbain a Alep et au Caire a I'epoque ottomane (XVIe-XVIIe siecles)'. Bulletind'Etudes Orientates, 31(1979), pp. 113-28; idem, Grandes villes ambes a I 'epoque ottomane(Paris, 1985); Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule: Institutions.Waqf, and Architecture in Cairo (16th and 17th Centuries) (Leiden, New York, and Koln,1994); Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of theQazdaglis (Cambridge, 1997); Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty inthe Ottoman Empire (London and New York, 1993).

12. Omer Liitfi Barkan, XV ve XVImci Asirlarda Osmanli Imparatorlugunda Zirai EkonomininHukuki ve Mali E.iaslari. I: Kanunlar (Istanbul, 1943). Ottoman kanunnames have been morereeently studied by Ahmet Akgunduz, Osmanh Kanunnameleri ve Hukuki Tahlilleri, 9 vols.(Istanbul, 1990-96).

13. Ronald Jennings, 'Kadi, Court, and Legal Procedure in 17th C. Ottoman Kayseri', StudiaIslamica, 48 (1978), pp. 133-72; idem, 'Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi in17th C. Ottoman Kayseri', Studia Islamica, 50 (1979), pp.l5l-84; Ozer Ergen?, 'OsmanliKlasik Donemindeki "Ejraf ve A'yan' Uzerine Bazi Bilgiler', Osmanli Ara§tirmalari,3 (1982), pp.105-13; idem, 'Osmanli §ehirlerindeki Yonetim Kurumlannm NiteligiUzerinde Bazi Du§uncelcr', in VIII. TUrk Tarhi Kongresi Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler(Ankara, 1981); Amnon Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth Century(Cambridge, 1984); Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa.1600-1700 (Jerusalem, 1988); Judith Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt(Cambridge, 1985).

14. Dror Ze'evi, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany, NY,1996); Rossitsa Gradeva, 'Orthodox Christians in the Kadi Courts; The Practice of the SofiaSheriat Court, Seventeenth Century', Islamic Law and Society, 4 (1997), pp.37-69; YvonneSeng, 'Standing at the Gates of Justice: Women in the Law Courts of Early Sixteenth-CenturyUskudar, Istanbul', in S. Hirsch and M. Lazarus-Black (eds.). Contested States: Law.Hegemony and Resistance (New York, 1994), pp. 184-206; i§ik Tamdogan-Abel, 'Les Han,ou l'etranger dans la ville ottomane', in F. Georgeon and P. Dumont (eds.), Vivre dansVempire ottoman: Sociahilites et relations intercommunautaires (XVIIIe-XXe siecles)(Paris, 1997); Madeline Zilfi (ed.). Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastem Women inthe Early Modem Era (Leiden and New York, 1997); Amira Sonbol (ed.). Women, theFamily, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (Syracuse, NY, 1996); Gavin Hambly (ed.).Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, Piety (New York, 1998); NajwaAl-Qattan, 'Dhimmis in the Muslim Court: Legal Autonomy and Religious Discrimination',International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31 (1999), pp.429-44.

15. Dror Ze'evi, 'The Use of Shari'̂ a Court Records as a Source for Middle Eastem SocialHistory: A Reappraisal', Islamic Law and Society, 5 (1998), pp.35-56.

16. Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The HistorianMustafa AU (1593-1606) (Princeton, 1986); Franz Babinger, Mehmed der Eroberer undseine Zeit: WeltenstUrmer einer Zeitenwende (Munich, 1953).

17. E.J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1900-1907); Walter Andrews,Poetry's Voice, Society's Song (Seattle, WA, 1985); Victoria R. Holbrooke, The UnreadableShores of Love: Turkish Modemity and Mystic Romance (Austin, TX, 1994); Kemal Silay,An Anthology of Turkish Literature (Bloomington, IN, 1996); Wolfram Eberhard and PertevNaili Boratav, Typen tUrkischer Volksmarchen (Wiesbaden, 1953); Ilhan Ba§g6z, TurkishFolklore and Oral Literature: Selected Essays (Bloomington, IN, 1998); Andreas Tietze, TheLingua Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (Urbana,IL, 1958) (with Henry and Renee Kahane); idem, Worterhuch der Griechischen, Slavischen.Arabischen. und Persischen Lehnworter im Anatolischen Tiirkisch (Istanbul, 1999).

18. Friedrich Giese, Die altosmanischen Anonymen Chroniken (Breslau, 1922); Franz Babinger,Die friihosmanischen JahrbUcher des Vrudsch (Hannover, 1925); Franz Taeschner, Diealtosmanische Chronikdes A^iqpagazade (Leipzig, 1929); V.L. Menage, Neshri's History ofthe Ottomans: The Sources and the Development of the Text (London and New York, 1964);Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley andLos Angeles, 1995).


