On the urban geography of seventeenth century Ottoman Istanbul: boundaries and politics of coexistence in Eremya Chelebi Komurcuyan (1637-1694) This paper is part of a larger project trying to explore the social and intellectual life of seventeenth century Istanbul, and the construction and subversion of communal boundaries through the life, literary production and autobiographical writings of Eremya Chelebi Komurcuyan of Istanbul (1637-1694). His works vary over a large span of genres from poetry to history, from religious pamphlets to his long diary and to polemical works against Jewish Messianism of the period. In this paper, I will focus on the use of urban geography of Istanbul as a means of negotiating social boundaries, identities and difference in the framework of politics of coexistence. In recent scholarship on the nature of the early modern Ottoman society, there has been a tendency to rethink on the social and political turbulences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was lately marked by the publication of Baki Tezcan’s ambitious and comprehensive book. Although his discussion of a notion of ‘limited government’ is productive for our purposes, Marc Baer’s and Tijana Krstic’s works have been especially inspirational and intellectually engaging due to their focus on questions of conversion, communal boundaries and moments of social confrontation including discussions of non-Muslim communities. The corpus of works produced by Eremya Chelebi Komurcuyan of Istanbul provides us with a picture of the urban geography of Istanbul useful for a better understanding of the larger processes of transformation. I aim at giving a perspective of the creative social tension that was caused by local urban conflicts, confrontations and negotiations specifically taking place in the second half of the seventeenth century. Using his diary, history of Istanbul, history of the fires of Istanbul, his map of Istanbul and Evliya Chelebi’s work on Istanbul (the first volume of his Seyahatname), I will demonstrate how some unsettling social and political events of this period were met by a member of the Armenian community. I intend to show how he uses urban geography as a canvas on which he (re)draws social boundaries. It is reflected in his works as a manifestation of the anxieties triggered by confessional competition, conversion of souls and spaces, and messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi.

This paper is a thought piece about the intersection of law and literacy in the late medieval/early modern (15th-16th-century) eastern Mediterranean world—a geography deliberately intended to include both the Mamluks-then-Ottomans and Renaissance/Discovery Europe. In it, I will explore the concept of “legal literacy” as the intersection of literacy qua literacy and literacy as awareness of a legal cultural system and how to exploit it for personal and/or group benefit. I draw inspiration from Michael Clanchy’s notion of “practical literacy,” which he developed in the context of late medieval England (From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307). The paper extends from research on the Ottoman conquest of the Arabic-speaking world, which I performed using an array of legal sources (law codes, jurisprudential manuals, contract formularies, law court records, and endowment deeds) in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. This research has yielded evidence of the pervasive use of legal documents by large segments of the population, some of which would be conventionally considered illiterate. My basic contention is 1) that this period was not only one of geopolitical inflection (read: empire-building), but one in which we see a fundamental transition toward a new, popular relationship with writing itself, especially as connected to law, broadly conceived, and 2) that the expansion of writing and empire were mutually reinforcing if not always deliberately so. I will argue that in narrowly construing literacy as the ability to substantially read the written word, not only are other more ubiquitous forms of literacy missed, but the full power of being able to read even a very little is underestimated. I will conclude by engaging the slippery question of why the printing press took off in Europe while it did not appear in the Middle East until centuries later—this despite printing technology’s well-known Eastern origins and the Middle East’s/Islamic world’s early and sophisticated use of paper.

In 1693, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, one of the major intellectuals writing in Arabic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, embarked on a major journey through much of the Ottoman Arab lands. He detailed this experience in the longest of his four travelogues titled, The Literal and the Figurative: The Journey to Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz. While the main goal of his journey was to visit and verify the many “friends of God,” both living and dead, he also used the framework of travel to open discussions of varied intellectual topics and mix genres together into a novel work. This paper attempts to situate this major opus of al-Nabulusi within its Ottoman historical and intellectual context. In particular it focuses on the text as a response to the Kadizadeli challenges of the seventeenth century, despite the fact that it contains very little information for the positivistic historian. Replete with references to controversies over coffee, tobacco, zikr, and saint visitation, the travelogue shows the lasting reaction to the Kadizadeli movement that reverberated throughout the empire both in its capital and in its provinces. Moreover, it explores the connection between this counter-reaction to the Kadizadelis and the al-Nabulusi’s innovative narrative and epistemological strategies.