My paper aims at examining the real composition and workings (as opposed to normative existence) of Istanbul mahalles in the early seventeenth century mainly on the basis of court records and mühimme defterleri. (Istanbul sicill defterleri, 1-6, mühimme defterleri, 75-82) Urban mahalles of central Ottoman has been viewed as rather homogeneous, tightly-knit, and relatively unchanging. To have a fresh look at those apparently stable Ottoman mahalles, one may want to observe mahalles of a city for a particular time of distress in order to see what kind of problems they were faced with and in what ways they handled the problems. The early seventeenth century was exactly such a period in Istanbul, as the city was flooded with immigrants that included more non-Muslims than Muslims, water and food supply for the residents ran short, and numerous reports were made about the robbers and outlaws in and around the city. Expulsion cases and complaints arising from the mahalles in this period were mostly related to issues of morality and security. They tend to talk about prostitution and robbery as well as possibility of fire and/or murder. I plan to examine such cases involving mahalles with following questions in mind: 1. Who filed complaints against whom and who expelled whom within the mahalle? There are cases where coreligionists expelled coreligionists, Muslims expelled non-Muslims, and Mixed people of a mahalle expelled some non-Muslims. I will analyze the leadership structure and the concerns raised in each case with a view to understanding Muslim/non-Muslim relations of the time . 2. What are the implications of such expulsion cases/complaints in regard to the phenomenal migration to Istanbul in those days? Does the fact that expulsion cases mostly talk about issues of morality and security and usually not about the lack of kefalet indicate that newcomers were accepted if they obeyed the norms of the mahalle and be useful to the existing residents? 3. Why were there repeated government orders to keep the mahalles better-defended with gates and/or guards at least since the late sixteenth century and well into the 1660s? Did something make at least some of the mahalles reluctant to be totally protected from outsiders? Were the level and nature of protection wanted by the government different from those wanted by the people of the mahalles?

In the discussion of the legal status of non-Muslims in an Islamic state so much emphasis is given in the literature to the far-reaching legal autonomy enjoyed by dhimmis in the resolution of disputes with fellow coreligionists that they almost appear as living completely separate lives from their Muslim neighbors. Non-Muslims in 17th century Istanbul had their own legal tribunals operated by the Greek and Armenian patriarchates and the rabbis of the Jewish community. The geographical sphere of jurisdiction varied by community in accordance with the internal organization of a particular religious group. It could encompass large areas comprising of several towns and neighborhoods, or, be limited to just a fraction of a neighborhood in which the members of a religious community lived. The geographical jurisdiction of the Muslim courts in a court district or that of a sub-district (nahiye) in larger towns, on the other hand, usually coincided with the borders of a residential neighborhood. Adjudication in the neighborhood with the mahalle as the basic unit of geographical jurisdiction was the norm in the Islamic court system. My study of the late 17th century court records of Galata and Hasköy, two Istanbul neighborhoods with a significant non-Muslim population, reveals that they occasionally preferred to forfeit their own independent jurisdiction and chose to portray themselves first as residents of the mahalle, which they communally shared with adherents of other faiths. In my paper I will attempt to elucidate this strategic preference of identity as part of the overall society of the neighborhood by analyzing exemplary cases found in the sharia court records of Hasköy and Galata in which the plaintiffs adduced concerns for the wellbeing of the mahalle as the reason behind their complaint to the Muslim judge. Under what circumstances did non-Muslims find it advantageous to present themselves as residents of the mahalle – in the same way as their Muslim neighbors – when seeking the resolution of a legal dispute? How does this behavior tie in with the understanding of the mahalle as the key unit of solidarity, which fulfills the crucial function of managing conviviality on the local level? This paper further aims to question the exclusiveness of autonomous legal jurisdiction among non-Muslims by throwing light not only on the choice of a mahalle-defined identity and conflict resolution as an important legal avenue but also on the identification of many non-Muslims with the overall population of mahalles in Istanbul.

