The Ottoman Capitulations “revisited:” new approaches and new perspectives on a much-discussed Ottoman institution
Panel 206, 2019 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 16 at 3:00 pm
Panel Description
The Ottoman capitulations (ahdname in Ottoman Turkish) are undoubtedly one of the most famous and studied documents produced by the Ottoman chancery. Throughout the centuries, they played different roles in the socioeconomic life of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in regulating its relations with European powers. They were political and commercial treaties between the sultans and European governments, grants of legal and economic privileges for foreign merchants residing in the empire, domestic agreements between the Ottoman government, tributary polities, and specific groups of subjects, etc. However, the historiography of the capitulations has mostly focused on their role as macro-level diplomatic and trade agreements and has viewed them alternatively as a top-down pronouncement of the Ottoman government, the outcome of intensive diplomatic efforts and major imperial concerns, or as a purely Ottoman institution to deal with political and religious communities of foreign subjects.
This panel challenges these old approaches and aims to propose new avenues of research and methodologies in order to explore the multifaceted relations between the capitulations, the individuals who benefitted from them, and similar institutions developed outside the Ottoman Empire. One panelist provides a comparative study of sixteenth-century Ottoman capitulations and of contemporary charters granted to communities of Ottoman merchants in Italian port cities that uncovers many similarities between these document types. Focusing on the capitulations granted to Franciscan friars in Ottoman Bosnia, the next panelist shifts the perspective from that of the central state to the beneficiaries of the capitulations and shows that the friars played an active role in shaping the meaning and the outcome of the documents. Finally, the last panelist combines top-down and bottom-up approaches to the study of Venetian and Ottoman travel documents in order to understand how the macro-level of the capitulations interacted with the micro-level of the individual travel papers.
By combining a comparative study of the capitulations with contemporary European institutions and a bottom-up approach focused on the individuals who benefitted from these documents this panel offers new perspectives on the study of a traditional topic in the Ottomanist historiography. Together, these three contributions demonstrate that the capitulations were not an exclusively Ottoman institution and that they were the product of intense bottom-up and top-down processes of negotiation between institutions and individuals, which showcases the limits of state control over the meanings and the uses of the capitulations themselves.
Among the different roles they played in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period, the capitulations (ahdname in Ottoman Turkish) were also charters regulating legal and economic privileges and duties of members of European mercantile communities residing in Ottoman cities. The privileges included tax exemptions, consular jurisdiction, inheritance rights, and specific procedures in Ottoman courts. The individuals enjoying them were called müstemin (“protected foreigners”) in Islamic legal terminology. Most of the historiography of the Ottoman capitulations treats these documents as a purely Islamic/Ottoman institution with historical precedents in the medieval period without considering analogous instruments devised by contemporary Mediterranean powers to host communities of foreign merchants. Similar to the Ottoman sultans, in the sixteenth century the Italian city-states of Ancona, Venice, and Florence strove to attract groups of Ottoman merchants (mostly Sephardic Jews, Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks from the Balkans) in order to benefit from their commercial activities and to establish peaceful relations with the Ottoman sultans. Consequently, they issued charters (called with different terms like condotte, livornine) bestowing legal and economic privileges on merchants from the Ottoman Empire in order to benefit from their expanding commercial activities in the eastern Mediterranean. This paper will provide a comparative study of the Ottoman capitulations and the charters granted to Ottoman subjects by the three aforementioned city-states. It will deal with the legal and economic status of the “protected foreigner” in the documents in order to show how similarly or differently Ottoman and Italian authorities regulated the sojourn of foreign merchants and their interplay with the host society. In particular, it will focus on residence regulations, taxation, communal organization, and interaction between the foreign merchants and local legal institutions. Overall, this paper will argue that, despite substantial differences in the political, legal, and economic systems of the Ottoman Empire and Italian city-states, the Ottoman capitulations and Italian city-states’ charters should be considered as similar solutions devised to cope with a common historical challenge: how to incorporate growing communities of individuals belonging to different political and religious communities into the socioeconomic system of the aforementioned polities in a century of substantial expansion of the Levantine trade and intensive migrations in the eastern Mediterranean.
Throughout the early modern period, countless diplomats, traders, and couriers traveled the dangerous sea and land routes between Venice and Istanbul. These individuals connected the two empires and allowed for the regular movement of information, food supplies, and other assets vital to the prosperity of both polities. They did so under the protection of lofty diplomatic agreements, the ahdname or capitulations, which enshrined mobility practices in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, the ahdname were far from the only instruments that addressed mobility between Venice and Istanbul. For example, on June 13. 1524, the Venetian resident ambassador (bailo) in Istanbul, Piero Bragadin, received a visit from Ali Bey, a translator in Ottoman service, who accompanied a high-ranking Ottoman ship captain and four lesser naval officers. The Ottomans had come to request Venetian patent letters (lettere patente), a form of travel paper which would identify them as friends of Venice while cruising in the Mediterranean. Several weeks after the Ottoman Imperial Council returned the favor when it granted Bragadin orders so that Venetian couriers “would not be molested while coming and going” between Venice and the Sublime Porte. The Venetian made frequent use of these orders, which they referred to as “way orders” (comandamenti di strada), and almost literal translation of the Ottoman term yol hükmü. How then did the capitulations translate into the reality of everyday travel that we glimpse through the Venetian anecdote? How did the ahdname interact with secondary documents ranging from the passes described above to permits (licentiae/tezkere), and safe-conducts (salvacondotti/aman), all of which played a crucial role in regulating the daily movement of goods and people? In other words, how did the macro level of the capitulations and the micro level of individual travel documents interact? This talk explores these questions by focusing on the sixteenth century, a period in which both the capitulations and personal travel papers experienced significant formal and functional developments. By relying on both Venetian and Ottoman sources, this paper argues that the capitulations could act, at the same time, as diplomatic agreement and as travel papers and that their presence significantly defined the contours of Venetian and Ottoman everyday travel papers and practices.
The ahdname, given to the Franciscan friars by Mehmed II upon his conquest of Bosnia in the mid-fifteenth century, is without a doubt one of the most famous Ottoman documents of the western Balkans. Referenced countless times in both Franciscan and modern scholarly literature, the ahdname acquired an almost cult status as the ultimate proof of a special pact between the Catholic order and the sultans. Without entering the debate on the authenticity of this document (as others have already done so), my aim is to look at this document as a testament of the Franciscan skillful engagement of the Ottoman administrative and diplomatic genres and as a reflection of the ways in which the Ottoman subjects appropriated and applied these documents. Much has been said on the issue of diplomatic documents, especially in the context of foreigners in the Ottoman lands, but there is still little work on how different Ottoman subjects navigated the Ottoman administrative genres. In order to do that, I follow the paper trail of the Franciscan ahdname scattered across the vast archive of one of the largest and oldest Catholic monasteries in Bosnia, the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in the town of Fojnica. The Holy Spirit is the present home of the ahdname but it is also an archive housing Ottoman documents from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, offering an opportunity to situate the ahdname within the rich history of written interaction between the monastic order and the state. Specifically, I trace how the ahdname is referred to in various fermans, buyuruldus, and hüccets between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. Following the paper trail that the ahdname left in these texts draws important insights into how narratives of privilege were crafted and evolved over time. The Franciscan ahdname, like majority of the Ottoman documents, has hitherto been studied as top-down pronouncements of the state, demonstrating its comprehensive control. My work shifts the perspective from the state to the consumers of these documents, highlighting the limits of state authority over its own bureaucracy and an active role taken by the subjects in shaping the meaning and outcome of Ottoman documents.
