This paper will address the 13th and 14th century Anatolian phenomenon of the urban brotherhood from a multi-linguistic, multi-religious, multi-cultural perspective. The Armenian priest-poet Yovhannes Erznkac'i wrote a canon for the Armenian brotherhood of Erznka in the late 13th century. In order to understand the importance of this text (and the social phenomena associated with it) in an Armenian context, this paper places the brotherhood within the larger framework of the development of the Islamicate notion of futuwwa as a code of chivalrous (or at the very least, appropriate) behavior. Understanding the Armenian pronouncement of futuwwa from the greater perspective of the socio-political paradigms that existed in 13th and 14th century Islamicate (and, yet, majority Christian) lands of Anatolia allows us to form new and important conclusions about the ways in which Christians and Muslims coexisted under a somewhat standardized urban umbrella of social organization during a time period of regional political unrest. At the same time, it allows us to reconsider these somewhat standardized urban associations from the framework of political and social practicality -- a practicality upon which, it might seem, religion bore very little consequence. This, in turn, encourages us to approach the late medieval period in Armenian, Persian and Turkish Anatolian history more from the perspective of "connectedness" rather than from a viewpoint of disjointed, linear histories. In fact, this paper suggests that not doing so does a disservice to our understanding of the depth and significance of this particular period's urban development. Using sources from a variety of languages, this specific study shows the necessity of contextualizing Armenian sources with contemporary texts composed in other languages in order to best approach historical reality. At the same time, the study insists upon the inclusion of Armenian texts in the larger historical narrative of the foundation period of the Ottoman Empire and the early centuries of its expansion.

In the seventeenth century, the term regularly used by the Ottoman state to characterize Orthodox Christian (as well as Jewish and Armenian) subjects on the corporate level was ta’ife (“group”), rather than millet (“religious community, nation”), which is not found in archival documents until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and did not come into common usage until the nineteenth century. We thus find phrases such as zimmi ta’ifesi, Yehudi ta’ifesi, and Ermeni ta’ifesi in seventeenth-century registers. Yet ta’ife was also employed by the Ottoman bureaucracy to describe an entire spectrum of groups into which Ottoman subjects could be classified, including categories as broad as gender (nisvan ta’ifesi) or as narrow as Ottoman officialdom (ehl-i örf ta’ifesi). Ta’ife was also frequently used in reference to professional organizations. The multiplicity of meanings inherent in the term is emphatically on display in petitions brought by members of two related cap makers’ guilds in 1657: Muslim and Orthodox Christian linen skullcap (takiye) makers and soft felt cap (arakiye) makers appeared before the Imperial Divan to explain the parallel internal crises in leadership that their respective guilds were experiencing at that time. In these decrees, Orthodox Christians and Muslims of each guild present arguments as to why their particular “group” should be permitted to select their guild’s kethüda (“warden”). The crisscrossing combinations of the term ta’ife in phrases such as zimmi takiyeci ta’ifesi (“zimmi skull cap makers’ group”) and Muslim arakiyeci ta’ifesi (“Muslim soft cap makers’ group”) reflect the Ottoman state’s understanding of the vast array of roles filled by Ottoman subjects of varying confessional identity: belonging to one type of ta’ife did not preclude belonging to several others in the seventeenth century. Though the arguments of the Muslim and Orthodox Christian parties in each guild at first appear straightforward, many layers of meaning are embedded in the indirect statement in which the decrees are written: the texts represent the Ottoman scribe’s summary not only of the petitioners’ claims but also of the petitioners’ versions of the opposing parties’ claims and why those claims were invalid. A close reading of these decrees is warranted in order to understand the connections between them and to better appreciate the significance of the term ta’ife in seventeenth-century Ottoman bureaucratic discourse. It will then be possible to better contextualize the significance of the emergence of the term millet in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The topic I propose to investigate concerns the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Crete in late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the period from 1897 to 1923. The material I work on, therefore, is from a period when the Cretan Muslims became a “minority” in Crete, in terms of numbers, and were treated as such, in terms of state policies. The objective of my research is twofold. Firstly, it focuses on the change of roles between the Greek-Orthodox and Muslim communities of Crete, during the period under scrutiny. Secondly, it aims to compare, in chronological or territorial terms, this particular 30 year period of Cretan history to different --and yet relevant--case-studies of co-existence. To be more specific, it examines Ottoman Crete in comparison to Greek Crete, and focuses on the relationships developed, at the turn of the century, within two different polities: The Ottoman Empire, trying to be self-legitimized in the world of the nation-states, and the Greek nation-state, trying to expand and to transform into an Empire. To be more specific, this paper shall address a period when the continuous negotiations and conflicts around Eastern Mediterranean resulted in reasserting group-based practices, both at a state, and at a local level. At the same time, however, group-categories were not constructed in abstraction from subjectivity; individual identities were used simultaneously to group-ones, in order to inspire a more intimate version of loyalty between state actors and potential citizens. Furthermore, personal socio-economic interests and individual practices contradicted with and, at the same time, influenced the group-paradigms. In order to illustrate this argument, this paper examines the shaping of the Muslim minority of Crete as part of a local transformation, the characteristics of which revealed the hidden depths of European modernity --as reflected on the Eastern Mediterranean-- and the vast field of possibilities that contradicted with the national, linear understanding of the past. As to the sources of our research, they consist mainly of the archives of the Cretan Muslim pious foundations, which are used in order to demonstrate how both ottoman and post-ottoman Crete was shaped by the interaction of the Muslim with the Greek-Orthodox Cretans on a local basis. Hence, we believe that late 19th century Crete offers a telling example of multi-identities and of inter-communal practices challenging dichotomies such as “centre” versus “periphery,” “modern” versus “traditional,”“communal” versus “individual,” or “national” versus “imperial.”

ABSTRACT Since mid-1980s, there is a rather feverish campaign by the Pontic Greek community both in Greece and in the diaspora for recognition of a Pontic Greek “Genocide” by the Greek government primarily, and then the other international bodies including individual states. The activists of this campaign claim that between approximately 350,000 and 1,000,000 Black Sea Rums were subjected to a “genocide” initially by the Ottoman government during 1914-1919 and then the Ankara government between 1920-1923. These claims have been upheld by a number of academics, especially in Greece. And there is a larger Armenian “genocide” literature part of which mentions a “Pontic Greek Genocide” in passing. As for the Turkish academics, a distinct lack of interest is evident, and not until very recently academic works on the Black Sea Rums during the First World War and what the Turkish historiography labels as the “National Struggle of 1919-1922” have been published. But, most of these works are in Turkish and rather devoid of any sort of comparative analysis of available primary sources, both Turkish and foreign. Particularly after the Greek occupation of Izmir in 1919, the Greek government encouraged a number of Pontic Rums, whom it deemed as another group of “unredeemed Greeks”, to agitate for an autonomous Pontic Greek state in the Eastern Black Sea region encompassing the towns of Sinop, Samsun, Giresun, Trabzon and Rize. This agitation was received with great alarm by the Istanbul government but there was not much it could do in the face of an Allied occupation of the capital city. Ankara government, which was formed in April 1920, however, took some measures of its own to suppress what it considered as “Pontus rebellion”. In this paper, an attempt will be made to examine the policies of Ankara government vis-à-vis the Pontic Rums, including both who participated in the autonomy movement and who did not. The study will be based on American and British archival documents as well as Turkish military archival records pertaining to the period. This will be an historical analysis with particular endeavor to avoid the “genocidist-denialist” dichotomy which seems to have permeated the current debate on the subject.