A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire : Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century 9781135041458, 9780415821773

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A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire

Provincializing the history of the Ottoman Empire, this book provides a critical approach to the projects of ‘modernity’ that have taken place in the Eastern Mediterranean over the past two centuries. The study focuses on the crucial middle decades of the nineteenth century. Leaving their mark on this period are the turmoil of insurgency in Greece and Egypt, a growing intervention of the European Powers in Eastern Mediterranean politics, and the unfolding of large reform projects within the administration of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst these developments have prompted enduring debates over Middle Eastern paths of transformation, the case of Cyprus has remained isolated from these discussions, an omission that this book seeks to address. One of the first research monographs to appear in English on Cyprus during the eventful times of the Ottoman ‘long’ nineteenth century, this book consistently seeks to provide a dialogue between source analyses and theoretical frameworks. Exploring the myriad relationships between this singular locality and the regional – not to say global – dynamics of empire, trade, and social change at that time, A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire will be of relevance to students and scholars with an interest in the Middle East and Modern History. Marc Aymes is a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. His works focus on Mediterranean provincials and Ottoman forgeries. He currently serves as an editor of the European Journal of Turkish Studies and of the journal Labyrinthe: Atelier interdisciplinaire.

SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East Edited by Benjamin C. Fortna, SOAS, University of London and Ulrike Freitag, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

This series features the latest disciplinary approaches to Middle Eastern Studies. It covers the Social Sciences and the Humanities in both the premodern and modern periods of the region. While primarily interested in publishing single-authored studies, the series is also open to edited volumes on innovative topics, as well as textbooks and reference works. 1 Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia The umma below the winds Michael Francis Laffan 2 Russian–Muslim Confrontation in the Caucasus Alternative visions of the conflict between Imam Shamil and the Russians, 1830–59 Edited and translated by Thomas Sanders, Ernest Tucker and Gary Hamburg 3 Late Ottoman Society The intellectual legacy Edited by Elisabeth Özdalga 4 Iraqi Arab Nationalism Authoritarian, totalitarian and pro-Fascist inclinations, 1932–1941 Peter Wien 5 Medieval Arabic Historiography Authors as actors Konrad Hirschler

6 Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908 Gökhan Çetinsaya 7 Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World The urban impact of religion, state and society Edited by Amira K. Bennison and Alison L. Gascoigne 8 Subalterns and Social Protest History from below in the Middle East and North Africa Edited by Stephanie Cronin 9 Nazism in Syria and Lebanon The ambivalence of the German option, 1933–45 Götz Nordbruch 10 Nationalism and Liberal Thought in the Arab East Ideology and practice Edited by Christoph Schumann

11 State-Society Relations in Ba‘thist Iraq Facing dictatorship Achim Rohde 12 Untold Histories of the Middle East Recovering voices from the 19th and 20th centuries Edited by Amy Singer, Christoph K. Neumann and Selçuk Aks¸in Somel 13 Court Cultures in the Muslim World Seventh to nineteenth centuries Edited by Albrecht Fuess and Jan-Peter Hartung 14 The City in the Ottoman Empire Migration and the making of urban modernity Edited by Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler 15 Opposition and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire Conspiracies and political cultures Florian Riedler

16 Islam and the Politics of Secularism The Caliphate and Middle Eastern modernization in the early 20th century Nurullah Ardiç 17 State-Nationalisms in the Ottoman Empire, Greece and Turkey Orthodox and Muslims, 1830–1945 Edited by Benjamin C. Fortna, Stefanos Katsikas, Dimitris Kamouzis and Paraskevas Konortas 18 The Making of the Arab Intellectual Empire, public sphere and the colonial coordinates of selfhood Edited by Dyala Hamzah 19 Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire A study of communal relations in Anatolia Ays¸e Ozil 20 A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century Marc Aymes

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A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

Marc Aymes Translated from the French by Adrian Morfee

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Marc Aymes The right of Marc Aymes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Aymes, Marc. A provincial history of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century / Marc Aymes. pages cm. – (SOAS/Routledge studies on the Middle East; 20) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cyprus – History – 19th century. 2. Cyprus – History – Turkish rule, 1571–1878. 3. Mediterranean Region – History–1815-1914. 4. Eastern question. I. Title. DS54.7.A964 2013 956.9’015 – dc23 2012048661 ISBN: 978-0-415-82177-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-79372-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Taylor & Francis Books Published with the support of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre d’Etudes Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques (CNRS/EHESS/Collège de France, Paris) and the French National Research Agency (ANR)

Contents

List of maps Preface Acknowledgments Explanatory note List of abbreviations Introduction: questioning the province

viii ix xii xiv xvi 1

1

The nation-as-history

21

2

Ottoman entanglements

33

3

Eventful synchronicities: the scales of the ‘Eastern Question’

57

4

Europe absorbed: territorial imprints

92

5

A departing world?

Conclusion: provincial empire Sources Bibliography Index

135 177 184 190 216

List of maps

1 2 3 4 5 6

The Ottoman ‘White Sea’ Property held by ‘Europeans’ in Cyprus Surface areas of ‘European’ holdings Property held by the Mattei family members Locations of property held by other families Kykkos Monastery: rural activities and dependencies

xix 98 99 101 102 103

Preface

It is a deep-buried memory, an unwarranted inheritance, a gift without lineage or possibility of return. It is the history of a world that is not mine. A world which, though past, is not yet abolished. It needed to be accounted for – and so I went to examine it. I went to Cyprus, first of all. My pretext was to unearth something of what is referred to as the empire of the Ottomans. But Cyprus is a place where the past offers no respite (Thompson et al. 2004; Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux 2005; Bryant 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2012). Declaring oneself a historian strikes dread into one’s listeners. It is often better to remain silent. Boredom stretches out to the horizon. Having nothing to say is exhausting. And so if Cyprus struck me as provincial, it was firstly due to the depletion of its history. Then it was time for the great departure to the City, to Istanbul. Leaving behind the immobility of the island for the bustle of what was once the capital of the Ottomans offered a ‘recommended detour by the centre (or by history), i.e. by totalization’ (Colonna 2004: 457), and involved being carried along by the grandiloquence, perhaps the bombast even of the metropolis. But the question still remained. From the distant offices of the Sublime Porte in Istanbul – now peopled by researchers studying its countless archives – what could one hope to understand of the provincial world, of which Cyprus is a case study? How could there be room for the province to ‘strike back’ (Forsén and Salmeri 2008)? It was this doubt which gave rise to the project of adopting the province not as the locus of a monographic study but rather as a global problem affecting history in general – with the ambition of provincializing the Ottoman Empire, in all its vastness.

*** This book is one of the first research monographs to be published in a Western language on Cyprus, relating to the eventful decades of the first half of the nineteenth century (1820–64). This period was marked by the turmoil of rebellion in Greece and Egypt, by the increasing intervention of the European Powers in Eastern Mediterranean politics, and by the implementation of major

x

Preface

reform projects in the way the Ottoman Empire was administered. Whilst these developments have prompted lasting scholarly debate over the course taken by the transformations the Middle East was then undergoing, the case of Cyprus has remained isolated from the ebbs and flows of regional scholarship. Yet there existed many relationships between this individual locality and the contemporary regional – not to say global – dynamics of empire, trade, and social change. And so this book draws on a variety of archival sources to seek to account for this complex compound. Primary research for this study was conducted in Cyprus at the Makarios III Foundation and the Ministry of Education in Nicosia/Lefkosha, as well as at the ‘National Archives’ in Kyrenia/Girne; in Turkey, at the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office in Istanbul; in France, at the Archives of the Ministère des Affaires étrangères in Paris; and in the United Kingdom, at the British National Archives in Kew. A further particularity is that this work consistently seeks to establish a dialogue between theoretical references and the analysis of sources. When seeking to account for transformations in the region over the course of the nineteenth century, one needs to grapple with the discrepancy between the overarching schemes and processes of global history (e.g. the empowerment of bureaucracies, trade shifts, imperialist power grabs, and upsurges of national or denominational feeling), on the one hand and, on the other, the variety of local or vernacular knowledge (be it a trait of government, a social competence, or a dialectal accent). I have here sought to explore patterns of history-writing that may help interweave these two diverging lines of enquiry. This book draws on works by scholars in social anthropology, imperial studies, and regional history, with the aim of providing readers with the conceptual groundwork to enable them to relate the analytical frameworks used in Middle Eastern history to other areas of scholarly enquiry. My efforts have coalesced around an attempt to conceive of a history of the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean world(s) from a specifically provincial perspective. This wording is not a mere reminder that Cyprus was at that time part of the polity commonly referred to as the ‘Ottoman Empire’. It is also there to enquire into what exactly we might mean by that. And hence to define an approach for a history of what I will be calling the Ottoman provincial world. Adopting a provincial take on the history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century means we need to get a sense of how well-established ‘narratives’ – such as those of ‘centralization’, ‘bureaucratization’ or ‘politicization’, as well as ‘modernization’ or ‘the impact of the West’ – hinge on other levels of agency. This provincial history of the Ottoman Empire hence aims to fuse together imperial patterns and local knowledge, so as to approach what one may call the Ottoman provincial synthesis (cf. Hathaway with Barbir 2008: 7). It both deals with Ottomans-turning-Cypriot and Cypriots-turning-Ottoman – in sum, Ottomans-cum-Cypriots. The notion of

Preface xi provinciality is taken as a way of conceiving the entanglement of many space- and time-scales within the Ottoman world. It is hoped that provincializing the history of the Eastern Mediterranean in this way will provide a critical approach to the patterns of historicity bred in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds.

Acknowledgments

This book, like its companion work already published in French (Aymes 2010), is drawn from my doctoral dissertation, and as such is wholly indebted to the people and institutions who have enabled me to carry out my research for over the past ten-odd years. A page of thanks would never suffice to fully express all I owe them, nor distract from my full responsibility for the many gaps and errors which doubtless plague these pages. Nevertheless I wish once again to express my thanks to:  the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), the Académie Française, the Centre d’Etudes Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques (formerly the Centre d’Histoire du Domaine Turc) (Paris), the History Department at Aix-Marseille I University and the Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur les Mondes Arabe et Musulman (Aix-en-Provence), the Institut Français d’Etudes Anatoliennes (Istanbul), the Maison de l’Institut de France in London, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (Nicosia), the Ecole Française d’Athènes (Athens), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Department of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cyprus (Nicosia), the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin), and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY);  the Bibliothèque Universitaire des Langues et Civilisations (BULAC) (formerly the Bibliothèque Inter-Universitaire des Langues Orientales, Paris), the British : Library (London), the library at the Centre de Recherches sur l’Islam (Islam Aras¸tırma Merkezi, Istanbul), the Turkish National Library (Milli Kütüphane, Ankara), the Library of the Turkish History Foundation (Türk Tarih Kurumu Kütüphanesi, Ankara), the Centre for Cypriot Studies (Κέντρο Επιστεμονικών Ερευνών, Nicosia), the Centre for Studies of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos (Κέντρο Μελετών Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου, Archangelos Monastery), and the Library of the Makarios Foundation (Ιδρυμα Αρχιεπίσκοπου Μακαριου Γ’ Βιβλιοθήκη, Nicosia);  the National Archives of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (Milli Ars¸iv, Girne), the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office (Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivi, Istanbul), the British National Archives at the

Acknowledgments

xiii

Public Record Office (Kew), and the Archives of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (Paris);  last but not least, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (through the ANR-GOUV-08 ‘Order and compromise’ research programme), both generous financial supports for the translation of the present work.

And my gratitude to François Georgeon, Robert Ilbert, Gilles Veinstein, Dilek Desaive, Jak S¸alom, Belgin,: Canan, : Ebru, : Ümmiye; Gökhan Sengor, Apo, Ihsan, Ilker, Isa and his family, At least two Mehmets, : Özlem, Kumiko, Ilhami, and all those who made the Istanbul archives a lively place, Onur and a pair of Yücels, along with Ali Akyıldız, Sia Anagnostopoulou, Tassos Anastassiadis, Nathalie Clayer, Hamit Bozarslan, Mathieu Grenet, Gilles Grivaud, Antonis Hadjikyriacou, Matthias Kappler, Hans-Jürgen Kornrumpf, Sinan Kuneralp, Michalis N. Michael, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Gilles Pécout, Anna Pouradier Duteil-Loizidou, Maurus Reinkowski, Daniel Rivet, Charis Stavrides, Martin Strohmeier, Ioannis P. Theocharides, Agamemnon Tselikas, Nicolas Vatin, Adrian Morfee for his commitment to the translation of this work, Ruth Berry, Tony Hirst and Kathryn Rylance for their assistance in the final preparations for publication, Laurent Dubreuil, Benoît Fliche, Hervé Georgelin, Isabelle Grangaud, Élise Massicard, Nicolas Michel, Baudouin Millet, Michel Tissier, Stefan Winter, and Mehmet Yas¸ın. And all of the people at Labyrinthe and the European Journal of Turkish Studies. To Aline and Georges. To Aude.

Explanatory note

Reading conventions (transcription, transliteration, and translation) Studying the Ottoman archives involves working with the Arabic alphabet used in Turkey up until 1928, as well as with the modern Turkish alphabet used since then. I have adopted a compromise with regard to transcription. In those instances where there is no possible ambiguity, the current-day alphabet is used (hence c, pronounced ‘dj’, to transcribe the Arabic letter djim), but otherwise I have opted for a more precise transliteration (hence for the consonants such as g, h, s, and z). I thereby adhere to the conventions of the IJMES transliteration system for Ottoman Turkish. The transliteration used here is strictly a matter of spelling. That is to say that even for words whose current Turkish phonetic form is generally accepted, I have systematically chosen to give priority to the written form encountered . in the document. Thus virmek is given rather than vermek, oldıgı rather than . oldugu, itdügi rather than the current form ettigi, and so on. Linguistic studies on this period confirm the phonetic validity of this choice (Velkova 1995: 203–5). However punctilious this approach may seem, it has the merit of faithfully reproducing any of the scribes’ errors or spelling variants. The names of places and people are generally given as they appear in the documents being quoted. That is why for Greek and European names given in Ottoman documents I have preferred to follow the spelling of the original document rather than substituting the word as it appears in its language of origin. Thus in what follows La-piyer will at times be substituted for Lapierre, and Kilbı- for Kilbee, etc., in the same way as Mösyö will not necessarily be rewritten as Monsieur. (For discussion of how patronymics are deformed in the Ottoman archives see below Chapter Four as well as Aymes 2011.) For draft documents in which there are corrections, strikethrough indicates that something has been crossed out, and curly brackets are used for additions which are clearly posterior to the original writing of the text. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Currency For most of the period under study the money used in the Ottoman Empire . was the piastre (guru-s¸). It was divided into 40 pa-ra.

Explanatory note xv

Calendar In the period under study the Ottoman State simultaneously used two calendar systems: the Muslim calendar of the Hijra (hicrı-) based on lunar cycles, and the so-called ‘financial’ calendar (ma-lı-) which followed the Julian calendar, though starting in AD 622. The Muslim calendar was by far the most commonly used during the period. For most of the Ottoman documents I quote from, I give the indicated (or estimated) date, together with its Gregorian equivalent between square brackets. Here are the abbreviations used for giving the dates of the Hegira calendar: M. S.. Ra-. R. Ca-. C. B. S¸. N. L. Ẕa-. Ẕ

Muh.arrem (el-h.ara-m) S.afer (el-ẖayr) Rebı-‘ü-l-evvel Rebı-‘ü-l-a-ẖir Cema-ẕı-ü-l-evvel Cema-ẕı-ü-l-a-ẖir Receb (el-ferd, el-mücerred) _ S¸a‘ba-n (el-mu‘az_zam) _ - n (el-müba-rek) Ramaza S¸evva-l (el-mükerrem) Ẕı--l-k.a‘de Ẕı--l-h.icce.

It is also worth pointing out certain particularities for recording the day: . ‘gurre’ is the first day of the month, and ‘selẖ’ the last; ‘eva-’it.’, ‘eva-sıt.’, and ‘eva-ẖır’ refer respectively to the first, second, and third ten-day period of each month.

List of abbreviations

1. Archival sources Abbreviations for places subsequently referred to    

BOA: Bas¸bakanlık Osmanlı Ars¸ivi (Istanbul, Turkey) MA: Milli Ars¸iv (Kyrenia/Girne, Cyprus) MAE: Archives of the Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (Paris, France) PRO: The National Archives, Public Record Office (Kew, United Kingdom)

Abbreviations for archives AD: A.DVN: A.DVN.MHM: A.MKT: A.MKT.DA: A.MKT.DV: A.MKT.MHM: A.MKT.MVL: A.MKT.NZD: A.MKT.S¸D: A.MKT.UM:

BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Evrâk Odası defterleri – Ayniyât defterleri BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Sadâret Dîvân Kalemi belgeleri, Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn Kalemi BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn Mühimme Kalemi BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Divân-ı Ahkâm-ı Adliye BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Deâvî BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Sadâret Mektûbî Mühimme Kalemi BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Meclis-i Vâlâ BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Nezâret ve Devâir BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – S¸ûrâ-yı Devlet BOA, Bâb-ı Âlî Sadâret Evrâkı, Mektûbî Kalemi – Umûm Vilâyât

List of abbreviations CAD: CCC: C.ML: CPC: DVE: FO: HAT: HR.MKT: : I: .DH: I: .HR: I: .MSM: I: .MVL: I: .MMS: I.S¸D: KS¸S: MD: ML.VRD.TMT: MMD: OE: Suppl. turc: TS¸R.KB.THR: TS¸R.KB.NZD: YEE:

xvii

BOA, Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn ve Bâb-ı Âsafî defterleri – Cezâ’ir Ahkâm defterleri MAE, Correspondance consulaire et commerciale BOA, Cevdet tasnifi – Mâliye MAE, Correspondance politique des consuls BOA, Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn ve Bâb-ı Âsafî defterleri – Düvel-i Ecnebî defterleri PRO, Foreign Office BOA, Hatt-ı Hümâyûn BOA, Hâriciye Nezareti belgeleri – Mektûbî Kalemi : BOA, I: râde – Dâhiliye BOA, I: râde – Hâriciye BOA, I: râde – Mesâil-i Mühimme BOA, I: râde – Meclis-i Vâlâ BOA, I: râde – Meclis-i Mahsûs BOA, Irâde – S¸ûrâ-yı Devlet MA, Kıbrıs S¸er’iyye Sicilleri BOA, Dîvân-ı Hümâyûn ve Bâb-ı Âsafî defterleri – Mühimme defterleri BOA, Mâliye Nezareti defterleri – Temettuat defterleri BOA, Mâliyeden Müdevver defterler Αρχείο Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου, Οθωμανικά Εγγραφα (Theocharides 1993 and 1999) Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits orientaux, Supplément turc BOA, Kıbrıs Mutasarrıflıg˘ ı evrakı – Tahrirât Kalemi yazıs¸maları BOA, Kıbrıs Mutasarrıflıg˘ ı evrakı – Mabeyn, Sadâret ve büyük dairelerin yazıs¸maları BOA, Yıldız Esas Evrakı

2. Publications Abbreviations for full titles Annales: Belgeler: Belleten: BJMES: BMGS: ByzFo: CCEC: CMMC:

Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations – subsequently Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales (Paris) Belgeler. Türk Tarih Belgeleri Dergisi (Ankara) Belleten (Ankara) British Journal of Middle East Studies (London) Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (Birmingham) Byzantinische Forschungen (Amsterdam) Cahiers du Centre d’Études Chypriotes (Paris) Cahiers de la Méditerranée et du monde méditerranéen (Nice)

xviii

List of abbreviations

CSSAAME: CSSH: EB: EI, EI2: EKEE: EEKEIS: HR/RH: I_slAns: IJMES: IJTS: ILS: JCS: JEMH: JESHO: JMS: JRAI: K.X.: KySp: MHR: NPT: ReMMM: ROMM : SIsl: SFo: TDVI_A: THR: TSAB: Turcica: WI:

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Durham, NC) Comparative Studies in Society and History (Cambridge) Études balkaniques. Cahiers Pierre Belon (Paris) Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden), 1st & 2nd ed. Επετηρίς του Κέντρου Επιστεμονικών Ερευνών (Nicosia) Επιστημονική Επετηρίς της Κυπριακής Εταιρίας Ιστορικών Σπουδών (Nicosia) The Historical Review/La Revue historique (Athens) I_slam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul) International Journal of Middle East Studies (London/New York) International Journal of Turkish Studies (Madison, WI) Islamic Law and Society (Leiden) Journal of Cyprus Studies/Kıbrıs Aras¸tırmaları Dergisi (Gazimag˘ usa) Journal of Early Modern History (Leiden/Minneapolis, MN) Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (Leiden) Journal of Mediterranean Studies (Malta) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (London) Κυπριακά Χρονικά (Larnaca) Κυπριακαί Σπουδαί (Nicosia) Mediterranean Historical Review (Tel Aviv University) New Perspectives on Turkey (Great Barrington, Mass.) Revue des Mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée (Aix-en-Provence) Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée (Aix-en-Provence) Studia Islamica (Paris) Südost-Forschungen (Munich) _ Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı Islam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul) Turkish Historical Review (Leiden/Cambridge) Turkish Studies Association Bulletin (Bloomington, IN) Turcica. Revue d’études turques (Leiden) Die Welt des Islams (Göttingen)

Map 1 The Ottoman ‘White Sea’ (after Birken 1976: 102)

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Introduction Questioning the province

Where are we headed? Before us lie vast spaces ruled by the descendants of the House of Osman – the ‘Ottomans’. This was originally, at the end of the thirteenth century, only a modest Turkish-speaking tribal principality on the Anatolian margins of the Seljuq lands, but as of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it became a sizeable political entity, and for several centuries its lands ran in a swath around the Mediterranean and Eurasia, from the Maghreb to the Caucasus, and from the Hungarian plains to Yemen. This expansion coincided with the introduction of a political structure of similar scale via a process of both centralization and ‘imperialization’ (Kafadar 1995: 97). This resulted in what is today commonly known as the Ottoman Empire. Of all the centuries in its lengthy existence, the nineteenth was the ‘longest’ (Ortaylı 1983). It was then that the Ottoman Empire underwent multiple, profound transformations, some decided by its rulers and others occurring independently of them. These transformations affected the capabilities of its government, the equilibrium of its economic structures, and the forms of sociability practised within it. Historical scholarship has variously labelled these changes ‘centralization’, ‘westernization’, and ‘modernization’ depending upon the outlook adopted. This should not, however, lull the reader into thinking that we are dealing with some cosily determined context and period. On the contrary, one of the aims of this study is to tease out the manifold problems and concerns that flow from the archives for studying the Ottoman Empire of the period. The approach will not consist in implementing a panoramic elucidation of the past, but rather in devising a technique for better interrogating these documents. The reader, in other words, should be prepared for a discomforting field of study. We shall call it the province. The research conducted here thus seeks to provide a provincial take on the history of the vast Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.

2

Introduction – questioning the province

Cyprus: the home to ‘local knowledge’? And so we arrive at an island in the Mediterranean, conquered by the Sultan’s armies in 1571 – and which will eventually fall unopposed into the orbit of another empire in an agreement signed on 4 June 1878 – the British Empire. The imagination of romantic travellers has been haunted by the legends of this land, who ‘like to envisage sacred groves for Apollo, baths for Diana, a forest for Pan, and prairies for choirs of nymphs’.1 This has long seemed a fertile hunting ground to historians, with a Gothic nave here dating from the Crusades and a Venetian castle there. Greek is spoken – and Turkish too since the island became Ottoman, though the present day might suggest that these two are mutually incompatible. Here, then, is Cyprus, one amongst the many ‘provinces’ making up this vast empire. The word ‘Cyprus’ seems to suffice, and the stage is already set. The scene could take its name from the title of the paper given by the Cypriot historian Theodore H. Papadopoullos at the first ‘International Cypriological Congress’ held at Nicosia in 1969: ‘Unity and Diversity in the History of Cyprus’. Once upon a time there was an island which was unique of its kind thanks to the ‘successive presence of imported civilizations’ (Papadopoullos 1973: 5). This diversity soon became unified – though it is not said when exactly – by the ‘crystallization of a dominant cultural tradition’ which, whilst it ‘continued to undergo modifications, as well as influences, arising from new cultural borrowings’, was nevertheless such that the attentive observer could ‘apprehend its unity via its diversity’ (ibid.: 5 and 8). Hence there is something akin to a ‘native stock’, a substrate, a historical Cypriotness (ibid.: 8). And so consequently, the history of Cyprus in Ottoman times is still primarily Cypriot history. As a matter of fact, in Papadopoullos’s text-cum-manifesto, the Ottoman period is referred to only in passing (ibid.: 7). What is at issue here is not simply a question of taking Cyprus as the theatre for an unparalleled historical intrigue: It is not exactly a matter of determining whether or not it is feasible to provide an overview of Cypriot history, taken in its temporal entirety, but instead of showing that the various disciplines called upon to construct such an overview may, as a set, constitute (and justify) an autonomous domain of specialization within the historic–philological sciences. (Ibid.: 1) In other words, what is at stake in Papadopoullos’s undertaking is ‘finding an epistemological status for [Cypriot] studies’, and thus founding a Cypriology (ibid.: 3). The goal is that Cyprus will act as the founding principle of a specific form of knowledge, of a general science. Papadopoullos refers to the example of Egyptology and Assyriology, but on reading him it can seem more tempting to draw a parallel with the birth of psychoanalysis, a shockwave that profoundly altered the established order of the sciences from the late

Introduction – questioning the province

3

nineteenth century onwards. History, geography, anthropology, and linguistics will now have to answer to the tribunes erected by Cypriological science. Cyprus becomes an epistemological beast in its own right, whose supposed singularity, exceeding the order of historical fact, assumes equal status to a principle of intelligibility. This, one may suggest, parallels ‘the way the [British] colonial authorities in Cyprus used history and archaeology in order to counter the Greek national movement’ by promoting an ‘Eteocypriot’, an ‘authentic Cypriot’, identity (Hatzopoulos 2005: 186; cf. Given 1998). And so with Cyprus we discover the law of a genre – that of the local. The heuristic approach of this Cypriological project looks very similar to ‘local knowledge’, for which the anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposes the following maxim: ‘To an ethnographer, sorting through the machinery of distant ideas, the shapes of knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements’ (Geertz 2000: 4). Knowledge is said here to be unable to take shape at a distance, requiring the proximity afforded by local applications. But Geertz is careful to maintain a certain ambiguity here: the knowledge in question might be that of the man of science, or of the agents observed. The local, then, as a ‘field’ of research, bears the imprint of an equivocal duplicity. And under these circumstances, the horizons of a history taking Cyprus as ‘instrument’ and ‘encasement’ are no longer necessarily Cypriot. It should be possible, on the contrary, to envisage a history of Cyprus which is both locally Ottoman and Ottoman in other ways too. A history of the here, and of the there. We will call it ‘provincial history’.

