In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman central administration started to adopt and implement a series of new measures to regulate urban planning, maintain hygiene in urban spaces, and develop a system of central health administration. Istanbul served as the major venue for these new regulations and remained the prime recipient of the services that grew out of this institutionalization. For example, it was at that time that graveyards and slaughterhouses were systematically moved outside the city walls and littering was severely banned. Although these new services started as ad hoc regulations for preempting emergent situations (epidemic diseases, earthquakes, fires, etc.), they gradually became systematized through the course of the century to constitute the basis of an early form of “public health” organization in the Ottoman Empire. What is most interesting is that these measures were formed and put into practice at the same time that new medical notions (especially with regard to disease transmission) started to find their way into the scholarly discussions of Ottoman medical elite in the second half of the sixteenth century. These notions, which were fast embraced and canonized in the Ottoman medical literature, were also accepted as a sound basis of legal theory about proper conduct pertaining to bodily cleanliness and urban health and hygiene. More specifically, they opened administrative practices to a new and broader dimension of justification, such that urban hygiene and other matters could be justified and implemented as legally authorized practices of the state. This paper will address the legal and intellectual context in which these measures were fashioned and the rationale behind them, especially with respect to medical knowledge. Ultimately, the paper aims to demonstrate that two distinct processes worked concomitantly to create new powers of government in the process of early modern state-formation: the institutionalization of “public health” services and the usage of medical knowledge to implement and justify these services.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries both the Middle East and Europe suffered a number of devastating plagues among sheep and cattle. Worst of all were the great rinderpest epidemics of the late 1500s to early 1700s. Often overlooked by historians, these outbreaks were among the worst natural disasters of the age, creating serious economic dislocation and even famine in these regions still so heavily dependent on livestock for food and labor. This paper first considers the causes and consequences of major epizootics (animal epidemics) on both sides of the Ottoman border. In both cases, population pressures and rising demands for urban and military provisioning relocated the pressure of raising livestock to economic and geographical peripheries. Sheep and cattle were forced to make longer treks to more distant markets, leaving them more exposed to infection. At the same time, the recurrence of severe winters during the so-called “Little Ice Age” of the late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries weakened the animals and promoted the spread of illness. Next, the paper examines how responses to the outbreaks began to diverge between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While the uneducated majority of both Muslims and Christians still tended to view animal plagues in terms of divine punishment or humoral corruption, veterinary doctors and public health officials in eighteenth-century Europe developed new theories of contagion and new practices of “stamping out” sick animals to control infection — practices not followed in Ottoman lands until the twentieth century. While usually cast in terms of Western scientific progress, I would argue that this difference also stemmed from diverging attitudes towards animals and welfare. In this way, the story of animal disease control mirrors issues in the comparative history of human disease control and public health discussed elsewhere in the panel.

Animal disease was central to the history of Ottoman Egypt. Animals were the historic motor force of the economy of rural Egypt as means of transport, sources of agricultural labor, and stores of wealth. A series of massive epizootics and climatic events at the end of the eighteenth century led to an enormous reduction in animal populations in Egypt. These seismic demographic shifts in the countryside led to a search for other forms of energy and labor. The most important of these new sources of power and work were humans. Agricultural tasks previously reserved for animal bodies now came to be taken over by humans as never before. The end of the eighteenth century is thus when we see the beginnings of corvée in Egypt, a fundamental reordering of landholdings in the countryside, and different conceptions of rural labor. All of this, I argue, can be traced to the results of vast numbers of animals dying in a concentrated period at the end of the eighteenth century. By showing the highly significant consequences of animal disease in Ottoman Egypt, this paper, like the panel as a whole, thus seeks to argue for the importance of an environmental and epidemiological perspective in Ottoman history.