Following their manumission, female palace slaves who belonged to the various ranks of the harem hierarchy, left the Imperial Palaces and settled in various neighborhoods of Istanbul either as married or as single. Even though these women continued their relation with the Imperial Court, they were readily integrated to the society, mainly to the neighborhood in which they lived. An examination of court registers reveals several different ways the women interacted with residents of the neighborhood. This paper will explore the extent of relationship between manumitted female place slaves and their neighbors in the eighteenth century Ottoman Empire by considering the dynamics of the era. It demonstrates how manumitted female palace slaves established relationships with the surrounding neighborhood residents through various ways such as buying and selling, as witnesses or as guardian (vasi). This paper also argues that the establishment of relationship between manumitted female palace slaves and neighborhood residents led to the introduction of the dynamics of the imperial court to the residents of the neighborhood. In the eighteenth century a wide range of social classes, ranks, and ages appeared to share the same spaces of sociability and intimate relationship existed between elite and urban cultural spaces. In such a historical context, female palace slaves who had acquaintance with the imperial court life style and possessed rich and varied material wealth compared to contemporary women played an important role in transmitting the courtly way of life to both residents of their neighborhood and to urban society in general. Furthermore, the appearances of neighborhood residents as witnesses and as guardian to the case of female palace slaves in the law court held in the Imperial Palaces made them be aware of court life and culture.

Imperial edicts, registers of important affairs, military police documents, inspection registers and other documents of the central administration can provide insights about official policies and means by which the Ottoman government aimed to maintain public order in Istanbul. However, they do not offer much information on the responses of the inhabitants of the city to a perceived lack of order and security in their surroundings. In this paper, I will analyze selected court records (sijils) of Istanbul in order to examine different issues of public order that arose among the city’s inhabitants and the ways in which such conflicts reached the shari‘a courts in the city. I will argue that, as far as public order offenses were concerned, judges played mainly the role of facilitator to reach an amicable settlement between the parties to a conflict and were primarily concerned with maintaining social harmony in the community. Residents had significant autonomy in matters of their neighborhood and in determining who was worthy of being a member of their community and who was not in their eyes. My analysis will rely primarily on the records of the courts of the judge and the deputy judge of inner Istanbul (Istanbul mahkemesi and Bab mahkemesi) between the years 1789 and 1793. The presence and mingling of “unidentified” persons (mechulu’l-ahval) in residential and commercial neighborhoods were perceived as a threat to public order and security, which required that community members were “identifiable” (ma‘lumu’l-ahval) to each other and to the authorities. I will show in my paper how residents made use of these legal categories before the judge to determine who should be expelled from their neighborhoods and on what grounds. I believe my paper will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of neighborhood life in Istanbul in this period, as well as the relationship between the courts and inhabitants of the city. Combined with the other papers on our panel, I hope to be able to draw more reliable conclusions about these dynamics based on a larger pool of data from the court records.

The urban life in early nineteenth-century Istanbul provided choices and alternatives that enabled urban poor, including some janissaries, to develop new relationships and a sense of solidarity among themselves. Indeed, they retaliated against the injustices inflicted upon them by the middle class or namely the people of virtue (ehl-i ?rz). In this period, the so-called people of virtue came to believe that janissaries were bandits whose activities put their life, honor, and property in danger. Some of them were anxious about being associated with janissaries. For example, those who lived in Sultan Mehmed, Süleymaniye, Sultan Bayaz?d and Ayasofya neighborhoods in Old Istanbul saw a variety of janissary symbols on their doors when they got up in one of the mornings of 1809. According to Cabi, the chronicler of the time, one of them said to his neighbor: “Brother, we did not know that we are fellows of 31st Battalion.” In addition to growing such dissatisfaction with janissaries, he stated that the janissaries divided the city district-by-district, even house-by-house. Not only did they mark Muslim house doors, but also those of Armenians and Jews. Even, they marked the church and the Patriarchate’s doors. These people were afraid to remove the janissary marks, ranging from a Kaaba at Mecca to a fish, depending on the battalion. A rumor circulated around the same neighborhoods that in reprisal, if any of them dared to erase these marks, the janissaries hung a horn on their doors in the following morning. This paper examines such public anxieties in early nineteenth-century Istanbul neighborhoods from a micro perspective of everyday life. By providing examples deriving from primary sources, including chroniclers, local court records and other significant archival sources, it aims at showing dynamics of urban Istanbul and in particular that neighborhoods were not close entities; rather, they were open to change and were clear representatives of living societies of the time.