Here, there: the province I am speaking from The word province is here used as the crucible for working on concepts themselves. It therefore needs to be understood in ways which exceed its standard meaning. All the same, the fact of using the word province would already appear to imbue the project just sketched out with a particular tone. In my mother tongue (i.e. French) province, in the singular, has derogatory overtones, be they avowed or not, retaining the insipid existence of Madame Bovary’s Yonville (of which the subtitle is Provincial Manners) and the nausea felt by Rimbaud in Charleville. The province, be it real or imagined, a novelistic device or land of the poet, will never be anything other than the opposite of Paris looking mockingly and condescendingly down on it: Have we mocked the figure of the provincial man enough yet? [ … ] Saying a man looks provincial is almost an insult – you may as well call him an oaf, a boor, ill-fashioned, an idiot. [ … ] We think of the provincial man of legends, the dimwit, the simpleton, forever having the wool pulled over his eyes by the local press and being mercilessly, relentlessly hoodwinked. The age-old wary traveller arriving in Paris up from the provinces, with one hand on his watch and the other on his double pockets, anxiously observing his neighbours as he goes around in his

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Introduction – questioning the province carriage or visits the theatre, convinced that he was spotted by a band of thieves as soon as he left his village in the back of beyond, determined not to sleep in his tavern bed and going down with a fever and stomach bug the day after arriving on the penny-ride stage-coach, not daring to plunge into the crowd or pause in front of the shop windows or enter a restaurant, caught up in the Parisian maelstrom without understanding a jot of it. (Larousse 1982: vol.13, 332 [art. ‘Provincial’])

In comparison to feverish Parisian existence, the province equates to boredom. Life there is minuscule, prosaic, given over to dull ordinariness, deprived of style. Nothing ever happens there, which basically amounts to saying that the province has no history. Are these overtones specific to the French language, or do they also apply to the Ottoman context? Do we not run the risk of illegitimately exporting the connotations of the French world to the Eastern Mediterranean if we talk too much about the ‘province’ when studying what happened in the Ottoman Empire? Since this is above all a matter of translation, it is worth referring to the entry for ‘Province’ in the Dictionnaire français-turc à l’usage des agents diplomatiques et consulaires, des commerçants, des navigateurs et autres voyageurs dans le Levant, written by Thomas-Xavier Bianchi in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘PROVINCE, s.f., eïa-let, pl. a. eïa-la-t ; memleket, pl. mema-lik ; vila-ïet. – Air, manières de province, tachralyq thavri. – Langage de province, thachra liça-ni, bedevi liça-ni’ (Bianchi 1843–46: vol.2, 755). As defined here, the Ottoman province is firstly an administrative district (eya-let, then vila-yet). It is also, by extension, a ‘dominion’ (memleket) over which the sovereign exercises his authority (see Redhouse 1890: 1981). But ways of behaving and speaking rapidly come into play – there are ‘manners’ and a ‘language’ that identify the provincial man. And Bianchi, a gifted lexicographer (unless he is simply giving in to some incorrigible Parisian trait), does not fail to include the possible implicit meanings of the French language – a touch of Parisian smugness seems to creep through with his ‘de province’. Explanations about the use made of dictionaries of the period are provided further on. What matters here is to notice that the Ottoman language also alters over the course of Bianchi’s definition. The province with its backward manners and clumsy speech is no longer eya-let or memleket, but t.as¸ra. And what does this word mean? It is a variant of ‘t.ıs¸arı’ (or dıs¸arı, in modern Turkish), the first meaning of which is the outside, the exterior.2 The province is outside. It is, notably, outside the civilized city, like the countryside and the desert – or this at least is the separation implicit in the final term put forward by Bianchi, ‘bedevı-’.3 Istanbul and the Ottoman desert, basically.4 The provincial (t.ıs¸arılü) is thus always apart by definition. Wherever the provincial may hail from – the depths of the countryside, the midst of the desert, or some distant land – the traces of otherness and rusticity are there to be seen.5

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So in both French and Ottoman Turkish, translating the province reveals a common meaning underpinned by the same thought pattern. In the two languages this revolves around a shift from the provinces in the plural, as a multiplicity of localities subsumed under an administrative tool, to the province in the singular, something that connotes a mode of conduct and a structural figure. At the very least the criss-crossing, overlapping meanings justify the use of the term province here. In particular it means that this survey of Ottoman Cyprus must factor in the connotations of the province à la française – factor in, and thus recognize their pertinence and sift through their conceptual implications. In order to do this it can be useful to follow the course set out by Alain Corbin with regard to Paris and the province: [T]he distinction [ … ] is not strictly speaking geographical [a]. Furthermore, the notion of the province is not based on some analysis of difference or inequality, but on a perceived lack, a distance, a privation vis-à-vis the capital. Here, rather than being the same sort of distinction as that separating the North from the South, it is a matter of a relationship [b]. Conceived of in this way, the province is not the same as the countryside nor as the provinces even – regional units with their own history, own privileges, own institutions, and own administration, and whose outlines may be more or less geographically identified [c]. The province that interests us here is not a sum of the provinces, but rather a highly complex socio-cultural reality, which often goes unaffected by major breaks in political history [d]. Writing the history of the province involves writing an account of the representations of the territory, and not an account of the way provincial images are fabricated [e]. (Corbin 1992: 777–78) This roadmap merits close attention. Let us go through the stages as marked out above ([x]). a. The province is not some given, physical place. The analysis of the Ottoman words for it conducted above has illustrated this sufficiently: the frontier between within and without is based on a symbolic, not a natural, topography. What matters when designating Cyprus a province is thus the distinction between this term and other notions, derived primarily from geographical metaphors. The province is not the ‘edge’ or ‘periphery’. b. The idea of the province, rather than referring to a place, refers to a relationship. A provincial history takes relationships as its object of study, and the area under study is thus variable. In particular, it should not be reduced and limited to some ‘natural’ frontier – the corollary of what has just been stated in [a]. Cyprus may well be an island, but that in no way signifies that the coastline decisively structures the province it belongs to. In other words, designating Cyprus as provincial signifies that it is traversed by multiple networks and frameworks of knowledge and power,

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tugging at it from beyond the horizon. This deliberate choice stakes out an essential difference with so-called ‘local’ history: rather than dealing with a microcosm we are dealing with kaleidoscopic flux. c. ‘[T]he province is not the same as the countryside nor as the provinces even’ – and thus provincial history does not presuppose any given thematic slant, no more than it does any geographical boundary (unlike ‘rural’ history). It implies in particular that it is necessarily of larger scope than a local ‘monograph’. And thus, as stated, the aim of this work is to take the case of Cyprus as its point of departure. The idea is not to write the history of a particular locality, Cyprus – even though the choice of this locus arises from the fact that it has so far remained one of the ‘well-protected domains’ least studied by Ottomanist historians. Rather, the idea is to use it as a laboratory to understand, in an ideal–typical way, how the Ottoman province in general functioned at that period. d. Corbin’s point that the province is ‘a highly complex socio-cultural reality, which often goes unaffected by major breaks in political history’ highlights an essential problem for provincial history, that of the variation of scales.6 And thus since the province is a set of relationships, a crucial point when studying it is to juxtapose, combine, and endeavour to hold together the singularity of the local with the entirety of large-scale dynamics. In other words, the province needs to be thought of as a place where varying scales come into interplay, making it possible to ‘pass from one history to another one (or several others, even)’ (Revel 1996: 36). This passage moreover points towards the need to ‘free oneself of the influence of generally accepted trends’, to ‘not give in to the tyranny of established fact of “what actually took place”’ (id. 1989: xv–xvi). Hence a further implication needs to be stressed: there is no guarantee that we will be able to understand the province, ‘a highly complex socio-cultural reality’, solely by applying historical models derived at the larger scale of the Ottoman Empire, or the Mediterranean, or Eurasia as a whole. That would reduce the argument to a like-for-like basis, establishing the primacy of a given scale of observation (and causality) over all other possible scales. The provincial history set out here, on the contrary, is based on the hypothesis that: carefully increasing the number of scales of observation is likely to yield greater knowledge if one posits that reality is complex (the principles underlying social dynamics are multiple and may be perceived according to different social configurations) and inaccessible (one may never have the final word and models of reality need to be revised endlessly). [ … ] [C]hoosing any given scale of observation never truly results in the reduction of the diversity of the world and the singularity of things. (Lepetit 1996: 92–93) The province thereby becomes the crucible for interrogating the models applied to Near Eastern history and present-day Mediterranean Europe.

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The weft and warp of the province make it necessary to complexify the rhythms of ‘History’, as written by those from the metropolis. e. This is followed by an additional point about the sort of ‘relationship’ which goes to make up the province. Clearly, our understanding of this relationship needs to go beyond the way it is generally understood (‘a perceived lack, a distance, a privation’, etc.), and not simply reproduce the ‘images’ of the province-as-outside, the province-as-desert. But this critical distance could also be used in turn to question the pertinence of the idea of a relationship: are we that certain that the province boils down to certain proportions, and can be studied using a common yardstick? On the contrary, it might be marked by an irreducible ‘difference’ (a term Corbin leaves to one side) – a discrepancy amounting to a singular event or incommensurable something. In other words we also need to run the risk of seeing some indefinable something suddenly emerging in the ways political and social frameworks were structured at the time. In short, there is nothing self-evident about the province I am speaking from. And readers will be disappointed if they are expecting this study to open out onto a systematic overview or identikit picture of the situation of Cyprus at the period. Clearly any such attempt would be in keeping with the framework permeating much Ottoman ‘provincial history’, here understood as the history of Ottoman provinces (e.g. Imber 2002: 177–215; cf. Ünlü 2010). Yet this amounts to the opposite of an ‘opening out onto’, and involves taking the context and categories of the analysis as being drawn up in advance and corresponding to a predefined table of contents. Such an approach would be the hallmark of a univocal writing closed in on itself – a mono-graphy: All monograph authors know they need to situate the monad under study in its context – be it ecological and demographic (the world and men, and more recently the climate), administrative and political, economic, or cultural even. Each monograph no doubt has its own characteristics, but all of them conceive of the context in a remarkably repetitive way. If the truth be told, it is conceived of as a table of contents, the set of links the author is obliged to make to fields outside the immediate object of analysis. (Revel 1989: xxv) Monographic research is by definition closed, guided by pre-determined rationales, which it is then simply a matter of going through. But the desire to make this study into a veritable opening out onto something larger means these rationales have to be invented as part of a deliberate choice. What follows does not seek to be some pat, well-rehearsed discussion progressing smoothly along. The aim here is not to iron out difficulties but instead to raise as many of them as possible.

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Provincial history thus involves a certain amount of improvisation. We need to try out various registers and offer multiple unorthodox readings without any preconceived ideas about the degree of academic specialization required by each. This is not a matter of ignoring how demanding specialist knowledge is. Rather it is a way of curbing how it is commonly used, which tends to whittle away at the field of what is possible, thus stifling wisdom. And so the form of history starting here is one that goes beyond the univocal and the monographic – it is a polygraphic history.

Testing polygraphy The word polygraphy is here used to indicate that we will be drawing on multiple writings – and thus necessarily multiple readings – in our search for what was provincial about Cyprus. This is primarily a matter of using multiple archives. Research carried out over the previous century gives an idea of just how many there are. This study needs to take them into account. Benjamin Arbel and Gilles Veinstein (1986) have analysed the tax regulations the Ottomans laid down after conquering the island. Jakob Merkelbach (1991), Kemal Çiçek (1992, 1995a and b, 2002; cf. Çiçek and Saydam 1998), Ronald C. Jennings (1993, 1999), and Nuri Çevikel (2000, 2008a and b) have studied the legal registers of Lefk.os¸a from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7 Bénédictos P. Ioannou (1998) and George Dionyssiou (1995) have illustrated how rich the archives of the local archbishopric are. Following in the footsteps of Claude Delaval Cobham (1908), Magali Bergia (1997) and Rita C. Severis (2000) have both conducted in-depth studies of the vast corpus of travellers’ accounts by people who visited Cyprus in the nineteenth century (see also Masson 1992 and 1993). Theocharis Stavrides (2001) has published certain documents held by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whilst Pavlos Hidiroglou (1973), Ioannis P. Theocharides (1993, 1999, 2004) and Michalis N. Michael (2001) have published registers and documents from the Cypriot monastery of Kykkos. A team of archivists from Istanbul has put forward a statistical analysis of censuses of the population and landholdings carried out by the Ottoman State in the 1830s (Osmanlı I_daresinde Kıbrıs 2000). Theodore H. Papadopoullos (1965) has undertaken a longer-term study of the data available for the population of Cyprus. He has also gone over and published entire sections of the documentation from Western consulates in Larnaca (Papadopoullos 1980), as have Eleni Belia (1973), Anna Pouradier Duteil-Loizidou (1991–2009) and Lucie Bonato (1998 et seq.) (see also Michael 2012). It is also worth mentioning Harry Luke, the precursor in this area (1921). George Hill’s History of Cyprus (1972) draws its material for the section

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on the Ottoman period from the archives of the French consulate transcribed into Greek by the local ‘chronicler’ Neoklis Kyriazes, who compiled them into his Κυπριακά Χρονικά (‘Cypriot Chronicle’, hereafter Κ.X.) that was published between 1923 and 1937 in Larnaca (Michailidi 1982a and b; Jacovides-Andrieu 1988). Finally, various archives relating to Cyprus have been inventoried, ranging from Nicosia to Istanbul and from Sofia to Venice (Hidiroglou 1971–72; Kyrris 1973–75; Theocharides 1977, 1979–80, 1984; Console veneto a Cipro 1990; Archivio del consolato 1993; Desaive 1994 and 1998; Kıbrıs Mutasarrıflıg˘ ı 1996; Cambazov 2000). All of these works – and the instances cited here are far from exhaustive – illustrate how diverse the archives centred on the Ottoman Cyprus are (see also the studies in the work edited by Michael et al. 2009). Thus certain choices have had to be made limiting the spectrum of the archives which transpire in these pages, and this for both practical and theoretical reasons. The first of these choices has been to privilege the least studied sources, that is to say the ‘indigenous’ documentation. Consequently, without wholly neglecting the so-called ‘consular’ sources – and we shall see just how essential it is when adopting a provincial history approach to compare and contrast these with the Ottoman archives – I have had to forgo further peregrinations in the archives of the Public Record Office and the Quai d’Orsay,8 as well as forgoing journeying to other capitals (Berlin, Moscow, Vienna, and Washington, D.C.) as part of my provincial investigations. In addition to this a linguistic choice has been made. Studying the history of Cyprus requires a good knowledge of Greek and Turkish at the very least, as well as palaeographic skills relating to the various sorts of documents in each language. When I started out in 1997 all of this was new to me. My project was to study a region of the Ottoman Empire, irrespective of which one it was. There was no guarantee that I would be able to successfully carry out any such research in Cyprus. Access to the archives would be fraught with the usual difficulties, I was warned, both in Nicosia/Lefk.os¸a and Istanbul or Athens, and so I would perhaps be forced to opt for another part of the Empire. That is why I felt it a priority to learn Turkish, as it was the only language I could be sure to find used from one place to another (Lory 1997; Hazai 2005). Greek was of course another widespread language in the Ottoman world.9 But I could not be sure that it would be as common in the archives as Turkish. In Cyprus itself it was indeed difficult to access substantive archives. At the ‘National Archives’ in Girne/Kyrenia (Northern Cyprus) I had no choice but to trust to luck for my research into nineteenth-century sources (carried out in autumn 2000–winter 2001) as whilst there were Ottoman documents there was no catalogued collection nor index. (And thus however diligent the team at the Milli Ars¸iv may be, I would tend not to agree wholeheartedly with the

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flattering description of the archive put forward by Altan et al. 1977.) Whilst this was an excellent introduction to palaeography, it did not bode well for the medium-term feasibility of my project. At the Archives of the Archbishopric of Nicosia, as at the Centre for Studies of the Holy Monastery of Kykkos, I was informed that access was only accorded to better ‘authorized’ researchers than I was (February 2003). And so a great wealth of sources in Greek remained out of my reach. At the same time a series of trips to Istanbul (in spring 2001, spring 2002, and summer 2003) confirmed the wealth of documentation held by the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office. There seemed no end to the rich catalogues and profusion of consultable documents. And as testimony to this, the sources privileged below come from the archives built up and held by the former capital of the Ottoman State, Istanbul. Now it is down to reading. And it is when tested against a prolific and scattered documentary corpus that the problems of provincial history gradually emerge. Provincial an-archives The choice of the Istanbul archives as preferred source should not be misconstrued: however ‘central’ the documentation I drew upon might seem, my aim squarely is to conduct a history of something called ‘province’. But under what conditions is such a history possible?10 It is not rare for a tacit equivalence to exist between state and archives. After all, are not the archives the writing of an arkhè, a principle of command most fully expressed in a state bureaucracy? And this to such an extent that ‘the surest way the particular form of social organization called the state transpires is perhaps the existence of archive repositories’ (Descimon et al. 1997: 14). The mid nineteenth-century reorganization of the Ottoman ‘document treasury’ in Istanbul is exemplary here, when a new edifice was built near the Sublime Porte (where the government offices were) to house documents hitherto scattered around the damp cellars of the Golden Horn. The responsibilities of those in charge of inventorying the documents were redefined and the filing system altered so as to optimize the ‘state’s ability to remember’ (Akyıldız 1993: 49–51; Bas¸bakanlık 2010: xxxvii–viii). Echoing the ‘treasury’ built up by the French royalty in the late Middle Ages, the official Ottoman terminology here ‘suggests both a state discourse – via the production and conservation of royal acts – and a discourse about the state – via the archival instruments and the classifying of the archives themselves’ (Potin 2000: 49). This was the archiving logic at work in the organization of the documentation studied here, a logic bound up with the interpretation that is generally accepted to define the Ottoman nineteenth century and the ‘reorganizations’ (Tanzimat) carried out by the men of the Sublime Porte: The scope of government was gradually broadened to include all areas of life. The whole assumption of the Tanzimat was that reform meant

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codification, systematization, and control, even in those areas where actual reforms were not needed. (Shaw 1968: 33) And so the Ottoman Empire – both as a socio-political entity and a paper universe – was transformed in a process called ‘centralization’. By this measure, however, the province is the exact opposite of commandment. It is outside the arkhè – quite literally an an-archic place, a place without archives. This is what a British consul in Rhodes, Robert Campbell, sought to express when describing in 1859 how the Ottoman administration functioned in ‘the Islands in the Ottoman Archipelago and of Cyprus’:11 All is anarchy and confusion. It cannot be otherwise as neither Archives, Registers, or Records of any kind are kept. All official documents received at the Conac whether from the Authorities at Constantinople, from those of the different Islands, or from the foreign Consuls are crammed indiscriminately into bags, some of which bags with their contents are carried off by each successive Governor General, when he is appointed to another Post.12 The reference to bags is reminiscent of other descriptions of how the Ottoman Chancellery functioned prior to 1839: Every official had the famous torba, a silk or linen bag in which important documents were kept – and often buried for weeks. The archives were likewise housed in torba’s hung on pegs in the wall. On a smaller scale this scene was reproduced in each seat of provincial administration. It was possible, and sometimes happened, that even in this setting business was efficiently conducted. More often, it was not. (Davison 1963: 36) This is a problem that historians of the period prior to the ‘reorganizations’ of the nineteenth century have frequently emphasized: ‘the progressive loss of control by the central administration over the provinces created a discontinuity between the document-producing processes of the central offices and the world outside’ (Findley 1980: 91). And it is precisely this discontinuity that brings into focus the problem facing any attempt to write a provincial history: if the province is a place where the archiving power of the centre does not hold sway, then what point is there seeking the sources of its history in Istanbul? This seeming paradox arises, first and foremost, from the ambiguities surrounding the ‘archontic dimension of domiciliation [ … ] without which no archive would ever come into play or appear as such’ (Derrida 1995: 10). The real question, then, is where exactly does the presumed ‘centrality’ of the Istanbul archives refer to: is it to the Sublime Porte of the time, or the Prime Minister’s

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Office (Bas¸bakanlık) of today? Here it is important to dissociate two archiving processes, which though often concurrent obey wholly distinct dynamics: on the one hand ‘document-producing processes’, the decision to create a trace on paper, and on the other hand consigning a document to the archive repository to await the future historian. This also serves as a reminder that ‘document’ is not synonymous with ‘archive’: ‘The archived sources at the historian’s disposal have been built up in two phases: firstly as documents, and secondly as archives, that is to say as documents that are conserved, classified, and inventoried’ (Anheim and Poncet 2004: 3). Confusing the two stages leads to the risk that ‘the archive [that is to say, here, the archive repository] exclusively and necessarily defines the historical perspective of all the documents deposited in it’ (Agmon 1999: 110). And so, in a curious metonymic effect, it implies mistaking the container for the content. Along these lines one ought to discuss the pertinence of the distinction ‘between two kinds of archives, the provincial and the central’ (ibid.). After all, why should the Istanbul archives exclusively reflect the point of view of the Sublime Porte? And why, inversely, should the archives held by certain local authorities (important families, the tribunals, and groupings of dignitaries) essentially convey the vision of a regional microcosm? That would amount to endorsing some centre/periphery dichotomy even though the content of these archives abolishes any such dividing line, for the registers of the provincial tribunals abound in orders and decrees from the sultanate, whilst in Istanbul entire registers are filled with collective and individual petitions _ mazbat _ .a, and ‘arzuh _ . a-l respectively) sent in from the provinces (ibid.; (mah.zar, see Ursinus 1994; Doumani 1995: 10; Toprakyaran 2007; Lafi 2011; cf. Kıbrıs Mutasarrıflıg˘ ı 1996, and Bas¸bakanlık 2010: 185). The same sort of porosity may also be found in Western consular documentation, which contains just as many echoes of ‘the necessity of locality’ as instructions received from European capitals.13 And so the archives consigned to the Empire’s metropolis comprise traces of the provincial localities in large numbers. What is needed, therefore, is to read them in such a way as to bring out some of their provincial ‘anarchy’, and so track down the singularities within. Such singularities become manifest, in particular, when studying non-standardized documents: as Yavuz Cezar (1998: 87) points out, certain provincial tax registers from the eighteenth century ‘are not standard, and [ … ] they lack the neatness and order of the records kept by the central bureaucracy’. And this heterogeneity ‘is present not only between records from different provinces, but among different records from the same province’. The inability of the central government of the period to impose its authority in the provinces no doubt has something to do with the often arbitrary nature of these records and their overabundance, Cezar states. However, ‘[i]f one reason for this was that in the eighteenth century the provinces had the initiative over the center, another would be the vagueness and inconstancy inherent in the nature of the practice’ (ibid.: 88). This doubly emphasizes the singularity of the provincial archives. What may be seen here is an extravagant archival

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process, escaping the standardized programme dictated by the law of a ‘centre’. An archival process in fact which denies its own principle, flouts its own rule, and renders any interpretative endeavour even more undecidable. It can be objected that these archives bear the hallmark of a specific context (the eighteenth century and its ‘decentralization’), whereas the period of ‘reorganizations’ in the nineteenth century abounds in documents that can be seen as symbolizing the advent of standardized documentation, controlled by a central government. Key to this line of reasoning is the assertion that ‘with the Tanzimat reforms [ … ] the center won back the initiative that was lost to the provinces in the eighteenth century. Therefore, the most disti[n]ctive feature of the post-Tanzimat period was to be the trend towards centralization’ (ibid.: 92). And yet, in a similar way to the centre/periphery dichotomy (whose relevance is further addressed below in Chapter Two), the provincial perspective might bring into question the vision of this period as one of centralization after centuries of decentralization. Jane Hathaway’s work on eighteenth-century Egypt already obliges us to proceed with caution, as it stresses that ‘the post-Süleymanic decentralization of the Ottoman Empire appears far more Süleymanic and centralized than we might have expected’ (1996: 29). Echoing this (seemingly) paradoxical centralized decentralization, Ariel Salzmann also observes (in relation to the Diyarbakir area in the eighteenth century) that ‘Ottoman fiscal decentralization transformed the state-society relationship in important ways, often without leading to a true decentralization of power and authority’ (2000: 132). In a similar vein Michael Meeker points out in his study of the Trabzon region that ‘the problem of decentralization was then in place before, during, and after the classical period’ (2002: 146). And Yavuz Cezar himself indicates that ‘[the] accumulated experiences from the eighteenth century did form a basis for the Tanzimat reform movements beginning in the 1840s’ (1998: 92). There could not be better grounds for extending his analyses to a study of the nineteenth century.14 Hence the advent of the ‘reforms’ in no way attenuates the difficulty, as anyone who has visited the Istanbul archives realizes, for the majority of documents relating to nineteenth-century provincial life are disseminated and discontinuous snippets. Disseminated firstly because the complexity and lability of Ottoman governing bodies resulted in a string of different documentary series,15 and secondly because any given series is organized primarily according to when it was consigned to the archive by the bureaucracy, and only secondarily according to any geographical or thematic coherence.16 Discontinuous because certain series of documents are subject to major ebbs and flows, and affected by irruptions and interruptions. Furthermore, when certain indications are combined and compared, this can on occasion give rise to irreconcilable interpretations – as when reading the contending petitions sent to the Sublime Porte with regard to the Cypriot ‘headmen’ Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo in the early 1840s, a task which will retain our attention in Chapter Three below.17 And so ultimately, when it comes to the way the documents are

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classified and their content is indexed, the Istanbul archives relating to the nineteenth-century Ottoman provinces still confront us with a multiple and proliferating configuration, echoing the variability of a bureaucracy in the throes of change. And thus the province qua configuration of archives may be described as a constellation of discrete points which are only rarely linked up. It is ‘rendered’ with continual blanks, suspending the law of archiving institutions. This brings out the methodological specificity of a provincial approach, which has to work with the impossibility of building up the continuum of a corpus within so-called ‘central sources’. Under these circumstances provincial history has no choice but to be a path seeking to cut across and ‘sor[t] through the machinery of distant ideas’ (Geertz 2000: 4). It is in this sense that seemingly ‘central’ sources become provincial archives – or rather what I have termed provincial an-archives, since they subject their locus at the ‘centre’ to the risk of their extravagances within the Ottoman world. The accent to be accounted for And so the history of the Ottoman province makes for necessarily uncomfortable reading. As an-archives, the sources used here are not just a repository – to be sifted through at leisure – but a splinter sample continually leading towards additional interpretation. And thus there are ‘two ways of apprehending the document: either as “authorized” by an institution, or as relating to a “nothing” ’ (de Certeau 2002: 136).18 To get a clearer idea of the difficulty, it is worth referring once again to the ‘Province’ article quoted above from T.-X. Bianchi’s Dictionnaire français-turc (1843–46). Despite being informed by a host of implicit positions and censures, it is still fragmented, revealing the irreconcilable and far-ranging multitude of meanings attributed to a single word. It thereby confronts us with a series of successive definitions which are juxtaposed rather than linked, a disorder which might strike us as the symptom of a confused way of thinking, whereas it is in fact a way of translating the plurivocal nature of the concept, exposed without attention to organization into a hierarchy. (Senellart 1995: 25). Each of the entries in the dictionary, then, forces us to ‘think of the single in terms of the many, whilst retaining the dispersed character of the latter’ (ibid.). And that is precisely what a provincial an-archive obliges us to factor back in. Even though it might be possible on reading such or such a document to decide that a given meaning is to be privileged over others, I will not be able to extract myself from the ‘stereographic plurality of the signifiers that weave it’ (Barthes 1979: 76; emphasis in the original). That is why I quote wherever necessary (and as exhaustively as possible) from the dictionaries

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of Ottoman Turkish published during the second half of the nineteenth century – taking them to function as a primary source due to their chronological proximity. I thereby hope ‘at every moment to develop the polysemous reading of the text’ (id. 1984: 56) and thereby be faithful to my principle of polygraphy. A ritual formula in nineteenth-century administrative correspondence illustrates how this difficulty is bound up with the Ottoman vocabulary of the period. When the author of a report, having gone over the grounds of the affair under consideration, starts to consider what decisions to recommend, he introduces his suggestions with the expression: ‘considering the tenor of the matter’ (siya-k.-ı is¸‘a-ra naz.aren).19 It is precisely here that the formal archiving process of the administrators seeks to impose its law on provincial dispersion – and where this reduction to the same is continuously disturbed by an eerie strangeness. It is precisely here that the story of provincial history starts. Against the backdrop of normative determinations positing the archive as the sediment of paper authority, provincial history invites us to continually seek out singular textual events.20 It underlines that ‘the archive is [ … ] not a material from which referents may be drawn, it partakes in a reading act in which signifying patterns and meaningful devices are actualized’ (Guilhaumou 1998: 273; in italics in the original).21 Thus the provincial an-archives are not merely the ‘sources’ for this study, they constitute its subject. The writing events initiating this corpus leave it open, meaning my reading, any reading is haunted by an impossible domiciliation. They whisper: ‘I do not believe [ … ] in the irresistible organising generosity of historical events establishing and transmitting what they testify to’ (Frugoni 1993: 4). They present historical rationalization with a challenge that defies blanket generalizations.22 And they require an approach that attests to a versatile discontinuity and irreducible disseminations. And so what is required is to make visible the vast spectrum of archives that are operative, and not just via surreptitious footnotes but in the body of the text itself. Quotations are the means of generating this visibility – by which I mean the opposite of an example. Rendering a document exemplary involves giving precedence to an act of rarefaction whereby everything is reduced to the principle or general process to be illustrated. The use of examples is ultimately part of an approach opportunely known in French as the dépouillement (literally the laying bare) of archives. Quotations wrong-foot this enforced laying bare and put to the test its economy of rarefaction. Whereas examples symbolize the power of a panoramic law over an empirical trace, quotations expose a text to its own risks and reinitiate the displacement at work. ‘This gives rise to a means of exposition which might appear tortuous and complicated, but which continuously reinjects the rules of the game into the account of the game itself ’ (Revel 1989: xvi). My writing cannot but be inflected by the same precariousness as the archive onto which it is grafted: it is ‘an attempt both to write about the modern history of the region [the Near

16

Introduction – questioning the province

or Middle East] and at the same time to discover how to write about it and explain to myself why I have not been more successful in doing so’ (Hourani 1981: xi). And in this way it works both to produce positive knowledge and, at one and the same time, to question it via a process of critical reflexivity. It is a speech act seeking to bring out the difficulty of its utterance, a form of knowledge wed to its precarious implementation. In short, it is a form of writing which comprehends its own difficulty: ‘a way to ask questions, not a substitute for answers’ (Snyder 2003: 11). If I say ‘this is a provincial history’, that needs to be understood as referring to a problem as yet unsolved. This approach implies the need, alongside self-legitimized, consecrated, and professionalized modes of history-writing, to ‘accumulate lay knowledge in the way that [people] would have come to know it’ (Barth 1993: 250).23 ‘Lay’ here refers to improvisations that depart from official framings of events, makeshift stories and styles that put well-established narratives out of joint. In this regard my argument aims to dispose of the contradistinction between top-down and bottom-up approaches. As highlighted above, the core of the documentation used for this study consists of archives produced by or for high-level state authorities: if taken at face value such archives often tend to reproduce an official – hence mostly metropolitan – version of history. All the same these documents, if close-read, allow for a breach of historiographical homotheties. Top-down archives can also work bottom-up. The province does not therefore refer to a ‘domain’ of research answering to some legalistic logic of specialization and expertise: any approach that seeks to ‘promote local descriptions that maintain a distance from classical totalising models of social history’ (Guilhaumou 1998: 277; in italics in the original) is a provincial approach. This takes us back to the word local, and to the questions it unleashes. There is the question of method, no doubt: limiting the case under study to a localized space is governed by the need for ‘disaggregation’, seeking to account for empirical ‘variation’ – a need that informs my decision to limit my research to the sole case of Cyprus.24 Then there is especially the question of knowledge, for it is also necessary to comply with the imperative of generalization, and accept to a certain extent ‘a radical simplification of both the historical and regional dimensions of [the] matters [under study]’ (Geertz 2000: 185). And thus ‘local knowledge’ may be seen to refer to an epistemology of synecdoches, consisting in ‘seeing broad principles in parochial facts’ (ibid.: 167). But this means that the idea of the ‘local’ takes on a supplementary meaning. When it was a matter of enquiring into the methodological conditions of fieldwork, local could be taken in a restrictive, topographical meaning. But now that the issue relates to the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, the meaning of the term expands: ‘local not just as to place, time, class, and variety of issue, but as to accent – vernacular characterizations of what happens connected to vernacular imaginings of what can’ (ibid.: 215). This accent – as a way of speaking and a spelling rule (in certain languages at least), a musicality of the voice and a diacritical mark, a sign of knowledge (it attracts

Introduction – questioning the province

17

attention) and recognition (it distinguishes and stigmatizes) – makes for a sort of ‘locality’ that exceeds any demarcated ‘field’. Circulating freely in our hemispheres of knowledge – language, imagination, sensibility, understanding, judgement – it speaks of the ubiquity of vernacular empiricity. Redefined thus, local knowledge no longer proceeds from some pre-defined monographic place. As will be highlighted in Chapter One, it in no way implies converting the methodological field of enquiry (Cyprus) into some privileged sui generis knowledge (and this irrespective of its name – ‘Cypriology’, ‘area studies’, or whatever). It adheres instead in a vernacular accentuation following as closely as possible the polygraphy that the provincial an-archives require of us. It is only in this sense that provincial history may be said to be local – without being Cypriot. Key to this approach is an argument for ‘provincialization’ which, though a commonplace among scholars of ‘area studies’, has not yet been granted full resonance in the innermost recesses of ‘monographic’ research. What fields and lines of enquiry could make it possible for an Ottoman history ‘to explore the capacities and limitations of certain European social and political categories in conceptualizing political modernity in the context of non-European life-worlds’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 20)?25 Indeed, the study of provincial accents implies adopting a critical view of the categories that Europe-centred designs of ‘modernity’ hastily subsumed under their standards – e.g. that of state bureaucracy, national sovereignty, and a pattern of agency involving a univocal set of identities and loyalties. I have here set out to apply the ‘provincializing’ motto to the letter. With a view to discovering what provincialization is about in practical terms, the accent is placed on questioning the ins and outs of the term ‘province’ as it may apply to the Ottoman realms (Chapter Two). This enables us to better appreciate the synchronous dynamics that formed the fabric of the Ottoman ‘long nineteenth century’ (Chapter Three). This in turn leads to an emphasis on how during that period ‘the Ottomans and their European neighbours still inhabited a common world’ which had not, pace modernist Orientalists, become a thing of the past (Chapter Four).26 And so this study, rather than falling into some essentialist line postulating unassailable divides into East and West, Islam and Christendom, will instead seek to describe the processes it analyses as composite ones, not as dichotomous imitation or teleological exceptionalism (Chapter Five). In sum, my purpose is to focus on the historical creativity that developed within the Ottoman provincial complex.

