From medieval to (early) modern - the line between Mamluk and Ottoman around 1500 has been a hard and fast one in Middle Eastern studies for a long time, one that few scholars have had the temerity to cross. Recently, however, a reaction against that "eternal wisdom" has surfaced, and some have started to see, in place of a break, a transition. They have begun to insist that we need to look at Mamluk-Ottoman interactions other than warfare, to reassess the Mamluks' condition at the end of their regime, and to understand the consequences of the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands in terms other than oppression and resistance. This panel, as part of that movement, brings to MESA some of the latest scholarship on the Mamluk-Ottoman transition in Syria.
The first paper discusses the relation of a European visitor to late Mamluk Syria, Ludovico di Varthema. His engaging description of early 16th-century Damascus, where he resided for some time, will be read in the context of contemporary Arabic sources and analyzed in terms of recent scholarship on the literature of travel. Having set the scene, the second paper analyzes landholding by the sons of Mamluks in light of the curious circumstance that while they were losing their access to iqta' land, at the same time they were able to dedicate considerable property in waqf. The paper explains why they were able to control property in this way and looks at how the change of administration with the Ottoman conquest affected the holding of land. The third paper discusses a growth in agricultural literature produced and consumed in this period in Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul and examines the networks of writers and readers in this new configuration of capitals. The paper argues that the emerging discourse on farming displayed a heightened emphasis on practical knowledge and observation, and that this was related to increased investment in farming among both Mamluk and Ottoman urban elites. The final paper reformulates the conquest of Syria as a geopolitical shift in Syria's position and role in the eastern Mediterranean and reconfigures existing and new research within the context of that geopolitical shift. It is interested particularly in the economic consequences of the shift and their reflection in the extant Ottoman fiscal documents. Together, these papers open a new window onto the socio-economic and intellectual changes in post-conquest Syria.
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Italian adventurer and raconteur Ludovico di Varthema (d. 1517) is best known for visiting Mecca and traveling throughout South Asia—and for his fluid identity, which included posing as a Muslim, that facilitated his journeys. But his Itinerario also holds a fascinating and understudied account of late Mamluk Damascus, where he stayed “some months in order to learn the Moorish language” (Arabic). The city captured Varthema’s imagination and set a path for the rest of his travels. In his account, he details Damascus’s economy, natural environment, and Christian identity. He also comments at length on the city’s oppressive military government and soldiers’ abuse of local women. In doing so, Varthema mixes genuine insight with naïve prejudice (and gilded artifice) on a variety of topics, including how Mamluk commanders gain and lose their offices, the military value of the citadel, the plural legal system, and the prostitution scene. While overtly critical of his Mamluk hosts, Varthema, himself a Renaissance man-at-arms, was drawn to the Mamluk way of life and the privileges—material and sexual—it afforded. Moreover, he held all Mamluks to be “renegade Christians,” another layer of identity that resonated with his own. This paper will analyze Varthema’s description of Damascus, parsing fact from fiction with the help of contemporary Arabic sources (e.g., Ibn Tawq and Ibn Tulun). It also will examine Varthema’s textual bid for authority with his home audience—the Italian travelogue was first printed in Rome in 1510, and then briskly translated into other European languages. For context, the paper will engage current scholarship on religious pilgrimage, Orientalism, Mediterranean hybridity, and a putative shift from late medieval to early modern world travel. Some have seen in Varthema’s work a shift toward secular and empirical reportage—a new literary genre by the “curious” traveler. Others maintain that in denouncing Islam, searching for Christian converts and allies, and fighting with distinction for the Portuguese, the Italian, in the end, was not so radical. This was medieval travel and crusade repurposed for the 16th Century.