19. Christine Woodhull, Talikizade's §ehname-i Humayun (Berlin, 1983); Gabi Piterberg, 'SpeechActs and Written Texts: A Reading of a Seventeenth-century Ottoman Historiographic Episode',Poetics Today, 14 (1993), pp.387-418; Lewis V. Thomas, A Study ofNaima, ed. N. Itzkowitz(New York, 1972); Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire.

20. Coletnan Barks, with John Moyne, Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home(London, 1998); William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teaching of Rumi(Albany, NY, 1983); Mehmet Fuad Kopriilu, TUrk Edebiyatmda Ilk Mutasavviflar(Istanbul, 1919); Robert Dankoff and Gary Leiser (trans.). Early Mystics in TurkishLiterature (London, forthcoming); Abdiilbaki Golpmarli, Atevi-Bektaî Nefesleri (Istanbul,1963); F.W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (Oxford, 1929); JohnKingsley Birge, The Bektashi Order of Dervishes (London and Hartford, 1937); IreneMelikoff, Destan d'Umur Pacha (Dustumame-i Enveri) (Paris, 1954); idem, Hadji Bektach,un mythe et ses avatars: Genese et evolution du Soufisme populaire en Turquie (Leiden,1998); Michael Winter, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt: Studies in the WritingsofAbdAl-Wahhab Al-Sharani (New Brunswick, NJ, 1982); Ahmet Ya§ar Ocak, OsmanliToplumunda Zindiklar ve Mulhidler (Istanbul, 1998); Ahmet Karamustafa, God'sUnruly Servants: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200—1550 (SaltLake City, UT, 1994).

21. Some valuable work has been done on this subject: Hanna Sohrweide, 'Der Sieg derSafawiden in Persien und seine Ruckwirkungen auf die Schiiten Anatoliens im 16.Jahrhundert', Der Islam, 41 (1965), pp.95-223; Colin Imber, 'The Persecution of theOttoman Shiîtes according to the MUhimme Defterieri, 1565-1585', Der Islam, 56 (1979),pp.245-73; Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, 'Oizilbash Heresy and Rebellion in Ottoman Anatoliaduring the Sixteenth Century', Anatolia Modema, 1 (1998), pp.1-15.

22. Uzunârsili, Ilmiye Te§kilatr, Richard Repp, The Mufti of Istanbul: A Study in theDevelopment of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London, 1986); Hans Georg Majer,Vorstudien zur Geschichte der Ilmiye in osmanischen Reich (Munich, 1978); Madeline Zilfi,'The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul', Journal of NearEastern Studies, 45 (1986), pp.251-69; idem. The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema inthe Postclassical Age, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis, MN, 1988).

23. Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law of Tax and Rent (London, 1988); Colin Imber,Ebu's-Su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford, CA, 1997); Uriel Ueyd, Studies in OldOttoman Criminal Law, ed. V. Menage (Oxford, 1973); Haim Gerber, State, Society, andLaw in Islam: Ottoman Law in Comparative Perspective (Albany, NY, 1994).

24. Oktay Aslanapa, TUrk Sanati, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1972-73); Nurhan Atasoy, Ibrahim Pa§a Sarayi(Istanbul, 1972); Esin Atil, Levni and the SUmame: The Story of an Eighteenth-CenturyOttoman Festival (Istanbul, 1999); Esin Atil (ed.), Turkish Art (Washington, DC, 1980);Aptullah Kuran, Ilk Devir Osmanli Mimarisinde Cami (Ankara, 1964); idem, Mimar Sinan(Istanbul, 1986); Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture (Baltimore, 1971);Gulru Necipoglu, Architecture, Ceremonial, and Power: The Topkapi Palace in the Fifteenthand Sixteenth Centuries (New York and Cambridge, MA, 1991); idem. The Topkapi Scroll:Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica, CA, 1995); LucienneThys-§enocak, 'The Yeni Valide Mosque Complex of Eminonu, Istanbul (1597-1665):Gender and Vision in Ottoman Architecture', in D.F. Ruggles (ed.). Women, Patronage, andSelf-Representation in Islamic Societies (Albany, NY, 2000); Tulay Artan, 'The KadirgaPalace: An Architectural Reconstruction', Muqamas, 10 (1993), pp.201-11.

25. Filiz fagman and Nurhan Atasoy, Turkish Miniature Painting (Istanbul, 1974); WalterDenny, The Ceramics of the Mosque of Riistem Pasha and the Environment of Change(New York, 1977); idem. The Classical Tradition in Anatolian Carpets (Washington, DC,2002); Howard Crane, Risale-i Mimariyye: An Early-Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Treatiseon Architecture (Leiden, 1987); Raymond, 'Les grands waqfs'; idem, Grandes villes arabes;Behrens-Abouseif, Egypt's Adjustment to Ottoman Rule.