*** I therefore undertake to adhere to the word of the archives. That means that ‘the texts [should] first be left to speak as concrete totalities before being linked up with each other, and with the particularities of the period and place of their production’ (Le Bras 1991: 182). It also means that the lines of enquiry envisaged below have not necessarily been conceived as part of some

18

Introduction – questioning the province

overall fabric devised to result in a homogenous and coherent overview. Such an approach is not without risk, the first of which is that of ‘highly indeterminate causes and effects, where the historical subject and historian sardonically and/or desperately circulate between different levels of explanation’ (Boureau 1989: 1492). Let us accept it, for the time being at least. That way we can be assured that were some decisive reference level to unexpectedly provide provincial history with a terra firma – then it will in due course emerge.

Notes 1 Comte d’Estourmel, Journal d’un voyage en Orient (Paris, 1844, vol.1, p.233) quoted by Bergia 1997: 276–77. 2 See Redhouse’s definition (1890: 1240): ‘t.ıs¸arı, t.as¸ra: 1. The outside, exterior. 2. The space outside. 3. The country, the provinces; also, foreign lands’. The same definition is given in the K.amus-ı Türkı- by S¸emsettin Sami, published in 1899: ‘côté externe, extérieur d’une chose, domaines autres que la capitale (Istanbul), dépendances’ (quoted by Berber 1999: 211). 3 Ibid.: 348: ‘bedevı-: 1. Pertaining to the open country or the desert. 2. (pl. bedeviyu-n) An Arab of the wilderness, a Bedouin. (Bedouin is the French corrupt form of Bedeviyyun)’. The term is implicitly opposed to ‘beledı-: 1. Of or belonging to a city, town, or village. 2. Civic, civil, municipal, local. 3. An inhabitant, not a stranger; native (to a region). 4. Town-made; esp. certain kinds of silk stuffs of home manufacture; kind of locally-made cotton material’, from which is derived ‘belediyet: 1. The civic, civil, municipal state. 2. Civilization. 3. The condition of a local inhabitant, of a native. 4. The condition of one thoroughly familiar with a place’ (ibid.: 381). 4 It is worth observing however that the association between bedouinity and the desert (and hence nomadism) is neither systematic nor atemporal, as proven by Martinez-Gros’s subtle reading of Ibn Khaldûn (2006: 56–57). And as regards the relationship of the Bedouin world to a sedentary urban life, Khaldûn’s theoretical model suggests it be conceived dialectically rather than as a simple dichotomy (ibid.: 75, 116, 233–37). 5 Quoting Redhouse (1890: 1240) again: ‘t.ıs¸arılü: 1. Pertaining to the outside, outer. 2. Pertaining to the country, provinces, or foreign parts; provincial; rustic’. This complex set of meanings may be found in the modern Turkish usage of the term ‘köylü’ (literally ‘villager’) to mock someone all of whose characteristics – their way of dress and manners – mark them out as non-urban. 6 Corbin no doubt has his doctoral thesis in mind here (1968) – referred to in Corbin (1998: 324–25): ‘A poor peasant from the Limousin, when asked in 1967 during an oral survey whether he had seen the effects of the great depression of the 1930s, answered that he remembered the good years very well – when his only cow’s calf had survived – and the bad years – when the calf had died.’ 7 Çevikel (2000) supplements his use of local registers with complaints made by Cypriots and sent to Istanbul. Cf. also the publication of one of these registers by Akgör 1994. 8 The archives of the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce, held at Aix-en-Provence, have been omitted. As regards the Centre des archives diplomatiques in Nantes, its État général des fonds 1999 (Paris: Ministère de Affaires Étrangères, Direction des archives et de la documentation, 1999) suggests that it has very few holdings in documents relating to Cyprus in the nineteenth century.

Introduction – questioning the province

19

9 Olivier Bouquet (2007: 289–90) observes that it ranks high among the languages that senior Ottoman civil servants claimed to master in the second half of the nineteenth century. 10 For an earlier elaboration of the main points set out in this section, see Aymes 2008b: 4–6. 11 FO 198/13, f.464–516, ‘General Report on the Island of Rhodes for the years 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857 and 1858’ (appended to letter no.8 from Campbell to Bulwer, 24 February 1859). This document does not only concern Rhodes but the entire governorate of the Aegean islands, of which Rhodes was the capital. 12 Ibid., f.504 vo. 13 Quotation taken from CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f. 1 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 10 January 1832). For more on this see Chapter Four below. 14 For a further discussion of ‘centralization’ in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire see Aymes 2010: 105–91. 15 See for instance the ramifications of the A.MKT series, which includes the correspondence of the Grand Vizier’s secretary (Mektu-bı- K.alemi). It progressively splinters into sub-series of varying length and institutional cohesion: A.MKT.UM (‘all provinces’, covering the period 1849/50–1891/92), A.MKT.NZD (‘ministries and offices’, 1849/50–1891/92), A.MKT.DV (‘legal affairs’, 1842/43–1870/71), A.MKT.MVL (‘High Council of Judicial Ordinances’, 1840/41–1867/68), A. MKT.S¸D (‘Council of State’, 1868/69–1891/92), A.MKT.DA (‘Council of Judicial Ordinances’, 1868/69–1878/79), A.MKT.MHM (‘important affairs’, 1840/41– 1858/59). 16 I do not wish to over-generalize here, and there are many other possible cases which would immediately disqualify this observation, as transpires from consulting the Guidebook to the Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office published by the Archives Directorate (Bas¸bakanlık 2010). : 17 I.MVL 139, and cf. Uzun 2002: 18–22. 18 This ‘nothing’ is that which escapes the ‘voracious authority’ of a system, an utterance shorn of referentiality and hence import, that ‘refers to what is unsupported by any reality’, to ‘the “purely” ethical act of belief ’ (de Certeau 2002: 127, 131 and 136 respectively). _ .a of the Meclis-i va-la-, 14 S¸. 1262 [7 August 19 Examples : in A.MKT 49/67 (mazbat _ .a of the Meclis-i va-la-, 9 L. 1272 [13 June 1856]); AD 1846]); I.MVL 1636 (mazbat Vilâyât Giden no.594, p.10 (order of the governor of Cyprus, 29 R. 1273 [27 December 1856]); A.MKT.NZD 214/41 (teẕkire to the governor of Cyprus, undated, stamped and dated on 26 C. 1273 [21 February 1857]). : There are also variants to this expression: ‘siya-k.-ı inha-ya naz.aren’ (I.MVL _ a of the Meclis-i 4116, mazbat va-la-, 27 S¸. 1265 [18 July 1849]); ‘siya-k.-ı inha-dan : . . _ .a of the Meclis-i va-la-, 14 B. 1262 añlas¸ıldıgına naz.aren’ (I.MVL 1547, mazbat _ .a of the [8 July 1846]); ‘siya-k.-ı ifa-de ve tak.dı-re naz.aren’ (HR.MKT 53/34, mazbat - . 1269 [21 December 1852]); and ‘su-ret-i is¸‘a-ra göre’ local Cyprus authorities, 9 Ra . : (I.MVL 1317, teẕkire, 28 Ẕ. 1263 [7 December 1847]). It is also worth noting the multiple meanings of the word siya-k. (Redhouse 1890: 1099): ‘1. a drove of cattle sent as a present; esp., as a present or dower to a bride; hence, any bridal present or dower so sent; 2. a concatenation, series; 3. arrangement of ideas; 4. manner, method, style’. Derived expressions cited by Redhouse include ‘bu siya-k.da: in this manner or connection’, and ‘siya-k. ü siba-k.: the following and preceding context and tenor of a word’. 20 This idea of a textual event can be associated with a ‘concept of historicity [that] will no longer be regulated by the scheme of progression or of regression, thus by a scheme of teleological process, but rather by that of the event, or occurrence, thus by the singularity of the “one time only” ’ (Derrida 2002: 118).

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Introduction – questioning the province

21 Guilhaumou’s argument has been further elaborated upon with regard to the debates on the ‘history of concepts’ (2001). 22 Dina R. Khoury’s remark is a case in point (1997: 36): ‘Notwithstanding the existence of an elaborate and effective guild structure in Istanbul and Bursa, examples from other areas of the Empire preclude us from making blanket generalizations about guilds in the sixteenth century.’ 23 This argument partakes in Barth’s enquiry about the ‘nature of data and methods’ to use in understanding Balinese sorcery practice: ‘I never attempted any structured interviewing exploring sorcery as a “domain”, nor did I apprentice myself to any expert or give the impression that I wished to acquire the skills involved. Rather, I tried [ … ] to accumulate lay knowledge in the way that most Balinese would have come to know it.’ 24 This overlaps with Geertz’s argument about ‘the disaggregation theme in [his] work’ with regard to ‘the necessity to gloss over internal variation and historical dynamics’; ‘the world’ – Geertz concludes – ‘is a various place [ … ] and much is to be gained, scientifically and otherwise, by confronting that grand actuality rather than wishing it away in a haze of forceless generalities and false comforts’ (2000: 186 and 234 respectively). Barth’s study of ‘Balinese worlds’ is also thought-provoking on this issue, and particularly the chapter ‘The problem of variation’ (1993: 92–105). Elsewhere I have tried to outline how pertinent these issues are for history, see Aymes 2004c. 25 For a differently framed yet similar argument see Jack Goody’s attempt ‘to show how Europe has not simply neglected or underplayed the history of the rest of the world, as a consequence of which it has misinterpreted its own history, but also how it has imposed historical concepts and periods that have aggravated our understanding of Asia in a way that is significant for the future as well as for the past’ (2006: 8). 26 Here quoting Faroqhi (2004: 211), whose conclusion I have thus taken it upon myself to displace by one century: ‘the first and most important point made by the present study is that, before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, or perhaps 1750/1163–64 if stricter criteria are preferred, the Ottomans and their European neighbours still inhabited a common world’. See also Ágoston 1998.

1

The nation-as-history

Or, l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses. (Renan 1947 [1882]: 892)

The voyage to the province starts today. It is, first of all, a voyage in time. Anyone wishing to be a historian of Cyprus must first address the commonplace issue of a historiography that bears the traces of the present day. The island’s recent history, normally referred to as the ‘Cyprus dispute’, would seem to have led not only to brutal antagonism but also to new terms in the history of (and in) the island. And these terms are those of the nation. Thus most available publications on the history of Cyprus are remarkable for the way they constantly reappropriate the past and rewrite history to conform to the canons of national teleology. Or to put it differently, the polarization of national current affairs reaches out beyond the borders of its original sphere (the recent context), and has taken hold of prior periods (primarily the Ottoman and British periods) so as to look for what are taken as retrospectively manifest signs of an emergent nation. Such rewriting thus presupposes that Cyprus acquired a national identity at a very early stage, at least during the final centuries of the Ottoman period if not earlier still (see Michael 2009a). If here I speak of Cyprus and not Cypriot it is as a reminder that several national identities are at play here, something it can seem hard to ignore nowadays, viz. Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, Greek, Turkish – and straight Cypriot too. But the key thing that interests us here – the way imposing an identity has repercussions on the elaboration of social knowledge – lies elsewhere: above and beyond variations in its object of reference, the same principle of national identification is at work. It may therefore be said that several Cypriot histories coexist and clash but, whatever the end of each one may be, their writing generally proceeds with the same means, the same categories, and the same polarizations.

22

The nation-as-history

Cyprus is not at all a particular case. On the contrary, the national question is a powerful and fertile trend in studies of the history of the ‘longest century of the Ottoman Empire’ (Ortaylı 1983). This trend covers two possible attitudes: certain works set forth an approach that is critical of the emergence of national identities and the building of nation states (it may be called ‘national historiography’), whilst others adopt a nationalist stance and the immediately exclusive passion for the One, the ‘pure hatred of the Other, a coming together in order to exclude’ (Rancière 1995: 23). It is essential to distinguish between these two positions, but tricky too as the critical drive of a scientific approach can at times embrace the apologetic urges of national ideology. In other words, it is possible to speak an erudite language of nationalism.1

The uncertain distinction Ahmet C. Gaziog˘ lu’s book The Turks in Cyprus. A province of the Ottoman Empire (1571–1878) was published in 1990. Five years later the Turkish history journal Tarih ve Toplum, published in Istanbul and intended for a general readership, published a review of the work (by the historian Kemal Çiçek) situating it in comparison to other publications: Most history works about the Turkish period in Cyprus are works of propaganda far removed from any form of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, the Turkish period in Cyprus is generally not addressed seriously but based on superficial information. [ … ] From this point of view, Gaziog˘ lu’s work is the first in the English language to address the history of Cyprus under Ottoman administration in a scientific way and from the point of view of the Turkish historian. (Çiçek 1995a: 58) Çiçek’s first observation relates to the need to distinguish between ‘propaganda’ and ‘science’, which are not to be confused. But what is such a distinction expected to deliver? It is not only meant to guarantee a rigorous method but also the recognized authority of ‘scientific knowledge’: in the same text Çiçek refers to another historian of Cyprus, Halil Fikret Alasya (1939, 1964), as an ‘unquestionable authority [italics added] on the history of Cyprus’. But is ‘unquestionable’ really the right word if one wishes to designate the search for knowledge in action?2 In addition to a few works that are indeed works of history, Alasya is primarily the author of countless articles marked by his commitment to the Turkish nationalist cause in Cyprus, published in the heat of the intercommunal conflicts that erupted in the island, especially in 1963 (see Türkiye dıs¸ındaki Türkler bibliografyası 1992: 537 et seq.). There is a certain similarity here to Gaziog˘ lu, who has frequently appeared in the official media of the self-styled ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, subject to the conflicting pulls of propaganda and knowledge.3 In both cases, it is clearly

The nation-as-history

23

problematic to ‘ascertain whether the task of the researcher is to codify or to analyse, if the researcher truly seeks or just restricts himself to translating the real into the terms of a particular social system’ (Bayart 1978: 114). Are we confronted here with the fixing of meaning or the floating of signification? The problem is that no language, be it scientific or propagandist in intent, falls outside performativity, ‘which defines precisely the power of language and power as language, the excess of the language of power or of the power of language over constative or cognitive language’ (Derrida 2002: 118; emphasis in the original). And so by this yardstick the word ‘unquestionable’ is indeed wholly appropriate, as by overlaying the prestige of critical knowledge with an affirmation of legitimacy it clearly brings out this duplicity. This aporia of distinction is fundamental, and one we cannot escape. Yet if we are to avoid turning scientific endeavour into a petitio principia, this aporia has to be recognized, expressed, and thus circumscribed. Is this what Çiçek is seeking to do in observing that Gaziog˘ lu ‘addresses the history of Cyprus under Ottoman administration in a scientific way and [italics added] from the point of view of a Turkish historian’? Equally, it is possible to see this as a tacit renewal of non-distinction (or indeed pure and simple reiteration of it). On the one hand Çiçek makes it clear that the Turkish historian has his word to say when it comes to questions of rigour, whilst on the other he suggests that there is no incompatibility between historical science and the rationale of a Turk who is also a historian, that is to say with the point of view of a historian writing as a Turk. It thus becomes a matter of a Turkish writing of history, not the writing of a national history but the national writing of history. Here it is exactly as if Çiçek took these two closely related ideas as identical, making it impossible to detect when the Turkish historian becomes a Turk who is also a historian. But we on the contrary need to do everything we can to make this distinction explicit, in order to prevent the language of nationalism from appearing indiscriminately alongside that of the historian (see Aymes et al. 2012). Otherwise critical knowledge can be overrun by an apologia directed at the present day: the emergence of a national identity and the construction of a nation state are no longer patiently examined and meticulously conceptualized, but become instead an accomplished fact, the naturalized crucible for all inter: pretation. The historian Halil Inalcık, a leading figure over the past fifty years in the study of the Ottoman Turkish world, has not always succeeded in avoiding this sort of slippage, as shown by his conclusion to an article about the population of Cyprus in the Ottoman period: ‘In the past there were times when Turks constituted the majority or half of the population of Cyprus. Unlike the Latins, Turks settled in the Island to make it vatan, : homeland’ (Inalcık 1997: 9). The job of the historian (who happens to be Turkish) gives way here to : the automatic reflexes of the Turk (who is only incidentally a historian). Inalcık clearly uses the word ‘vatan’ (homeland) in its most contemporary meaning – as he does with the term ‘Turks’ – an ideological construction of the final Ottoman decades and of the Kemalist

24

The nation-as-history

Republic. His observation thus merges with the commonplaces staked out by Turkish nationalist discourse on Cyprus: as the slogan has it, ‘a land becomes the homeland [vatan] of those who die for it’ (quoted by Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux 2005: 80). The use of the word ‘vatan’, in this sense, when applied to the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus, vehicles an idea of a-temporality, of the naturalness of the homeland as something which clearly does not call for any further discussion. Furthermore, the use of the Turkish word in a text otherwise written in English tends to lend credence to the idea that the term bears an irreducibly Turkish imprint, and that the translation supplied is only a pale substitute for it. A term relating to history, whose origins need to be determined and analysed, is thereby immediately assimilated to the nature of things. And yet has it not become commonplace that ‘homelands’ often pretend to be older and more immemorial than they in fact are (Geary 2002); that a fair number of their ‘traditions’ turn out on examination to have been invented for the needs of the cause (Laroui 1976: 33–43; Babadzan 1999)? In failing to take stock of this fact, the national writing of history tends to ‘confus[e] an epistemological itinerary with an ontological one’ (Kafadar 1995: 58). It does not so much run the risk of being anachronistic, as the more absolute one of being achronistic: the nation has always existed as an incorruptible essence and the historian simply needs to account for its phenomenal variations. Such a form of history, deprived of temporality, becomes the taxonomy of national things.

Perduring communities And so by establishing a perpetual identity of the self-same an erudite language of nationalism elides the question of historical continuity. It sounds bound to the ‘reassurance of fratricide’ (Anderson 1991: 199–203). Criticizing this language, on the contrary, involves inscribing the national here-and-now within the historical depth of a chain of actualizable signifiers.4 This is what Ilan Pappé proposes in the light of studies of Ottoman Palestine: [ … ] to widen the accepted historiographical view on Palestine in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a view which has hitherto tended to be conflictual in nature, focusing as it does, for the most part, on the clash between Zionism and the local Palestinian population. We wish to view the social history of Palestine – a path historians only recently have begun to take – as a continuum within the social history of the Ottoman Empire. (Pappé 1997: 163) What is at issue here is to initiate historicity by reinstating continuity. This implies supplementary work with regard to the categories of historical analysis. For from the Arab Near East to the Balkans, the privileged way of conceiving of the history of states and societies today is in terms of religious

The nation-as-history

25

and ethnic ‘communities’ and the problems of ‘intercommunal’ relations, of which contemporary national formations are the (chrono)logical result. A single word suffices to designate this approach, and the debates it gives rise to: millet. Its Arabic version, milla, ‘occurs in the Koran with the meaning of religion’ (Lewis 1968: 335; cf. Copeaux 2002: 28–30). And this usage, denoting the belonging to a religious confession, is also to be found in certain nineteenth-century Ottoman documents. Thus the governor of Cyprus, paraphrasing a declaration by the Cypriot episcopacy about the ‘rites of the religion of Jesus’, uses the expression ‘rites of the millet’.5 However ‘community’ (taken to be a religious community) is the most widespread translation of ‘millet’ among historians, referring in this sense to the ‘framework within which the Christian and Jewish communal authorities functioned under Ottoman rule [which] has been called the millet system’ (Braude and Lewis 1982: 12). What some call the ‘millet system’ means, in short, the institutionalization of an autonomous form of management accorded to certain confessional groups within the Ottoman political entity. What follows does not seek to address the question of whether or not a ‘millet system’ existed in the Ottoman Empire: the meaning attributed to the phrase has been the subject of diverging and contrasting interpretations.6 The intention is to discuss the assertion that millets correspond to a form of pre- or proto-‘national’ identity – or in other words an assertion of the continuity between the ‘communities’ of the past and the nations of today. Already in the midst of the troubled 1950s, the British Islamic scholar Charles F. Beckingham hinted at some such view. Reporting on ‘Islam and Turkish nationalism in Cyprus’ he came to the following conclusion: Under present conditions a strong and overt anti-religious movement among Cypriot Turks is no more likely than it would be in Pakistan. This is not because they are devout, which for the most part they are not, but because of the intimate relation that exists between religious and national feeling in consequence of the working of the millet system, the preponderance of the Greek Orthodox population and over three-quarters of a century of foreign rule. (Beckingham 1957b: 83) All of these composite factors have continued to play a key role in subsequent analyses of the ‘Cyprus dispute’. When devising an explanatory framework for nationalism at large in the Ottoman and then post-Ottoman world, the ‘consequence of the working of the millet system’ has tended to occupy centre stage. Thus Kemal Karpat, in his study of the relations between ‘communities’ and national identities in the Ottoman Empire, puts forward a condensed version of this hypothesis:

26

The nation-as-history The process of nation formation first among Christians and then among Muslims in the Ottoman state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was conditioned to an important extent by the socio-ethnic structure and the religious identity engendered by the millet system. (Karpat 1982: 141).

What is established here, therefore, is not just a chronological succession linking millet and nation but primarily a causal relation. Bruce Masters’ enquiry into the ‘roots of sectarianism’ (2001) is an ideal test case for assessing what is at stake in such a course. From the outset he explains that he hopes his work will ‘be helpful in clearing up the ambiguities surrounding the historical experience of the [Ottoman] empire’s ethnic and religious minorities’ (ibid.: 1). The term ‘minority’ works in collusion with present-day nation states and with their legal concepts. Its use here would require work to specify the concept, such as that carried out by Jacques Ehrenfreund, who develops the ‘concept of minority culture [ … ] to account for the cultural model on which Judeo–Berlin existence was based’ in the late nineteenth century (2000: 245). But to read Masters, a passing observation about the ‘stark difference with which a common history can be remembered by Muslims, Christians, and Jews’ would seem to be sufficient to justify a resolutely retrospective approach (2001: 1). The paradox is that this ‘common history’ is told in terms of the progressive breaking off of relationships between ‘minorities’ having nothing in common. Thus Masters disputes the validity of any historiography that could be termed ‘revisionist’, which, for reasons specific to each representative named (Edward Said and his criticism of Orientalism, or supporters of the ‘Arab nationalist paradigm’), has ‘avoided topics that serve to segregate the peoples of the Ottoman Empire into monolithic, vertically constructed, sectarian communities’ (ibid.). Whilst Masters clearly distances himself from any nationalism as such, this does not mean to say that he does not borrow his categories from the national writing of history, to return to the distinction put forward above. His perspective is (using Benedict Anderson’s work as a primary reference to present and support the argument) to consider ‘minority’ denominational communities in the Ottoman Empire as the matrices of ‘imagined communities’ that are national in character: as he puts it, ‘we can plot the history of the religious minorities in the Ottoman Arab world as a narrative of change and adaptation from their initial contacts with European merchants and missionaries to the articulation of national identities at the end of the empire’ (ibid.: 13). This brings out how criticism of ‘revisionism’ founds Masters’ retrospective approach, which retains the continuity revisionism loses. So Masters openly declares his intention to give precedence to history, which restores continuities, over a nationalist disappearing act which does away with the past in the name of the pure present of an eternal nation. And the continuity thus regained is all the more fertile as it is part of

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the longue durée of a specifically Ottoman past, as Masters explicitly claims: ‘I differ from these earlier works by identifying the transformation as starting before the eighteenth century and by placing these developments squarely within the context of Ottoman history’ (ibid.). Let us now examine what such an approach implies if applied to the object of study here – that of Cyprus. To read what nineteenth-century European consuls and twentieth-century historians have to say, it would seem that this is a country whose socio-political structures are dominated by a confessional institution, namely the Orthodox Church.7 Hence several works have put forward the hypothesis of a historiographical course leading from sectarian cohesion structured by ecclesiastical authority to a modern national sentiment. This question is at the heart of a long article published by Athanassia Anagnostopoulou focusing, significantly, on the issue of continuity. Her approach is as follows: To take into account, even in the background, all the structures which, on the whole, displayed a degree of continuity between the Ottoman period and the British period. On the one hand these structures encouraged socio-economic and political development which proved ‘problematic’ in the long run, and on the other hand the birth of Greek and Turkish nationalism [ … ]. (Anagnostopoulou 1998: 145) Thus two continuities are sought here, the first relating to a large ‘socioeconomic and political’ spectrum, and the second to a more specifically ‘nationalist’ question. Above and beyond the fact that the frontier between the two fields can seem unclear, Anagnostopoulou’s study is explicitly associated with the Hobsbawmian ‘era of nationalism’ (ibid.: 146). And in fact the subject (the Orthodox Church in Cyprus) limits the field of observation to a particular form of nationalism, ‘Greek’ Cypriot nationalism: Our prime concern here will be to discover the mechanisms originating in the Ottoman period which enabled the Church not only to emerge as a national authority but, despite new historical conditions, to further become, at least for a certain period, the sole source of national inspiration and sole authority for political action for Greek Cypriots. (Ibid.) We may see here Anagnostopoulou’s stated preference for continuity, with the traces of the ‘origins’ overriding ‘new conditions’. And thus originally there is a religious institution anchored in the Ottoman past, the Cypriot Orthodox Church, within which one may detect in filigree the outline of the ‘millet system’. Therefore the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Cyprus in the mid-nineteenth century is taken by Anagnostopoulou as the ‘Christian community’s sole and solitary apparatus for organising, delimiting, and legitimising itself’ (ibid.: 155).

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These are precisely the terms generally used to define the historiographical notion of millet. Hence continuity here does not signify the suspension of time within the permanence of the eternal nation. The origins exert their power over a movement or shift: Within the medium term [the Church] went on to gradually incorporate within its sphere of power forces acting centrifugally to the framework of Ottoman power and, in the long term, adopt a language which was specific to a less and less religious community. (Ibid.: 157) Elsewhere Anagnostopoulou judges it appropriate to add ‘and more and more national’ to complete the sentence (1993: 818; 1998: 173). Thereby the national community becomes the historical horizon of a denominational community. Religious and national are merely temporary ways of describing it, the principle of continuity residing in the substantive, in the community as a ‘structure’ that the historian – seeing beyond the epiphenomena of the history of battles, conquests and protectorates – may rediscover at work. What becomes of the heuristic of distinction when measured against the perdurance of the community? How may one reinstate continuity without ignoring singularities? This is the difficulty faced by Engin D. Akarlı in his study of the ‘long peace’ of Mount Lebanon in the years 1861–1920. He underlines how the idea of ‘confessionalism’, where the term is defined as ‘the distribution of offices by sect, according to pre-set quotas’, needs to be hedged around with precautions: ‘an analytical distinction has to be made between confessionalism as a means of socio-political organization and integration, and confessionalism as a basis of nationalistic political identity and loyalty’ (Akarlı 1993: 190). Distinction is not the same thing as separation. It cannot be excluded that these two confessionalisms are in fact one, or at least coexist – as was the case in Mount Lebanon at that time. However, in this particular case the ‘community’ of the millet would appear to be closer to the first form of confessionalism as defined by Akarlı, whereas the national ‘community’ tends towards the second. And there is no guarantee that these two ‘communities’ are part of the same historical fabric (cf. Kitromilides 1999; Livanios 2008). In a similar vein Stefan Winter’s study of the Shiites of Lebanon elaborates on this conundrum with regard to earlier centuries of Ottoman provincial government. He argues that undue emphasis on ‘religious or national characteristics’ has led to an underestimation of the issues of ‘co-optation, social process, political struggle, reform and adaptation’ (2010: 5–6; see also Baer 2012). Hence the true importance of the distinction lies in the way it constantly urges us to rediscover at one and the same time both the forms of historical

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continuity and the singularities of the social and political configurations under study.

