A major theme in the social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire has been the permeable nature of social and occupational boundaries, especially as it was observed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Professional soldiers, who as a rule were members of the elite askeri service class, frequently established livelihoods in trade or the crafts in towns where they were assigned, in order to supplement their income, while artisans and merchants obtained nominal memberships in the same military units, often to secure the legal and tax privileges of the askeri class. The growing presence of soldiers throughout the empire, whether nominal or real, has led some historians to describe Ottoman society as undergoing “militarization,” or more generally, “askerization.” Studies of this complex process have tended to outline its general features and offer a broad, usually quantitative demographic analysis. The present study aims to complement this emphasis with an in-depth, micro-historical focus on the households of three Ottoman military officers active in seventeenth-century Aleppo. It draws on scores of local, Arabic-language manuscript records, primarily the registers of the local law court (sijillat), and Ottoman Turkish-language imperial records, mostly cadastral documents (tahrirs) and administrative correspondence from the central administration in Istanbul. The study reconstructs key practices that enabled military cadres to establish themselves as major players in the provincial society and economy: the acquisition of clients and slaves, the building of manor houses in strategic locations, the founding of charitable foundations (waqfs), but most important of all, the extension of moneylending and investment operations throughout the city and countryside. Represented in this selection of households are (1) members of the locally garrisoned imperial herald unit (chavushan); (2) cavalry officers (sipahis) administering land assignments (timars); and (3) persons descending from pashas and vassal lords (muteferrika). Particular attention will be paid to the varying strategies by which each household, over time, brought both villagers and townspeople into relations of financial dependence and consolidated their position through the geographical clustering of residences and/or the foundation of waqfs. The assertion by these households of economic and social influence in the second half of the seventeenth century sets an early precedent for the ascendancy of the landed urban notables in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The recently growing body of 'renewal of faith' literature has hypothesized a pietistic revivalism in early modern Ottoman Empire. This literature argued that the Ottoman processes of state and social formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were engaged in the Mediterranean age of confessionalization. These contentions inspired one historian to argue that the fateful second siege of Vienna in 1683 by the Ottoman armies under the command of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha (1676-1683) was a jihad, that is, a religiously motivated undertaking. Rather than interpret the launching of the Vienna campaign exclusively through the prism of religion, my paper undertakes a reconsideration of Kara Mustafa Pasha’s grand vizierate through a comparative analysis of seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicles and Habsburg diplomatic letters. During the late 1670s and early 1680s three Habsburg ambassadors resided in Constantinople, while three other envoys traveled to the city. The Habsburg representatives constantly struggled to maintain ‘gute Nachbarschaft und Freundschaft’ with the Ottomans between the first congratulatory letter of the Habsburg War Council President Raimond Montecuccoli in April 1677 to Kara Mustafa Pasha and the last series of fruitless peace talks between the Grand Vizer and Albrecht Caprara. Kara Mustafa Pasha, who, in the words of ambassador Kindsperg, was ‘a harsh and obstinate man satisfying neither Christians nor Turks’, subtly and obstinately ignored all peace attempts. Moreover, the Grand Vizier purposefully instigated the anti-Habsburg rebellion of the Protestant magnates in Upper Hungary and Transylvania. He several times welcomed the representatives of the rebels in the Ottoman capital despite remonstrations of the Habsburg envoys each time. Contemporary Ottoman chronicler Silahdar recorded that the Grand Vizier also arranged dispatches of fake incursion letters from the Austrian border to the Ottoman capital so as to justify a campaign against the Habsburgs. In short, the Vienna campaign was more a function of the Grand Vizier’s personal ambitions, strategic miscalculations, and enthusiasm to redesign Central Europe geopolitically than a purported Islamic revivalism within the Ottoman court. My paper complements recent efforts to revive diplomacy as an heuristic tool in Ottoman historiography. Besides, through a comparison of Kara Mustafa’s aggressive Central European policy with the more balanced tactics of his two Köprülü predecessors, I contribute to the recent discussions on the increasing role of the courtiers in the Ottoman decision-making mechanism. Finally, I illustrate shortcomings of overarching paradigms in explaining specific events and entire eras in Ottoman history.

This paper analyzes the attitude of the Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem toward the Order of Friars Minor, commonly referred as “the Franciscans,” during the first part of the seventeenth century. The Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem, despite their exploitation of the Franciscans as a revenue stream, often protected the friars from the angry crowds who sometimes gathered aiming to attack them. The Ottoman Empire and the European rulers had signed agreements to ensure the protection of the European citizens in Ottoman lands, mainly traders and members of religious orders. Any breach of such agreements could have harmed the Ottoman Empire at both the political and economic levels. Nonetheless, many factors led to frequent riots by the local population against the Franciscans; among these were the weakness of local governments, the spread of epidemic diseases, and severe droughts that led to bad harvests, dying animals, and hungry people. The description and analysis of the situation will be based on three letters that Franciscan friars living in Jerusalem wrote to a senior officer of their order who held the position of commissariat in charge of the Holy Land. As an organization, the Custody of the Holy Land’s mission was stewardship of Catholic holy places and the reception of pilgrims, and the main tasks of the Custodian included providing for the friars and supplying them with all of the resources they needed to maintain the holy places. The letters, which were found in the archives in the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid, were written between 1619 and 1621 and contain first-person observations about the challenging circumstances the friars faced in the Holy Land and detailed descriptions of the conditions of many of the buildings where they lived, worked, and worshipped.