This panel will explore the changing dynamics and functions of petitioning from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Petitions were a crucial mechanism for the provision of justice in the Ottoman Empire, serving as a medium through which subjects, officials and visitors could make demands of the Sultan. Because petitions detail a wide range of issues and grievances, they provide insight into contemporary social issues and conceptions of sovereignty.
In contrast to shari‘a court records – the most widely-used source for Ottoman social history – the voluminous records of the petitioning system have not yet been thoroughly explored by historians. Yet these sources tell us a great deal about aspects of Ottoman life which the shari‘a court records elide, such as the enduring connections between provincial cities and Istanbul, and the intimate involvement of the central government in the minutiae of daily life across the empire.
Petitions were written in a patrimonial idiom: the devoted slave appealed to his or her benevolent lord and begged him to uphold justice. But this consistent idiom masks great changes in the nature of Ottoman government: from the patrimonial system of the sixteenth century, through the elaborate bureaucracy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the modernizing state with pan-Islamic ambitions of the nineteenth century. It also obscures the varied functions of petitioning: the petition was used to request employment, object to tax demands, criticize official abuses, or demand resolution of a legal dispute. At the same time, the granting of a petitioner’s request asserted imperial legitimacy through patronage and projected the Sultan’s sovereignty over his subjects and even members of the Muslim umma who were subjects of foreign empires.
As well as addressing the methodological challenges involved in working with petitions, the panel will focus on the specific ways in which the petitioning process invested the Ottoman state with legitimacy vis-à-vis its subject population and competing local, regional and foreign power-brokers. Paper A will examine how petitioners composed their petitions in the context of the bureaucratization of the petitioning system in the seventeenth century. Paper B will examine the role of petitions in the relationship between the government and non-Muslims in eighteenth-century Ankara. Paper C will study the use of petitions in political disputes and private lawsuits in eighteenth-century Egypt. Paper D will explore what petitions sent by Muslim subjects of foreign empires tell us about strategies of legitimation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
How were petitions successfully submitted for consideration by the Ottoman Imperial Divan in the capital city Istanbul whose population was often illiterate or only conversant in a tongue other than Ottoman Turkish, the official language used by the Ottoman bureaucracy?
In the mazalim tradition of classical and medieval Islam the ruler was expected to be easily accessible to his subjects to hear complaints about all forms of injustice that they have suffered, particularly through the wrongdoings of officials. In this immediate form of justice any subject could report wrongs in person to an ever-present ruler who would then usually decide on the spot. The absence of set legal procedures in the hearings before the ruler made the help of legal professionals such as lawyers unnecessary and the ruler’s decision was based on considerations of equity.
Following the general tendency towards institutionalisation and bureaucratization in the Ottoman realm the ruler’s court –together with its function of hearing petitions– was replaced early on by the Imperial Council as the highest administrative and judicial body in the Empire. The hearings of the Imperial Council operated according to a strict legal procedure that practically abolished the possibility of a subject filing his or her petition impromptu and directly to the ruler in person. Instead, bureaucrats of the chancery took the initial –and crucial– decision about which cases ought to be even considered for deliberation at the Divan.
In my paper, I attempt to shed light on the thus far neglected initial phase of the petitioning process. What were the mechanisms by which subjects who were often far from fluent in Ottoman Turkish, or not even literate at all, produced a petition text that would pass the scrutiny of the Divan clerks in order to be dealt with by the Imperial Council? What ways of submitting a petition proved most effective? This paper will draw particular attention to the instrumental –and often indispensible– role that professional petition scribes played in the successful consideration of one’s supplication.
Petitions submitted by Ottoman subjects to the Imperial Council are very colorful and unique sources of social and legal history. They constitute unique moments where the researcher is able to come much closer to touching and hearing the historical subject. An analysis of the rhetorical language and of the content of the petitions, as well as of the actors involved in petitioning, provides us with incomparable information on social and legal affairs. This unique source has received almost no attention in studies on Ottoman history despite the fact that it has been widely utilized by researchers in European history. Another advantage that petitions—as well as the Imperial Council registers—give the researcher is that they provide a great deal of information about the experiences of non-Muslim subjects in the empire. Non-Muslim religious leaders and ordinary non-Muslims contacted the central government more often than they utilized the local kad? courts since they had their own community courts.