The hypnotic hyphen This raises a question about another form of continuity, relating not to historical phenomena but the tools we use to conceive of them. The question it raises is theoretical rather than chronological: if we equate the confessional identities of yesterday with those of today, are we not confusing the principles and the results of our analysis? If modern categories of the ‘community’ ultimately seem so pertinent, is it not simply because they indicate that the historian is once again operating according to her own invariant categories? It is useful to start by turning once again to the semantic field of the term ‘millet’. For in addition to the explanations given above, we now need to add a far from innocuous observation about a shift it underwent in meaning: ‘Millet was a term which originally meant a religious community and in the nineteenth century came to mean nation’ (Braude and Lewis 1982: 12). On first reading this seems to wrap it all up: the observation that there is a continuity between the terms as used by contemporaries would appear to clinch the argument for continuity between the community of the millet and national community. It can be interesting however to subject this to a second reading, for if the meaning of the word millet is open to interpretation, the meaning of the word nation deserves equally scrupulous examination. When in 1832 the French consul in Cyprus, Alphonse Bottu, sent the Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents about the ‘body of the French nation in Larnaca’ gathering in a ‘national assembly’,8 is it really a question of an imagined community, of a common destiny and of an age of nationalisms? The consul is more probably referring to some wholly different ‘nation’, viz. the small group of traders, be they French or not, who looked after the interests of French trading companies in Cyprus and thereby enjoyed consular protection. In the same vein, let us now turn to a letter sent by the French consul in Cyprus to his ambassador in Istanbul in 1862: within the space of a few lines it is stated that Prussia is a ‘great military nation’ and that the ‘nation has been summoned’9 – that is to say two highly heterogeneous meanings of the same word.10 This clearly brings out the difficulty, a classical problem in historians’ nomenclature as identified by Marc Bloch: ‘changes in things do not by any means always entail similar changes in their names’, and ‘conversely, moreover, the names sometimes vary according to time or place, independently of any variation in the things themselves’ (1953: 159–60). We need to bear this in mind when returning to the link between ‘millet’ and ‘nation’ and the conditions in which this link is possible. This link comes with two implicit presuppositions. Firstly, the idea that in the Ottoman world (and the nineteenth century in particular) ‘millet’ refers to an effective form of political and social structure, and that the structure is determined by both ‘ethnic’ and religious criteria. This line of reasoning may

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be illustrated by such diverse quotes as: ‘the socio-ethnic structure and the religious identity engendered by the millet system’ (Karpat 1982: 141); ‘the historical experience of the [Ottoman] empire’s ethnic and religious minorities’ (Masters 2001: 1); ‘the formation of an ethno-religious authority at the head of an ethno-religious body’ (Anagnostopoulou 1998: 154). Yet even if one recognizes the effectiveness of millets in the Ottoman Empire of the time (which as stated earlier is a separate question), it does not automatically follow that they can be described in ethnic terms. The concept of ethnicity, however convenient it may be, can hardly be called upon to do work without first being rigorously defined (see Barth 1969; Poutignat and Streiff-Fénart 1995; Décobert 2000; Brubaker 2004). And with regard to Ottoman studies the concept does not seem to have been analysed sufficiently closely. To the best of my knowledge those authors who do explicitly raise the question of the pertinence of ethnic designations in the Empire have preferred to limit themselves to reserving judgement or else expressing doubt: it is true that Metin Kunt argues for the existence of a certain ‘ethnic and regional solidarity’ within imperial senior bodies in the seventeenth century, but his conclusions privilege the inter-individual horizon and lack precision as regards the hypothesis of ‘groups’ made up along ethnic lines (1974: 237). For his part Karl Barbir warns against an ethnic interpretation of designations such as Turk or Arab, as he underlines that an ‘important distinction’ needs to be made if we are to ‘investigat[e] cultural-linguistic tendencies rather than potentially misleading ethnic-national associations’ (1979–80: 68–69; cf. Lellouch 2000). Discussing the Ottoman Balkans in the eighteenth century, Paschalis M. Kitromilides gives a clearer idea of what is at issue in this ‘distinction’, observing that whilst ‘Greek culture’ may no doubt be justly considered an ‘ingredient of common Balkan identity’, that does not authorize us to accord it any ‘ethnic significance’ (Kitromilides 1999: 139). Hence his conclusion relating directly to the question of the community and the role it plays as an administrative structure framed by ecclesiastical bodies: Measures of ecclesiastical administration [ … ] should be accordingly understood in terms of the ecclesiastical policy of the time, rather than seen through the refracting prism of later national conflicts. [ … ] The focus of the activity of the Orthodox Church was, therefore, on the sustenance of the Orthodox faith, not on some supposed project for the ethnic Hellenization of the Balkan population. (Ibid.: 142) Such precautions, some may object, apply to a period prior to the ‘era of nationalism’. Shifting back to the nineteenth century then, suffice it to quote Pierre Voillery’s argument against the generally accepted categories of the ‘Bulgarian Renaissance’, underlining the ambiguous role played by bodies that were subsequently described as ‘national’ (the first of which was the

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Orthodox Church), amongst ‘a population who were originally (and in order) Ottoman, Christian, Slav, and Bulgarian’ (1983: 246 and 249). These reservations are more than mere caveats: they raise serious problems within the longue durée of communities and more generally raise questions about any too close and automatic a link between the notions of community and ethnicity. Let us now turn to the second presupposition mentioned above, which may be expressed as follows: given (first presupposition) that there exist such ‘ethno-religious’ criteria within Ottoman society, the crystallization of national identities will occur according to these same criteria in the ‘era of nationalism’. Yet is not such a line of reasoning based on the a priori definition of firstly the national community and secondly the millet predating the age of nationalisms, where the two happen to share the same identifying features? The hyphen, in other words, already seems to have been established in advance. One of Anagnostopoulou’s statements about Greek ‘communities’ in Asia Minor clearly brings out this tautology, when she declares she will study ‘the millet-i Rûm as an ethno-religious, that is to say national, body’ (1993: 813). This not only presupposes that the meaning of history provides a path through an apparently chaotic chronology, but further posits the sovereignty of categories of historical interpretation whose invariance was assumed from the outset. A certain community invariable is always already present.

*** Studying the erudite parlance underpinning the history of Ottoman Cyprus in this way helps us map the outlines of the project undertaken here and sketch out the first stages of an approach. What I wish to emphasize is that the premises of the study undertaken here not only subject the continuities of the national writing of history to critical assessment, but also raise questions about the continuities of the writing of national history, and especially the ‘ethno-religious’ keystone symbolized by the ‘historiographical fetish’ (Braude 1982: 74) of the millet. The need to undermine the essentialism of the nation-as-history does not amount to wishing to reinstate some kind of smooth temporality or uniform historicity, which always presuppose an attempt to homogenize that risks reintroducing the teleological syntax of nationalist history. The very principle of continuity – be it chronological or interpretative – imposes a style of history writing of which one needs to be wary, and that one would do well to leave behind. Such is the prime meaning of a history of Cyprus which is first and foremost provincial. Returning to the sources of today’s ‘communities’ no more holds the key than does positing some atemporal national or pseudonational genius loci. On the contrary, the provincial hypothesis is an attempt to hold together the local and the traces left by a non-national empire.

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Providing a more substantive definition of this Ottoman provinciality is no easy matter, and it is the subject of the following chapters – it is a matter of questioning, and a matter of archives too.

Notes 1 See Timothy Snyder’s inspiring take on ‘myths and metahistories’ (2003: 9–12). The chosen readings and commentary below do not pretend to be exhaustive or to attain to some illusory balance between the nationalist forces at play: the idea is simply to use them as material for reflecting about the ‘archives’ of an Ottoman provincial history. Cf. Millas 2002; Liakos 2008; Eldem 2009. 2 On the idea of the limitless nature of ‘science as research’ (Wissenschaft als Forschung), see Oexle 1996: 18–19. 3 The critical overview put forward by Çevikel (2002) offers a panoramic vision placing Gaziog˘ lu among the trends in ‘Northern Cypriot’ historiography. 4 For discussion of ‘actualization’, that is to say the establishment of ‘genuinely two-way links of intelligibility’ between present and past times as a heuristic form of historical reasoning, see Aymes 2009a (quoting from Bloch 1993: 95). See also the collective work published under Aymes 2005b, some of which has helped shape this chapter. 5 A.MKT 204/77 (B. 1265 [May–June 1849]): in the first document, ‘āyīn-i dīn-i ‘İseviyye’, and in the second ‘a-yı-n-i milletiyye’. The translation ‘rites of the millet’ is far from perfect as it masks the attributive use of millet here. 6 The key discussions of the historiography of Ottoman millets are Braude and Lewis 1982; Ursinus 1989; Goffman 1994; Konortas 1999. Two more works have also contributed to the debate: Makdisi 2000 and Masters 2001. For a minute analysis with regard to early Republican Turkey, see Hendrich 2003 and 2009: 21–22. A recent bibliographical update has been provided by Bassi and Zuccolo 2010. See also Chapter Five below. 7 See CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f. 393 vo (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.24, 31 October 1835): the ‘Archbishops and Bishops’ are described as the ‘administrators of the Island’ in the early nineteenth century. See also works such as Dionyssiou’s (1988, 1992a and b). 8 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.1–4 (Bottu to Count Sebastiani, letter no.9, 10 January 1832). 9 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f. 258 vo (du Tour to de Moustier, letter no.57, 17 January 1862). 10 On the subject of the Ottoman vocabulary of the ‘nation’ see Lewis 1968: 358. S¸erif Mardin emphasizes that among reformist Ottoman administrators, S.adık. Rif‘at Pas¸a was one of the first to use the word ‘millet’ in the modern sense of nation (1962: 189–90). Similar occurrences may nevertheless be found a few decades earlier, in the first issue of the official Ottoman gazette Tak.vı-m-i Vak.a-yi‘ (created in 1831), where there is talk of history as a factor ‘linking up the nation’ (milletin rabt.ı) (quoted by Kolog˘ lu 2002: 2078).

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We still have to know what was Ottoman about the particular phenomena we propose to deal with. (Barbir 1999: 254)

I have chosen to use the word ‘province’, but wish to make a distinction clear from the outset: provincial history means something further than local history. As shown by the preceding discussion, this position implies a certain vision of the history of Cyprus. Unlike the Cypriological project which sought to embrace Cypriot history in all its diachronicity, and ‘national’ readings which presuppose a retrospective continuity running from the era of nations back to the Ottoman past, the purpose here is to imagine a point of view which accords due weight to the fact that for several centuries Cyprus was an integral part of the vast polity called the ‘Ottoman Empire’. The object under study is not Cyprus qua historical subject with its own specific trajectory, but Cyprus qua locus for apprehending the history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In short, the case of Cyprus is not intended to lead to sui generis analysis but to act as a prism for questions relating to the entire Ottoman domain. I shall thus attempt to define the provinciality of the history of Cyprus, and study the specific and singular character of the history of Cyprus qua provincially Ottoman. Such an approach also entails conceptual analysis to tease out what we mean by the term ‘Ottoman’ itself.1

From the local to the provincial – towards which horizons? The study of provinciality does not imply the negation of a so-called ‘local’ approach, but rather places it in a state of tension vis-à-vis a certain Ottoman entity taken as a whole, whose features are as yet undefined. Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher suggested a variant on this conundrum, when studying the political evolution of Syria in the light of ‘the tension between the localist and cosmopolitan factions’ within Damascene families in the eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries (1985: 221). This tension enables us to spell out other issues at stake in local history, and thus sketch out those that a provincial approach ought to dwell upon. Let us now attempt to multiply relationships linking the Cypriot locality to its associated horizons, be they near or far. Despite the risks involved in using incomplete and discontinuous clues, I hope to be thus able to understand certain movements and flows which, during the first half of the nineteenth century, punctuated the history of Ottoman Cyprus. Merchandise: the ‘Levant trade’ and beyond As a first approach, a network of relations needs to be studied, that of the trade in merchandise. The ‘Report on the Produce and Trade of the Island of Cyprus’ drawn up in spring 1842 by the British consul James Lilburn provides an outstanding vantage point here.2 This report not only provides unusually plentiful statistics but also an overview of imports and exports recorded by the Larnaca Customs in 1841, thereby sufficing to establish the clear dominance of Ottoman trade with Cyprus in the early 1840s, for the ‘well-protected domains’ of the Sultan account for 38 per cent of exports by value and 47 per cent of the imports recorded by Lilburn.3 This is most useful, as it gives some idea of scale, though the information is immediately hedged with precautions and reserves, all of them necessary. For the consul declares that the report has been drawn up using the customs registers in Larnaca – an archive subjecting him, and us in turn, to a complex set of constraints and restrictions. We may thus note that there is nothing automatic or exhaustive about the customs records. Firstly they are based on a defined code of budgetary and scriptural conventions, of tariffs and exemptions, applied in a way which tells us as much as it conceals, as shown by the following remark by Lilburn: One cause of difficulty in ascertaining the exact amount of the value of goods imported, is that those which have paid the duty in another port of the Ottoman Empire, arrive here with a Terkari [i.e. teẕkere] or Certificate to that effect, and those goods are not inserted in the books of the Custom House.4 Secondly, customs inspections are beset by a large number of frauds and infringements. Thus Lilburn emphasizes the extent to which the silk trade is shrouded in silence. In his view one ought to take into account the quantity which is well known to be exported without passing through the ordeal of being inserted therein [in the Books of the Custom House]. This applies to some articles more than to others, the principal of which is silk, which being small in bulk, compared to its value, is very easily

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smuggled out of the country, in which operation the merchants receive great assistance from the subordinate employés [sic] of the Custom House.5 We are thus obliged to substantially alter the level of trade as depicted by Lilburn, who underestimates both the share of ‘imported’ merchandise from other Ottoman provinces, of which an unspecified quantity is sold in Larnaca without being recorded by Customs, and the share of exports to France, the main destination for Cypriot silk and thus in all probability the prime beneficiary of silk smuggling. There is further need for caution, as the data used by Lilburn only allows us to sketch out the map of a trade and not the geography of an economy (see Quataert 1994: 835). This is illustrated by the following remark: In th[e] table [of imports] some articles are inserted, as imported from other places than that of their manufacture, for instance, from Leghorn, Smyrna and Beyrout are imported many articles of British Manufacture, such [as] Manchester goods, Iron, Earthenware.6 And so, if we trust the table put forward by Lilburn, over half the ‘imports’ from the Ottoman Empire are comprised of ‘British manufactured cotton’ (mainly from the region of Manchester).7 This phenomenon of transit via Ottoman ports does not enable us to arrive at any general observation since British trade with Cyprus at the period was singular in character.8 But recognizing that there are such singularities does not mean we should overlook the general implication, that what we call the ‘Levant trade’ (trade between the ‘merchant stations’ (échelles) and European ports) could on occasion follow tortuous routes in the Ottoman provinces. So what we are dealing with here is not simply a straight line between Cyprus and the horizons of the West, but also a trade that is relayed, or re-routed even, via the main Ottoman emporia in the region. Neither Lilburn nor doubtless any other consul in Cyprus bothered to look further into the intra-Ottoman circumvolutions detected here. Nor did they have the means to do so. For, in the mid-nineteenth century, consular correspondence on trade did not see beyond the horizon of Larnaca, and traffic in other ports on the island remained outside the consuls’ ken and did not figure in their archives (including Limassol, even though certain consular representatives lived there). The French consul Alphonse Bottu admitted as much in 1833: ‘I have been unable to obtain reliable data on operations in Limassol and a few other small harbours.’9 But we must not underestimate the level of trade in these ‘little harbours’. An Ottoman inventory of the tax farms (muk.a-t.a‘a-t) of the island drawn up in 1841 refers to lumber exported from . Lefke, and lemons and pomegranates taken on board at Ma-gosa (Fama10 gusta). On the ‘Essai d’une carte agricole de l’île de Chypre’ appended to the Recherches en Orient of the French geologist Albert Gaudry (1855), Limassol (Leymosu-n) is described as a ‘warehouse for all wines and spirits’,

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and ‘Kerinia or Cerines’ (Girı-nye) as a ‘warehouse for trade in Caramania’. And in the ‘Five-Yearly Report on the Island of Cyprus’ drawn up in 1858 by the British consular authorities it is stated that: As there is no path between Larnaca and Baffon [Ba-f/Paphos], and the land lying between these two towns is very uneven, it is impossible to use camels and so in summer cereals build up in Baffon itself, whence they are directly exported on large sailing ships [ … ]. The produce of Cerigne which consists mainly in Carobs, cereal, and oil are also directly exported abroad.11 And that is without taking into account what would now be called ‘informal’ trade. Trying to estimate Cypriot wheat exports for 1832, Bottu states that ‘a large quantity was smuggled out from the coast’.12 This all suggests that Larnaca harbour was not the only place in Cyprus where trade was conducted and merchandise sent overseas. Limiting oneself to Larnaca would amount to accepting that ‘the fairly significant level of Turkish and Greek navigation to the country is unknown’.13 For against the backdrop of the ‘Levant trade’ polarized by the merchant station of Larnaca, one may begin to make out the virtually hidden fabric of multiple trade networks. How can we flesh these out? The problem is that the Ottoman archives provide no overall portrait of trade in and around Cyprus. Any customs registers have been lost, and the Ottoman administrators in the middle decades of the nineteenth century appear not to have felt the need to consign commercial data resembling that provided by certain consuls in their statistical sketches. Hence it might seem opportune to adopt a circumventory approach: given that there are no archives relating strictly to trade, let us look for and study non-trade documents which might indirectly provide glimpses of the exploitation of certain Cypriot resources. An observation by Bottu in 1833 invites this sort of shift of focus: ‘As Carob produce is a farm, it is not possible to ascertain the exact export amount. The amount given in the [trade] list is that which was given to the Customs. It certainly is not even a quarter of the true quantity.’14 It may be deduced that a large number of Cypriot products, like the Lefke lumber and Famagusta lemons and pomegranates mentioned above, and carobs here, were farmed out by the Ottoman authorities. This practice, as the French consul points out, removes these goods from ordinary trade circuits, or more exactly carves out a separate field of trade bound up with tax interests and other customs revenues, without counting the further fact that customs management is conceded as farms by the Ottoman administration. A governor of Cyprus placed a bid for the concession in the mid-1840s for a total sum of about 400,000 piastres.15 Lilburn, for his part, drew up a list of all the tax farms in Cyprus for 1841, estimating the Kyrenia farm to be worth 12,000 piastres, the combined Larnaca, Limassol and Famagusta farm 367,000 piastres, and the Lefke one 5,000 piastres.16 This extensive farming out of taxes is sufficient to prove that

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supposed trade flows did not operate freely of Ottoman socio-political horizons. The trade links between Cyprus and Ottoman terra firma often only appear in the archives in close correlation with considerations exceeding those of trade alone. For instance, an 1833 note by the French consul Bottu about cereals produced in the island states that: ‘priority [is] given to public export, that is to say resulting from a special Governor’s permit’.17 And these lucrative activities have left even more visible traces in the budgets of the Ottoman public authorities than they have in the consular archives, which are often exclusively focused on the intrigues of the local microcosm. A request from the governor of Egypt’s superintendent (ketẖüda-) to the Sublime Porte, in 1853, informs us that a trader named ‘K . ozma’, residing in Cyprus, is behind the trade in cereals between the island and Alexandria, and that delays in their accounts are likely to throw the budget of the Egyptian Treasury into disarray.18 It is clearly not just some Cypriot microcosm that has interests in a trade such as this, for it also plays a part in the management of supplies carried out by the Egyptian and Ottoman authorities. A report by the British consul Niven Kerr on the consequences of a serious drought in Cyprus in 1844 confirms this: ‘Cyprus instead of exporting Grain as it usually does has this year drawn considerable supplies from Egypt, Constantinople and the Coast of Caramania.’19 And so in fact a methodological necessity (turning to non-trade documents to discover the traces of a trade which would otherwise remain invisible) brings with it a heuristic precept: we may see here that we are dealing with an economy which is, in Karl Polanyi’s words, ‘embedded in social relations’ (2001: 57) – a complex knot of trade, knowledge, and power offering a picture of what might be termed the ‘political economy’ of the Ottoman province (see Genç 1990 and 2000). And we must always bear in mind the interplay of writing underpinning this study, for when all is said and done the archives used here speak far more of an economy of powers than they do of the movement of inanimate goods. Administrators: provinciality as knowledge of the local Seen in this light the Cypriot locale appears as an integrated milieu – and we touch here at the heart of the tensions at work in a provincial history: ‘the very thrust of the integration narrative, regardless of the theoretical approach used, tends to relegate the interior regions of the Ottoman Empire, such as Jabal Nablus, to the status of a periphery’s periphery’ (Doumani 1995: 3). While this is meant to pose a challenge to the model of an inevitable ‘peripheralization’ of the Ottoman Empire (cf. Wallerstein 1980, Wallerstein et al. 1987, Kasaba 1988), the portrait of Cypriot trade given above implies the production and acceptance of some such integrative account, which works to highlight the dynamics by virtue of which a locality becomes an integral part of a larger entity, imposing (all or part of) its conditions. Using the word ‘province’ always involves turning towards distant, dominant horizons.

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What becomes of the ‘local knowledge’ mentioned above, then? Whether it be a matter of rediscovering the voices of the conquered (often in the name of some repressed national genius) or else of disintegrating and ‘disaggregating’ empirical data prior to interpreting it, a local approach would seem to imply the wish to deconstruct an integrating, dominant, imperial account. Such as that for instance of the West and its world-economy: many of the institutions and practices assumed to be the products of an externally imposed capitalist transformation existed before European hegemony and may in fact have helped pave the way for both European economic expansion and Ottoman government reforms. It is critical, therefore, to examine the local contexts in which the processes of Ottoman reform and European expansion played themselves out. (Doumani 1995: 4; italics added) The local accent therefore flouts the idea of integration within an encompassing hegemonic system. But the notion of the province, on the contrary, seems able to accommodate this as it is based on the principle that the locality is integrated within a larger system. But is this in fact so? Does shifting from the local to the provincial involve quite such a radical shift of horizon? Significantly, it can also happen that placing the accent on ‘local knowledge’ provides decisive insights for launching a provincial history. Amy Singer’s study of the countryside around Jerusalem just after the Ottoman conquest of the Fertile Crescent in the sixteenth century illustrates this point. Let us turn to her preliminary proposition: Peasants around Jerusalem, or anywhere else in the Ottoman Empire, comprised societies which developed from their own political, economic, religious, cultural, and legal experiences and expectations. These should be the starting point for any theoretical conceptualization of the societies themselves. (Singer 1994: 23) In other words, it is clear that ‘local knowledge’ should still take precedence. Yet the stance adopted by Singer is not so much a matter of principle (undermining a hegemonic historical account) as the recognition of a given fact, since the period under study followed on immediately from the setting up of Ottoman tutelage in the region. Under these circumstances, the primacy accorded to the local comes across as a precaution due to empirical uncertainty, for above and beyond the nominal change in the sovereign and political system, to what extent did the Ottoman conquest actually change the daily life of the Palestinian peasantry? Anchoring her study in the local in this way is emblematic of an approach which prefers as a matter of prudence to work with the a priori hypothesis of the permanence of societies rather than that of a tabula rasa. It is then up to the historian to study to what extent the

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Ottoman conquest marked the beginning of a new phase of history for these societies: Ottoman provincial administrative mechanisms did not replace existing structures of local government and taxation in conquered areas. Initially, they imposed only a general framework; gradually Ottoman practices were introduced, simultaneously incorporating useful and appropriate aspects of local custom. The resulting administration was clearly Ottoman, adapted to suit local conditions. (Ibid.: 3) In this regard the approach adopted by Singer is similar to that of Doumani. And yet it might be said that she radically ‘Ottomanizes’ the perspective. The similarity resides in their common concern with locally contextualizing the integration into a larger system. But whereas Doumani’s favoured object of study (merchant networks) skews his comments towards a world-economy, relegating the action of Ottoman administrators to second place, it is they who are the focus of Singer’s research. And so once the role played by ‘local conditions’ has been established, the tutelary global power at play is that of a mode of administration, of an authority exerted by the agents of a distant sovereign, affirming (or attempting to affirm) his control over vast and diverse regions. It is this overarching system that Singer states is ‘clearly Ottoman’. Benjamin Arbel and Gilles Veinstein have shown that there are similar ‘Ottoman mechanisms of provincial administration’ with regard to the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus. They point out that Ottoman administrators sought to arrive at a ‘compromise’ between the ‘interests of the Treasury’, the ‘general principles of the empire’, and the ‘condition of the rea-‘ya- on the island’ (Arbel and Veinstein 1986: 42–43). And so as in Palestine the progressive introduction of general norms went hand in hand with the incorporation of local customs. This is what Singer, seeking to determine the relations between the Palestinian peasants and the agents of the Ottoman State, refers to as a ‘nebulous compromise’ (Singer 1994: 3). But it needs to be made clear that what is at stake here is not the apprehension of some ‘Ottoman’ prototype which, fulfilling the desire for a grammar of civilizations, political systems, and modes of production, would specify the historic essence of the ‘Ottoman Empire’ in contrast to other ‘cultural spheres’ without the same typical features. For the question of ‘Ottoman mechanisms of provincial administration’ is first and foremost a matter of comparing internal usage: to what extent do the countries placed under Ottoman sovereignty partake in what the administrators perceive as a common project – that is to say a shared normativity and comparable means of putting it into practice?20 It is thus a matter of acquiring ‘a deeper understanding of the extent to which provincial organization and operation bear some common Ottoman stamp’ (Singer 1996: 147) – in other words, of assessing the extent to which the Ottoman provincial administration operated on a standard basis. On the horizon of such an

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approach there is a question: is it possible and pertinent to speak of an Ottoman Province with a capital P, the province as the standardized product of Ottoman bureaucratic machinery? That is what provincial history taken to an extreme would imply. It might be a distant and utopian horizon, but at least it holds out the possibility of a typology.21 It is important to underline how this approach reconfigures questions relating to the local/provincial pairing. It is true that Singer’s work on permanent and lasting features (pre- and post-Ottoman conquest) can in a way be seen as echoing Papadopoullos’ Cypriological project, and the search for a localness of history which inspired it (see Introduction above). But the difference is that the typological perspective finally ends up refuting the implicit postulate of an irreducible specificity of the local. Singer’s expansion in temporal scope exceeds the Ottoman period itself, but so as to better apprehend – at the heart of the local – a certain Ottomanness, viz. a specific way in which official agents of the Ottoman administration approached the local. The search for specificity has thus shifted, no longer being an issue for the locality itself but for the relation established between the locality and the administrators of a tutelary sovereign – an issue of provinciality. And so the notion of the province, far from signifying a break with the local, in fact implies a supplementary form of local knowledge. For it is now a question of knowledge of the local. A knowledge originating in the local, and where the local is the horizon.22

The decentred empire Anchoring provinciality within the local in this way does not put an end to the problems raised by provincial history. The question remains as to whether the province in question can be conceived of without presupposing the hegemony of a ‘centre’. An important issue is at stake here – that of determining whether (and how) provincial ‘Ottomanness’, if taken to denote ‘basic common experiences and values’, may be conceived of in broader terms than purely that of interests of state (Anastasopoulos 2005: xvi–xviii). But speaking of a ‘centre’ often leads on to talk of a ‘periphery’. It is therefore first necessary to examine the full implications of this word. Undermining the ‘periphery’ What may we expect of a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire? First and foremost (and once again in Amy Singer’s words): a ‘re-evaluation of the balance between center and peripheries. [ … ] [T]hose researching the provinces must also take into account the changing understanding of the Ottoman regime at its center’ (Singer 1996: 147). But what does that imply? The first point to note is that the words periphery and province are clearly often used indiscriminately. On some occasions this underlines the symmetry between ‘the vantage point of the centre on the periphery’ and ‘the

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perspective of the province on itself and on the centre’ (Agmon 1999: 110). On others it brings out the ‘flexible and permeable boundaries between center and periphery’, in the hope of providing ‘a history of provincial life in the Ottoman interior’ (Doumani 1995: 217 and 2).23 And on yet others and even more characteristically it is a matter of envisaging a ‘new, multi-polar and complex line of inquiry that prioritizes everyday contact as well as practical and discursive interweaving between the imperial center and the provincial periphery’ (Hanssen et al. 2002: 6). And so as said, the terms are used indiscriminately (cf. Anastasopoulos 2008; Ünlü 2010; Özdalga et al. 2011; Oualdi 2012). But is this in fact tenable? The term ‘periphery’ frequently crops up in discussions and theorizations relating to the notion of Third World dependency, and also bears the imprint of the Braudelian theme of the integration of the Mediterranean into a reconfigured world-economy.24 There are several different aspects to this connotation of the word: ‘periphery’ may be understood relative to the political sovereignty of Istanbul, or to the economic polarization of London or Paris. The term ‘province’, however, introduces an inevitable semantic restriction, for whatever the ‘periphery’ being considered, studying it as a ‘province’ necessarily means situating it within the cogs of the Ottoman administrative processes. And it is for this reason that Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber, in contrast to the Braudelian approach, decided to insert the adjective in the expression ‘provincial periphery’ (Hanssen et al. 2002: 12).25 But what does the indiscriminate use of these two terms imply in this specific context? In a way it is a matter of being faithful to the Ottoman term translated as ‘province’, for as seen above ‘t.as¸ra’ brings with it the idea of an outside space or exteriority of some sort (see Introduction above). Ottoman usage thus does indeed imply that the ‘province’ is outside something, on its margins, on its periphery. A further and more recent layer of meaning has accreted on top of this, and one which underlies the study published forty-odd years ago by the historian and sociologist S¸erif Mardin under the title ‘Center–periphery relations, a key to Turkish politics?’ (1973). Whilst he at no stage refers to the need to distinguish between ‘province’ and ‘periphery’, the relation established between the two terms is not one of strict equivalence, more a matter of partial overlap: whilst it is true that provinces are necessarily peripheries, not all peripheries are provincial. The province is thus only one possible form of periphery.26 For from a long-term perspective extending beyond the end of the Ottoman Empire itself, the word ‘periphery’ also indicates ‘the most important social cleavage underlying Turkish politics’ (Mardin 1973: 170). This meaning refers more to a social and cultural metaphor than to any geographical fact, and the ‘lower classes’ of Istanbul are just as much on the periphery as the provincials are (ibid.: 175 and 179). But the periphery of what, exactly? This question brings out the highly structural nature of Mardin’s analysis whereby the ‘periphery’ can only be conceived of and talked about in a hyphenated form as a ‘center–periphery’. In contradistinction with the ‘heterogeneity of the periphery’, the ‘official elite’ is said to be ‘singularly compact’, forming

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the ‘bureaucratic core of the state’ and unified by a single ‘bureaucratic code’ (ibid.: 172–73). And so prior to any supposedly social or cultural dimension, this ‘cleavage’ is in fact a historical ideal type, indicating the possibility of conceiving of a socially and normatively centred state. This implicitly brings with it a restrictive response to the question ‘what does it mean to be an Ottoman?’, and one modelled on the definition put forward a few years earlier by Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote: The term Ottoman here is used to signify those who qualified for first-class status in that society by serving the religion (being Muslim), serving the state (holding the position that gave them a state income and a privileged tax status), and knowing the Ottoman Way (using the Ottoman Turkish language and conforming to the manners and customs of the society that used Ottoman Turkish). (Itzkowitz and Mote 1970: 11) In context this definition no doubt seeks primarily to establish the external boundaries of that which is said to be Ottoman in contradistinction to the European world: as Itzkowitz and Mote specify, ‘[t]hese Ottomans were cut off from Europe by both a religious barrier and a physical frontier’ (ibid.). But their definition nonetheless also lays down internal boundaries by the triple inclusion it puts forward (religion, state, and way of life), thus restricting Ottomanness to the circle of those enjoying official recognized status within the imperial political system. Within the long timescale of ‘Turkish politics’, Ottomanness is thus assimilated to state officialdom and is thereby instigated as the symbolic (rather than geographical) centre, and as a principle for commanding, codifying, and ordering, without which history would be submerged by the heterogeneous and anarchic ‘periphery’.27 This leads to the following conclusion: there is but one step from the ‘province’ to the ‘periphery’. The latter presupposes conceptualizing an exclusive centre that is by nature autonomous and unique in its field, and it is from the perspective of this centre itself – conventionally called the ‘state’ – that the ‘periphery’ can be identified as the unnameable anarchy of the insubordinate.28 Strictly speaking a ‘province’ does not imply the irreducible dualism that is part and parcel of the centre–periphery pair. It is certainly the case that on its own a province is unable to be a centre, but that does not mean to say that it must necessarily be relegated outside any form of centredness and be entirely heteronomous. Or, to put that differently, the province is as much centre as it is periphery. Beyond the law of the centre – an ambivalent portrait of the provincial Ottoman And this is where the problems start. Identifying a ‘periphery’ made it easy to localize and conceptualize a centre (in geographical, sociological, and cultural

