The Circassians, who had been mostly ignored by the empires surrounding their lands, entered the orbit of the Ottoman Porte in 1556 with the annexation of Astrakhan by the Tsardom of Muscovy and became a contested borderland between the Ottomans and Muscovites. This paper will analyze the Ottoman methods of Islamization of the Circassians of the North Caucasus in the 17th century. Ottoman documents demonstrate that starting in the second half of the 16th century, the Ottoman Porte made a concerted effort to convert the animist Circassians to Islam in the expectation that conversion would cement their loyalty or allegiance to the sultan. It is well known that the Circassians, especially their rulers, could convert to Islam or Christianity depending on their political alliances. For Circassian rulers, however, converting to or following a certain religion did not necessarily translate into allying with or submitting to the imperial power professing the same religion. Most of the time rulers were very open to conversion and there are examples of rulers and nobles who converted to a different religion more than once or of families with Christian, Muslim, and animist members. Although we know about conversions of Circassian rulers, it is more difficult to understand how conversion happened at the people’s level. In investigating the conversion of the commoners in the Circassian lands, this paper will utilize Ottoman and Russian archival documents, travelers’ accounts, chronicles, and other narrative sources. Islamization of the Circassians peoples of the North Caucasus occurred between the 16th and the 19th centuries. Apart from political alliances and missionaries sent by the Ottoman Porte and Crimean khans, places of pilgrimage, which in the North Caucasus also served as places of commercial fairs, facilitated the religious transfer owing to the abundance of merchants from the Islamic lands. These merchants not only traded in goods but also, in a clear parallel to many other frontier regions of the Islamic world, consciously encouraged a synthesis of Islam with local beliefs and, ultimately, conversion. This paper will present a model of such a merchant-facilitated conversion as it developed in the specific conditions of the Circassian tribal societies in the 17th-century North Caucasus. Special attention will be paid to the contribution of pre-existing places of pilgrimage and commercial fairs to initial religious synthesis that eventually led to mass conversions of animist Circassians to Islam.

The organization of foreign trade in the eighteenth-century Crimean Khanate, an Ottoman vassal state at the East European steppe frontier, presents something of a conundrum. Among the extant primary sources of Crimean provenance the types of materials used for studying international trade in the Ottoman Empire, apart from the international instruments, are mostly lacking. Materials originating from the Khanate’s Ottoman suzerain and its trade partners (Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and France) feature reports about the goods and prices and several important first-person accounts (by L. Ch. Peyssonnel, Baron de Tott, and N. E. Kleeman). The fragmentary nature and poor availability of some of these materials must account for the lack of systematic studies into the Crimean economy. This paper will utilize the available sources to assess the viability of the Crimean economy in the eighteenth century with particular reference to the Khanate’s response to possibilities to expand its foreign trade. Brian G. Williams has aptly defined the geopolitical confrontation leading to the Khanate’s demise in 1783 as one between the centralized, modernizing Russian Empire and the essentially pre-modern Crimean Khanate. By 1700 the Crimea was divested of two of its key traditional sources of revenue: the slave trade in East European Slavs and the tributary payments due to the Khanate as the heir to the Golden Horde. In 1700–1783 the Khanate found itself losing large parts of its territory to Russia. Yet the same period also saw the Crimea moving away from the economy of predation towards greater reliance on the productive economy of traditional crafts, agriculture, salt works, and trade. These changes in the Crimean economy, however, did not lead to any meaningful attempts at modernization prior to the Khanate’s short-lived independence (1774–1783); whereas during the latter period such attempts were half-hearted and unpopular. The organization of its foreign trade continued to be defined, and hindered, by the Khanate’s traditional Turko-Mongolian ethos. As demonstrated by the experiences of the Austrian businessman, Kleeman, in his failed attempt to open direct trade between Austria and the Crimea, that organization was much less efficient, secure, or profitable than the one enjoyed by West European merchants in the Ottoman Empire. At this point Russia was poised to take over the Crimea, and the removal of the Khanate’s Christian population, traditionally the backbone of its commerce, in 1778, sounded a death knoll not only for its economy but also for the Khanate itself.

Over the last decades, Ottoman port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean have attracted considerable attention as the nodes of incorporation between the western capitalist system and the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. İzmir was one of the most prominent port cities of this period in terms of its commercial and demographic structure. A number of influential historians regard the early modern period of Izmir’s history as the beginning of the long incorporation process, which they examine within continuity from the early seventeenth until the twentieth century. This paper argues against this interpretation. On the basis of the evidence offered by tax registers, travelers’ accounts, and city development plans drawn by Ottoman authorities, it will demonstrate that there is a clear-cut contrast between the early modern period and the nineteenth century in terms of the commercial and demographic patterns attested in Izmir. Whereas in the sixteenth century Izmir was a small coastal town, during the first decades of the seventeenth century it experienced a rapid economic and commercial development. Consequently, the port city welcomed new immigrants from various parts of the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean basin. Over just a few decades its population increased more than ten folds. These Muslim and non-Muslim newcomers established new ethnically and religiously mixed quarters in Izmir. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the city experienced a significant economic boom and simultaneous new migration waves. In this latter period, however, immigrants settled into more homogeneous new quarters. These new quarters also attracted some of the old inhabitants, who helped to consolidate this more homogenous communal structure. Therefore, by the twentieth century the demographic structure of the city was thoroughly transformed. The transformations outlined above argue convincingly against dating the beginning of the incorporation process for Izmir to a period prior to the nineteenth century.

When and how does a place become a border, or a frontier? The answers to such a question depend on the historical period. Borders and frontiers were much more fluid and permeable before the formation of the modern state and especially a certain type of it, the modern nation state. Extraterritoriality, complexity and fluidity that were once prominent features of pre-modern states, and of borders, became menaces to be cured for nation states. The relationship between states and their societies had to be redefined. The history of the emergence of nation states out of the Ottoman imperial framework provides us with cases of particularly violent and rapid transitions from ‘heartlands’ to ‘borderlands’. The Ottoman county of Foçateyn used to be located at the ‘heartland’ of the Ottoman Empire, on the western Anatolian seaboard. After the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), it turned into a ‘borderland’. The costs of this transition were drastic. Eski Foça, the center of the Ottoman county of Foçateyn, was a boomtown located on the shores of western Anatolia. Muslims—Kurdish, Turkish or others—had long been the residents of the county along with non-Muslims such as Greeks, Armenians and Jews. This cosmopolitan outlook reached its peak towards the end of the 19th century when the town and the county were incorporated with the world economy. Growth attracted migration and the demography of the county changed in favor of Ottoman Greeks whose numbers comprised the majority of the population on the eve of the Balkan Wars. This paper will analyze the transformation of Foçateyn from a county possessed of a cosmopolitan outlook and incorporated economy into one whose population became homogeneous and whose economy became dominated by the state. It will argue that a clear correlation existed between the transformation of the county of Foçateyn into a borderland, on the one hand, and the radical demographic and economic transition it experienced, on the other.