My paper will explore the dynamics of non-Muslims’ petitioning the Imperial Council by following the case of Armenian priests who converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in mid-eighteenth-century Ankara. Documents concerning the case will allow us to see not only the relationship of the Armenian community and the patriarchate with the imperial center, but also the interplay of different legal actors and institutions that was triggered by petitioning. A series of criminal and notary registers as well as registers of imperial decrees concerning the priests, their relationship with the community as well as the punishments inflicted upon them will also provide valuable information on the workings of the early-modern penal system in general and regarding the non-Muslims and their conversion in particular. Furthermore, the case of Armenian priests will show how petitioning was an integral part of the Ottoman legal system by revealing the frequency of petitions that were referred in Ankara court records.
Recent scholarship on Egypt has recognized that the relationship with Istanbul and the wider Ottoman world remained crucial to the history of the province during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Petitions sent from Egypt, and the imperial orders issued in response, were a key vector in this ongoing relationship between center and province. A great number of both original petitions and registers of imperial orders survive in the Basbakanlik Archive in Istanbul. However, they have not received much attention from historians of Egypt, who have focused largely on the sharia court registers held at the Egyptian National Archive. Petitions deserve more attention because they reveal the close involvement of the imperial government in affairs at all levels of Egyptian society, ranging from petty quarrels among neighbors through the administration of local institutions to the violent feuds of the military grandees.
Egyptians of different socio-economic backgrounds sent petitions concerning a wide range of issues. Subjects sent petitions demanding intervention in private legal disputes, requesting appointment to positions in awqaf, or asking for pensions in recognition of previous service. Members of Egypt’s military elite sent petitions in the context of their violent factional struggles: to demand control of a revenue source, to complain about the actions of a reforming governor, or to seek refuge from an enemy. The issues handled by the petitioning system encompassed both public issues and private concerns; the petitioning system was intimately involved in both the political and the legal.
In this paper I will use original petitions, imperial orders, and stories of petitioning reported in chronicles, to examine how both the military elite and ordinary subjects used petitions to draw the imperial government into their affairs. I will look at how rhetorical strategies differed according to the petitioner’s status and demands, and I will ask whether the imperial palace treated petitions differently according to whether they were sent by ordinary subjects or military officials. Through these investigations I will attempt to trace the boundary between the public and the private in Ottoman legal and administrative practice, and I will address the overarching question to what extent petitioning was a system of patronage based on political expediency, and to what extent it was a legal system based on procedure.
Most studies of petitioning in the Ottoman Empire focus on the rights and responsibilities of petitioners and their sovereign in terms of a tacit political covenant where the ruler provides justice and stability in exchange for certain responsibilities such as working the land, paying taxes, and serving in the army. However, the right to petition the sultan was not limited to Ottoman subjects; in fact, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, many non-Ottoman Muslims from across Central Asia petitioned the Ottoman sultan and state for the redress of grievances they experienced while traveling in the sultan’s “well-protected domains”, particularly during the hajj. Although they were legally subjects of Tsarist Russia and Qing China, these Muslims professed allegiance to the caliph as a spiritual, and theoretically temporal, authority.
These travelers, whom I call “spiritual subjects,” petitioned the sultan in his capacity as the caliph. However, even as they requested patronage, they did not share the responsibilities of legal Ottoman subjects. How did they conceive of the Ottoman sultan’s responsibilities toward the non-Ottoman umma? What notions of justice, rights and responsibilities informed their petitions? How did Ottoman statesmen interpret the notion of “spiritual authority” and “spiritual citizenship,” and how did it inform day-to-day governance?
My paper will explore these questions and propose an alternative framework for studying the dynamics of trans-imperial petitioning. Drawing on sources from the Ottoman interior and foreign ministries that are preserved in the Basbakanlik Archives, I suggest that non-Ottoman petitions to the sultan evince the development of a relationship that was characterized by greater asymmetry than the pact between the ruler and his legal subjects. In responding favorably to non-Ottoman Muslims, the sultan-caliph was at pains not only to dispense justice but also to promote and project Ottoman authority to colonial powers and foreign observers. Thus, broader concerns about legitimacy – both domestic and international – factored into the state’s willingness to offer rights, protections, and patronage to individuals who were not legally Ottoman subjects. As I will show through a reading of both the petitions and the state’s responses to them, this was in exchange for a form of loyalty that could theoretically be used as leverage in international politics.