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terms) whose law seemed to have been written for a modern state and its bureaucracy. But by making this dualism more problematic and undermining the premises of any such opposition, the provincial perspective puts this vision of the state centre to the test – in particular enquiring into the validity of a history of the Ottoman Empire posited as a central, pyramid-shaped, hierarchical state. And so adopting a provincial perspective entails going beyond the limits of a strictly state-based conception of Ottomanness: ‘It is clearly impossible, certainly undesirable, to arrive at a rigid, monolithic definition of who an Ottoman was, lest we take the normative categories of the Ottoman state at face value’ (Hanssen et al. 2002: 12). Therefore the supposed ‘bureaucratic core’ needs to be put to one side awaiting closer examination into its various implications (see Aymes 2009d). For whilst any study of the final century, in particular, of the Empire needs to address the question of the bureaucratic nature of the Ottoman State, caution is nevertheless required: it is not certain that Ottomanness, as seen from the province, is the sole preserve of a (state) centre imposing its role. What is needed, in fact, is to go beyond the limits of Ottoman history conceived uniquely in terms of the administrators. Ottomanness is not simply a matter of the framework of administrative compromises, but it also mobilizes other registers of social relations, other experiences, and other expectations. Amongst this diversity of ‘schedules of concerns’, as Amy Singer puts it, intersection does not amount to congruence (1994: 130). Many studies (all referring back to Hourani 1968) have helped bring to light the key role played by the ‘notables’ residing in the main towns of the Empire in the everyday functioning of the Ottoman regime (see Khoury 1990 and 2006; Faroqhi 2008). These approaches are highly diverse but nevertheless agree on a key formula: the ‘notables’ are ‘those who can play a certain political role as intermediaries between government and people’ (Hourani 1968: 48). This brings out the idea of the mediation of power between the overarching Empire and the local singularity, where this mediation attests to the genuinely provincial nature of the system described. So why not try to envision a ‘politics of notables’, Cypriot fashion? Let us take an important man on the island during the first half of the . nineteenth century, Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga. He was important for he was the governor of Cyprus on three separate occasions (for a total of more than ten years) between 1822 and 1842.29 So it would initially appear that we are dealing with an administrator appointed by the authorities in Istanbul. Was he an establishment figure, a ‘servant’ (k.ul) trained at the Sultan’s palace and destined for high office? In an entreaty addressed to . the Grand Vizier in 1841, Meh.med Aga simply states that he has ‘for many years [been] one of the servants of the Sublime Sultanate’.30 But this is merely a generic expression and it would be overly hasty (at least for this period) to . take it literally and conclude that Meh.med Aga was a k.ul in the strict sense of 31 the word, a ‘slave’ in the Sultan’s household. However, in the ‘Memorial of famous Ottomans’ published in 1890–91 by the biographer Meh.med Süreyya-,

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. we may read that Meh.med Aga ‘had been sila-h.s¸or and k.apucubas¸ı’, that is to say a guard (literally a ‘musketeer’) and Chamberlain in the Imperial Palace (Süreyya- 1995–98: vol.IV/1, 291). Initially, then, everything would appear to suggest that he is indeed an establishment figure. But apart from that what do we know about him prior to 1822? Süreyyaindicates that he had acted as a mütesellim (tax collection agent) in T.ırnova, and then in Cyprus, but without specifying the dates or for how long. The title . of aga, though somewhat slippery at the time, is suggestive of training for the pursuit of arms rather than more clerical activities.32 Some even go so far as . to describe Meh.med Aga as an ‘ignorant and illiterate’ man.33 This profile is similar to that of the ‘pashas-turned-efendis’ in Damascus studied by Karl Barbir, ‘Ottoman officials in the military career who retired to or settled’ in the provinces, and ‘in the process [ … ] transferred to bureaucratic and religious . careers’ (1979–80: 69; cf. Toledano 1997). Perhaps Meh.med Aga was an Ottoman-turned-Cypriot, along the lines of these ‘Ottomans-turned-Damascenes’. . To be utterly accurate the case under study here is of an ‘aga-turned. efendi’, for – unlike another aga in the region of Trabzon during the same period, whose successive titles attest to his political ascent (Meeker 2002: . 223) – Meh.med Aga’s career remained fairly modest: he never became ‘Meh.med Beg’ or ‘Meh.med Pas¸a’. Furthermore, we need to ‘situate’ Meh.med . Aga more precisely and unearth evidence of his embedding in the local context comparable to that of the ‘Ottomans-turned-Damascenes’. Such traces do indeed exist, even though they are rare and tenuous. The earliest reference figures in a short biographical entry relating to his son, Tah.sı-n Beg Efendi, and situates him not in Cyprus but at Damascus, where he is referred to as the ‘principal owner’ of a ‘noble residence’.34 The same text also establishes . that in AH 1215 (1800–01) Meh.med Aga moved to Nicosia (Lefk.os¸a), ‘where numerous noble and virtuous men of the island [of Cyprus] come from’,35 without specifying the reason for this move. Another indication comes from the English traveller Nathanael Burton, who arrived by ship in Larnaca on 8 March 1837, and who offers the following portrait of Governor Meh.med . Aga: ‘an ignorant wretch, who, some years ago, kept a shop on the little bazaar of Scala [the merchant station of Larnaca]’ (1838: 166). It is admittedly difficult here to determine to what extent this comment should be attributed to Burton’s pronounced taste for satirical caricature (his purpose being to denounce the pillage of Cyprus by Ottomans who, according to him, care more about accumulating personal wealth than about the public good). . Nevertheless, this affords an indication, however slight, that Meh.med Aga had put down roots in Cyprus, for it would appear that he had already acquired property there and established business relations by the time he was appointed governor of the island. . Moreover there are other indications suggesting that Meh.med Aga figured among the local ‘notables’. Firstly the length of his time as governor of . Cyprus, and secondly his title of aga which at that time did not necessarily designate a military agent of the state, but was also attributed to all the

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various sorts of provincial elite.36 The local power of the ‘aghas’ in Nicosia, ‘wealthy landowners as despotic as they [we]re fanatical’, is a commonplace in letters written by French or British consuls in Cyprus, at least up until the . 1840s.37 Everything would appear to suggest that as of the 1820s Meh.med Aga was a member of this influential group. Thus a dispatch (in 1833) from the French consulate in Larnaca gives an idea of his rapidly increasing local power: The current Governor of the islands, who is himself a merchant, imposed a far higher tax on all the villages than that of the Porte, on the pretext of sending the quantity of wheat and barley demanded of him to Constantinople; he had the grain placed in his personal storehouses; his agents and associates also purchased large quantities at highly advantageous prices, due in part to the export ban. Grain exports will only be permitted once the tax has been sent to Constantinople and when Saïd Méhémed is unable to find any more grain to buy.38 The ‘shop’ referred to by Burton has now become ‘personal storehouses’, and . the business activities of the ‘merchant’ Meh.med Aga are remarkable for being closely bound up with his administrative functions. A further quotation . helps tie this all together: in March 1844 Meh.med Aga applied to be awarded the farm of the island’s customs and tithes on silk, for a payment to the Imperial Treasury of a total sum of 460,000 piastres39 – which according to information provided by the British consul Niven Kerr amounted to over one tenth of the island’s annual revenue.40 And so it would appear that . Meh.med Aga’s personal fortune at the end of his life was closely bound up with the management of local tax resources: Hill (1972: 184 fn.2) thus reports information according to which this fortune ‘would amount to 40,000,000 piastres (over £400,000)’.41 This might seem to put the finishing touches . to the portrait of Meh.med Aga as an ‘Ottoman-turned-Cypriot’. Yet other hypotheses are also possible, and a different career could be imagined, no longer that of an Ottoman-turned-Cypriot in peaceful retirement, but the social and political ascension of a minor military or paramilitary chief with local roots, on the model of those who held sway in the Black Sea provinces during the eighteenth century. Michael E. Meeker has shown that in these regions there were ‘aghas who founded agha-families’, pointing out that they ‘arose for the most part from lower-level regiments and militias’: Some of them may have held janissary titles and ranks, since it became common for all kinds of individuals to do so. More typically, they belonged to regiments and militias that imitated and emulated the janissaries by their tattoos, insignia, and banners. (Meeker 2002: 173) It is possible that, like these genuine or pretend janissaries, or like the nineteenth-century aghas of Damascus who were powerful ‘para-military

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. chieftains’ (Schatkowski-Schilcher 1985: 32), Meh.med Aga was a member of a local elite which was progressively integrated into the imperial political system. There are various indications in favour of such a hypothesis. The first is . that Meh.med Aga may have been of Cypriot origin. Several subsequent biographers concur on this point.42 But this is something that is rarely mentioned . in sources dating from the lifetime of Meh.med Aga himself. To my knowledge, only one French consul in Larnaca in the 1820s refers to it, and then only in passing.43 Whether true or not such a rumour shows the local renown he enjoyed over a period of several decades, being remembered as a man who ‘knew Cyprus and its leading men well, having spent so much of his life there’ (Hill 1972: 184), and who also went to the trouble of committing his memory to stone by establishing a religious institute, as did many of his equals: . Meh.med Aga endowed a religious school (medrese) in Famagusta in 1826 (Suha 1973: 358). There is nothing surprising about this sort of fictitious origin. In a similar vein the fact that ‘local origins’ were traditionally imputed to members of the ‘Azm family, who were leading figures in eighteenth-century Damascene high society, could in fact simply refer to their ‘post facto “adoption”’ by the local population and its chroniclers (Barbir 1980: 58). When it is a matter of throwing light on questions of belonging, fabricated links count as much if not more than origins themselves (see Hathaway 2003: 8–17, 34–38, 186–88). Another indication is that there is no mention in the Ottoman or consular . documents of Meh.med Aga having acted as a provincial administrator anywhere other than in Cyprus (except for the case of T.ırnova where according to Süreyya- he had been mütesellim before taking up his post in Nicosia in 1822). When he was reappointed governor of the island in 1841, in particular, the Ottoman authorities, who according to well established habit listed previously held posts, do not refer to any such appointments, and he is simply referred to as ‘the former governor of Cyprus’.44 In short it would appear . that, unlike many other governors of the island at this period, Meh.med Aga was not part of a pool of provincial imperial administrators who were moved around from one post to another. This brings us back to the question asked . earlier on – was Meh.med Aga a man of the establishment? For when it comes down to it, to what extent can we interpret the titles given by Meh.med Süreyya- in his biographical note (sila-h.s¸or, k.apucubas¸ı) as indicating that . Meh.med Aga had received Palace training? They could just as well result from the dissemination of a Palace lexicon to the provinces, and the appropriation of this lexicon by local elites who in the early nineteenth century often largely escaped the Sultan’s authority. This one may relate to what Hülya Canbakal (2007: 85) characterized as a ‘relative weakness of central control over the distribution of titles’ in provincial societies. Thus from the late eighteenth century onwards the title of k.apucubas¸ı was increasingly ‘granted as a grade or rank, including for certain provincial notables’.45 And . here once again the case of Meh.med Aga appears similar to that of the aghas of the Black Sea – a ‘regional’ notable partially inserted within the hierarchies

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of the imperial state and of reduced spatial mobility due to his embedding in local networks (cf. Meeker 2002: 214–23). . Under these circumstances, Meh.med Aga comes across more as a minor local chief promoted over the course of the years into the orbit of imperial dignitaries. In the mid-1840s this promotion resulted in his attaining the rank (pa-ye) of ‘manager of the Imperial Stables’.46 This was one of the ranks accorded to the principal Ottoman civil servants, coming between the ‘second’ (sa-niye) and ‘third’ (sa-lise) ranks in a hierarchy which, on being newly reorganized in 1832–33, included four and shortly afterwards five dif. ferent levels. Meh.med Aga’s promotion thus attests to his nominal integration within the imperial honours and remunerations system. The form of address used by the Sublime Porte officials when addressing him at this period, ‘izzetlü (‘honourable’, ‘respectable’), confirms this formal promotion.47 However this integration is not purely nominal. If we are to believe the portrait of the ‘customs, ceremonies, expressions, and usages of the Ottoman people’ drawn up by an employee of the Porte, ‘Abdül’azı-z Beg, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sultan Mah.mu-d II (1808–39) sometimes came during the month of Ramadan and sat in the store of a tobacco merchant in the neighbourhood of Beya-zid, in the centre of Istanbul. And it is further . stated that this store was ‘underneath the residence of K . ıbrıslı Meh.med Aga, the former governor of Cyprus’ (Abdülaziz Bey 2000: 257).48 In the early . 1840s the same Meh.med Aga was in charge of overseeing the completion of a ‘riverbank palace’ (sa-h.ilsara-y) being built at K . uruçes¸me on the western bank of the Bosporus.49 This duty obliged him to spend 3,513 purses (kı-se), or about 1,756,500 piastres.50 The building was never completed as it was badly damaged by fire when nearly finished.51 But the entreaty drawn up by . Meh.med Aga, who found himself reeling under debts of three million piastres as a result of the affair, enables us to arrive at two conclusions. Firstly it really was a ‘palace’ (sara-y), not just a simple ‘house’ (ẖa-ne), and we can imagine it was . an imposing and fairly richly decorated building. Secondly, Meh.med Aga was careful to systematically add the adjective va-la- (‘supreme’, ‘exalted’, ‘high’) to the word sa-h.ilsara-y when describing this ‘riverbank palace’. According to the protocol of Ottoman language of the period, this word indicates that the building was probably intended for a very high state dignitary, an ‘Excellency’, or even a member of the Sultan’s family. And this, more perhaps than the building’s architectural appearance, is why the building is referred to as a ‘sara-y’. While it is corroborated by the social segregation which would appear to have been prevalent in K uruçes¸me at the time,52 this . . affords an indication of the way Meh.med Aga, above and beyond his nominal integration into the hierarchy of imperial honours, also participated – to a certain extent at least – in the social milieu of the imperial capital’s elites, where many ties were built up or else frayed as a function of vast expenditure and monetary fortunes. These ties were also closely linked to piety on occasions. And the titles of . Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga attest to his religious respectability, with ‘el-h.a-c’

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indicating that he went (at least once) on pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Islam, Mecca and Medina, and ‘es-seyyid’ indicating that he belonged to a family descended from the Prophet, frequently called es¸ra-f in Ottoman Turkish. Whilst at the period this status was not ‘sufficient in itself to determine one’s standing’ (Marcus 1989: 62), it conferred an entitlement to tax and legal advantages, as well as privileges relating to dress.53 Especially, . it brings us back to the ‘noble residence’ in Damascus that Meh.med Aga is said to have owned in the early nineteenth century. The biographer T.opal Ah.med Rif ‘at Efendi states that this residence is ‘known as the house of . the s¸ürefa- by the inhabitants’.54 This suggests that Meh.med Aga was not merely one s¸erı-f among others within Damascene society: for among those who, like him, were related to the Prophet’s family, he was the only one to live in a house renowned for being directly associated with this holy lineage. . Did Meh.med Aga still own his ‘noble residence’ in Damascus forty or so years later? Whatever the case may be, in spring 1844 he was on the road to Damascus once again, being tasked with supervising the caravan on the pilgrimage to the Holy Places carrying the treasures presented as a gift by the Sultan’s household (S.urre-i hüma-yu-n ema-neti).55 And so the former governor . of Cyprus, who throughout his life went under the modest title of aga, found himself in charge of one of the key symbols of imperial piety. Above . and beyond any unproven career as an administrator, Meh.med Aga was involved in a pan-Ottoman ‘politics of piety’ (Zilfi 1988). This takes us to the heart of the ‘double-edged legitimacy’ of certain families of provincial notables, whereby their sacred lineage meant they enjoyed a certain level of recognition ‘by their own society and by the central authority in Istanbul’ (Pappé 1997: 164). . This is the portrait we can draw of Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga. In the late 1830s the American missionary L. W. Pease wrote a short biographical notice in his Researches in Cyprus which is worth quoting in full, as it resumes this complexity and adds supplementary details, but without really shedding any light on the more murky areas: He is a native of Syria, and I believe from the city of Aleppo. When a very young man he was bought as a servant by a very rich Turkish merchant. After the decease of his master, he married the widow, and thus came into the possession of her property, became himself a merchant and increased his capital, was sometimes sent to Constantinople to procure the reappointment of governors, and finally having made interest for himself rather than his employer, came back to Cyprus a governor. He held the office for four years in succession, when he was removed by the Sultan to another post, but again received the appointment and held it about six years. In 1838 he was again removed from the office and was appointed builder at his own expense of some extensive public buildings

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in Constantinople, the Sultan having been informed of his great wealth. He is supposed to be possessed of about $2,000,000. The Sultan calls him the Golden Governor. He left Cyprus with the accusation of extorting from the Greeks 10 million piastres over and above the statutory tax. (Severis 2002: 157–58) Although there are certain ambivalences – and in fact precisely because they cannot be resolved – this portrait enables us to sketch out the multiple networks of power and knowledge, concerns and memories, that go to make up the fabric of the Ottoman Empire in its provinciality. It also confirms the need to do away with simplistic diptychs, as it is clear that for such a person ‘the borderline between “central” and “local” government had been obliterated’, a bit in the same way as it was for provincial notables in the late Roman Empire (Brown 1992: 22–23). By turn ‘merchant’ in Larnaca and palace builder on the Bosporus, minor local military chief and imperial high digni. tary, Meh.med Aga fully encapsulates the singular breadth that a provincial Ottoman’s life could have. The dissipation of ‘official’ Ottomanness But can he really be said to fully encapsulate it? Such a conclusion seems . debatable at best without having invoked other Meh.med Agas to support such a claim. Was he an exceptional case? And if he was, are we still entitled to consider him as ‘exceptionally “normal” precisely on account of what it reveals’ (Grendi 1977: 512)? . It would seem that the case of Meh.med Aga was indeed exceptional if we limit ourselves to the limited circle of high administrators appointed by the Sublime Porte to Cyprus, and he is an absolutely unique case among the Ottoman governors sent to the island, without equal in the archives of the period.56 But there is no good reason to limit the point of comparison to Cyprus. On the contrary, what is at stake in a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire is precisely – as said above – going beyond a fixed scale and given geographical area (cf. Faroqhi 2002; Adanır 2006). In addition to the . cases referred to above, Meh.med a’s career pattern might appear some: Ag . what isomorphous to those of Ibrahı-m Ka-hya al-K . azdaglı (Hathaway 1997), Stephanos Vogorides (Philliou 2011), or any other ‘quintessential gentrypasha – “both a man of the state (rical-ı hükümet) and native of the region (ahali[-yi] buldan)”’ (Salzmann 2004: 163–69, here 165). And so, a bit like an identikit portrait, it is solely because we have been able to overlay other similar profiles found elsewhere in the Ottoman domain (on the Black Sea, in . Damascus, and so on) on top of that of Meh.med Aga that he has been fleshed out as a typical provincial man. And if despite this we decide to privilege Cyprus as our field of study, there . are many ways in which the exceptional Meh.med Aga may be viewed as normal. Though they differ in their provinciality, there are many other

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equally provincial profiles to be found in the available archive material, showing multiple and ambivalent forms of integration into the world of the Empire. What can we say, for example, of a certain Georges Lapierre who arrived in Larnaca in August 1811, and whose linguistic talents in Turkish and Greek meant he was rapidly appointed as dragoman to the French consulate there?57 He was born in Istanbul,58 and married a Louise Pery whose family came from the Cyclades islands of Syros and Tinos.59 He so marked local Cypriot chronicles that in his History of Cyprus Sir George F. Hill devotes a note to him running over several pages (1972: 138–41). Each of the traces left by this ‘extremely shifty character’ (ibid.: 141) elicits lengthy commentaries. Or, as a Cypriot ‘primate’ puts it when addressing Consul Antoine Vasse de Saint Ouen in 1834: ‘it would take ten volumes [ … ] to relate all the intrigues, underhand deeds, excesses, and horrors that the man committed.’60 Here we will limit ourselves to the most important of the many available clues. During the time (up until 1823) when Lapierre worked as dragoman for the French consulate ‘he was continually detained by business in Nicosia where the local authorities reside’,61 or to put it differently he assiduously frequented the elites close to Ottoman power. In 1822–23 he sought to buy real estate properties that had belonged to proscribed Christians.62 After having been removed from his consular duties by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, he bolstered his local ties in Cyprus by becoming an associate in the monopoly on grain produced in the island in concert with a certain James (or Giacometto) Mattei, the Prussian consul, and with an eminent . figure in Nicosia’s high society, Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga, all this under the auspices of . 63 Governor Meh.med Aga. In 1829 the French consul was unable to suppress his admiration for ‘his financial means, his business activity, and his perfect knowledge of the languages, habits, and resources of the Country’.64 But he was implicated in shady dealings relating to hoarded goods and was obliged to leave Cyprus and return to Istanbul. In 1834 it is said that he had retired to the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara,65 and that in September 1832 he ‘renounced his title to French nationality’.66 And on returning to Cyprus on 24 April 1840 he came armed with a ‘vizierial letter’ from the Ottoman government, according to the acting consul Bernard Clairambault, naming him director of the island’s lazaretto for a yearly stipend of six thousand francs.67 All these clues corroborate that we are dealing with a provincial Ottoman here. . Comparing the Ottoman Meh.med Aga and the Ottoman Georges Lapierre delivers an additional conclusion: seen from the province, the domain we might wish to refer to as Ottoman administration appears decidedly fuzzy – and hence the temptation to replace the term with others such as ‘governmentality’ (Hanssen 2002: 57) or ‘governance’ (Philliou 2011: xxiii–v). The provincial ‘notables’ were just as much men of religion, local military chiefs, and merchants as they were administrators in the strict sense of the word. In other words, they ‘were not on the state payroll’, and even among those who were, many cannot ‘be identified completely with what one might call the

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regular Ottoman “establishment” in Damascus: the provincial governor, the chief magistrate (kadı), and their retinues’ (Barbir 1980: 69–70). And so it would seem inconceivable that their horizons were limited purely to interests of state as laid down by the Sultan’s Palace, and which can be résuméd in a few main principles: the proper exercise of divine and Sultanic justice, securing supplies for the capital, and maintaining efficient tax and military mechanisms. A provincial history means we have to imagine an approach to administration that does not reduce it to this ideal type.68 And this brings us back to the definition of the ‘notables’ put forward by A. Hourani: ‘[their] modes of action must in normal circumstances be cautious and even ambiguous’ (1968: 46; cf. Brown 1992: 62). It is important to fully unpack all the implications of this observation, and not just stop at its immediate meaning – the notable as a slippery figure of compromise aware of where true interests lie. What it signifies above all is that the notables’ freedom of movement involves mobilizing heterogeneous registers of political action, and that it is based on a complex configuration for which Ariel Salzmann provides the following overview: Although the imperial capital remained the physical reference point for much of the state’s ideological and regulative authority as well as holding a plurality of military force, in a large, preindustrial territorial state like the Ottoman Empire, actual rule relied upon controlling and manipulating interests, corporate groups, and institutions that often straddled state and society. (Salzmann 1993: 413 fn.7) Although an ad hoc description of the ‘state’ still remains to be found, we discover once again an idea already suggested above, this time from a different chain of thought: the picture of provincial Ottomanness which emerges is not exclusively the result of the univocal action of a legislative and administrative centre. There doubtless is a centre, but most of the time it is only a distant ‘physical reference point’ – a capital, and no more than that.69 However vague it might appear to say that a given individual carries out ‘administrative’ functions, it is equally true that there is a tangible and verifiable link between official agents of the ‘Sublime Sultanate’ and the person of the Sultan (which does not mean to say that this link is exclusive). And so what we need to realize is that the provincial ‘administration’ mobilizes men on a local basis, only some of whom are ‘official’ agents of the Sultan’s power, or as Michael E. Meeker puts it: ‘[t]he provincial elites were then both inside and outside the official class’ (2002: 147). This, in fact, can be interpreted in two different ways – firstly, that there are non-official administrators, and secondly that there are officials whose activities exceed their administrative . functions. The career of Meh.med Aga is a good example of this second sort

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of administrator, for his official career is only one facet of an inextricable nexus of diverse ties, be they local or imperial, or relating to business or piety. These ties, in combination with ‘the state’s ideological and regulatory authority’, sketch out the main lines of action of ‘actual rule’.70

*** The province, though feeling the aura of the capital and the pomp of the tutelary sovereign far beyond the horizon, diffracts and multiplies the forms of knowledge and power at work throughout the vast Ottoman space. We cannot measure Ottomanness simply by the yardstick of official codification, and need also to take into account the dissipation of the administration. The terminology is important here – dissipation, not just dissemination. The latter term still presupposes the attribution of deliberate institutional intentionality to a ‘centre’, to a state capable of propagating its institutional model (of deconcentrating and devolving it as it were); dissipation, on the other hand, takes some of the institutionalism away from this model, and it is no longer presumed that the state knows what it is doing in its organizational functions.71 This notion of dissipation opens up an approach which fundamentally undermines the a priori opposition between the centre and the periphery, enabling us to envision a de-centred and unsanctioned form of Ottomanness. Welcome to the empire of the province.

Notes 1 For an earlier elaboration of the main points set out in this chapter, see Aymes 2007. 2 FO 78/497, f.188–204: ‘Report on the Produce and Trade of the Island of Cyprus’, appended to letter no.7 of 26 May 1842 (f.186 et vo). 3 Ibid., f.192 vo (‘Imports in the Custom House of Larnaca, 1841’) and 194 vo (‘Exports from the Custom House of Larnaca, 1841’): respectively £42,730 (out of a total of £112,055) and £11,965 (out of £25,377). 4 Ibid., f.195. 5 Ibid., f.193. 6 Ibid., f.193–95. 7 Ibid., f.192 vo: these imports of ‘Brit. manufact. Cotton’ via the Ottoman Empire amount to £6,000. 8 In particular British merchants frequently used European or Levantine shipping companies to handle their trade. A report by the consul Niven Kerr a few years later provides evidence of this trend: FO 78/580, f.166 (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.3, 31 January 1844). Lilburn also points out (FO 78/497, f.196) the specific character of the trade in Manchester cotton, which is turned into printed calicoes in Cyprus, a commerce which is ‘in the hands of native Merchants’, and these calicoes are then ‘exported’ in toto to the Ottoman market (for a total sum in 1841 of £6,500: ibid., f.194 vo). 9 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.213 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.38, 18 February 1833). : _ .a dated 11 Ra-. 1257 [3 May 1841]: 10 I.DH. 1871, defter enclosed with a mazbat . ‘Lefke’den diya-r-ı a-ẖara giden enva-‘-ı kera-ste ‘ava-‘idi’, ‘Ma-gosa’dan diya-r-ı a-ẖara giden lımon ve nar ‘ava‘idi’.

