As with many Ottoman institutions, the first half of the seventeenth century was a period of enormous change for the cavalry branch of the Ottoman standing army, or Alt? Bölük Halk?. Writers affiliated with the court complained of the infiltration of the organization by “outsiders” (ecnebi), men of peasant origin, whereas it had previously been largely exclusive to members of the sultan’s slave household, trained in the palaces of Istanbul and Edirne. Simultaneously, cavalrymen increasingly took up residence in provincial cities, where they assumed control over many aspects of the empire’s tax administration, transforming thereby into a wealthy, semi-hereditary elite. The organization became less exclusive in tandem with the expansion of its privileges and influence. In addition to the financial cost of maintaining this army, its members also threatened the state with rebellion on multiple occasions, ensuring that it would never be far from the attention of reformers. These developments, as well as the undoing of the cavalry army’s power following the reforms of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha (Grand Vizier 1656-61), have heretofore been understood through the often-biased writings of court officials and the retrospective accounts of Ottoman chroniclers. This paper turns instead to the organization’s surviving salary registers (mevâcib defterleri), introducing these key sources and the unique properties that enable them to be used to explore the cavalry army’s organizational, financial, and demographic history. The registers show how the corps’ regimental structure was reshaped by its members’ newfound power, permit a grounded analysis of the changing composition of its membership, and reveal how its old elite was replaced, under Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, by a new cadre of volunteers from across Anatolia and the Balkans. This archive-based approach allows us to move beyond the tropes of deterioration and corruption presented in the literary sources, producing as a result a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of the cavalry corps’ transformation.

This paper explores a genre of Ottoman Turkish religious literature known as the hilye and its relation to the intellectual, socio-political and cultural context of the Ottoman 17th century. Initially in the late 16th to early 17th century, the hilye (lit: ornament) emerged as versified, eulogistic renditions of the body of the Prophet Muhammad, with the Hilye-i ?erif of Mehmed Hakani (d. 1606) being the first and most representative example. Thereafter during the course of the 17th century, the genre expanded massively in scope to number to also include the bodily traits of the first four caliphs, the Abrahamic prophets and some select Sufis as the subject matter of their mesnevis. Later, in the late 1670s, master calligrapher Hafiz 'Osman (d.1698) took inspiration from the genre and rendered the Prophet Muhammad's hilye into calligraphic panels, hereby inaugurating an even wider culture of icon veneration in the Ottoman lands. The purpose behind both the versified and calligraphic hilye was to keep their copiers, reciters and keepers from ill-fortune, poverty, disease and the torments of hellfire by channeling the divine grace (baraka) embedded in renditions of sacred bodies into the earthly realm. However despite alluding to a time of great uncertainty and calamity, the expansion of the versified and calligraphic hilyes as a genre and their relation to the context of the Ottoman 17th century has remained unexplored. Indeed, whilst the calligraphic panel hilyes have attracted scattered interest from art historians, what has not been examined is whether the uncertainty and anxiety incited by the manifold crises of Ottoman state and society during the 17th century--such as political factionalism and executions at the center, rampant banditry and massive peasant flight from the land, climatic upheaval, monetary crisis and inflation as well as plague epidemics—may have compelled a growing preoccupation with the body in 17th century Ottoman religious thought and practice, as evinced by the growth of the hilye genre. By charting the history of this genre of Ottoman religious and devotional literature and relating it to the context of the 17th century Ottoman Empire, I aim to shed light on how religious thought and practice changed and responded to a time of deep and pervasive imperial crisis during the 17th century. In so doing I want to add to the emerging scholarship on the ‘pietistic turn’ in Ottoman social and political thought in the 17th century.

