This paper explores how the Ottoman state regulated alcohol production, distribution, and consumption networks of Ottoman Istanbul in the 17th century, incredibly well documented in the city’s Islamic court records, the main body of primary sources of this paper. The focus of this research is Galata, the cosmopolitan district of the city and a Mediterranean and Black Sea port. Galata was an essential node in the early modern alcohol networks and famous for its taverns which connected people from diverse backgrounds for consumption, business, and sociability. Although alcohol is forbidden in Islam, Ottoman authorities did not apply a total ban on it. Instead, to contribute to state revenues, they collected taxes from anyone producing and selling alcoholic drinks. From time to time, however, the state criminalized alcohol, banned its sale, and closed taverns that certain periods of the 17th century witnessed quite severe and historically unprecedented attempts in this context. What makes Galata a particularly interesting case is that, despite these bans, state officials continued to collect alcohol taxes and many taverns remained open or reopened soon after their closure. I argue that the state adopted a flexible and pragmatic approach to benefit from Galata’s lucrative alcohol business, especially when the imperial treasury needed income. However, the bans gained importance when alcohol consumption caused disorder in society and the state aimed to show its power by maintaining the public order. At this point, as alcohol was an inseparable part of everyday life, both Ottomans and European visitors resisted the bans and negotiated with the state to maintain their alcohol-related social and economic activities. This paper benefits from microhistory, global history, and global microhistory which is the intersection of small-scale and large-scale analyses offering complementary aspects in historical study. I also employ the “connected histories” approach that explains global movements of people, objects, and ideas with an emphasis on the interconnectivity of the early modern world. In this way, this study aims to offer a comprehensive history of Ottoman Istanbul by zooming in on its local dynamics and zooming out to include its connections with other cities within the global alcohol networks of the 17th-century. By examining the forms and limits of state regulation on alcohol networks, this paper also sheds a brighter light on alcohol’s place in Islamic societies and provides new insights into the crisis and transformation paradigm that has been used by many scholars studying this century.

Being one of the largest districts of Ottoman Istanbul, medīne-i Abū Ayyūb (present-day Eyüp Sultan) owned a significant status in the cityscape due to its historic core centered around the shrine complex of Abū Ayyūb al-Anṣārī (d. ca. 669), a well-known anṣār and the host of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. As various medieval Arabic sources attest, he lost his life during the Umayyad Siege of Istanbul in the seventh century and was buried around the city walls. Claimed to be discovered following Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, his grave turned into a shrine and a principal place of ziyāra. At the crossroad of early Islamic, Byzantine and Ottoman periods, this grave signified a representational sacred space imbued with religious and political symbolism. Integrating an Islamic layer to multi-layered history of the city, its discovery pointed out divine blessing behind the conquest and symbolically purified the city. A close reading of Arabic and Turkish hagiographical narratives and chronicles reveal a multi-layered picture of the discovery with different story-lines and elements, even more than what Yerasimos argued in his Légendes d’Empire. A significant question in this regard is to what degree Ottoman sources relied on the previous Arabic narratives and produced their own version(s) and how this situation is related with presentist approaches pertaining to Islamization of the city, Ottoman legitimacy of rule, continuity and fluidity between Christian and Muslim sacred spaces. Exploring how the discovery was narrated for a variety of audiences and purposes, my paper suggests that Christian veneration of the grave and Christian intermediacy in the discovery are recurrent themes in the early Ottomans narratives, the sources of the later periods on the other hand are tended to be excluding Christian elements and agency. Instead they point out other motifs (e.g. gravestone inscribed in ʻIbrῑ (ﻋبرى) or kufic). This tendency seems to be in line with the growth of medīne-i Abū Ayyūb as a predominantly Muslim town from the sixteenth century onward at the expense of limiting non-Muslims behavior in the vicinity of the shrine. As multifarious Ottoman judicial records and imperial decrees of the sixteenth and seventeenth century demonstrate, Christians living in the vicinity of the shrine were repeatedly warned against their consumption of alcohol and the making of music. Their behaviors were found to be violating the pious atmosphere of the shrine, that functioned as a landmark between the city’s early Islamic past and Ottoman present.

In the pre-modern Ottoman Empire, any individual, regardless of social status, gender, religious affiliation, and citizenship enjoyed the right to petition the sultan to forward grievances against state officials and commoners alike. The central institution dealing with the petitions of Ottoman subjects as well as foreigners was the Imperial Council (divan-ı hümayun). It operated as both a “cabinet” of state, dealing with major political, military, and economic issues, and as high court of justice. It was presided by the Grand Vizier (sadrazam), the sultan’s deputy, who took decisions in accordance with Hanafi Islamic law (Sharia) and sultanic legislation (kanun) in collaboration with Ottoman judicial authorities, provincial governors, and financial officials. Despite the expanding scholarly literature on the Ottoman legal system since the 1990s, the Imperial Council remains an understudied legal institution and we still know little about its functioning as a court of justice. Scholars of the Ottoman legal system focus on Qadi courts (ordinary Ottoman tribunals) as the main Islamic judicial institution of the Ottoman Empire or on fatwa production (non-binding legal opinions issued by muftis). The neglect of the Imperial Council stems from the widely shared belief that this institution operated as mostly an ombudsman institution and it played a little role in the resolution of legal suits among private individuals. In particular, we still do not know the types of legal suits handled by the Imperial Council, court procedures, and the relations between this institution and other Ottoman forums of justice. This paper expands our current knowledge of the Imperial Council by focusing on the appeals made to this court by Venetian merchants in the years between 1600s and 1630s. The largest European mercantile group in the Ottoman Empire, the Venetians turned to this institution in large numbers to both complain against Ottoman officials and to solve commercial and criminal disputes with Ottoman subjects. It was actually the most used Ottoman court by Venetians and other Western Europeans alike. By employing both Ottoman and Venetian sources, I examine the procedures of petitioning and dispute resolutions, the types of grievances brought to this court by Venetian merchants, and the role of international diplomacy in solving disputes there. In this way, I show the important judicial function of this institution in regards with the legal suits of Western Europeans and its overall contribution to the regulation of international trade and Ottoman/European relations.

This paper examines the Ottoman 17th-century incorporation of Ottoman Banat (Romania) into the empire through the Romanian endowments destined for Mecca and Medina. These imperial endowments for the people of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina served as an important tool for both Ottoman authority in the Harameyn/Hijaz and as a way to incorporate new spaces in the empire - such as Ottoman Banat. The paper focuses on the Surre registers funded by the harvests in Romania which then supported the livelihoods of foreign resident pilgrims living in the holy cities. This imperial connection brought together odd pairings such as sufis from Central Asia living in the holy cities finding money in their pockets from revenues of a harvest cultivated by Romanian peasants. In a close examination of the Romanian surre registers for Mecca and Medina the paper navigates questions examining the bounds and binding of imperial space and imagined sovereignty.