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11 FO 198/13, f.532 vo–533 (appended to letter no.8 from Robert Campbell, British Consul in Rhodes, to Henry L. Bulwer) (in French in the original). 12 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.214 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.38, 18 February 1833). 13 Ibid., f.308 vo (Guillois to Rigny, no.29, 8 August 1834). 14 Ibid., f.214 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.38, 18 February 1833). : 15 I.DH. 4279, memorandum to the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi) (undated, dated overleaf: 10 Ra-. 1260 [30 March 1844]). The order (ira-de) enclosed with this document requests that the amount (bedel) of the farm, initially estimated at 400,000 piastres, be increased. But a document written by the British consul Niven Kerr suggests that this did not take place, however (FO 195/102, f.458: letter to Sir Stratford Canning, no.3, 3 August 1844 – quoted by Hill 1972: 179). 16 FO 78/497, f.202. 17 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.214 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.38, 18 February 1833). 18 A.DVN 91/74, memorandum (müẕekkire) signed by the steward (ketẖüda-) of the governor-general of Egypt (undated; stamped overleaf: 27 Ẕa-. 1269 [1 September - - nıñ hasbeü’l1853]): ‘K . ozma bazirga . : . ıbrıs mütemekkinlerinden [Huce Melıke] K . mak.u-le Iskenderiye’ye gönderdigi ve k.ars¸ılık. olarak. oradan aldıgı ẕaẖa-’iriñ henüz . muh.a-sebesi rü’yet ü tesviye olunmadıgı [ … ] ẖaẕı-ne-i Mıs.riyye muh.a-seba-tınıñ . tes¸vı-s¸ini mü’erri olacagı’. 19 FO 78/621, vol. 2, f.115 (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.11, 1 November 1845). 20 The expression ‘Ottoman administrators’ is deliberately vague, and should perhaps remain so (given how problematic the appointment of these administrators is: see Aymes 2010: 106–30). It certainly leaves many problems unresolved as regards our understanding of what the Ottoman ‘State’ is. 21 Which is in fact what Singer’s project is, if one is to believe the lines following on from the passage quoted above: ‘[ … ] or can be divided into a number of possible typologies of provincial administration which evolved under the broad umbrella of Ottoman rule’ (1996: 147). And again (1994: 3): ‘The aim is to attain a perspective of rural administration closer to that of the peasants themselves, both its immediate personification and its imperial persona, and to build a new empirical basis for understanding the actual administration of the countryside. Having done this, one must further ask, to what extent the administration of Palestine typified Ottoman provincial administration of the period’ (italics added in both quotations). See also Ursinus 1995: 359–60; Greene 1996: 70–71. 22 This discussion echoes to a certain extent (I am grateful to Mathieu Grenet for pointing out this parallel) Horden and Purcell’s distinction between ‘history in’ and ‘history of ’ the Mediterranean (2000: 2). It is also reminiscent of the argument for ‘ethnicity as cognition’, whereby ‘ethnicity is fundamentally not a thing in the world, but a perspective on the world’ (Brubaker et al. 2004: 32). 23 The initially surprising term ‘interior’ is not one that Doumani explains. As one reads the work, however, it seems that it is intended to underline the desire to study a provincial hinterland (in this instance Jabal Nablus) far away from such great urban centres as Jerusalem or Damas – what Doumani elsewhere ironically refers to as ‘a periphery’s periphery’ (ibid.: 13). 24 See Wallerstein 1975 and 1979, as well as works published by the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations (at SUNY Binghamton) which has brought out the journal Review since 1977. 25 See too the indication provided by Hanssen in the same book (2002: 51 fn.7): ‘the terms “centre” and “periphery” are used [here] to denote political, social and cultural relations within the realms of the Ottoman Empire.’ 26 Mardin speaks of ‘the periphery – in the meaning of provinces’, which presupposes the possibility of some other meaning (ibid.: 182). Equally, like Singer or Arbel and Veinstein quoted above, he underlines the extent to which the

54

27

28

29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

Ottoman entanglements provincial periphery is defined by the administrative pragmatism of its Ottoman conquerors (ibid.: 171). Nearly twenty-five years after the publication of ‘Center–periphery relations’, the portrait provided by Dina R. Khoury reveals how enduring this historiographical approach has proved to be: ‘Turkish historians of the Ottoman Empire, who have done much to shape Western scholarship, have focused primarily on the state because it has been central to their narrative of modernity. They continue to function under the Ataturkist legacy, despite meaningful efforts to surpass it. Consequently, they have tended to study Ottoman political hegemony by analyzing central institutions and ascribing agency and autonomy to the state’ (1997: 3). The clearest formulation of this perspective may be found in the outline definition put forward by Metin Heper, and which follows broadly similar lines to Mardin’s approach: ‘“Center” refers here to those groups which try to uphold the state’s autonomy and supremacy in the polity; “periphery” refers to those who try to escape from the regulation of the state’ (Heper 1980: 99 fn.1). In 1822–27, 1833–38, and for a few months in 1841–42. Hill (1972: 149, 173, and 183) and Dionyssiou (1995: 81), from whom I take this information, both refer primarily to Neoklis Kyriazes’s ‘Cypriot Chronicle’. : I.DH 1525 (dated overleaf 13 February 1841): ‘bunca senelerden-berü bendega-n-ı salt.anat-ı seniyyeden bulunarak.’. For a study of the patterns and rhetorics of servility (in the parallel context of the Tunis palace), see Oualdi 2011: 23–61. _ _ s.v. ‘Ag˘ a’; Pakalın 1946–53: vol.1, See EI2, s.v. ‘Agha’, IslAns, s.v. ‘Ag˘ a’; TDVIA, 21–22; Sakaog˘ lu 1985: 7. Hill 1972: 184; Dionyssiou 1995: 81 (both according to K.X.). Excerpted from T.opal Ah.med Rif‘at Efendi’s ‘Orchard of the dignitaries’ (1866: 59): ‘S¸a-m-ı cennet-mes¸a-mmda beyni’l-aha-li beytü’s¸-s¸ürefa- dinmekle ma‘rûf ẖa-ne-i ‘a-lı-niñ fı--l-as.l s.a-h.ibi sa-da-t-ı h.üsniyyeden K . ıbrıs cezıresi muh.as.s.ılı esbak. merh.um . El-h.a-c Meh.med Aga’. Ibid.: ‘cezı-re-i meẕku-reden ma‘den-i rica-l ü ah.ra-r olan Lefk.os¸a’da biñ ikiyüz on bes¸ senesinde nümu-da-r olarak.’. Abraham Marcus thus notes (1989: 71) that in eighteenth-century Aleppo ‘the aghas included military officers, government officials, tax-farmers, and merchants’. Quote taken from CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 21 December 1831), f.286 vo–287. CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.251 (Guillois to de Broglie, no.5, 2 November 1833). : I.DH 4279 (dated overleaf 30 March 1844). FO 78/580, f.167 (Kerr to the Count of Aberdeen, no.3, 31 January 1844) (quoted by Hill 1972: 170–71, fn.7). Although Hill provides neither source nor date, the exchange rate used means this can be situated in the 1830s (cf. Pamuk 2000: 191). Süreyya- 1995–98: vol.IV/1, 291; K.X. X (1934): 29, quoted by Hill (1972: 184 fn.1). See CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.344 vo (Méchain, 28 June 1823): ‘a new Governor is awaited, he is a man from Cyprus to whom in the past I rendered a very great service’, where the date of the letter makes it possible to identify the governor in . question as Meh.med Aga. But the American missionary Lorenzo Warriner Pease who was in Cyprus in the late 1830s relates in his unfinished manuscript of his . Researches in Cyprus that Meh.med Aga was, on the contrary, ‘a native of Syria, and I believe from the city of Aleppo’ (quoted in Severis 2002: 157 fn.73; see ibid.: xlvi for information about the manuscript in question). : I.MVL 476 (dated overleaf 30 September 1841): ‘esbak. K . ıbrıs muh.as.s.ılı H . acı . Meh.med Aga’.

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_ s.v. ‘Kapıcı’: ‘kapıcıbas¸ılık son yüzyıllarda rütbe veya pâye olarak da 45 TDVIA, verilmeye bas¸lanmıs¸, hatta bazı âyanlara bile tevcih edilmis¸tir’. The regional aghas studied by Meeker underwent the same process of integration, being awarded the honorific title of Imperial Porter (k.apıcıbas¸ı) (2002: 215, 222). As for the title of mütesellim which (according to M. Süreyya-) was accorded to Meh.med . Aga when in Tırnova and then in Cyprus, it could be subjected to similar analysis. Metin Kunt has suggested that this term was mainly applied in the first half of the seventeenth century to members of ‘local – and unofficial – elites’ the Ottoman governors found themselves having to deal with (1983: 98). : 46 I.DH 4279 (dated overleaf 30 March 1844): ‘Is.t.abl-ı ‘a-mire müdı-rligi pa-yelüler. inden muh.as.s.ıl-i esbak. ‘izzetlü H . acı Meh.med Aga’. This post was created when _ s.v. the stables were reorganized in 1837: see Pakalın 1946–53: vol.2, 8; TDVIA, ‘Istabl’. : . 47 See once again I.DH 4279 quoted above: ‘‘izzetlü H . acı Meh.med Aga’. According to Redhouse’s dictionary (1890: 1298), the term was used for military officers of an intermediary rank, or civil functionaries of an equivalent grade. 48 The word ‘Kıbrıslı’ literally means ‘from Cyprus’, and so tends to corroborate the . indications quoted above relating to Meh.med Aga’s ‘localization’ (if not his origins). : 49 I.DH 1525 (date-stamped overleaf 13 February 1841). 50 As a point of comparison, in the middle of the century the monthly pay of the Governor of Cyprus varied, depending upon his title, between 15,000 piastres (for an efendi) and 40,000 piastres (for a pas¸a) – that is between approximately 4,000 and 10,000 francs of the period (according to CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.37: letter from Tastu, 4 August 1850). 51 Orhan Erdenen (1994) found no traces of the ‘palace’ in question. _ 52 Cf. Istanbul Ansiklopedisi, s.v. ‘Kuruçes¸me’. : 53 See I.MVL. 1203 (undated [~ 1844–45]): there is reference to ‘extraordinary _ on the Muslim population of Cyprus, based on seven and a half taxes’ (‘ava-rız) piastres per person for seyyids and members of the military ranks, and eighteen and a half piastres for the rest (‘ehl-i isla-mdan seyyid ya-ẖu-d ‘askerı- bulunanlarıñ . beherine yedis¸er buçuk. ve sa-’ir ehl-i isla-ma on sekizer buçuk. guru-s¸ ‘ava-rız_ [ … ]). For further information about the status of the seyyids, changes to the es¸ra-f and correlated provincial ‘nobility’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Schatkowski-Schilcher 1985: 124–25; Sarıcık 2003: 86–120; Kılıç 2005; Canbakal 2006. 54 Quote taken from T.opal Ah.med Rif ‘at Efendi (1866: 59): ‘beyni’l-aha-li beytü’s¸s¸ürefa- dinmekle ma‘ru-f ’. ‘S¸ürefa-’, the plural in Arabic of ‘s¸erı-f ’ (meaning ‘holy’, ‘noble’), is the Arabic equivalent of the consecrated term in Turkish, ‘es¸ra-f ’. : 55 I.DH 4333 (dated overleaf 29 April 1844). 56 Cf. the table of Ottoman governors in Cyprus at the period given as an appendix in Aymes 2010: 343–54. 57 CCC, Larnaca, vol.15, f.177 (Regnault to the Duc de Bassano, 24 December 1811). I wish to thank Louis Lapierre, Georges’ descendant, for having brought my attention to this document and to several others quoted later (see Chapter Four below, and cf. Lapierre 2008). 58 CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.226–27 (list of French people and protégés residing in Cyprus, appended to letter no.2 from Consul Méchain to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, 8 April 1820). 59 Lapierre’s baptismal record and marriage certificate are held in the (Latin) registers of the Catholic Church of SS Peter and Paul in Galata, in Istanbul. According to Philemon 1859–61: vol.3, 258–62 (translated by Cobham 1908: 467), Lapierre was also ‘of a family belonging to Syros’. 60 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.327 (Vasse de Saint Ouen, no.2, 13 November 1834).

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61 CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.226–27 (Méchain, no.2, 8 April 1820). 62 Ibid., f.330 (Méchain, no.34, 6 February 1823). Méchain states that the French Consul in Acre (and former Consul in Cyprus), one Regnault, was also involved in these ‘irregular and inappropriate speculations’. For further discussion of these issues, see Chapter Four below. 63 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.156 (letter no.25 from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 3 December 1827); see also Hill 1972: 138. It is unclear exactly how this monopoly functioned. In a letter (no.2) of 2 July 1829 (ibid., f.172), Consul Méchain also alludes to a ‘monopoly on the cottons and Silks of Cyprus’, which thanks to Lapierre accrued, according to his report, to a trading house in Mar. seille until mid-1828. For further discussion of Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga, see Chapter Five below. 64 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). 65 Information obtained by the French consul Antoine Vasse de Saint Ouen during . discussions with the governor of Cyprus, Meh.med Aga: CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, o f.327 v (no.2, 13 November 1834). 66 Ibid., f.114 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.13, 8 September 1832). 67 CCC, Larnaca, vol.19, f.146 (Clairambault to Thiers, 27 April 1840). 68 For discussion of the ‘radical historicity [of administration] as a mode of governing society’, see Descimon et al. 1997: 7–16. 69 Substituting the term ‘capital’ for ‘centre’ may help avoid ‘study[ing] Ottoman political hegemony by analyzing central institutions and ascribing agency and autonomy to the state’ (Khoury 1997: 3; full quotation given above n.27). On this point see Salzmann 2004: 25. 70 Salzmann’s terminology, which I adopt here, has the merit of describing the dual nature of authority without thereby introducing a dualism, unlike the centre/periphery dyad. The two authorities are neither exclusive nor incompatible, and the one is not supposed to establish itself against the resistance of the other. Rather than being a dualist way of structuring historical explanation, it is a matter here of a distinction – in the sense of the word already evoked above (Chapter One), a necessary but impossible task that is forever provisional and in need of being continually repeated. 71 Cf. Aymes 2008c, with reference to Meeker’s idea of the ‘dissemination of an imperial modernity’ in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire (2002: 83–184).

3

Eventful synchronicities: the scales of the ‘Eastern Question’

By moving beyond centred, official Ottomanness to search out its discreeter forms, do we not run the risk of massively diluting what we mean by ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Ottomanness’? If the contours of Ottomanness fade and disappear then what becomes of a provincial history seeking to insert the case of Cyprus within the social and institutional context thought of as ‘Ottoman’? What is needed is to find new approaches and lines of enquiry, and test them to see if they allow us to redefine both the empirical realities and the theoretical issues of a form of Ottoman provinciality. Echoing what has been said earlier, the point of departure needs to be a definition of the province that integrates the locality within an overarching system – the mediation between an Empire in its entirety and a local singu. larity. The case of Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga studied above might function as a symbol of this, but in sociological terms he was an exception in Cyprus. It is hardly possible on the basis of so slight a clue to affirm that the lives of the inhabitants of the island as a whole resonated to vaster rhythms than those of place, that they knew of horizons beyond the furrows of their dönüm,1 or that they took part in movements of greater magnitude than a simple donkey ride. And so the question that needs to be addressed is: to what extent did the lives of Cypriots of the time partake in rhythms pulsing through the Ottoman Empire as a whole? To what extent were Cypriot timescales aligned on Ottoman timescales? This question poses a multi-pronged challenge to our automatic ways of thinking, be they unknown to us or else all too well known – known by heart. For it is akin to the search for the deep forces and underlying trends of the ‘grand historical narrative’ of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. And so attempting to highlight the Ottoman rhythms within the Cypriot time frame would boil down to seeking to establish whether Cyprus took part in this larger history (cf. Rogge 2009): did ‘what was meant to happen’ indeed happen? So what was meant to happen? The larger historical narrative includes several intersecting sagas with the Mediterranean queen being dethroned by the masters of the oceans, and the ‘sick man of Europe’ being gobbled up by national and colonial desires – a process known as the ‘Eastern Question’. So what happened in Cyprus? Nothing, perhaps.2

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Preamble: the Eastern Question (a textbook history) This Eastern Question informs all of this chapter, either explicitly or else more discreetly in the background. It is thus first necessary to go over its main thrust.3 First of all there is a general context: ‘When it comes to the modern period, this discourse has been dominated by a single overarching narrative: the piecemeal incorporation or integration of the Ottoman Empire into the European economic and political orbits’ (Doumani 1995: 3). In other words, the whole of the Ottoman Empire underwent an ‘impact of the West’ during the nineteenth century or, to put it slightly differently, an ‘impact of Europe’ (Laurens 1993: 40; concerning this motto and its critique, see Hourani 1957: 90–91; and Heywood 1988: 341). Against this general backdrop, the history of the Eastern Question is concerned more specifically with the diplomatic aspects: What is referred to as the ‘Eastern Question’ corresponds to a set of facts which occurred between 1774 (the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca) and 1923 (the Treaty of Lausanne). The prime characteristics are the progressive dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the rivalry between the Great Powers who were seeking to establish their control or influence over the Balkans and the countries on the Eastern Mediterranean (as far as the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean) and Southern Mediterranean coasts. (Mantran 1989: 421) And so history relates the increasing intervention in Ottoman affairs of the agents of the Western ‘Powers’ (France, Great Britain, and the Russian and Austrian Empires), with a series of symbolic dates: ‘1798 marks the beginning of Western intervention in the Arab world with the Egyptian expedition’ (Laurens 1993: 5). If we limit ourselves here to the ‘beginnings’ of the narrative, this is followed by the War of Greek Independence in 1821–29, and then the 1831–40 rebellion against the Sultan by the governor of Egypt, Meh.med ‘Alı-. These crises, which increased the opportunities for European interventionism and the forms it took, are considered to be a watershed in the history of international relations in the Mediterranean, defining a wholly new equilibrium and balance of power both between the ‘Powers’ themselves and with the Ottoman Empire. As described by Henry Laurens, this resulted in a ‘self-reproducing mechanism’, with: sectarian revolts tending towards national movements, European intervention both in the name of protecting Christians and of the nationality principle, and the limits to this intervention due to the dogma of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, corresponding to the need to

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maintain a balance between the great Western States, referred to at the time as the ‘Powers’, both within Europe and worldwide. (ibid.: 53) It is also worth quoting Leon Carl Brown who, placing the Eastern Question within the long time frame of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, defined it in more inclusive terms: it consisted in the setting up and perpetuation right down to the present day of a ‘penetrated political system’ in the Eastern Mediterranean, characterized by intrusion without colonization (Brown 1984: 5). Be it viewed as a mechanism or a system, in both cases the Eastern Question is a programmed history controlled by a set of constraints. It is an entity which needs to be interpreted and understood as such, a game whose rules are mainly known in advance.4 The Eastern Question therefore brings with it its own compass and guidelines. What matters here is that the rules of the game have been applied irrespective of scale, defining not only the stakes and issues in negotiations between heads of state, but also those in local equilibriums in the provinces of the Empire. Thus for example the conclusion Laurens draws about the ‘1840 Eastern crisis’: [It] is the clearest demonstration of the role of the Powers in the future of the Arab East. More concretely, it proves that the local political game is closely dependent on the balance of powers in Europe, and thus the world, and that the regional political forces need to be closely linked to the system of European forces. (Laurens 1993: 60) The Eastern Question is thus a fully homothetic account of events, and ‘what happens’ at the scale of the Empire in its entirety also occurs at the scale of such-and-such a provincial locale. This strict proportionality means that the thrust and purpose of a ‘provincial history’ is limited to bringing to light how the ‘great game’ of international relations is reproduced on a reduced scale within a given region. The approach adopted by David Kushner (for Palestine), as revealed in a passing turn of phrase, is exemplary here: The involvement of foreign powers in the affairs of the country was a corollary to the general European encroachment upon the Ottoman Empire which gave rise to the Eastern Question. [ … ] Certain aspects of the history of Palestine and its neighboring areas can therefore serve as suitable case studies which may teach us something about Ottoman history as a whole. (Kushner 1986: x; italics added)

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Corollary: (math.) direct consequence of a proven theorem. Despite the ambiguity of his conclusion, Kushner clearly states that the ‘history of Palestine’ is subservient to the theorem of the Eastern Question.5 Thus goes the history of the Eastern Question. Let us complete it simply by underlining the long-term and long-ranging nature of its problematics: This narrative is a central one because it deals directly with the problematics of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism and because it has implications for current debates on development strategies, international relations, regional conflicts, state formation, and the social bases of nationalist movements. (Doumani 1995: 3) Within the optic of my project for a provincial Ottoman history (a project similar to Doumani’s), this vast programme can also be formulated as follows: From our perspective the Eastern Question was in a way a raising of the stakes, an ‘internationalization’ of the center-periphery ‘tug-of-war’ between Istanbul and the provinces. [ … ] The internationalization did mark a significant rupture in the conduct of center-province relations. In the breakaway provinces – like Serbia or Greece – as well as the provinces remaining under Ottoman rule – like Mount Lebanon – race, ethnicity and sectarian identification became essentialist, political vocabularies of difference that fed international claims for ‘national’ emancipation. (Hanssen 2002: 55–56) But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The purpose of this brief preamble is simply to give an idea of the requisite timescale for the history of the Ottoman nineteenth century, whose tempo beats in time with the weakening pulse of the ‘sick man of Europe’.6 Does the Cypriot scene operate on this timescale? Retrospectively, it might seem that the locality of Cyprus clearly epitomizes one of the main mottoes of ‘Eastern Question’ historiography: namely, the idea of an ‘impact of the West’ deeply transforming the Mediterranean from that time onwards. Cyprus was one of many regions prized from Ottoman control during the nineteenth century, becoming a British quasi-protectorate in 1878. The low-intensity conflict which has torn Cypriot society apart from the mid-twentieth century onwards may also be seen as a late resurgence of an Eastern Question syndrome (cf. Copeaux and Mauss-Copeaux 2005: 23–70; Holland and Markides 2006: chapters 7 and 9; Varnava 2009). We shall see, though, that depending on the prism adopted, the pertinence of the ‘Eastern Question’ timescale for understanding the history of Ottoman Cyprus is not necessarily self-evident.

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Fitting concerns At first sight certain elements give cause to doubt that life in Cyprus followed any tempo other than that of works and days. A certain number of clues may be found, primarily in the consular archives, relating to the degree of integration of the island into Mediterranean networks of correspondence, and they are evocative of a feeling of isolation, of being outside the information circuits functioning in the Ottoman world. If Cyprus appears ‘provincial’, it is in the derogative sense of the word laid out above (see Introduction). Correspondence times – ‘suspensions and delays’ Dispatches written by European consular agents provide a convenient way of approaching this question since one of the duties of a consul is to establish and maintain close ties with the distant horizons of both their embassy in Istanbul and their relevant ministry in Europe. They therefore promptly indicate any obstacles to the carrying out of this duty. And in the case of Cyprus the obstacles were plentiful. The voyages of the consuls appointed to the island are informative of the difficulties in getting there. Here for example is the journey for which Niven Kerr was making preparations, having been appointed to Larnaca by the British Crown in the summer of 1843: As I am about to start for my Post at Cyprus, and intend to proceed via Marseilles, and from thence to Malta by the English Packet that will convey the next Overland Mail to that Island, allow me respectfully to lay before you the difficulty I shall experience in performing the rest of the voyage, owing to the want of any direct communication with Cyprus.7 Kerr requested that his superiors address an application to the Admiralty for a British vessel to transport him from Malta to Cyprus. However, his following correspondence makes it clear how slow progress was. Having arrived in Malta on 13 July,8 he had to wait until 1 September before one of the Queen’s ships took him on board to sail towards the Eastern Mediterranean. And the journey was not over yet. Kerr embarked on the Tyne in Malta for Alexandria; whence the Geyser took him to Cyprus, but only via Beirut. He only reached Larnaca on 18 September, and expressed his regret at the ‘unavoidable delays that have retarded my progress to this place’.9 This episode can serve as an introduction to the transport difficulties affecting not only the consuls but also the sending and receiving of correspondence, which depended on the shipping lines; and the archives suggest that Cyprus was an uncertain and on occasions unplanned port of call. No doubt Niven Kerr was professing his optimism in the annual report on Cyprus he sent to the Foreign Office in late 1844:

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Eventful synchronicities: the ‘Eastern Question’ The Island has also had a great advantage in the increase of steam communication, the Austrians making their voyages between Constantinople and Beyrout twice, instead of once a month as formerly. A French company was lately established at Marseilles to run a steamer between Cyprus, Syria, and Caramania, but their vessel has not as yet made her appearance. In addition to the above an American steamer is also expected to run on the same line.10

Whilst I have found no other traces of the existence of the French and American projects mentioned by Kerr, an Austrian line, Lloyd, is regularly mentioned in the correspondence of the consuls. And in his Lettres de Turquie published in the early 1850s, Abdolonyme Ubicini gives the details of his journey there: Caramania, Syria and Palestine Line between Smyrna and Jaffa, connecting with the previous [Anatolia line between Constantinople and Smyrna]. Crossing took 141 hours. Departures every fortnight on Saturday on the arrival of the Constantinople Packet. Arriving on the second Monday after departure. Ports of call, Rhodes, Mersin (Tarsus), Alexandretta (Aleppo), Latakia, Larnaca (Cyprus), Beirut, Caïfa. (Ubicini 1853–54: vol.1, 432–33) An Ottoman document from 1862 also confirms that the line tended to be twice monthly, as well as underlining how unpunctual the ships were.11 And indeed numerous hazards jeopardized the frequency of service. On 10 March 1845 Kerr writes that the Austrian ship will only be able to call at Cyprus once a month due to quarantine with Syria.12 In addition to such health hazards were those relating to the impact of military events on shipping lines, such as during the Egyptian–Ottoman war of 1840: ‘for the past several months steamships calling at Cyprus and Syria have abandoned this line, and since the Consulate at Larnaca has no Cipher Officer available, I am reduced to making the most of French commercial ships.’13 And so the consuls’ dispatches devote much space to deploring the situation, as much as they do to seeking alternatives and ad hoc solutions. The steady flow of correspondence depends on seizing opportunities on a day-to-day basis – when a ship leaves, irrespective of what sort or where it is going: Having long been without any direct or indirect opportunities to send you my correspondence I have not had the honour since my last dispatch of keeping you informed of the successive political events either here or in Caramania. Today I am taking advantage of an urgent opportunity for Alexandria to give you a summary that I am obliged to make as brief as possible due to my state of suffering and the little time I have at my disposal.14

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This dispatch dated 1833 is marked by disturbances arising from the Egyptian invasion of Syria. But the same attitude and practices would seem to prevail in calmer years too. For instance, there are brief notes on the verso of dispatches sent by Niven Kerr in 1843 indicating that they were carried by the Beirut steamer or the boat to Smyrna.15 And Kerr, writing in 1844, states: I have the honor [sic] to acquaint Your Lordship of the very imperfect and irregular means of communication with this Island. On despatches reaching Alexandria from London after a passage of thirteen or fourteen days by the monthly steamers, fifteen to sixteen days, and often a longer period, is necessary for their conveyance from thence to Cyprus, owing to there being no continuation of the line from Beyrout.16 Thus the authorities in London had various plans for a postal steamer in the Eastern Mediterranean, but they came to naught.17 It would seem that this failure was at least partially compensated by the arrival of ships ‘laden with merchandise’ directly from English ports to Cyprus, as noted by the French consul in 1849, whereas previously ‘it was Beirut and Smyrna which supplied its needs [for British manufactured goods] in small quantities’.18 But this solution was one of expedience and depended on the whims of trade. It is clear that in the mid-nineteenth century Cyprus was not part of any maritime postal network permitting regular consular correspondence. Does the same hold good for links between Cyprus and the authorities in Istanbul, or had they established specific means of communication (similar to those the British sought in vain to set up in the 1840s)? There are frequent allusions in Ottoman correspondence to the arrival or departure of a ‘steamer’ (va-pu-r) carrying individuals summoned to Istanbul (to settle legal disputes for instance).19 Furthermore there is also a reference in a dispatch dated autumn 1855 to a ‘postal steamer’ (posta va-pu-rı) used to carry about 400,000 piastres collected in Cyprus for the Imperial Treasury so as to finance the ‘Crimean Army’ (K.ırım ordu-yı hüma-yu-nıçün).20 The difficulty, however, is that it is rarely spelled out whether or not the ship in question is sent by the Ottoman navy. This did occur in July 1860 when the Porte got a va-pu-r ready to carry several high-ranking provincial officials (the Commander in Chief of the Arabian army, the governors general of Alep, Izmir, and Damascus, and the governor of Cyprus accompanied by a ‘special envoy’) to where they were posted.21 And even more revealing documents dated June 1859 sent by the Grand Vizier’s adviser (müstes¸a-r) to the Admiral of the Ottoman Fleet explicitly envisage an ‘imperial steamer’ (va-pu-r-ı hu-ma-yün), thus belonging to the Ottoman navy, to carry the ‘Cyprus post’ (K.ıbrıs postası).22 Exceptional circumstances require exceptional decisions, and the instruction to the K.apuda-n Pas¸a occurs within the context of the French campaign in an Italy marked by the Austrian defeats at Magenta on 4 June and at Solferino on 24 June 1859. As regards the July 1860 document, the context was that of an urgent situation arising from disturbances in Mount Lebanon

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and Damascus, making it necessary that the newly appointed administrators should rapidly take up office. Moreover in both instances additional clues confirm that the situation departed from the standard practice of the Ottoman authorities. Plus on 13 June 1859 the Porte was concerned about disruptions to Austrian maritime links, and it is further specified that these disruptions made it necessary to find an alternative solution so as to deliver official documents that needed to be sent to Cyprus.23 There is a similar degree of expediency in the travel arrangements of Ottoman dignitaries going to Cyprus or elsewhere. On 3 August 1850 a new governor, H . asan H . afız_ 24 Pas¸a, arrived in Larnaca ‘on the Austrian Lloyd steamer’; we also learn that due to disturbances in Lebanon ‘Kourchid Pacha from Beirut, sent in some secrecy by Fuad Pacha who did not wish to upset him, arrived here on a Turkish war Corvette and embarked on the Austrian Lloyd steamer for Constantinople’.25 As may be seen the standard practice of the Ottoman authorities (as for European consuls) to ensure a regular postal service between Cyprus and Istanbul would appear to be using the services of the Austrian company, and this despite the fact that the liaison was precarious as evidenced by the instances discussed above. All of this caused countless ‘suspension and delays’26 in correspondence between the Porte and provincial places. Did the situation change from the 1860s onwards? In July 1861 the French consul du Tour states that ‘an Ottoman steamship line is going to be created between Cyprus and Syria’.27 The fact is that steam shipping became commonplace over this period in the Ottoman maritime area (Quataert 1994: 800) – but as things stand it is impossible to ascertain whether the projected line du Tour refers to was in fact set up for Cyprus, and within what time frame.28 A more decisive factor was no doubt the progressive introduction of the telegraph across the Ottoman Empire. The first link (with London and Paris) entered service in Istanbul in 1855 (Davison 1963: 69), and in November 1863 an undersea cable with Cyprus (from Beirut) was planned.29 However, among the archives held in Istanbul dispatches only started being sent by telegraph to and from Cyprus as of about 1868–69. This is indirectly corroborated by the United States consul in Cyprus, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, who in the early 1870s states he sent a telegram from Larnaca to the governor of the island (1877: 186). It may hence be concluded that up until this period Cyprus was only precariously integrated into the postal world of the Ottoman Mediterranean. Mediterranean rumours Does the difficulty in corresponding with Cyprus imply that Cypriots ignored everything happening beyond their shores? Statements by certain consuls could suggest this was the case. ‘I found the Island in a state of great tranquillity and not affected by the Affairs of Syria, as regards the political feeling of the people’, the British consul Lilburn reported in early January 1842.30 As for the French consul du Tour, he complained in late 1860 that he was

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‘deprived of all information from the outside world as is our wont here’.31 A few decades earlier, however, his fellow countryman Méchain had been fully abreast of the international situation and its latest developments and it only took him a fortnight to learn about the defeat of the Ottomans and Egyptians at Navarino on 20 October 1827, to which he referred in a dispatch of 9 November.32 He explained that he had heard the news on the arrival of ‘the King’s Corvette and the News sent on purpose by Monsieur the Admiral Commander de Rigny [commander of the French naval forces in the Mediterranean] to inform and where necessary help French people in these countries’.33 And no doubt the strong presence of European fleets in the Mediterranean in the final years of the Greek War of Independence played a fair part in the speed with which the news spread (see Grenet 2010: 401–49). By way of comparison, in 1840, ‘news of the treaty signed [on 13 July] between the four Northern Powers relating to Eastern affairs’ only reached Cyprus on 31 August.34 On the subject of Navarino Méchain adds another precious detail, stating that he was the one who transmitted the information to the local authorities who knew nothing about it.35 On the contrary, when in June 1827 there was among the ‘Turks’ on the island an ‘ever-increasing rumour about help given by Europe and particularly France to those they treat as rebellious subjects’, Méchain states: If we go to the Moassil [muh.as.s.ıl], to the courts, to the Customs House, our requests are answered with recriminations about Lord Cochrane and Fabvier, and about the funds they receive from the Comité de Paris. They enumerate [the] vessels and arms it sends to the Greeks and then recite the most energetic passages in speeches pronounced by our orators, and especially by Gl Sebastiani who is well known in the Levant for having been the [friend] and adviser to a Sultan. Translations of our newspapers may now be found circulating among the Turks and everything they read in them awakens the fanatical hatred they have for the Frankish Infidels they all consider as their enemies and that they are quick to place in the same category as the Rayas.36 The local Ottoman authorities were just as well if not better informed about the international situation. Here the reference to the ‘translations of our newspapers’ is particularly noteworthy. Méchain declares to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May 1827 that he has ‘learned of the death of M. Nestor Delaflechelles, whom Your Excellency had appointed dragoman in Cyprus, via the Corfu Gazette’.37 In the same vein as the passage quoted above Kerr, writing about ‘those who are apostates of Islam’ in September 1845, declares: as the entire official correspondence relative to this subject which was presented to the House of Commons on the 3rd of May, 1844, was