The plans to establish a Turkish-Armenian Catholicosate in the 17th century are central to understanding the issues relevant to Armenian history in that era. The authority of the Catholicosate at Etchmiadzin extended over almost all the Armenian realms, which were spread mainly within the territories ruled by the Ottoman Empire and Iran. In these empires, Armenians lived in religious community units and had internal autonomy. The Church exercised the functions entrusted to it through both the officials it appointed and those it sent on missions to the territories. The supremacy of Etchmiadzin, however, began to come under question and faced resistance. The existence of two state systems—the Ottoman and Iranian—ran counter to the system of management from a single center. The separatists had no deep ideological contradictions against the Armenian Church and did not reject its doctrine, but they had economic and political reasons to break away from the authority of Etchmiadzin. The sides also managed to involve representatives of the ruling elite in this struggle, urging them to view the Armenian issue in the context of Ottoman-Iranian opposition. The struggle led to the formation of conflicting parties that identified themselves through the names that the two Armenian populations—the Eastern Armenians and Western Armenians—gave each other, respectively Ajem (“Iranian”) and Tajik (Ottoman). The historiographical writing of this period not only outlines this political division, but also becomes a platform to preach the interests involved in this conflict, with the historian assuming the role of someone promoting the interests of one party or the other. In addition to the historiographical text commissioned by the parties, the preserved sources include numerous letters, archive materials, manuscripts and printed book references, a comprehensive examination of which will expose the core of the conflict between the Eastern and Western Armenians. Later, Etchmiadzin restored the status of the Mother See, and also reestablished its monopoly over a significant portion of the historiographical texts, describing the anti-Etchmiadzin movement in an extremely negative light. These assessments have also become dominant in historiography in general, which in turn has attempted to promote the legend of Armenian unity and to characterize Turkish-Armenian separatism as a national calamity. This study aims to address the issue of anti-See Catholicosates, which has been pushed by mainstream history to the margins, and to examine the impact of the Ottoman and Iranian political configurations on 17th-century Armenian political and economic history.

The religious transformation in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire has been largely examined in the context of growing religious tension. With a particular focus on the influence of Kadizadeli preachers in the Ottoman capital, themes such as Islamization, conversion or confessionalization have dominated scholarly perspectives on the Ottoman attitude towards religious diversity. However, my examination of various Muslim writings on the non-Muslim faiths reveals that the Ottoman conception of religious diversity was far more complicated. Historical accounts, polemics and theological works, which have until now largely been regarded as products of confessional polarization, can also be dealt with as signs of growing Muslim scholarly interest in those faiths, cultures and histories. In these written works that were produced between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth century, efforts to historicize the non-Muslim faiths and reimagine interconfessional boundaries are particularly salient. Authors writing in various cities of the empire, including Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus, engaged in debates around the question of how to conceptualize the non-Muslim faiths and differentiate them from Islam based on historical, theological and legal perspectives. As responses to this question, while many Muslim intellectuals emphasized interconfessional differences, others were primarily interested in common features between Islam and the other faiths. In this paper, focusing primarily on inclusivist approaches to religious diversity in a period that has long been portrayed as the “triumph of fanaticism,” I aim to show that Ottoman attitudes towards religious diversity were highly diverse and changing. In examining this revival of interconfessional themes, I will address the role of intensifying exposures to growing scholarly knowledge about the non-Muslim faiths in these changing attitudes, and how those intensifying exposures might have pushed the Ottoman authors to reframe their conceptualization of other faiths. Travelers, converts and diplomats, as the agents of scholarly exchanges, helped the Ottoman writers to cultivate an intellectual curiosity not only about relatively familiar Christian and Jewish cultures, but also various non-Abrahamic faiths. In addition to offering a revisionist reading of the religious transformation in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, this study calls for a reconsideration of the Muslim perceptions of religious others in a context broader than the legalist and largely ahistorical framework of “dhimma” or “People of the Book”.

The great seventeenth-century Sey??atn?me of Evliyâ Çelebi reflects a mythology that illuminates the extent to which the Genoese were remembered centuries after their power had vanished in the eastern Mediterranean. Several times he mentions a Genoese king in Istanbul, and to describe the distant or unknown past, he uses the idiom “the time of the Genoese,” which still existed in twentieth-century Turkish. Though his account of the Genoese is infused with myth, it nevertheless reflects the Genoese imprint upon these lands and peoples. The Genoese maritime empire was at its height in the fourteenth century, and the complex interaction between the the Genoese and a rising Ottoman principality echoes in Evliyâ’s writing, as his quasi-biblical genealogies tell the story of how the Genoese expended into the islands of Chios and Cyprus, Caffa in the Crimea, and Pera across from Constantinople. In raiding the Sey??atn?me for historical data, historians have misunderstood this masterpiece. The worldviews of Evliyâ and his interlocutors is not to be dismissed in our hurry to isolate a few pieces of data. In this paper, I examine the Ottoman memory of the Genoese through the prism of Evliyâ’s writing, and argue that his mythical distortions are not an obstacle to be overcome, but a worldview to be explored.