I am in the starting stages of a project titled "Ottoman Environment: Leisure, Pleasure and Well-Being" which concentrates on open sites used for public and popular entertainment in the main Middle Eastern centers. I focus on such cities like Istanbul, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus and Cairo, thus integrating the all-too-often separate spheres of the Arab provinces and the Ottoman heartland. The sites studied are defined broadly as "green lungs" within or near the urban centres instead of using the narrower term "gardens". Ottomans used a wide selection of public spaces for entertainment. These included graveyards (sometimes the main open green spaces in Ottoman towns), rivers, lakes, pools, springs, hills, and rural areas surrounding holy graves. I intend to focus on public outdoor activities embedded in Ottoman society and culture in the early modern period of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to understand Ottoman perceptions of nature and human relations to it. I will utilise a variety of literary, artistic, archival, pictorial and scientific sources pertaining to Ottoman environmental history. In the framework of MESA 2011 I propose to concentrate on one genre of sources, namely Ottoman bureaucratic correspondence written in Ottoman-Turkish. Although gardens, rivers, and other public spaces did not belong to the state and were not maintained by it, petitions from below by Ottoman subjects often drove the authorities to intervene. Collections like the mühimme defterleri (literally, "the registers for important affairs"), Ali Emiri, Ibnülemin and Cevdet (the last three are eclectic collections named after the late Ottoman bureaucrat who formed them) are a rich source on the bureaucratic aspects of Ottoman daily life, including leisure and recreation. Thus I will be able to present an array of existing concepts, practices, and experiences in the early modern Ottoman world regarding the mind and the body. These were not necessarily identical with learned and abstract discussions thereof, promoted either by medical luminaries or religious scholars (these sources, written in both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic will be studied and will form a different presentation). Moreover, the correspondence also reveals governmental priorities regarding the environment and key natural resources, like water or wood, and how these may clash with popular or customary usage of such resources. The paper shall provide insights into a specific culture but will contribute to a comparative, trans-cultural and trans-regional work.

After a failed revolt against Moroccan Sultan ‘Abdallah II (r. 1613-1623), the city of Fez sent two mad saints (majnun) to intercede on their behalf with the enraged ruler. When the sultan received the two emissaries, he scoffed, “The people of Fez couldn’t find any to mediate for them but these two shitters in their rags.” One angry saint replied, “By God, you will not have a free hand [in Fez] for forty-one years,” and the men departed. The sultan’s stomach suddenly reversed and he vomited feces from his mouth for several days, until he sent for the saints and begged their pardon. No sultan ruled in Fez for the period Sidi Jallul had predicted, “until God brought” the ‘Alawid Sultan Rashid. “And this story is true,” concludes the historian Al-‘Ifrani, “for I heard it from many people, and I summarize what was told to us.” Al-Ifrani’s history reveals a Moroccan conception of political sovereignty in which the Sufi saint guarded the Islamic umma’s well-being and corporeal health. The sultan received the bay’a, or contract of rule, defining his limited, temporal powers. But his state was not the body politic; Ibn al-‘Arabi describes the human body as a microcosm of the city, a parallel realm for God’s “divine system for the reform (islah) of the human kingdoms.” God appointed the human soul to be His Viceregent on earth and created the human body as a citadel for its residence. As just rule produces a harmonious body, so an unjust soul provokes a corporeal revolt. The vomiting sultan suggests a social life of Sufi theology in Morocco, a human body active in worldly politics, a living polity constituted through the body. This paper thus offers a conception of “public health” dissociated from the sultan’s state, which did provide medical care for its soldiers, an asylum (maristan) for the mad, and supported assistance to the poor through religious endowments (waqf). Our sources are the nineteenth-century hagiographical compendium of Moroccan Sufi scholar Muhammad al-Kattani entitled Salwat al-Anfas, the topography and architecture of Sufi shrines and of the city of Fez, and medical interviews with elderly residents of Fez. These sources re-construct Fez as a living “geo-political moral body,” in which Sufi saints were “public healers,” restoring (islah) God’s law to individuals in healing and justice to society.