It is now commonplace to describe Ottoman state-building as a long-term process of negotiation between state authorities and local provincial groups. What is striking is the enormous variety of forms this process took. Involving an impressive range of social and political actors, indigenous state-building generated differing outcomes for different participants, but typically witnessed a dynamic alternation of resistance and co-optation. This five-paper panel will explore the evolution and variety of state practices dealing with the incorporation of dissident social groups, spanning from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries and covering Rumelia, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces.
The first three papers of the panel examine the introduction of Ottoman power into various regions and various developments by which Ottoman hegemony is internalized. The first paper examines the gradual integration of the Bosnian gentry into the Ottoman political and economic order from the mid-fifteenth until the early seventeenth century. Focusing on the area around Sarajevo, the paper traces the conversion of the pre-Ottoman Christian landed class known as the voynuks to Islam, and sheds new light on the relative importance of different factors in that process, with particular attention given to the voynuks as commercial agents. The second paper considers the outlook of an Aleppan Muslim historian, Ibn al-Hanbali (d. 1563), who witnessed the Mamluk-Ottoman political transition (1516-17). Reflecting intra-Sunni tensions, his biographical notices of local Ottoman officials offers a trenchant critique of the Ottoman governing style. The third paper addresses the question of tribal formation along the steppe frontiers of inner Anatolia and North Syria, arguing that central state interventions between the 16th and 18th centuries were decisive in (re)defining the leadership and identity of pre-existing pastoral, nomadic groups, whether Kurdish or Turkmen.
The final two papers consider co-optation and resistance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when state efforts to re-gather power at the imperial center provoked widespread provincial resistance. Focusing on the south-central Anatolian town of Ayntab, the first paper problematizes the composition and aims of two well-known urban power groups, the Sadat and the Janissaries, and situates their factionalism on local and regional levels and from the perspective of center-periphery relations. The final paper turns to the Ottoman-Hapsburg Danubian frontier during the reign of Selim III (1789-1807). It traces the transformation of a multi-confessional network of autonomous soldier-adventurers under the leadership of of a grandee named Kara Feyzi to a rigidly sectarian nationalist movement.
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Dr. York Norman
Scholarship on early Ottoman Sarajevo, largely focusing on the conversion of the higher nobility and the peasantry to Islam, has tended to do neglect the continuing existence of a local Christian gentry. This gentry, named in early Ottoman sources as voynuks (soldiers), made up roughly 10 percent of the population and appeared to have retained their own rights to own arms, horses, special land holdings, and exercise personal mobility and religious autonomy in return for acknowledging in the new rulers. By examining the greater Sarajevo district's income registers (tahrir defters), law codes (kanunnames), pious foundation registers (vakifnames), and local court records (sicils), this presentation will analyze the role of voynuks in the region's conversion to Islam as well as their eventual integration into Sarajevo's burgeoning urban economy.
My findings first qualify the dominant notion that the voynuks only faced cultural pressure to convert as Islam was the dominant religion of the Ottoman military/administrative elite. The voynuks indeed faced significant local political socio-economic pressures to convert as the Ottomans soon created a new, entirely Muslim gentry named as ak?nc?s (raiders). This new order, a superior category to the vojnuks in the tahrirs, encouraged conversion in order for the local gentry to maintain or improve social status. Nevertheless, this pressure pales in comparison to either the displacement of the earlier Bosnian upper nobility by new Ottoman janissary fortress garrisons and the Muslim forces of local Ottoman warlords or the Ottoman's use of inheritance rights to induce Bosnian peasants to convert. Thus one sees a gradual pattern of conversion that took roughly 150 years to complete.
Moreover, the voynuks role in Sarajevo's rapid growth over the sixteenth century has almost been entirely ignored by prior scholars. By retaining their lands (çiftliks) at a fixed lump sum annual tax payment (mukataa), the voynuks could produce grain for the nearby city largely unregulated by the central authorities. The voynuks, using their powers of patronage, often allowed new partners-many of whom were peasants-to join their farm-enterprises, increasing the region's grain production and crop-tax revenue. As the voynuks and their partners were free to move to the city, the çiftliks were also important to Sarajevo's rapid population growth.