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Dr. Wakako Kumakura
Professor Ulrich Haarmann discussed the decline of the awl?d al-n?s in the Circassian period through a comparative analysis of iqt?‘ holdings in the Bahri period and the Circassian period in which he clearly showed that iqt?‘s held by them decreased in the latter period (Haarmann, 1984). Later he turned his eyes to the fact that the awl?d still enjoyed their economic activities in a period when they are considered to have declined, and modified his view regarding the decline theory (Idem, 1998). Recent studies reinforce the two movements that were pointed out by Haarmann, that is, the loss of the awl?d’s military status and increase of the awl?d’s waqf. However, there is as yet no study that explains the relations between the two seemingly contradictory occurrences. This paper therefore begins with the problem why the awl?d could acquire waqfs at a time they had lost land resources, and discusses change and continuity from the Mamluks to the Ottomans focusing on the following points:
1) It reveals the background to the formation of the awl?d’s economic base from the actual situation around the process of their land acquisition and the waqfization.
2) It gives a convincing interpretation of the problem why the awl?d were able to acquire land resources. In the process, it discusses characteristics of Mamluk administration in the Circassian period.
3) It further explores how administration changed through the Ottoman conquest and the establishment of Ottoman administration in Egypt, focusing on land holdings and the management of records concerning land.
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Dr. Aleksandar Shopov
Though Arabic books on agriculture prior to the fifteenth century and the agricultural practices they describe have been studied in some depth, such scholarship has been circumscribed by the notion of a “golden age” that ended more or less, around 1400. This paper will discuss manuscripts, archival documents, and narrative sources showing that, to the contrary, a renewed interest in agricultural science emerged around 1500 in Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul. My purpose is not to show the effects of the Ottoman-Mamluk transition itself on agriculture in these regions, but rather to explore the fluidity, mobility, and parallels that existed between Damascus, Cairo and Istanbul during and directly before and after the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Syria and Egypt in 1516-17. Discussing a network of agricultural treatises, their authors and readers in these three cities, I will argue that the emerging discourse on farming displayed a heightened emphasis on practical knowledge and observation, and that this was related to increased investment in farming among both Mamluk and Ottoman urban elites. Agricultural production and the production of agricultural knowledge were closely related, and had parallel and related trajectories in late Mamluk and Ottoman cities. Of particular interest will be the agricultural treatise by Ra?? al-D?n al-Ghazz? entitled J?mi? Far??id al-Mil??a f? Jaw?mi? Faw??id al-Fil??a (Complete Rules for Elegance in all the Uses of Farming), the last Mamluk work on farming. Written in Cairo in 1510 by a scholar from Damascus, and quickly acquired by Ottoman scholars and brought to Istanbul before or soon after the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt, this treatise exemplifies the new emphasis on observation as well as the mobility of agricultural knowledge in the last decade of Mamluk rule. Additionally, I will discuss how not only scholars and manuscripts but also agricultural products themselves increasingly flowed between these cities.
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This paper examines the changing geopolitical role of Syria in the Eastern Mediterranean after the Ottoman conquest of 1516. The shift in Syria’s borders that took place with the change of dynasty made significant alterations in Syria’s geopolitical and economic position. From a frontier province connected rather tenuously to Egypt and Arabia under the Mamluks, it became under the Ottomans a central hub for military affairs and for commercial and cultural exchange, the focus of a newly Ottoman Mediterranean. This framework connects the Mamluk and Ottoman periods in the region, provides an alternative to the nationalistic “conquest, oppression, resistance” framework under which so much research has been conducted, and makes a contribution to the history of global change and interaction. The paper seeks to do two things: one, to enumerate significant areas of change in Syria that this geopolitical shift affected and discuss how existing research, old and new, illuminates these areas. The elimination of borders, changes in trade patterns, new or newly bustling roads and routes, the shift in the main route of the hajj and its results, population movements, new constructions erected to accommodate these changes, cultural contacts and the production of new literatures and new legal interpretations are all reinterpreted as resulting from the change in Syria’s geopolitical position. Secondly, I want to highlight unanswered questions raised by this approach and address one of them, the
economic expansion in Syria brought about by the conquest, which is often referred to but not actually studied. Using financial records included in tax surveys and reports from the province, collected from the Ottoman archives, I will examine how the amounts and proportions of revenue from different activities in the province altered during the sixteenth century and analyze that in the light of what we have from other sources, such as travelers’ reports and histories. The purpose is to verify the increase and which sectors of the population benefited from it, and to evaluate Syria’s worth to the empire and the empire’s worth to Syria.