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Eventful synchronicities: the ‘Eastern Question’ reprinted in a newspaper in the Italian language called the ‘Portafoglio Maltese’, and widely circulated in this Island, I have been since that period continually called on to interpose all my authority with the Turks in such matters.38

It is also worth noting the (no doubt exaggerated) turn of phrase used by the French consul Tastu during the 1849 visit of S.afvetı- Pas¸a, the governorgeneral of the ‘Islands of the White Sea’ (i.e. the Aegean), to which Cyprus was then attached: ‘Were it not for the visit of Safeti Pasha the island of Cyprus would only know of the new administrative principles via the newspapers, and only as a measure that did not concern it.’39 And so news did circulate in the Mediterranean via Corfu, Malta, or elsewhere, and Cyprus was far from being excluded from the press circulation networks. Irrespective of whether one were a consul or an Ottoman subject (provided one had mastered the rudiments of reading, it is true), it was possible to obtain at least a brief glimpse of what was happening afar between Istanbul, Paris, and London, both in times of war and in times of peace.40 A file of archives dated 1840 not only lends some support to these assumptions, it also fleshes them out to a certain extent. This multifarious file stuffed full of numerous contradictory documents sent by various Cypriot authorities and notables to the government in Istanbul relates to the accusations and defamatory claims about two Lefk.os¸a ‘headmen’ (k.ocabas¸ı), AcıKirgekı- and Abeydo, suspected of fraudulent accounts.41 Rather than the details of the affair (which it would be difficult to present clearly), what is interesting here are the ways in which it developed, as described by the two accused: certain ill-intentioned people [ … ] have encouraged the propagation by word-of-mouth [tefevvüh] of a web of empty lies and unfounded slanders; the slanders in :question have even been put down in writing and published in the Izmı-r newspaper; once printed and copied, they arrived here, and came to the attention of your servants.42 What we are dealing with here, if the slight anachronism be deemed acceptable, is a veritable press campaign. Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo do not clearly designate their accusers, but other documents in the same file make up for this omission. It is said to be primarily the Archbishop of Cyprus and the ‘chief headman’ (bas¸ k.ocabas¸ı), :named Ya-nk.o, who ‘wrote to the editors of the . newspaper [gazeteẖa-ne] in Izmı-r to accuse Kerkerı- [sic] and Abeydo’.43 A key point is that the source of these ‘slanders’ is Cyprus, and Smyrna merely acts as a relay where the hitherto oral rumour is put down in writing. This is no doubt due to the fact that before the final decades of the century there was no local newspaper in Cyprus in either Greek or Turkish, as the first newspaper printed in the island only came out in 1879 (Ünlü n.d.). Smyrna, on the other hand, became an important centre for the distribution of printed news in the

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1820s (Mardin 1962: 193; Mantran 1989: 455).44 In 1843 the particularly favourable conditions for producing all kinds of paper made the Ottoman authorities decide to set up a paper mill there which remained in operation from 1846 to 1848 and from 1863 to 1864 (Arıkan 1997). The document studied here informs us that a ‘newspaper in the Ru-m language’ (the title of which goes unspecified) was published in Smyrna, which in the autumn of 1840 became the forum magnifying the quarrels affecting the Cypriot microcosm.45 Another document in the same file of archives, drawn up by the Ba-f (Paphos) district authorities, provides a more detailed illustration of how this journal acted as an echo chamber. Following on from the explanations given by Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo, it describes how the Smyrna-based newspaper spread or is reputed to have spread the news to Cyprus and elsewhere: a copy of the above-mentioned newspaper reached Cyprus and the situation became known; it is thus expected that one of the said copies will reach the Sublime Porte in the same way, and furthermore that the things said about the above-mentioned will end up spreading by word-of-mouth [teva-tür] in the Ba-f district and the districts it contains.46 Two different directions are referred to here. On the one hand, the reference to the Sublime Porte shows that the authors are aware of Ottoman administrative practice – viz., when the content of a newspaper is deemed to be in some way ‘sensitive’, it is generally required that a copy be sent to Istanbul. Thus in 1851 the Porte requested the va-lı- of the Islands, Halı-l Pas¸a, to have any publication displaying ‘claims to Hellenism’ seized and to send copies of any writings with ‘sensitive and harmful’ content to Istanbul.47 On the other hand, the reference to the Ba-f district makes it clear that the propagation of the rumour defies the law of the shortest distance, for rather than spreading directly from Lefk.os¸a it first passes via Smyrna (and via the written word) before doubling back (and reverting to the spoken word) and spreading in the region of Ba-f. What is more a further document of the same sort drawn up by a representative of the local authorities in Leymosu-n (Limassol) provides exactly the same schema for the circulation of information.48 The file on Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo also enables us to make another observation. Cyprus may be considered as the point of departure for signals spread via the Smyrna press or newspapers elsewhere and thus as taking part in regional, Ottoman, and international current affairs, just as much as being a mere receptacle relegated to the sidelines of such affairs. Thus in 1859 the French consul Darasse reports the actions of a certain ‘Mehemet Pacha’, an agent sent by the Porte ‘with instructions to seize as much money as he could from the inhabitants, on the pretext of course of tax arrears, Backiés [ba-k.iye], or other’, and adds: ‘what happens in Cyprus will, I know, be published by the press.’49 This shows to what extent the echoes in the press of Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo’s troubles were virtually commonplace. Cypriots, or some of them

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at least, knew how to have their current affairs resound beyond the confines of their locality. And so notwithstanding variations in the speed with which news spread, there was an inextricable continuity linking the areas of communication at the local Cypriot scale (from Lefk.os¸a to Ba-f and Leymosu-n) with those at the Ottoman scale (from Lefk.os¸a to Istanbul and Smyrna). From this point of view it is a mistake to think in terms of the drowsy lethargy of the Cypriot backwaters on the one hand, and the frenetic tumult of the grand narrative of Mediterranean history on the other. What is needed is to conceive of the Ottoman province along different lines, running contrary to this form of folkloric provincialism – and to see it as the combination of heterogeneous space-times, running from the most local to the pan-Mediterranean and perhaps, even, beyond. ‘None of their concern’: provinciality and provincialism For those who know how to decipher it or just listen attentively, the Ottoman provinciality of Cyprus operates at the level both of local quarrels and of news reaching it from the outside world. Yet what could the opinion of the Ottoman authorities have been vis-à-vis this circulation of news? A good case study is afforded here by the reactions triggered in Cyprus by events in summer 1853 precursory to the Crimean War (cf. Hill 1972: 195). A letter from the French consul Doazan on 1 September can serve here as an introduction to this discussion: The Island of Cyprus has also been going through its own little political commotions. Our islanders, who are normally so peaceful and indifferent to events happening far away, have nevertheless taken a keen interest in the Turkish–Russian question, with the Turks giving full vent to their rage with Greek Rayas, who for their part have indulged in overly premature joy. Some places have had scenes of disorder. In the cafes in Larnaca the Greeks, emboldened by believing themselves to be the stronger for being sheltered by the Europeans, have been shouting out ‘Long live Nicolas, down with the Sultan’, and in Limassol, Baffo, and a few villages, the Turks have armed themselves and prevented the Greeks from celebrating their religious services.50 A few brief comments are called for. Although the events related here illustrate the way Cypriot life was permeated by international tensions, this dispatch is clearly endued with a ‘provincial’ dimension in the French sense of the term – the smallness of everything, the tranquillity and indifference to elsewhere, all the ingredients of this folklore of the province that I will be calling provincialism. The condescending way in which Doazan introduces what he has to say is illustrative of this: ‘its own little political commotions’, even though what he goes on to report and the way in which he puts it would

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seem to militate against any such minimization. It is also worth noting that the ‘scenes of disorder’ would not appear to be limited to places where the news travels fastest, and in particular the reference to Ba-f is interesting, a place portrayed as remote in a previous document. In essence, the (virtually generic) way in which the consul describes ‘what has happened’ is primarily the expression of a form of self-satisfaction: The Governor, understanding the significance of the observations I unofficially addressed to him, was persuaded that allowing this commotion to continue unchecked would potentially add to the Sultan’s problems. Fortunately, these hostile dispositions were contained, and if everything finishes with a peaceful outcome the exasperation and enthusiasm of the Cypriots [will wane].51 Let us compare this phrasing with the pronouncements of the Ottoman authorities for what they suggest about the Ottoman vision of their province.52 Here it is useful to quote at length from a report from governor (k.a-’im-mak.a-m) Meh.med S¸erı-f Pas¸a to his hierarchy on 23 July 1853, setting out in detail his propositions to quash any further stirrings of discontent: The people of the island of Cyprus having heard that preventative measures had recently been taken with regard to the Russian situation, unfounded and unjustified rumours have recently started to circulate among the Muslims and non-Muslims [re‘a-ya-] in certain districts and villages. As soon as the news reached your humble servant, imperious warnings were given by publicly issuing the following express instructions in each district: ‘Everyone must attend to his own personal business and affairs, and it is wholly unfitting and none of their concern for anyone to express opinions about preparations and other concerns which may take place between states. Everyone shall as previously ensure that friendly and neighbourly relations be maintained between Muslims and non-Muslims, and busy himself with the fruitful pursuit of wealth and trade. Henceforth, whenever a person is known to have acted unfittingly by expressing an opinion about affairs of state, he shall be punished.’53 S¸erı-f Pas¸a presents these ‘express instructions’ as his own initiative.54 However, the terms in which the question is presented elsewhere (but at the same period and on the same subject), suggest that this is typical administrative practice in the provinces and characteristic of the attitude of provincial Ottoman administrators. Let us examine the minutes of a meeting between the principal authorities of the governorate of the Islands of the White Sea, held in Rhodes on 26 July 1853.55 On first reading, the document differs markedly from the previous one, since it is basically a paraphrase of an order issued elsewhere:

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Eventful synchronicities: the ‘Eastern Question’ The imperial cutter honoured us with an order [buyruldı] from the Marshall, with two copies in Turkish and Greek, ordering as follows: as reported to Your Excellency since certain people have, due to the Russian question, been so bold as to perturb the minds of the people of the country and fabricate all sorts of unfounded rumours, and [ … ] given the manifest importance of the region and the position of the Governorate of the Islands of the White Sea, it has been ordered that it be declared and made known that, under the sovereign aegis ensuring their tranquillity, the people of the country are to go solely about their own business, and safety and peace, without troubling their minds about anything. Should any individual dare to propagate false rumours he shall, if a foreigner, be banished and removed from the country, or in the case of local people their name and standing shall be transmitted for punishment.56

The person sending out this order is not explicitly identified, but there are several clues all pointing in the same direction: 1. The order which has been received is said to have come ‘from the Marshall’ (müs¸-ıra-ne), a term mainly used for the principal military leaders, and more generally senior officials of the Ottoman State. 2. The order is referred to as a ‘buyruldı’, and it would appear that in the archives of the province this term was mainly used to refer to an instruction from a provincial authority.57 Orders from Istanbul and directly invested with the aura of the Sultan are more normally referred to otherwise (as ‘ira-de’, ‘ferma-n’, or ‘emirna-me-i sa-mı-’).58 3. The governor-general of the Islands is not one of the signatories, and is represented among the signatories by a ‘substitute’ (k.a-’im-mak.a-m-ı va-lı-). In a dispatch dated 24 August 1853 and signed by his hand, he states that he had left Rhodes to visit certain islands placed under his authority, referring to Sa-k.ız (Chios) and Midillü (Mytilene).59 4. The buyruldı was carried to Rhodes by a ‘k.u-ter’ (from the English ‘cutter’), a light craft for short-distance transport. It is thus quite possible that it was the vessel at the governor-general’s disposal for short trips to the Islands or for urgent correspondence. However, it is worth noting that such a ship might well not have been used for any longer and more perilous voyage, such as that between Rhodes and Cyprus.60 So we may conclude that the order in question very probably comes from the governor-general of the Islands himself (Rah.mı- Pas¸a), and not from the Sublime Porte. Whilst the possibility that orders were previously sent from Istanbul cannot be excluded, we are dealing here with the intraprovincial formulation of the situation, with a provincial administrator addressing his subordinates so as to convey his instructions to each locality and see that they are carried out. The reference to the two languages (the order was sent out both in Greek and in Turkish) shows that the aim was

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precisely for local effectiveness. In this way the buyruldı paraphrased here operates according to exactly the same principle as the order by S¸erı-f Pas¸a quoted earlier. And thus the prohibition expressed is based on the same provincial administrative precept: ‘Everyone must attend to his own personal business and affairs’, S¸erı-f Pas¸a ordered; ‘the people of the country are to go solely about their own business’, enjoins Rah.mı- Pas¸a. Both thus formulate the principle of a provincialism by decree: the people of the province are not to busy themselves with ‘events happening far away’, to use the expression of the French consul Doazan. Theirs is to be a strictly local history, and any Ottoman horizon is denied to them. Provincialism accordingly operates here as a negation of the news networks spawned by provinciality. There is however a clear difference in tone between the two documents, perhaps (at least in part) due to the fact that the first is a direct form of address whereas the second is a careful paraphrase. On the one hand we have the muted terms imbued with weighty official expression found in the Rhodes document, and on the other the brusque and assertive judgement, ‘it is wholly unfitting and none of their concern’ (ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe). Such a contrast makes it resoundingly clear that even though this may well have been a period of ‘reforms’, we need to be careful not to take the wrong political point of reference when reading these archives: we are dealing with a Sultanic ideal, bodied forth in a rhetoric (‘the sovereign aegis ensuring their tranquillity’) that is no less effective for being automatic. And there is little evidence to suggest that this ideal gives way to a political vision drawing on other values, which some might deem to be more ‘Western’, more ‘liberal’, and more ‘modern’. On the contrary, there is a curt haughtiness which, like S¸erı-f Pas¸a, acknowledges no law other than that of the established Ottoman socio-political hierarchy (Veinstein 1978): on the one hand are the subjects (re‘a-ya-) confined to their ‘personal business and affairs’, and on the other the rulers, who were members of the ‘military class’ (s.ınıf-ı ‘askerı-) and who exercised a monopoly over ‘affairs of state’.61 The expression ‘ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe’, translated here as ‘unfitting and none of their concern’, is revealing: vaz.-ıfe – meaning ‘duty’, ‘office’, ‘charge’, as well as ‘salary’ and ‘pension’ (Redhouse 1890: 1276) – is the term that is most frequently used in documents of the period for the prerogatives and duties of an administrator.62 As for the opposition between a within (da-ẖil) and a without (ẖa-ric), there is no need to go into a structural analysis of Ottoman political terminology to see that it is closely related to an essential part of the tie binding the Sultan and his ‘slaves’: ‘the traditional Ottoman concept of had, or “boundary”, indicating and enclosing the status, prerogatives, and privileges of each member of the Ruling Class’ (Shaw 1970, here quoted from 2000: 234). And so ultimately the expression ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe would appear to be the exact Ottoman Turkish equivalent of an Arabic expression used just as frequently by the Sultan’s agents at the period, to indicate the point where . they feel they are exceeding their prerogatives: ‘min gayri h.addin’.63 In short

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we are dealing here with a semantic repertoire that is traditionally reserved for the elite Ottoman leadership. This observation means that the translation of ‘ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe’ used for the purposes of the argument being developed here is not entirely appropriate, and that it might be more accurately rendered as ‘not within their sphere of competence’, which no doubt better captures the bureaucratic register of the Ottoman formulation. That is why the use made of it by governor S¸erı-f Pas¸a is all the more remarkable: his use of the notion of vaz.-ıfe points not to the duties of some subordinate official, but to those of the entire local population; the phrase ‘ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe’ no longer stands for the ‘affairs’ exceeding those within an official’s attributions, but rather for the whole of the state politics (‘umu-r-ı devlet’), as opposed to one’s ‘personal affairs and occupations’ (‘umu-r ve ẖus.u-s.a-t-ı ẕa-tiyye’). Hence a terminology intended to codify daily bureaucratic behaviour overlaps with a concept of rule, an idea of authority whereby the ruled inhabitants must not interfere with the state policies of the sovereign. This provides us with essential clues for understanding what sort of archive we are dealing with, and the ways in which it needs to be interpreted. The quotation studied here is sufficient to show just how fertile the semantic fabric is in the documents produced by and for provincial administrators, and this brings with it certain constraints. The first is that of rarity, as there are certain words the administrators judged to be ‘unfitting’ both for themselves and for the ‘people of the country’, and so they are not found in their writings. The second such constraint is that of frequency, for there are certain words that they chose to privilege. These words no doubt shaped their knowledge of the province, and there is every reason to believe that by policing the strict bodily and linguistic divide between the governors and the governed, between what was deemed fitting and what unfitting, they also exerted a powerful influence over the knowledge possessed by provincials themselves.

A singularly provincial Eastern Question Toing and froing between provinciality and provincialism, we need to test how fitting it is to read events in Cyprus in terms of the saga of the Eastern Question. If local governors S¸erı-f and Rah.mı- Pas¸as insist the heated debates of international current affairs are not a fitting concern for Cypriots, it is precisely because the island played at least an indirect part in their circulation, as seen above. The provincial history of Cyprus is thus to a certain extent concerned by the Eastern Question. But does that mean to say that Cypriot history needs to follow the master pattern it lays down, in accordance with some homothetic theorem? Studying the two orders quoted above has shown that we are dealing with documents concerning relations between a governor-general and his subordinates, and I implied that they are thereby provincial documents. But

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any such characterization should not be accepted lightly, and we need to look at its implications and determine just what is at stake. The approach taken will be as follows: if the documents quoted above may be deemed provincial, it is because their horizon is defined by the imperative that they be effective ‘here and now’. They are thereby concerned with drawing on local knowledge whilst at the same time shaping the knowledge of the locals, and seek to accommodate as far as possible specificities of place whilst at the same time reducing them. Furthermore, they may also be considered provincial insofar as neither S¸erı-f Pas¸a nor Raẖmı- Pas¸a are concerned with producing a new form of knowledge or novel form of administration, and their proper duty is limited to issuing those instructions they deem – on the basis of the precepts of pre-existing competence – to be best suited to maintaining or re-establishing public calm. For these various reasons these documents partake in what I propose to call a provincial style – that is to say they are inspired by an administrative ideal which is indifferent to the stakes of high politics, unless converted by the sovereign authority into instructions to be applied in the here and now. We may detect here the dissymmetry between, on the one hand, the uncertainties of the Ottoman political future and, on the other, the inflexibility of administrative faits accomplis (unless a counter-order is issued). This takes us back to the question of how fitting the Eastern Question may be deemed to be. Consular archives – archives of the Eastern Question? The thrust here relates more to the ‘Western’ archives and how best to use them than to the Ottoman documentation. What documents could better attest to the increasing implications of the ‘Powers’ in Ottoman affairs than the archives of European consuls in the Levant merchant stations? This means that it is very tempting to search them for clues to a history of international relations, or more exactly relations between the Ottoman and European states. After all, is it not self-evident that documents sent to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the British Foreign Office may be read in this light? As regards the French documents in particular, those conserved in Paris are primarily dispatches addressed by the consul to his minister, and only more rarely those sent to his direct superior, the ambassador in Constantinople. Their content has therefore undergone a degree of selection, focusing on questions of general politics, whereas correspondence sent to Constantinople on the other hand tends to confine itself far more to the everyday duties of the consul. Thus in 1827 when referring to the harm the governor of Cyprus, ‘a vulgar fanatic’, has done to the European merchants in Larnaca, the consul is quick to add: ‘Discussions arising from this system were the subject of a voluminous correspondence with the King’s ambassador. It would be tiresome to remind Your Excellency of all these details of local interest.’64

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Cutting short these prosaic reflections, Méchain then launches into a diatribe supposedly relating to ‘high politics’: It is a matter of the Turban waging war against the Hat, and expressing loud and clear its desire to chase it out from its States. This, I know, is what Sultan Mahmoud and the Ottoman Minister think at heart, but the indiscreet employee of their offices, who wishes to carry out this desire of all good Muslims, is nothing but a blunderer and will be disavowed.65 It therefore seems in many respects legitimate to employ a diplomatic frame of reference when reading these consular archives. This would provide local substance to the grand historical narrative of the Eastern Question or, conversely, would endow the small-scale history of the Cypriot province with an epic dimension. However, as shown by the quotation from Méchain above, when a consul seeks to meddle in diplomacy his posturing is frequently only equalled by his simplicity and ignorance. No doubt the consuls took part in the circulation of pronouncements within the sphere of the Mediterranean, studied above with regards to Cyprus. It is clear on reading them that their way of thinking bears the imprint of a certain diplomatic rhetoric. Méchain pointedly refers in 1821 to the ‘despair of the Turks who, believing their empire to be collapsing around them, no longer display any consideration’.66 And Darasse, writing in 1859, is quick to adopt a prose style worthy of Nicolas I: ‘Anyone living in these countries and observing what is happening cannot but give in to the vague sense of foreboding which generally precedes great crises, and believe despite himself in the imminent end of the Ottoman Empire.’67 Elsewhere he adds: ‘The state of the invalid is such that at the slightest symptom the estate is divided up prematurely.’68 In this respect one may speak of a diplomatic argument being projected into the heart of the consuls’ paperwork. But Darasse also revealingly adds: ‘Naturally I do not know and find it hard to believe, but the fact is that were it possible to take up such great affairs, the circumstances would be favourable and people’s minds prepared.’69 The consul openly admits here his awareness of the discrepancy between the here and now of his duties on the one hand, and the epic diplomatic dramas involving ambassadors and ministers on the other. It is precisely this mismatch that Darasse seeks to minimize by the ambiguous expression ‘were it possible to take up such great affairs’, both gesturing towards a great plan of Napoleonic proportion – expanding the programme of French conquests following on from Magenta – and also more prosaically expressing the modest ambition of a consul seeking to assert himself as the local power.70 But then there is his avowal of his own ignorance, and the humble and clumsy way he presents it clearly indicates he is aware of exceeding his prerogatives. There might well be an Eastern Question, but it is not within his sphere of competence – ‘ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe’ once again.

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The sphere of competence of a consul, even in the thick of crises that others have understood to be threatening the international balance in the Mediterranean, is to ‘protect the trade and navigation of [his] nationals abroad. The limits of this mission, though not its rules, are determined by customary law and local practice’ (De Clercq and Vallat 1868: vol.1, 1). Respecting Ottoman sovereignty is thus an absolute prerequisite. It suffices to read Darasse, writing on 19 July 1859 (hence at the height of the Crimean War): ‘if I were obliged to intervene to demand redress for all the infamies and injustices committed by the local authorities, and this every time the Christians asked it of me, I would no longer have the time to look after the interests of my nationals.’71 And when in the middle of the commotions of the summer of 1821 Méchain finds reason to complain of the ‘partiality of the Governor’ (who according to him intercepts his correspondence with Constantinople and encourages recalcitrant payers in Cyprus to fleece French traders), he knows of only one rule of conduct: ‘a good ferman would remove all these obstacles, and I have asked the Embassy.’72 The consuls thus appear far removed from the Eastern Question, and their job strictly limits them to the traditional practice of power in Ottoman countries. This should put us on our guard against the temptation to read consular archives diplomatically. The seemingly generic nature of these archives, from Méchain to Darasse, does not preclude the possibility of important upheavals or discreet shifts. In particular, as Robert Ilbert has pointed out, the socio-political profile of consuls underwent significant transformation in the 1840s: The former consuls, who were ‘merchants in chief ’, gave way to professional politicians. The period of the merchant stations came to an end. [ … ] [T]he consuls had more clearly become the instruments of political pressures from their home countries. (Ilbert 1996: 3 and 81) It is tempting to subscribe to this vision for Cyprus at this period, and the case study of British consular representatives in Larnaca provides sufficient corroboration. In the 1820s and 1830s the agent for the British Crown in Cyprus appointed as vice-consul was named Antonio Vondiziano. He belonged to the group of ‘Ionians’ formerly employed by the Levant Company, who thus enjoyed royal protection. But in the 1830s both London and the British Embassy in Istanbul were considering modifying the status of consuls. In 1825 the dissolution of the Levant Company had already obliged the government in London to take the Ionians under its direct authority, and on this occasion the Foreign Office asked John Cartwright, the consul general in Istanbul, to draw up a review of the ‘consular service’ of the British Crown in the Ottoman Empire.73 On several occasions during the following decade Cartwright was called upon to give his opinion on the operation of British consulates in the Levant, and drew up two voluminous reports in late 1831 (on the division into consular districts and the income of agents)74 and late

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1835 (on consular jurisdiction in civil affairs)75 respectively. Both in terms of their form and their content these denote a plan to increasingly rationalize the bureaucracy of the ‘Consular Service’. When Vondiziano’s post fell vacant, this provided the Foreign Office with the opportunity to put the project into practice on Cyprus. In 1825, writing about the old vice-consul who had been in office since 1796,76 Cartwright pointed out that ‘his advanced age, it is supposed, prevents him attending so effectually as formerly to the affairs of his office’.77 But it was only on the death of Vondiziano in early 1839 that it was possible to change the way the Cypriot post was managed.78 The resignation inherent in the following internal minute: ‘the Foreign Office has received no Returns of the Trade of Cyprus, and it is out of the question to expect any from the present aged Consul Mr. Vondiziano’,79 was superseded in Lord Palmerston’s instructions to the new consul James Lilburn, enjoining him to preserve the archives carefully, be punctual in his bureaucratic duties, and provide statistics whenever possible: I also inclose to you Copies of Circular Despatches dated the 30th September 1833 and 1st October 1836, and I have to call your particular attention to the directions contained in those Despatches, enjoining the careful preservation of the Archives of the Consulate. You will be punctual in forwarding to this Department at the regular Periods, the Returns required by the General Instructions; and it will be your duty to avail yourself of every favorable [sic] opportunity for collecting and transmitting to me any further useful or interesting information which you may be able to obtain relating to Commerce, Navigation and Agriculture, and to any other branch of Statistics.80 It is also possible to see this new approach in another set of indications. In late 1836 Palmerston recommended the consuls in place to ‘[appoint] to British Vice Consular Situations in the Turkish Dominions such British Subjects only as have a sufficient knowledge of the Turkish and Arabic languages’.81 A circular of 30 November 1839 enquired into the linguistic skills of the consuls themselves.82 And finally, in spring 1841 the Foreign Office sent its ambassador in Istanbul, Lord Ponsonby, ten copies of the revealingly entitled work: Reid’s Outlines of Turkish Grammar.83 The language issue is clearly associated (as shown by the instructions of 1836) with the desire to rid the ‘Service’ of its non-British local intermediaries. The post in Cyprus, which fell vacant in 1839, affords once again a privileged viewpoint for observing this logic at work. The nephew of the deceased vice-consul, Paul Vondiziano, requested that he be awarded the position,84 but his request was turned down, and a note written in the margin by John Bidwell, the head of the ‘Consular Service’ in the Foreign Office, unambiguously states the reason for this refusal: the new consul must ‘[c]ertainly [be] a British subject’.85 And it was indeed a subject of the British Crown, in the person of James Lilburn, who

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was appointed to this post in 1841 with the title of full consul.86 It would appear that the question of who represented the British Crown in the merchant stations of the Levant had become a cause of national interest in the eyes of the authorities in London.87 Such were the changes which seemed to be on the horizon in the early decades of the Ottoman ‘reforms’, with the growing integration of the Cypriot consular post into the diplomatic dynamics operative between the ‘Powers’. The consuls in Cyprus were the linchpins of the Eastern Question. But it is worth noting that this is no more than a possibility. For the internal reorganization of the British consular service which occurred in the 1830s and 1840s arose just as much from a pragmatic concern with good management than from any high political stakes, and perhaps even more so. When in March 1849 the Ottoman authorities decided to reorganize the administrative hierarchy in the Mediterranean islands, and to attach Cyprus to the governorship general of the ‘Islands of the White Sea’ (Ceza-’ir-i Bah.r-ı Sefı-d eya-leti) – of which Rhodes became the headquarters (Aymes 2004a: 244–45) – Lilburn’s successor Niven Kerr immediately underlined the necessary adjustments that this change implied for the post of the British consul in Larnaca: Owing to this new insular Jurisdiction I would beg the favour of Your Lordship’s instructions as to the rules by which my future proceedings are to be guided, for, Rhodes being the head quarters of the new Governor General, I am at a loss to know through what channel I am to communicate with him, as it appears contrary to the rules of the service that the concerns of a Consulate should have to be referred to a superior authority through the medium of the Vice Consul at Rhodes. Permit me, with all due respect, to submit to Your Lordship’s consideration whether the Consular service in these islands would not be more efficiently administered by a full Consul being appointed to Rhodes, having under his jurisdiction the same islands as those confided to the Government of Safety [sic, for S.afvetı-] Pacha, and Cyprus being reduced to a Vice Consulate. I cannot but think that a centralization of action in the Consulates, corresponding to that now adopted by the Turkish Government, would be highly advantageous to Her Majesty’s service, conducive to the welfare of the islands, and at the same time a saving of much inconvenience to Her Majesty’s Ambassador at the Porte [ … ].88 It is worth noting the terms in which Kerr puts forward his arguments, based on a concern for the ‘rules of the service’ and ‘efficient administration’, presenting himself more as one well versed in administrative routine than as a ‘professional politician’. Managemental concerns precede national interests. And it is for the same reason that Palmerston complied with Kerr’s request,89 who was transferred to Rhodes and entrusted with naming his successor (and