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In 1516-17 Ottoman armies defeated forces of the chief rival Sunni Muslim power, the Mamluk Sultanate, and in doing so destroyed a political order that had prevailed in Syria, Egypt, and western Arabia since 1250. Now doubled in size, the Ottoman Empire formed the major land power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Born, raised, and resident in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, the scholar Muhammad b. Ibrahim Ibn Hanbali witnessed this conquest and experienced the initial four decades of Ottoman rule. His two-volume biographical dictionary, Durr al-habab fi tarikh Halab, provides an expansive and unfolding portrait of his native city as it underwent a political and social transition to the Ottoman order. While used by many scholars as a source for the lives of individual figures, Durr al-Habab has not yet been the focus of a dedicated study examining Ibn al-Hanbali and his overall views of the new Ottoman regime.
Ibn al-Hanbali explicitly tells readers in his introduction that he wrote Durr al-Habab to memorialize the greatness of Aleppo, expressing an urban pride that is in tension with Ottoman imperial claims. In his portrayal of Mamluk and Ottoman officialdom, principally governors, judges, and professional witnesses (pl. ‘udul), Ibn al-Hanbali evaluates the actions of these power elites, not only showing a scholar’s general discomfort with the rough-and-tumble of politics but also revealing his specific critique of the Ottoman methods of rule. In short, Durr al-habab can be seen as a kind of evolving journal of local attitudes to Ottoman government and legal practice, which displayed both change and continuity from Mamluk times. This paper will examine Ibn al-Hanbali’s representation of Mamluk and Ottoman governors and legal personnel in an effort to trace how Aleppans came to terms with new rulers and a more centralized legal system. Using anecdotes in the notices of both these and other notable persons, the paper will illustrate the interaction between an alien elite and the local population, an interaction that involved both resistance and selective co-optation. In surveying the portrayal of generations of Mamluk and Ottoman officials an attempt is made to identify enduring ideals of just government and the extent to which these was in turn re-shaped by a new political dispensation within the Sunni Muslim world.
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Prof. Stefan Winter
The modern anthropological premise that states play a major role in the formation of tribes, most succinctly laid out by Morton Fried in 1975, has gained some currency among Middle East historians but has hardly been examined in an Ottoman context. This is surprising, as even a quick look at the administrative sources of the 16th to 18th century clearly shows that the tribal formations which dominated the hinterland of inner Anatolia and northern Syria/Mesopotamia in this period were not the same as those named in Mamluk chancery manuals for the preceding period, nor those recalled in oral histories of the region that date from the beginning of the twentieth century. As can perhaps best be demonstrated in the case of Lebanon, the establishment of Ottoman rule in the early 16th century led to the replacement of an older class of mainly Bedouin tribal rulers in the region with a new elite of secondary families, often recruited through co-optation into the Ottoman military apparatus or the awarding of tax farms, to serve as local intermediaries of the expanding state. But whereas the new tribal elites of Lebanon were essentially sedentary and anyhow soon fell under French protection, the Ottomans’ sponsorship of what anthropologists would describe as “colonial tribes” (Neil Whitehead) along the cultivated marges of Anatolia and northern Syria particularly in the late 17th and 18th centuries resulted in a significant shift in alliances and settlement patterns among Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab tribal groups from throughout the region. The aim of this paper is to situate the emergence of the Ebu Ri?, Yeni ?l, Re?wan, al-‘Abbas, Millî and other confederations as evidenced by contemporary chancery sources in the framework of Ottoman state building. By viewing the tribalization of the steppe periphery as a by-product, if not an outright strategy, of governmental control in the early modern period, we will call into question the axiom that state-tribe relations are characterized by tension, bring individual tribal leaders into the current discussion of “who is an Ottoman,” and ask how consciously the Ottoman state contributed to tribal ethnogenesis along what is today the Syrian-Turkish border.
