Archival Itineraries and Political Projects: New Geographies of Ottoman Imperial Sovereignty
Panel XIII-13, sponsored byOttoman and Turkish Studies Association (OTSA), 2020 Annual Meeting
On Friday, October 16 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
While attention to Ottoman intellectual, legal, and archival history has inspired new approaches to imperial sovereignty and its transformation between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the connections between these are an underexplored afterthought. This panel foregrounds the linkages between the expanding territorial reach of the Empire, the record-keeping practices that administer this expanse, and the evolution of an empire-wide legal and political consciousness manifest in and constituted by a wide range of textual and material practices. In tracing these linkages, we are in conversation with recent studies on the emergence of an archival consciousness that shaped Eurasian political thought and administrative strategy across the "early modern" and "modern" divides. Yet, attentive to how legal formulations, claims, and expectations both shape and are shaped by preservation practices, we move beyond an unproblematic reliance on either document or archive as stand-ins for a historical process. Instead, by exploring the various textual "citings" of an impulse to record and preserve, we also trace an alternative "site" for both the archive and imperial sovereignty itself. Collectively the presenters suggest that by tracing the diverse mechanisms generated to promulgate and preserve authoritative statements it is possible to move beyond the rigid opposition between "imperial" and "regional" or "confessional" claims. The panel is thus situated to engage with several methodological and theoretical debates in the study of archives, law, political economy, and social difference. As a study of archives, the panel challenges the re-emergence in comparative archival studies of a divide between "European" and "Islamic" practices and resists both the assumptive telos and civilizational rubrics that animate the field. Participants also trace how shifts in standards of judgment, categories of governance, and measures for preserving intellectual heritage also redefined the legal and political apparatus itself. Finally, panelists destabilize naturalized categories such as "central" or "imperial" by moving across juridical, regional, and confessional boundaries and engaging with diverse genres and institutions. Papers interrogate petitions sent by Armenian subjects of the Empire and the Armenian patriarchate; fatawa collections, their manuscript trajectories, and imperial learned hierarchies; the occlusion of particular communities and modes of religious engagement in manuscript libraries of the past and their digitalization in the present; and bound imperial registers in Istanbul as a mobilized paper trail shaped by both state and non-state actors. The panel thus identifies a legal and archival consciousness at once more mobile and more trans-regional than typically addressed in Ottoman studies.
Thanks to the digitization of manuscript libraries in Turkey in the twenty-first century, it is much easier to access thousands of manuscripts today than it was in the twentieth century. The aggregate collection is heavily skewed toward religion. While this may be expected as religion was a major subject heading in most pre-modern libraries, the overwhelming hegemony of Sunni Islam over the category of religion is nevertheless striking. Since the government is only sponsoring the digitization of the Islamic heritage, Christian and Jewish manuscripts that are still in Turkey today are not represented in this effort. Setting this significant exclusion aside, the digitization also fails to represent the non-Sunni Islamic heritage of Ottoman Turkey adequately. This paper aims to explain this failure by focusing on the kinds of libraries the collections of which are digitized and the socio-political context within which they were built.
The first (and longer) part of the paper introduces the types of libraries one could find in the late medieval and early modern periods in Ottoman Turkey. Most of these libraries were attached to mosques and colleges of law the construction of which, especially starting from the early sixteenth century on, were closely related to a political project that we may call legal imperialism. By sponsoring the construction of imperial colleges of law, transforming the multi-purpose places of Islamic worship to canonical mosques, and building a strict hierarchy of professors of law and judges to monopolize the interpretation of the law with a view to strengthen imperial authority, the Ottomans successfully circumscribed the pluralist potential of Islam in medieval Anatolia and late medieval Balkans. The collections of Ottoman libraries attached to colleges and mosques are a product of this imperial project. The first free standing public library in the empire, the Köprülü Library, was not any different. The second part of the paper makes an attempt to identify the kind of libraries where one could find texts that came to form the Alevi-Bektashi canon. Attention will also be paid to the largely oral nature of the Alevi-Bektashi tradition and the impact of this orality on the underrepresentation of non-Sunni texts in the written heritage of Ottoman Turkish.
In conclusion, I discuss the implications of the digitization of Ottoman manuscripts within the increasingly authoritarian political context of contemporary Turkey where Sunni Islam has been assuming a much more visible role in public life during the last decade.
