In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the role that legal actors who were not necessarily members of the learned circles, and particularly the sovereign (namely, the sultan), played in the administration of law in the Mamluk and the Ottoman context. This paper seeks to join this growing literature by examining the relations between four key concept - kanun, yasa (or yasaq/yasa?), siyasa and siyaset. Commonly, all four concepts have been treated as separate from, and in some cases contrasted to, the law that was formulated by the jurists (shari‘a or fiqh). In any case, the four concepts represent “policy-based” intervention in the administration of law. By looking at the relationship between these concepts as it emerges during the transition from Mamluk to Ottoman rule in Syria and Egypt, I hope to emphasize some important dimensions of these concepts that have not received in my mind sufficient attention in modern historiography. I argue that, in the context of the fifteenth and the sixteenth century (but possibly in earlier and later centuries as well), kanun and yasa on the one hand and siyasa on the other represented different forms of sultanic or “policy-based” legislation. To this end, I am interested in juxtaposing two legal aspects of the conquest that have not been treated as particularly related in modern historiography: the first is the Ottoman recurring reference in the decades following the conquest to the kanun (and, at times,kanunname) of the late fifteenth-century Mamluk sultan Qaytbay (r. 1458-1496); and the second is the denunciation by Arab observers, most of them jurists, of the new Ottoman administrative regulations as yasaq (or yasa), a highly charged, fairly negative, term in the Mamluk context. Each of these aspects of the incorporation of the Arab provinces in the empire reflects a set of sensibilities, the former those of the conquerors and the latter those of the conquered. The different sixteenth-century sensibilities stem from different understandings of the sultanate, the dynasty, and their role in formulating and administering law. While the new rulers tried to introduce the notion of dynastic/sultanic law, a legal corpus that is associated with the sultan and/or dynasty and draws its legitimacy from them, the Arab jurists opposed this notion of law and the implied role it ascribed to the sultan and to the dynasty more generally.

As is well known, the Ottoman law of succession that was prevalent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries considered fratricide a legitimate practice. This was no longer the case in the seventeenth century. This paper traces the transformation of the Ottoman succession from the late sixteenth to the seventeenth century with a view to connect this transformation to dynastic concerns with political legitimacy, and the political empowerment of the Ottoman upper judiciary (the mawali) and the law they represented. As this transformation amounts to a constitutional amendment, such a study of Ottoman succession opens a window to the unwritten Ottoman constitution of the early modern period and thus provides an opportunity to consider early modern Ottoman Empire as a constitutional monarchy of sorts.

Recent trends in Ottoman history writing capture the important link between law, legitimate power, and state formation. By pushing these modes of scholarship further, I hope to argue that over the course of the seventeenth-century a new discursive domain, defined by a tug-of-war between patrimonial and consultative strategies of negotiation, emerged with significant consequences for the nineteenth-century age of reforms. This argument relies (and in part “constructs” a notion of documentary archives) on three modes of discursive engagement: kanunnameler loosely categorized as law books promulgated by the divans of various Sultans, mühimmeler, records of imperial correspondence with state and non-state provincial agents, and nasihatnameler, representing the diagnostic efforts of contemporary Ottoman observers afflicted by a growing apprehension of imperial “decline.” Collectively, I argue that these documents can be read to reveal the residue of negotiative actions and thus the quotidian legal concerns of an early modern empire confronting the increasingly global dynamics of war, fiscal transformation, and demographic change that challenged the distributive legitimacy of an Istanbul-based imperial government. Using the traditional precepts of the Circle of Justice as they appear in each of the documentary genres outlined above, I demonstrate an ever expanding gap between social ideals, or expectations of rule, and the legal realities defining relations between productive property, peoples, and competing constellations of power. Reading these genres in conjuncture reveals a rich and dynamic heritage of ethical categories, traditionally the domain of intellectual historians. I push, however, for a new understanding of such categories as active strategies of rule, visibly deployed in administrative documents and revealing a conscious tactic to recraft Muslim religio-legal traditions to buttress imperial authority, create consensual legitimacy and ensure the continuity of Ottoman rule. More significantly, I argue that the notion of sultanic authority predicated on agrarian models of ethical rule and “the order of things” that was assumed to depend on clearly defined relationships between social groups, was explicitly invented by the nasihat writers in the midst of a seventeenth-century crisis. This moment, then, marks not “decline” but rather a mode of critical intervention and invention whereby the legality and legitimacy of Ottoman rule was articulated as an ideal against a backdrop of change.

