MESA Banner
The Empire Comes to Town: Towards a Social History of Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) Extended Residence in Ottoman Yenişehir, 1668-69
Abstract
The Ottoman imperial court of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was far from a strictly static institution, setting, or collection of persons devoted to the undertaking of administrative decision-making. To the contrary, by the middle of the Ottoman era the court had become a populous, biodiverse, and at times highly mobile “society” composed of humans and non-human animals organized into complex hierarchies of rank and function that interacted with the ecological and built environments of its geographic range in multifaceted ways. However, while the relationship between courtly residence and “everyday life” in Ottoman Istanbul, and to a lesser extent Ottoman Edirne, has been the subject of concerted historical study in recent years, there is a dearth of scholarship on the court’s engagement with the variety of other municipalities it frequented amidst centuries of inter-local peregrinations. To be sure, imperial residence at other places within the court’s shifting range of mobility tended to be much briefer than in the empire’s “throne cities” (Istanbul, Edirne, Bursa). This said, numerous engagements between the court and the other settlements in the path of its itineraries are nevertheless mentioned in Ottoman sources. As a means to further this research agenda, this paper examines the “social history of monarchy” in Ottoman Yenişehir (i.e., modern Larissa) during Sultan Mehmed IV’s (r. 1648-87) extended residence there as part of the empire’s campaign against the Republic of Venice in 1668-69. Based on a close reading of the Ottoman historian Abdurrahman Abdi Paşa’s (d. 1692) Book of Events, I argue that the court’s lengthy stay in Yenişehir brought a number of social-historical factors to bear on the city and its population that were uniquely experienced by locales visited by Ottoman imperial retinues. These included local access to courtly expenditure and patronage, subject participation in large-scale hunting operations and quartering practices, as well as honorary gift and death economies through the circulation of robes of honor and the severed heads of enemy soldiers. Given the significant role of courtly residence in maintaining Constantinople/Istanbul’s status as one of the world’s wealthiest and most populous cities from the Roman era through the collapse of Ottoman power in the 1920s, attending to the “everyday” consequences of Ottoman courtly residence patterns promises to further our understanding of the multitudinous settlements that lie in the post-Ottoman space, and especially those that were significantly exposed to the multifaceted influence of courtly mobility.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
Urban Studies