In 1692, the legal court of Galata received an order from the imperial palace that asked the judge to conduct an inspection of two houses in Sultan Bayezid neighborhood belonging to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects named Dimitri and Agya. The court sent an investigative team to the neighborhood, where a hearing took place in the presence of Muslim residents. Leading members of the Muslim community, including the imam and people composed mainly of seyyids as well as pilgrims, sued Dimitri and Agya on the grounds that their houses were located in the Muslim neighborhood and had historically belonged to Muslims. They also stated that it could be observed that the houses were surrounded by and adjacent to Muslim houses and were located far from the houses of the infidel community. Contrary to the law, they had bought these houses from Muslims and had been practicing their superstitious rituals (ayin-i küfri) there. They argued that these z?mmis were causing collective harm to residents of the neighborhood and demanded a legal solution. In accordance with these testimonies, the court ruled in favor of the eviction of Dimitri and Agya and the selling of their houses to Muslims on the grounds that non-Muslims were banned from settling in Muslim neighborhoods. This paper provides a sociocultural and legal analysis of changing intercommunal dynamics in seventeenth-century Istanbul with a specific emphasis on its religiously and ethnically most diverse district, Galata. By utilizing extensive unpublished legal court records belonging to the courts of Istanbul and Galata, I demonstrate that, in relation to the increasing religiosity of the time, the religious identities of neighborhoods became more contested. The process led to heightened pressure on non-Muslims at the neighborhood level and many non-Muslims were evicted from neighborhoods on the basis of their religious identity. While increasing orthodoxy and its implications have been noted in the relevant historiography, most studies have made use of catechisms, the writings of religious literati, and conversion narratives. My analysis goes beyond the official discourse and state programs in favor of understanding actual manifestations of increased religiosity and its impact on social and communal dynamics. I particularly emphasize communal demands and pressure from below and demonstrate the roles of ordinary Ottoman subjects as active participants and players in these processes, rather than as passive recipients of the programs imposed upon them.

Literature on Istanbul’s transforming built and social environment mainly focuses on processes through which large-scale urban transformation projects, including earthquake-risk transformation, function as a mechanism of socio-spatial intervention in lower-income neighborhoods, and result in displacement of marginalized citizens and social movements challenging these urban policies. Moving the academic focus to the study of power and inequality from above, this research aims to display the spatial mechanisms through which urban inequality is recreated and justified by the economic and political actions of the urban elite in Istanbul. In Kadikoy’s upper-middle income neighborhoods along the Bagdat Avenue, more than 2000 buildings have been demolished and reconstructed with the aim of earthquake proofing. Such reconstruction processes in the region are invited by homeowners who call risk assessment experts to evaluate their building. Although Kadikoy is the main opposition party CHP’s stronghold and homeowners in the region raise loud opposition to the government AKP’s growth politics, demolition and reconstruction of risky buildings also offer economic gains, as property and neighborhood values increase dramatically. Considering that the earthquake risk-driven urban transformation seems inconsistent with homeowners’ political convictions, but lucrative in terms of economic gains, this research examines the politics of ambivalence among the urban elite, which I locate on the fringes of the growth coalition. This research advances the literature by complicating existing understandings of the growth politics and displaying the simultaneously occurring anti-growth discourses and pro-growth practices of the urban elite, who give license to urban growth politics, while carefully distinguishing themselves from the government’s growth coalition. Thus, this paper sheds light on the mechanisms through which the urban elite reproduces its economic and spatial capital by engaging in rent increasing activities in practice, while morally justifying these actions by resisting against structural urban change on the discourse level. Building on a year-long ethnographic research in Kadikoy, this analysis displays the mechanisms through which affluent neighborhoods maintain their affluence through persistent capital investment that enable not only preservation but also enhancement of their economic status.

Studies of the Muslim Mediterranean often focus heavily on its sixteenth century context, when the Ottoman state expanded rapidly across the Mediterranean littoral and incorporated much of North Africa and the Balkan coastline into its sphere of influence. Significantly less has been produced about Ottoman naval affairs thereafter; instead, the general assumption seems to be a lengthy decline of Ottoman influence in the region, despite (or perhaps because of) the long, drawn-out conquest of Crete from the 1640s to the 1660s. Given rapid Venetian advances into the eastern Mediterranean during the initial decade of the War of the Holy League (1683-1699), one might even be inclined to think that these declinist assumptions are correct. This presentation challenges this oversimplified picture of the post-1600 Mediterranean world by drawing attention to the life and career trajectory of a much-neglected historical figure: the corsair-turned-Ottoman grand admiral Mezemorta Hüseyin Pa?a (d. 1701). While his biographical information and life experiences must be reconstructed from a variety of sources, ranging from French correspondence to Ottoman bureaucratic records, the course of his career encapsulates the reality of a global Mediterranean even as late as the final decade of the seventeenth century. In a trajectory that took him from becoming a corsair under the North African regencies, to a captive of the Spanish Habsburgs, to the ruling Dey of Algiers, to an Ottoman officer propping up its Black Sea and Danube frontiers, and finally, the grand admiral of the Ottoman navy, Mezemorta stands out as a trans-regional figure who knew not only the Mediterranean, but also the Black Sea, along with the peoples inhabiting all these regions. In the course of outlining Mezemorta’s remarkable life and experiences, the article will also examine historiographical questions about how to interpret the diverse perspectives on Mezemorta, which range across French consuls, captured Hapsburg engravers, and Ottoman chroniclers alike. More importantly, it will demonstrate how Mezemorta’s extensive experience, constructed across a wide space of Mediterranean, Black Sea and North African spaces, was absolutely critical for the temporary revival of Ottoman power in the eighteenth century, temporarily abating the crisis that had afflicted its institutions over the course of the previous one. This made him a harbinger of later developments that would see Ottoman rulers and statesmen take a more global outlook, and a recognition that the empire needed to have a better understanding of a wider world.