This presentation will focus on the pardons in Ottoman Empire during the reign of Abdulhamid II, which has been rarely studied despite the abundance of materials in the Ottoman archives. As one of the most controversial periods in Ottoman historiography, the Hamidian era (r.1876-1909) was marked by a legitimization crisis, censure on press, separatist national movements, centralization of the authority, international power dynamics and the bankruptcy of the economy. I argue that the frequently issued pardons had played a particular role in this context. The pardoning power of the Sultan worked well in the establishment of a legitimate and just rule in the eyes of the people and compensated the weakness of state in many cases. This research claims that pardons were issued as a state policy considering how it worked during the Armenian Events of the 1890s, the banditry problem and tribal conflicts in the borders. Also, to put an end to the activities of outlaws, to use them as informants and collaborate them in the critical areas of the Empire, pardons became the main tool for government to make alliances without losing its prestige. Through the discretionary power of forgiveness, the Sultan tried to restore the monarchical ideology with the merciful image of the Sultan. However, although granting pardons seems to have been a kind of obedience to the authority, the relationship established on pardons was established through bargaining and negotiations. The process of granting pardons was an interactive one in which the actors negotiated on the conditions according to the position of supplicant. In this context, pardon petitions sent by the convicts might allow us to see the dynamics behind frequently issued pardons and might give a new approach to the most debated characteristics of the Hamidian era. Keywords: pardons, petitions, state policy, late Ottoman history, Abdulhamid II, negotiation.

In 1869, the Ottoman Empire passed a law on citizenship that sough to create a loyal citizenry committed to the supranational identity of Ottomanism and to establish procedures for defining and naturalizing foreigners. Despite a long history of social and political connections to the empire, Muslims from across Central Asia were suddenly excluded from enjoying rights such as landholding that had the potential to impinge on the empire’s juridical and political sovereignty. Yet, travelers identified as “Russian” or “Chinese” Muslims continued to purchase and endow land and to acquire Ottoman citizenship without meeting new procedural requirements, instead relying on established customary practices. They also petitioned the state in large numbers for patronage – often making the case that they were entitled to financial and legal assistance as Muslims under the “moral” or “spiritual” (manevi) protection of the sultan. By invoking the sultan’s claim to authority over Muslims worldwide through the institution of the caliphate, petitioners engaged with the rhetoric of religious legitimacy and staked a claim of belonging to the state – which was for all intents and purposes inseparable from the caliphate – that did not accord with new conceptions of Ottoman citizenship. These non-Ottoman Muslims had become what I term the empire’s “spiritual subjects.” This paper will explore the tensions between secular legislation on citizenship and simultaneous attempts to use the institution of the caliphate to bolster the sultan-caliph’s claims to authority and legitimacy among non-Ottoman Muslims. Drawing on new archival research, it will consider how these informal normative practices continued to operate alongside legal reforms, and how the utilization of the caliphate was often at odds with the project of creating imperial citizens. The paper is part of a larger project that seeks to flesh out the concept of spiritual subjecthood or citizenship through an exploration of the social and political dynamics between non-Ottoman Muslims and the Ottoman state. Instead of looking at the discursive projection of power and the role that propaganda played in legitimizing Ottoman authority among the umma, I seek to examine more concrete factors such as patronage, social welfare, and the obligations of the caliphate vis-à-vis the Islamic community.