The masked death of Ottoman Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520-66) outside the besieged fortress of Szigetvár (present-day Hungary) in 1566 is one of the most dramatic stories of dynastic fate in the sixteenth century. Anxiety over Süleyman’s death invoked a masquerade of faked correspondence, staged ceremonies, and executions meant to disguise his demise, silence rumors, and preserve the Empire. Moreover, as Süleyman’s life ended during yet another quixotic quest for a triumphant victory in Vienna, flurries of diplomatic reports and information-gathering campaigns created a unique paper trail that extended from Ottoman Istanbul to Habsburg Vallodolid. Thus, a dynastic death, and the campaign that led to it, incited a trans-imperial circulation of texts replete with anxiety over imperial futures that crossed ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Traces of this event can be found in 134 entries of one volume of the umur-i mühimme defteri (registered copies of imperial decision-making), one of the most common sources utilized by historians of the Ottoman Empire. The “fixity” of this bound register, however, eclipses the intermediary voices and structures cultivated in order to manage administrative control over a dispersed empire. The mühimme was itself a method of record-keeping that attempted to “bind” regional dynamics to imperial intent. Historians who rely on this register are in danger of reproducing the vision of the center even when seeking to illuminate disparate lives and processes. This paper first demonstrates that even internal to an individual mühimme volume we can uncover a more diffuse set of actors and practices—a “mobile” archive of reports dispatched from the campaign trail and serving not as a final report but rather an administrative process at work.
The second part of the presentation shifts to traces of both military siege and sultanic death left in the archives of Simancas, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Budapest, Vienna, and Belgrade. Here I argue that in order to disinter the recorded remnants of what is otherwise a momentous event within the competitive rivalries of early modern Eurasia we must also engage in a traverse that maps a new itinerary of both “archive” and “state.” Finally, I revisit commemorative manuscripts devoted to Süleyman’s life and legacy and demonstrate that they too participated in producing and “archiving” the fate of both ruler and Empire. The paper uses the techniques adopted to shape and preserve dynastic legacies to reveal the vulnerabilities of an early modern administrative power based in part on record-keeping.
My paper will discuss the history of the fatawa collection of the seventeenth-century officially appointed Hanafi mufti of Jerusalem as the first in a series of Hanafi fatawa collections by officially appointed muftis across the Ottoman Empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. ‘Abd al-Rahim’s collection was compiled by his son who was asked to do so by the eminent chief imperial mufti, ?eyhulislam Feyzullah Efendi (d. 1703).
The collection established a new practice, that of the standardized collection of fatawa issued by provincially appointed muftis. These collections were very different from most collections from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century. The latter were non-standardized collections of rulings, or mecmu’as. Accordingly, these compilations varied significantly in terms of their organization and content. Different individuals and groups kept their own collections of rulings by eminent and less eminent jurists. The pre-Feyzuallah collections, then, illustrate the significance of Feyzullah Efendi’s vision of the standardized provincial fatawa collections that were part of the different provinces’ canon of “books of high repute.” The paper will also situate these collections as part of a broader reorganization of the imperial paper trail.
The Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives prominently displays books on Armenians and its online catalog showcases collections on Armenians, who are presented as a “problem” for the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, different Armenian archives worldwide preserve the dispersed records of Ottoman Armenian history and frame them as objects of national heritage rather than of an Ottoman imperial past. The framings of the Ottoman and Armenian archives are projections of twentieth-century nationalism and of the Armenian genocide and its denial, which have in turn shaped historiographies that situate Armenians in opposition to the Ottoman Empire.
This paper overcomes this telos and binary by treating the Ottoman archives in Istanbul and the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate archives, now housed in the Nubar Library in Paris, as connected objects of study. First, I focus on the trajectories, form and affect of both archival institutions. The form of the archive (i.e., the organization of the files, the categories used in the catalogs) reveals both how these archives were constructed and how they shape contemporary scholarship. The organizational schemas in the Ottoman and Armenian Patriarchate archives often compel researchers of nineteenth-century dynamics to begin their studies with the year 1840, reinforcing the Ottoman Tanzimat reform era periodization. Such an approach centers the role of Istanbul as an agent of change in the empire. Thus, I show how the schemas adopted to collect and file documents in both Ottoman and Armenian archives prioritize the role of Istanbul and assert a center-periphery paradigm.
Further, I explain how and why the archives of the patriarchate, although framed as national archives, in fact carry a vision of imperial control through the organization of petitions and the legal, cultural, and sociopolitical categories utilized within them. To show how these categories of order and power transcend the boundaries of Istanbul and diffuse into the borderlands, I examine petitions that were sent to Ottoman government offices and the patriarchate in Istanbul from the eastern borderland region of Erzurum, Bitlis and Van between the 1840s and 1870s. I argue that nineteenth-century Ottoman visions and practices of governance crossed confessional and regional lines, thus indicating a dispersed form of power. In sum, by treating the archives as an object of study, I demonstrate how archives that in the twentieth century have come to uphold opposing political projects in fact reinstitute shared categories of power and practices of governance.