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Dr. Hulya Canbakal
Late Eighteenth-Century Riots in Ayntab in Comparative Perspective
In 1772-1824, the town of Ayntab saw several waves of social and political upheaval, much like its senior neighbor Aleppo. Unlike rebellions in the earlier part of the century, economic tensions were not immediately visible in these disturbances even though they certainly were a factor. Instead, the period was marked by what looks like power struggles between sadat and janissaries of the town, again, much like in contemporary Aleppo.
Nineteenth-century historians of the Ottoman center dated the divide between the two groups in Ayntab and Aleppo (and Mara?) to the time of the Ottoman conquest, which, in fact, lends support to the interpretation we find in some modern studies on ashraf in Arab cities. Chroniclers characterized the sadat/ashraf-janissary divide as one between the old local nobility on the one side and pro-Ottoman social groups on the other. This argument is not completely incorrect but it appears ahistorical in its overarching scope. For one thing, it can be argued that the claim of descent from the family of the prophet Muhammad served simultaneously as a medium of resistance and adaptation to Ottoman rule in various parts of the empire, at least, from the 16th century onwards, but such claims were not prompted by just one factor, or one aspect of the process of state-making. Therefore, the claimants were not a homogenous group across time and space. The same considerations apply to claims of membership in the janissary corps as well even if the claimants in this case appear less diverse in terms of their social background. As for the ‘pro-Ottoman stance’ of the janissaries, it is as problematic as the ‘anti-Ottoman stance’ of the sadat/ashraf.
This paper attempts to disentangle the significance of the sadat/ashraf-janissary divide in Ayntab in the context of two episodes of upheaval: 1788 and 1791, and discuss them in three perspectives: local, regional and imperial.
The paper will be based on chronicles, the court records of Ayntab, and orders and reports from the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul.
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Dr. Tolga U. Esmer
In the early 1790s Ottoman officials along the Danubian frontier between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires increasingly began to mention a certain Kara Feyzi in their correspondence to ?stanbul. Emerging from among numerous bands of unruly soldiers that coalesced along this frontier, Kara Feyzi came to establish an amorphous, trans-regional network of bellicose men who wreaked havoc throughout Rumeli (i.e., Ottoman Europe) in between Ottoman wars with the Habsburgs and Russians from the early 1790s until 1807. Importantly, Kara Feyzi recruited anyone from Muslim and Christian peasants to high-ranking pashas and vezirs into his successful enterprise.
When Sultan Selim III finally co-opted Kara Feyzi in 1807 as an Ottoman official and provincial notable, he charged Kara Feyzi with defending yet another new frontier forged between an increasingly autonomous Serbia and Ottoman Bulgaria. It was along these new "national" borders that Kara Feyzi was able to create a frontier dynasty (continued by his son Es-Seyyid Kara Feyzi-zâde 'Ali Be?) in which his campaigns of violence into Serbia were sanctioned by the state. However, the nature of Kara Feyzi-zâde 'Ali Be?'s violence by the 1830's was very different from his father's—while Kara Feyzi targeted both Muslim and Christian communities indiscriminately during his rebellious years, his son developed a penchant for exclusively Christian communities and religious shrines.
This paper will look at the role Kara Feyzi and his son's movements played in the profound transformation of inter-confessional dynamics in the Ottoman Balkans during the transition from an imperial to a national framework from the 1790's until 1839. By exploring through both Muslim and Christian contemporary sources how religious loyalties, sites, institutions, and figures influenced the practices of networks of violence and those who opposed them over time, this paper will postulate that between the 1790s and 1830s rebellion and banditry in the Ottoman Balkans became the politicized site of contestation in which the religious, socio-economic, and political concerns of various groups in Ottoman Rumeli converged to highlight new tensions and redefine new relations.