26. Herbert A. Gibbons, The Foundations of the Ottoman Empire: A History of the Osmanlis upto the Death of Bayezid I (1300-1403) (New York, 1916); Mehmet Fuad Koprulu, Lesorigines de I 'empire ottoman (Paris, 1935); Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire


(London, 1938); Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia(Bloomington, IN, 1983); Kafadar, Between Two Worlds.

27. Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1481 (Istanbul, 1990); Stephen Reinert,'From Ni§ to Kosovo Polje', in E. Zachariadou (ed.). The Ottoman Emirate (1300-1389)(Rethymnon, 1993).

28. Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process ofIslamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley, 1971); ClaudeCahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey: A General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture andHistory c. 1071-1330, trans. J. Jones-Williams (London, 1968); Zachariadou (ed.).The Ottoman Emirate, Kafadar, Between Two Worlds.

29. Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants ofGenoa and Turkey (Cambridge, 1999); Halil Inalcik, 'Osman Ghazi's Siege of Nicaea andthe Battle of Bapheus', in Zachariadou, The Ottoman Emirate, pp.77-99.

30. W.L. Langer and R.P. Blake, 'The Rise of the Ottoman Turks and its Historical Background',American Historical Review, 37 (1932), pp.468-505.

31. Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century lbero-AfricanFrontier (Chicago, 1978); Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1500-1650(Seattle, WA, 1990); idem, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642-1660 (Seattle, WA, 1998);Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery(Albany, NY, 1994); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the EarlyModern Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ, 2000); Nicolas Vatin, L'Ordre du Saint-Jean deJerusalem, I 'empire ottoman et la Mediterranee orientate entre les deux sieges de Rhodes,1480-1522 (Paris, 1994); idem. Sultan Djem: Un prince ottoman dans I'Europe du XVesiecte (Ankara, 1997).

32. Salih Ozbaran, 'The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1534-1581',Journal of Asian History, 6/1 (1972), pp.45-87; idem, 'Expansion in the SouthernSeas', in H. inalcik and C. Kafadar (eds.), Suleyman the SecondandHis Time (Istanbul, 1993),pp.211-18; Bekir Kutukoglu, Osmanh-Iran Siyasi Munasebetteri (Istanbul, 1993); Jean-Louis Bacque-Grammont, Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leurs voisins (Istanbul, 1986); idem,'The Eastern Policy of Suleyman the Magnificent, 1520-1533', in inalcik and Kafadar(eds.), suleyman the Second and His Time, pp.219-28; Alan Fisher, The Crimean Tatars(Stanford, CA, 1978); Victor Ostapchuk, 'The Publication of Documents on the CrimeanKhanate in the Topkapi Sarayi: New Sources for the History of the Black Sea Basin', HarvardUkranian Studies, 6 (1982), pp.500-528; Darius Kolodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Relations(15th-18th Century): An Annotated Edition of '^Ahdnames and Other Documents (Leiden andBoston, 2000); Gustav Bayerle, Ottoman Diplomacy in Hungary: Letters from the Pashas ofBuda, 1590-1593 (Bloomington, IN, 1972); Geza David, 'Administration in OttomanEurope', in M. Kunt and C. Woodhull (eds.), SUleyman the Magnificent and His Age(New York, 1995), pp.71-90; idem. Studies in Demographic and Administrative History ofOttoman Hungary (Istanbul, 1997); Pal Fodor, In Quest of the Golden Apple: ImperialIdeology, Politics, and Military Administration in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2000);Agoston, 'Ottoman Warfare in Europe, 1453-1826'.

33. Esin Atil, The Age of Sultan SUleyman the Magnificent (Washington and New York, 1987);J.M. Rogers and R.M. Ward, SUleyman the Magnificent (London, 1988); Marthe BemusTaylor e; al., Soliman le Magnifique (Paris, 1990).

34. Kunt, The Sultan's Servants; Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600, trans. N. Itzkowitz and C. Imber (London, 1973); idem, 'Military and FiscalTransformation'; idem, 'The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300-1600', in H. inalcikwith D. Quataert (eds.). An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914(Cambridge, 1994), pp. i I-409; Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The OttomanRoute to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy;Ze'evi, An Ottoman Century.

35. Rifa'at Abou-el-Haj, The Formation of the Modem State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth toEighteenth Centuries (Albany, NY, 1991); Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats; Hathaway,The Politics of Households.


36. For other considerations of the periodization question, see Dror Ze'evi's essay in this issueand Jane Hathaway, 'Problems of Periodization in Ottoman History: The Fifteenth throughthe Eighteenth Centuries', Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 20/2 (1996), pp.25-31;Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modem Turkey (London and New York, 1964); Erik JanZurcher, Turkey: A Modem History (London, 1993); Michael Meeker, A Nation of Empire:The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).

Changing perceptions of the Ottoman empire: The early centuries

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