This paper examines Ottoman imperial pious foundations (vakifs) established in northern Dobruca, a region located at the Ottoman Empire’s northern frontier in Europe, currently part of Romania. By looking at vakifs founded in the cities of Babadag/Babadag, Isakçi/Isaccea, and Sünne/Sulina during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I argue that these institutions played important roles in providing social, educational, and cultural services to the Muslim community as much as they did in serving the region, and by extension the empire, economically. The vakif of Babadag, for instance, included a school (medrese) that helped educate the region’s Muslim elites up to the Romanian annexation of Dobruca in 1878. The vakif of Isakçi, one of the richest institutions of its kind in the area, supplied the Ottoman army with animals and agricultural goods. Finally, the vakif of Sünne, founded by Chief Harem Eunuch Haci Besir Aga (term 1717-46), funded the building of a lighthouse which served to guide navigation at the mouth of the Danube River. Many other pious foundations established in the region soon after its incorporation into the empire at the end of the fifteenth century played an important role in maintaining a strong Ottoman presence at the northern frontiers of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. At the same time, these foundations gave the region’s population access to vital Ottoman institutions such as mosques, schools, libraries, and hospitals and infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

This paper examines pious endowments (waqfs) established along the Danube by the Chief Eunuchs of the Ottoman imperial harem. Although they were technically personal endowments, all were connected to the pious foundations for the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, of which the Chief Eunuch was superintendent. All these foundations consisted of religio-educational institutions funded by commercial operations. They date to the very first Chief Harem Eunuch, Habeshi Mehmed Agha (term 1574-91), who founded an entire town, known as Ismail Geçidi (Ismail’s Crossing) in the Danube delta in what is now Ukraine, where the Danube flows into the Black Sea. Roughly 120 years later, his successor el-Hajj Beshir Agha (term 1717-46) encompassed most of the Danube delta in an endowment that provided for a fortified lighthouse with a local garrison at the delta’s easternmost point, in Sünne (today Sulina), Romania, to guide ships entering the Black Sea from the Danube with grain for the imperial capital. The endowment deed also provides for grain warehouses, a coffeehouse, and a shop selling sheep trotters. Farther inland, el-Hajj Beshir founded a madrasa at Sistova (today Shvishtov), on the Danube in what is now Bulgaria. This institution, also supported by a coffeehouse and a sheep trotter establishment, included a library stocked with seminal works of Hanafi jurisprudence. In a town far away from the imperial capital, and even from the provincial capital Sofia, the majority of whose inhabitants were Orthodox Christians, this madrasa must have represented a vital link to the official Ottoman religious establishment, while its library provided a critical infusion of Hanafi texts. This is consistent with el-Hajj Beshir’s religious foundations elsewhere in the empire, including Cairo, Medina, and Istanbul itself, but in a frontier region, it gained added importance. These foundations clearly did not exist in isolation from each other. El-Hajj Beshir Agha was aware of Habeshi Mehmed’s foundations. The foundation deed for his endowment at Sünne even provides for funds for Ismail Geçidi, thus demonstrating that waqf could be used to supplement pre-existing foundations. Collectively, these pious foundations emphasized the Ottoman presence in the Danube, a critical frontier region facing the enemy Habsburgs to the northwest and the enemy Russians to the northeast. In addition, they shored up state-sponsored Sunni Islam of the Hanafi legal rite, providing local Muslims, surrounded by Christians and far from the imperial and provincial capitals, with the foundations of legal and theological education.

This paper examines a number of endowments in the Western Balkan portion of the Ottoman Empire made in the mid-to late sixteenth century by Ottoman officials native to the region. In particular, I examine the endowments of Huseyin Pasha Boljanic (d. 1595) and his brother Kara Sinan Pasha Boljanic (d. 1582), both kapi kullari (“slaves of the gate,” i.e., imperial soldiers) and likely both Poturnaks, that is, recruits for elite service to the Ottoman sultan who were born Muslim and who were native to the region (the word comes from the Bosnian or Serbo-Croatian for “to become a Turk”). A number of primary and secondary sources hint at the possibility that Huseyin Pasha Boljanic was a Poturnak. The chronicler Ibrahim Pecevi refers to him as Potur Huseyin Pasha, a Hercegovinian from the southeastern Bosnian village of Praca who rose from cashnigir (taster) in the imperial palace to beylerbeyi (governor-general of a province). He credits this ascendancy to Huseyin Pasha’s close relationship with Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, one of Bosnia’s most famous devshirme recruits and one of the most famous grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire (term 1565-79). Among other things, Huseyin Pasha endowed one of the most stunning mosques in the Ottoman Balkans, located in Pljevlja in present-day Montenegro. Huseyin Pasha’s brother, Kara Sinan Pasha, was another accomplished Ottoman functionary active in this region. Given that he married Sokollu Mehmed Pasha’s sister, it is likely that he also had a close relationship with the grand vizier. Among other things, he endowed a mosque, a medrese, and an imaret (soup kitchen) in Cajnice in the self-styled Serb Republic of present-day Bosnia-Hercegovina. Scholars such as Behija Zlatar and Enes Pelidija have written about the endowments of Huseyin Pasha and Sinan Pasha previously. This paper aims to add to their work by connecting this endowment history to the history of Poturnaks in the Western Balkan region. Taking into account a number of other endowments made in the same region by Ottoman functionaries who may have been native Poturnaks or had significant connections to Poturnaks, I examine what properties these individuals chose to endow and where they chose to endow them and posit potential motives. In doing so, I offer a preliminary exploration of how Balkan Poturnaks engaged with endowments in their native regions, as well as some of the myths and legacies surrounding these endowments.

The proposed presentation will connect the Ottoman provincial organizational structure of Vidin County in modern-day Bulgaria with the local elite’s involvement in the politics of administration. By reading the historical evidence from Vidin County’s provincial judicio-administrative sphere against the imperial regulations on local governance, I will analyze how the local elite exerted political and economic influence through the intricate framework of representative bodies and associated offices during the 1840s. The sources for this analysis will include provincial council records, yearbooks, petitions, travelers’ accounts and imperial regulations. I will explore the rules of provincial governance outlined in imperial regulatory texts and compare them with evidence from local judicio-administrative organizations to examine two related hypotheses: (a) The offices (and the local elites occupying them) behaved in accordance with these regulations. (b) The local elite pursued strategies that benefited their interests by following the regulations of local governance. That is, these regulations defined opportunities for them. Conventional perspectives on 19th -century bureaucratic reform put heavy emphasis on complaints and irregularities to portray Ottoman provincial governance as a failed centralization effort. Reading regular and irregular practices with close attention to the rules that define them as legal or illegal can help challenge this perspective. The regular functioning of these offices and complaints about irregularities will be key in testing these hypotheses. Provincial correspondence and yearbooks often reflect how the ordinary practices of local offices -- elections, investigations, biddings on purchases, tax collection, etc. -- were carried out. By comparing such textual representations of provincial governance with the regulations that defined acceptable forms, we can get an idea of how closely the local notables were following these rules. Complaints about irregularities in provincial politics—such as corruption and abuse of power -- on the other hand, can inform us about how such allegations of malpractice were articulated and how they were resolved, if they were resolved at all. A close reading of rules in connection with regular and irregular practices of Ottoman governance in Vidin can help us understand if and how the local elite could use the offices and practices of the judicio-administrative sphere to maintain their influence. By focusing on ordinary practices and procedural justifications in order to problematize irregularities, this paper will diverge from studies that focus on conflicts and irregularities to see if the very design of Ottoman provincial governance provided legal avenues for the local elite to exert influence.