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henceforth subordinate) in Cyprus. He opted for a certain Demetrios Pierides90 who had very much in common with the former vice-consul Vondiziano: for all ‘his perfect knowledge of the English language, (which no one else in Cyprus possesses)’ and ‘his general acquaintance with English principles’,91 due to the fact that he had grown up in England, Pierides was ‘born of Rayah parents’; yet, Kerr comments, ‘as we have instances of persons so circumstanced holding both Consular, and Vice Consular appointments’ he does not expect this situation to cause any problems with the Porte.92 Furthermore, Palmerston pointed out to Kerr that the new vice-consul would not draw any salary from the Foreign Office93 – when even Antonio Vondiziano had received a stipend (which over the course of time and with the depreciation of the Ottoman piastre had become purely symbolic).94 The days of the ‘merchants in chief ’ were thus not quite over yet. To see to just what extent the professionalization of the consuls was far from being irreversible (at least for a very long time to come),95 it suffices to read the description put forward by the Frenchman Darasse in 1858: [A]lthough nearly all the states in the world are represented in Cyprus, they are only done so by natives of European descent and dubious nationality, called Levantines, unpaid civil servants, operating outside any consular career, and who wear many different uniforms and are highly desirous of enriching themselves.96 And Darasse refers to the case of the ‘Vice Consul of England (in post, a former tailor’s boy from Larnaca)’.97 The vagaries of the British consular position in Larnaca show in an almost archetypal way the leap to be made if we are to tie together the routines of the province and the teleology of the Eastern Question within a single historical schema. Significant events – two episodes None of this means that the provincial far reaches were wholly untroubled by events. If the Eastern Question is so substantive it is due to a set of significant episodes – Navarino 20 October 1827, London 13 July 1841, Paris 30 March 1856 – episodes which were events in their own right, furnishing the material for a history of battles and treaties. And as we have seen above, however remote Cyprus might seem, it was far from unaffected by the impact of such dramatic events, and just as they sent waves rippling through imperial capitals, certain episodes were also significant events in provincial locales – episodes during which political happenings intruded upon and upset the pure present of the administrators in Cyprus itself. August 1827: against the international backdrop of the increasing involvement of the British and French governments in Greece’s affairs, a young ‘Eastern secretary’ arrived in Larnaca from the British Embassy in Istanbul,

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one Robert Liston Elliott. On 14 and 15 August he spoke with the governor of the island (who had come from Larnaca for the occasion). The conversation dealt in particular with the poor treatment allegedly undergone by an Ionian under British protection named ‘Caliga’. Apparently it took a somewhat unusual turn since Elliott felt obliged to report the following details: It is proper that I should inform Your Excellency that in the course of my discussions with the Governor I found myself under the necessity of using very strong language, more especially with regard to the Ionian Caliga, whom he persisted in declaring a Rayah, and who is in fact a native of the Island and has no regular document establishing his nationality. After informing the Governor of Your Excellency’s Instructions to remove the Consul and such British subjects as might not wish to remain in the event of his declining to give the satisfaction required, I stated that after what had taken place I should not think it right to leave any Individual who might have a right to British Protection to his mercy, and that if any obstruction were offered to Caliga’s departure, I should think it my duty to land a force from His Majesty’s Ships and take him away; I added that though from the friendship subsisting between the two Countries we always addressed ourselves to the Porte to obtain redress for any grievances, His Excellency must be well aware that in an extreme case we could easily redress them ourselves, and that an order from His Majesty’s Government to the Commander of the Squadron could in the course of a week turn him out of his office and of the Island he governed.98 The contrast with the consuls’ missives is striking. The traditional technique of the ‘good ferman’, recalled here for the record (‘we always addressed ourselves to the Porte’), gives way to an attitude which would appear to be better summarized by the expression ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (even though it might seem anachronistic for the period). The point is that Elliott was an embassy man, and thus familiar with the ‘great game’ in which new horizons were opening up at the time due to the War of Greek Independence. His journey across the Mediterranean during the summer of this year, 1827, is revelatory: he left Istanbul for Smyrna, then boarded a British vessel to Greece where he received instructions ‘to make known confidentially and with all suitable precautions the state of [the] suspended negotiations’ between London and Istanbul.99 It was from Greece that he headed off for Larnaca, perhaps with some Byronic philhellenic verses in mind. Whilst the consuls posted to Cyprus might on occasion be responsive to similar lyricism, there is nothing in the archives of these years to suggest that relations between local consular representatives and the authorities in Nicosia were marked by such arrogance. On 6 July 1859, the :‘Consular Corps of Cyprus’ sent a joint letter to the governor of the island, Is.ha-k. Pas¸a:

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Eventful synchronicities: the ‘Eastern Question’ Mr. Governor, A civil servant has been sent from Constantinople to Cyprus tasked with demanding considerable sums of the inhabitants of this Island. However great the financial needs of the state might be, there is no worse danger than using such irregular procedures. Yet one of the means used consists in demanding taxes which are said to have not been paid over the past 15 years. [ … ] Accordingly the unfortunate inhabitants of Cyprus have no alternative other than to submit or revolt as the inhabitants of Candia did last year. [ … ] The Christian population of this island is known for its gentleness, and it is no doubt for this reason that it is being treated so harshly. It could, however, if need be, respond to injustice with force, especially as it is by far the largest. Any idea of encouraging it on such a course is far removed from our thoughts. On the contrary, we shall endeavour to dissuade it from doing so should the case arise, and when the Christian inhabitants begged us for our support, we recommended that they employ purely legal means and address themselves to the sovereign himself. In the meantime, we believe we should seriously draw the attention of Y.E. to the attitude of the population. We are also informing our governments of what is happening in Cyprus, to enable them to be able to appreciate the justice of the fiscal measures being implemented in this Island and the means of its implementation.100

The direct style of this document is certainly surprising. It is direct in both meanings of the word: first due to its cold brutality, breaking with the codes we are accustomed to finding in the consular archives. Here not only do the authors use diplomatic emphasis (a relatively standard procedure, referring here for the record to the precedent in Crete), they also brandish the threat of a ‘Christian’ revolt, whilst pretending (like Elliott thirty or so years earlier) to respect ‘legal means’ and the sovereignty of the Sultan. The language is thus inflected throughout by the grammar of the Eastern Question, which is even explicitly referred to at this period in Cyprus when a group of ‘French notables of Cyprus’ writing to Napoleon III on 28 May 1859 declare that ‘Western immigration is the only possible and rational solution to the Eastern Question’.101 The style is also direct in the second meaning of the word: with Elliott we were dealing with an indirect narration, leaving open the possibility that subsequent interpolation might have introduced additional arrogance. Here, on the contrary, the document reproduces discourse directly addressed to the governor in its original version prior to translation. It is important to underline the particular nature of this document: in the vast majority of consular dispatches of the period relations between representatives of the Powers and the local authorities are merely reported, with the words used being those of the consul addressing his superior and not the Ottoman governor. The relatively exceptional nature of this document also makes it harder to understand:

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does the firm and direct style of the ‘Consular Corps of Cyprus’ really depart from the rule of consular propriety? Are we not perhaps being a bit too quick when we attribute consular discourse, even though we know it poorly, with a sense of restraint borrowed from diplomatic ceremonial? Maybe the direct style of this document is the sort of rough handling the powerful typically met with at the local level, rather than an outburst of imperialist arrogance. Provincial improvisation And thus a point is gradually emerging which needs to inform any attempt to understand in what way the Eastern Question may or may not have been a significant event in the province. Any such attempt is not simply a matter of enquiring into the echoes in Larnaca or Nicosia of the game being played out between the Powers. Operating with some such logic of echoes, limited by the same premises as the centre/periphery conceptualization, would amount to decreeing a necessary heteronomy for the provincial dynamic. But on the contrary the double set of quotations given above makes it possible to imagine a singularity which would have been without precedent or equivalent for the ‘central’ diplomatic services. So it is possible that the principle of homothetic transformation be broken once again, this time between the significant events in the chancelleries and headquarters of the capitals and what happens in the provincial depths. In 1844 the British ambassador Stratford Canning obtained an ‘imperial declaration’ from the Porte stating that ‘the death penalty for apostasy from Islam would no longer be applied to Muslims, converts from Christianity, who wished to revert to their original faith’ (Davison 1963: 45). This issue of ‘apostates’ caused the European powers to exert diplomatic pressure on the Sublime Porte, prompting grandiloquent declarations remembered by posterity for the solemn emotion they imbued the Eastern Question with.102 One such is a statement by Lord Palmerston in 1851: Her Majesty’s Government are convinced that the Turkish Government must be aware that the time is gone by when Christian Europe could see with indifference the persecution of Christians on account of their Religious opinions; and as the Porte thinks it essential for the interests and safety of the Turkish Empire that Turkey should be deemed one of the European Powers, and that it should be an element in the general balance of Power in Europe, the Nations of Christendom have a right to expect that fanatical persecution of Christians shall cease in Turkey, and that no persons shall in Turkey be punished or molested in consequence of their religious opinions, whether those opinions may have been originally imbibed, or may have been adopted upon conversion.103 One simply has to read these lines out loud to feel their full force, and any translation already partially undermines it, as may be seen from the French

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version of this declaration drawn up by ‘Stephen’ Pisani, the translator at the British Embassy in Istanbul, for the agents of the Ottoman Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Le Gouvernement de S.M. est convaincu que le Gouvernement Turc doit savoir que ce tems est passé où l’Europe Chrétienne pouvait voir avec indifférence la persécution des Chrétiens pour des opinions religieuses ; et comme la Porte trouve que, pour les intérêts et la surêté [sic] de l’Empire Ottoman il est essentiel que la Turquie soit considérée comme une des Puissances Européennes, {et qu’elle doit être considérée comme un élément dans la balance générale du Pouvoir en Europe,} les nations de la Chrétienté ont le droit de s’attendre à ce que la persécution fanatique des Chrétiens cesse en Turquie, et que personne ne soit puni ou molesté dans ce pays pour ses opinions religieuses si ces opinions sont originellement inculquées ou adoptées après la conversion.104 But this translation does its work, and in the draft response drawn up by the Ottoman authorities, they adopt the key expressions of Palmerston’s declaration. It is worth quoting two significant extracts: ‘in truth it is necessary that no one be forced and dragooned as regards religious convictions [mu‘tek.ada-t-ı dı-niyyede]’, and ‘no Christian has been punished and forced as regards religious ideas [efka-r-ı dı-niyyeden t.olayı]’.105 Here we touch at the heart of the phraseology of the Eastern Question. What impact could these fine turns of phrase have had far from Istanbul, within the sphere (and at the local scale) of the province? There clearly was an impact, as the consuls in Cyprus were well aware of the diplomatic stakes currently accreting around the question of ‘apostates’. In June 1844 Niven Kerr acknowledged receipt of a circular sent by Canning to all his colleagues on 26 March: ‘[I] beg, with due respect, to congratulate Your Excellency on the tolerance which your exertions have secured for apostates from Islamism.’106 But the most important part is still to come, for Kerr deems it fitting to inform Canning while he is about it that in Cyprus ‘entire villages’ are inhabited by ‘Greek Muslims’, ‘many of whom will probably avail themselves of the benefit which Your Excellency’s late negotiations have procured for them when the fact of their security in taking such a step becomes more generally promulgated’.107 In addition to acknowledging receipt, this missive also performs a genuine act of anticipation. This word needs to be understood in various ways – as a matter of foreseeing, but also of encroaching on an as yet unwritten history. In other words Kerr, busily concerned with assuming his new responsibilities vis-à-vis ‘apostates’, permits himself a broad interpretation of the ‘tolerance’ secured by Canning. This is not just an attempt to apply the instructions he has received from his superiors in the diplomatic service, but also an attempt to solicit and interpret these instructions, and so it ultimately amounts to a genuine form of improvisation. Thus the correspondence of autumn 1851

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between Palmerston, Canning, and the Porte does not arise from some diplomatic misunderstanding occurring at the highest level of state, but from a solicitation ‘from the bottom up’, from the province, for it was Kerr who, once he had taken up his post in Rhodes, provided his superiors with details about ‘certain proceedings in the Isle of Cyprus which may fairly be placed under the head of religious persecution’.108 Yet their ‘being placed under such a heading’ is far from automatic. It is here worth consulting a file Kerr sent to the Foreign Office in spring 1845, containing duplicates of his correspondence ‘relative to parties in this Island desirous of apostatizing from Islamism’.109 It may be seen that on being received in London several passages from this correspondence were annotated in pencil in the margin (in the following quotations each of these passages is italicized). Some were simply underlined and a question mark added in the margin, such as the copy of Kerr’s letter of 20 March 1845 to Edhem Pas¸a, the governor of Cyprus: A Greek woman named Mariu, daughter of Thomas, who, seventeen years ago embraced Islamism, having presented herself to me to express her desire to avail of the privilege accorded to her by these arrangements, by returning to her former Faith.110 Then Kerr to Canning on 4 April: Considering that the Circular Despatch which Your Excellency did me the honor [sic] to address me on the 26th March, 1844 warranted my compliance with the woman’s request, I addressed Ethem Pascia [sic], the then Governor of the Island, thereon. […] I have told him I would prevent the wishes of the Turks being put into execution, but recommended him to remain in the vicinity of this Consulate, and await the result of the negotiation in favour of the woman Mariu, and I consider it prudent until then to make no representations in his favour to the Governor, unless any aggression on the part of the Turks should make it incumbent on me to do so.111 Finally, in an excerpt from the letter (still about ‘Mariu’) Kerr sent to Canning on 5 May, a note in the margin reveals what lies behind all these question marks: In the present state of this affair I have considered it right to retain the woman in my house until I receive from Your Excellency the necessary instructions for my future proceedings.112 In the margin alongside the word woman are the words: ‘not a British Protégée’.113 This terse note rings out like a reminder to return to daily consular

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business: Kerr’s authority must strictly limit itself to protégés of his nation, without indulging in any diplomatic speculation. But this little set of quotations and annotations also enables us to go further than that, for it may be seen that the Foreign Office’s incomprehension of Kerr’s bellicose turns of phrase (‘I would prevent’, ‘aggression’) is matched by its repudiation of his broad interpretation of the orders received. In other words Kerr has doubly overstepped his instructions: firstly by using a diplomatic rather than a strictly consular repertoire, and secondly by using this repertoire to improvise in a manner that does not fit in with his superiors’ (diplomatic) ideas. Borrowing from McAdam et al., ‘we can think of the repertoire as performances – as scripted interactions in the improvisatory manner of jazz or street theater rather than the more repetitious routines of art songs or religious rituals’ (2001: 49). It is exactly as if Kerr were interpreting the songsheet of the Eastern Question in such a way as to lend it a scope which exceeds the views of the British leaders. In fact the provincial version of the Eastern Question here exceeds the dramatization of the ‘master pattern’ as defined by the diplomats in the capitals. This double event in which diplomacy is improvised by a consul is an example of a singularly provincial form of Eastern Question. A few years later, before setting off for Rhodes, Kerr addressed some ‘memoranda for the guidance of Her Majesty’s Vice Consul at Cyprus’ to his freshly appointed successor (and by now his representative) Demetrios Pierides. Article 4, relating to the ‘protection of the Porte’s Christian subjects from religious persecution’, includes the following revealing lines: [ … ] you are never to seek out cases for application of the concessions which Her Majesty’s Government has obtained from the Porte in favor [sic] of Christians. Apostates, taken as individuals, are entitled to little respect or consideration: the interest attaches to the broad principle of liberty of conscience. The weakness of the Turkish authority in Cyprus, and the superior numbers of the Greek population are real sources of difficulty. These and other such considerations it would neither be safe, prudent or equitable for you to leave out of sight as often as you may be called upon by notorious persecution to refer any particular case to my notice.114 We may see here the unmistakable trace of Kerr’s being called to order back in 1845 – and even if we do not have the original text, it is possible to imagine how it ran: the Eastern Question is not something to be improvised, especially not in the provinces.

*** Being sensitive to the local scale of events thus enables us to ascertain that official frameworks never rule out differential writing and reading processes,

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instead straddling faithful repetition and outright improvisation. These processes compellingly suggest the importance of provincializing the history of the Ottoman Mediterranean – that is, of paying due attention to the creative events brought about in the province, and how they are entangled with and complexify overarching historiographical narratives. Is it due to the distance from the great imperial (or even provincial) capitals of the Mediterranean world? The archives left behind by Cypriot provinciality – without being wholly unconcerned (far from it in fact) by the debates circulating in the Mediterranean at the time with its many wars, steamboats, and soon telegraph wires, without escaping either from some of those instances of bravura which go to make up the history of the orientalist West – do indeed exceed the programme of the Eastern Question. Or else (and this only militates against the theory of a ‘what should happen’), the programme spins out of control, as in the case of the ‘apostates’ seen by Niven Kerr. Maybe then Cyprus was not necessarily preordained to be caught up in the process leading to the final and symbolic date of 1878 after all. What we find here is a form of history which follows its own pulse, a more discrete form of history going against the idea, so loudly proclaimed in the upper spheres of politics and the tumult of international relations, that all people and things ‘Ottoman’ were at Europe’s heart of ‘sickness’.115 This form of history, in fact, places the emphasis on the everyday comings and goings of provincial life. In Robert Ilbert’s terms (1996: xxviii), it remains basically ‘at least as much inscribed within the landscape of the Ottoman Empire as it is in the landscape of imperialisms’.

Notes 1 The dönüm is an agrarian unit of area of 939.3m2, or about one quarter of an acre; it was ‘thus called originally because the labourer, on reaching the end of his furrow, turned his plough and animal around’ (C. Huart, ‘Dönüm’, Encyclopédie de l’Islam, vol.I, 1913, p.1106). 2 See Aymes 2012a for an earlier elaboration of the first section of this chapter. 3 In what follows the expression Eastern Question will not systematically be placed between inverted commas for reasons of typographical simplicity. It should be systematically taken as citational however. 4 On this second point Brown (1984: 15) is careful to point out that the rules of the game were not laid down once and for all. However the range of possible variations would appear to be marginal since the existence of the ‘Eastern Question’ game qua coherent system never appears to be brought into question. 5 A similar perspective may be found, for example, in James A. Reilly’s work (2002), where the town of Hama is described as a ‘microcosm’ presenting on a reduced scale all the overall changes affecting the Ottoman Empire. 6 It is worth recalling that the turn of phrase originated in a declaration in 1853 by Tsar Nicholas I to Sir Hamilton Seymour, the British Ambassador in Saint Petersburg: ‘We have a sick man on our hands [ … ] a man gravely ill.’ Cf. Harold Temperley, England and the Near East: The Crimea, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936, p.272. 7 FO 78/539, f.161 (Kerr to Bidwell, unnumbered, 14 June 1843).

86 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Eventful synchronicities: the ‘Eastern Question’ Ibid., f.167 (Kerr to Bidwell, no.3, 15 July 1843). Ibid., f.175 (Kerr to Bidwell, no.5, 18 September 1843). FO 78/580, f.237 (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.23, 31 December 1844). A.MKT.UM 567/23 (19 Ẕa-.1278 [18 May 1862]). FO 78/621, vol.2, f.79 (Kerr to Bidwell, no.2, 10 March 1845). CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.12, f.29 (Fourcade to Thiers, no.3, 1 September 1840). CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.163 (Bottu to the Duc de Broglie, no.22, 7 February 1833). See FO 78/539, f.181 (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.6, 1 October 1843). Unfortunately it is generally not possible to consult the versos in the French diplomatic archives, for they have been transferred to microfilm and the paper archives consigned to silent damnation. FO 78/580, f.188 (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.8, 8 March 1844). See FO 78/506, unnumbered f. (Barrow to Canning, 9 February 1842); and CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.32 vo (Tastu to Tocqueville, no.6, 14 September 1849). Ibid., f.33. A.MKT.UM 10/66 (21 R. 1266 [6 March 1850]), 94/20 (9 Ca-. 1268 [1 March 1852]). A.MKT.UM 210/62 (19 M. 1272 [1 October 1855]). A.MKT.NZD 315/51 (stamped and dated on 29 Ẕ. 1276 [18 July 1860]): ‘bir va-pu-r tehiyesi’. A.MKT.NZD 284/46 (stamped and dated on 14–25 Ẕa-. 1275 [15–26 June 1859]). _ The means of address: ‘T.araf-ı sa-mı--i h.azret-ı k.apuda-nı-ye’ indicates that the document was not addressed to a common ‘captain’, hence the suggestion that it was addressed to K.apuda-n Pas¸a. A.MKT.UM 353/52 (12 Ẕa-. 1275 [13 June 1859]). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.37 (Tastu to Lahitte, no.10, 4 August 1850). Ibid., f.209 (Darasse, no.17, 31 July 1860). A.MKT.NZD 284/46 (stamped and dated on 14–25 Ẕa-. 1275 [15–26 June 1859]): - ‘K . ıbrıs postasınıñ duçar-ı ta‘t.ıl ü te’ẖır olması’. CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.234 (du Tour to Thouvenel, no.5, 2 July 1861). Nothing had changed by May 1862: see A.MKT.UM 567/23 (19 Ẕa-. 1278 [18 May 1862]). A.MKT.MHM 282/74 (22 Ca-. 1280 [4 November 1863]). FO 78/497, f.172 (Lilburn to Aberdeen, no.2, 5 January 1842). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.225 (du Tour to Thouvenel, no.1b, 9 December 1860). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.147 (Méchain, no.37, 9 November 1827). Ibid., f.148 (Méchain to the Comte de Damas, letter no.38, 17 November 1827). CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.12, f.28 (Fourcade to Thiers, no.3, 1 September 1840). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.148 (Méchain to the Comte de Damas, letter no.38, 17 November 1827). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.129 (Méchain, no.22, 20 June 1827). Alexandre Thomas Cochrane was an English sailor who was placed at the head of the Hellenic fleet in 1827–28 (Larousse 1982: vol.4, 512; Woodhouse 1975: 80, 114, 119). Charles Fabvier was a former colonel in the Napoleonic armies who, after falling from favour during the Bourbon Restoration, went to Greece in 1823 and served in the army of Hellenic insurgents (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 1989: 141 n.108). The ‘Comité grec de Paris’, a.k.a. ‘Société philanthropique en faveur des Grecs’ (Greek Committee in Paris, or Philanthropic Society to support the Greeks) was a French association of admirers of Greece founded in February 1825 by Orleanist and Bonapartist liberals (including Sebastiani and Fabvier), under the moral

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37 38 39 40

41 42

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and financial patronage of the Duc d’Orléans. In addition to collecting funds for the war, it organized a large number of public events, fairs, balls, concerts, and exhibitions which were keenly followed by prominent members of French society (ibid.: 10). Initially the Committee plotted to place the Duc de Nemours, the son of the Duc d’Orléans, on the Greek throne (Dakin 1973: 159). General FrançoisHorace-Bastien Sebastiani, a former Maréchal d’Empire (and later Minister of the Navy and Foreign Affairs in the early days of the July Monarchy), and a member of the Comité grec de Paris, was sent by Bonaparte on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul in 1802, and then again in 1806–7: the Sultan being alluded to by Méchain is Selim III (see Lewis 1968: 59, 70; Mantran 1989: 432). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.128 vo (Méchain, no.21, 12 May 1827). FO 78/621, vol.2, f.101 vo (Kerr to Aberdeen, no.9, 10 September 1845). The matters in question are discussed below. CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.31 (Tastu to Drouyn de L’Huis, no.5, 28 May 1849, postscript dated 11 June). Other references to newspapers by which information reached Cyprus, irrespective of its reliability, are to be found in CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829); CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.201 vo (Darasse, no.14, 3 June 1860); ibid., f.209 (Darasse, no.17, 31 July 1860); ibid., f.234 (du Tour to Thouvenel, no.5, 2 July 1861). The Ottoman spelling of their names fluctuates the whole time; that used here corresponds to the way they sign their names, ‘Acı- Kirgekı-’ and ‘Abeydo’. : - _ I.MVL 139, report signed ‘Acı Kirgekı’ and ‘Abeydo’ (undated [~ 1840]): ‘ba‘zı . es.h.a-b-ı agra-z_ [ … ] et.ra-f ü ekna-fa bir t.ak.ım eka-ẕib-i ‘a-t.ıle :ve era-cı-f-ı ba-t.ıle tes¸vı-k.-i . tefevvüh itmekde olduk.ları ve h.atta ẕikr olunan eka-ẕib Izmı-r gazetesinde bas.ılmak. üzere tah.rır olunarak. t.ab‘ ü temsıl olunub bu t.arafa gelmis¸ ve manz.u-r-ı k.ulları olmus¸’. Ibid., mazbat _ .a signed by the Governor of Cyprus Es-seyyid ‘Osma-n Nu-rı- et al. : . (undated [~ 1840]): ‘Kerkerı- ile Abeydo ‘aleyhinde Izmı-r gazeteẖa-nesine yazarak. [ … ]’. For further mention of the ‘Smyrna newspapers’ relating to Cyprus see CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.11, f.287 (Fourcade to Thiers, no.1, 24 July 1840). : _ .a signed by the Va-dı-lı- authorities (27 Ra-. 1256 [29 May I.MVL :139, mazbat . 1840]): ‘Izmı-r’de t.ab‘ olunan Ru-mı- el-‘iba-re gazete’. Both here and elsewhere (and for reasons specified in Chapter Five below), I prefer not to translate ‘Ru-m’ as ‘Greek’, and thus use the original term. _ .a) signed by the Ba-f k.aza _ - authorities (26 Ra-. 1256 [28 Ibid., round robin (mazbat . May 1840]): ‘gazete-i meẕku-re nüsẖası K . ıbrıs’a vürud iderek keyfiyet ma‘lum olmus¸ be bu vecihle nüsẖa-ı mezbu-rlardan Der-i ‘aliyye’ye gitmesiyle mersu-ma-nıñ . _ - larda daẖı- teva-türe resı-de olah.ak.k.larında olan kelima-t Ba-f ve h.a-vı- oldugı k.aza . - ẕ buyrulmus¸’. cag ı melh u . : I.DH. 14406, memorandum to the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi) (21–22 L. 1267 [19–20 August 1851]) : – with the slight difference that its content is less specifically political than I.MVL 139. Quotations: ‘Yu-na-nı-lik iddi‘a-sı’; ‘deru-nlarında t.ok.unak.lı . _ s¸eyler oldıgı’. ve : muzırr _ signed ‘H I.MVL 139, ‘arıza . asan vekıl-i k.ulları Leymosun’ (1 S¸. 1256 [28 September 1840]). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.186 vo (Darasse, no.9, 19 July 1859). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.65 (Doazan to Drouyn de L’Huys, no.4, 1 September 1853). Ibid., f.65–vo.. For a fairly different treatment of the documents quoted here and below, see Aymes 2012b.

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: I.DH. 17270, report (s¸uk.k.a) bearing the seal of the governor of Cyprus ‘Meh.med S¸erı-f ’ (16 L. 1269 [23 July 1853]: ‘Ru-sya keyfiyetinden t.olayı s¸u aralık. ru--nümaolan tertı-ba-t-ı ih.tiya-t.iyye cezı-re-i K . ıbrıs ahalisiniñ mesmu‘ları olarak. geçenlerde _ k.aza _ ve k.urada beyn el-islam ve re‘aya bı-as.l ü esa-s era-cı-f tah.addüs ba‘zı _ - ya ‘umu-men iderek s.avb-ı bendega-nemden ẖaber alınmıs¸ ve der-‘ak.ab her bir k.aza . tah.rırat-ı maẖs.us.eler nes¸riyle herkes umur ve ẖus.us.at-ı ẕatiyyesiyle mes¸gu-l olub beyn el-devletı-n va-k.i‘ olacak. teda-rüka-t ve sa-’ir ẖus.u-s.a-tıñ k.a-le alınması vaz.-ı felerinden ẖa-ricdir evvelki gibi isla-m ile re‘a-ya- bir birleriyle ülfet ve k.oms¸ılık. . itmege dik.k.at ve daha ziya-de kesb ve tica-retleri tems¸iyetine gayret itsün eger bundan böyle her kim öyle ẖaric-i vaz.ıfe umur-ı devleti lisa-nına alur ve ẖaber virilür ise müca-za-t olunacak.dır diyerek tenbı-ha-t-ı la-zıme icraolunmus¸’). If an order had been received from Istanbul (or some other part of the hierarchy based elsewhere) relating to this affair, it is most likely that it would be mentioned here given the bureaucratic protocol of the period. The note drawn up by the offices of the Grand Vizier on receiving S¸erı-f Pas¸a’s report would appear to confirm this hypothesis, for it approves his measures in the following terms: ‘the attitude of the above-mentioned substitute on this matter is within the remit of written orders’ (ibid., memorandum to the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi), 27 L. 1269 [3 August 1853]): ‘k.a-’im-mak.a-m-ı mu-ma-ileyhiñ bu ba-bda olan h.areketi yazılan . ves.a-ya- da-’iresinde olmagla’). S¸erı-f Pas¸a did not therefore act on the basis of any specific order, which is why the Grand Vizier has to confirm that his conduct did indeed conform to the duties of a governor. A related question is that of the hierarchical links which may have existed at this time between the authorities and the governor of Cyprus (see Aymes 2010: 122–30). : _ .a) signed by Meh.med Ra-’if, accountant (defI.DH. 17572, round robin (mazbat terdar) and lieutenant (k.a’im-mak.a-m) of the governor-general of the Islands, et al. _ es¸ẖa-s. dürlü era-cı-f (19 L. 1269 [26 July 1853]): ‘Ru-sya mes’elesinden t.olayı ba‘zı peydasıyla taẖdıs¸-i efkar-ı ahaliye ictisar eylemekde olduk.ları mesmu-‘-ı ‘a-lı-leri buyrulub [ … ] Ceza-’ir-i Bah.r-ı Sefı-d eya-letiniñ semt ü mevk.i‘ce daẖı- emniyeti . der-ka-r bulundıgından sa-ye-i asa-yis¸-va-ye-i mülu-ka-nede aha-li emı-n ü müsterı-h. . olarak. ve ẖat.ıralarına k.at.‘en bir s¸ey getürmeyerek hemen is¸leriyle mes¸gu-l olmaları keyfiyetiniñ beyan ü tefhım idilmesi ve nes¸r-i eracıfe cesaret idenler olur ise o mak.u-lelerden yabancı t.ak.ımınıñ memleketden t.ard ü iẖra-cıyla yerlüden olanlarıñ daẖı- li-ecli-t-te’dı-b isim ve s¸öhretleriniñ bildirilmesi ẖus.u-s.larını a-mir Türkı- ve Ru-mı- el-‘iba-re iki k.ıt.‘a buyruldı-ı müs¸-ıra-neleri k.u-ter-i hüma-yu-n ile s¸eref-efza--yı vus.u-l olub [ … ]’. See CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.181 (Méchain to Polignac, no.3, 28 September 1829): the governor issues a ‘Bouyourouldi’ so that the dragoman of the French consulate, Guillois, be recognized by the authorities in Larnaca as the acting manager of the consulate during Méchain’s absence. See too the buyruldı of the governor of Cyprus Meh.med T.al‘at Efendi studied by Çiçek 1995b, as well as the one requested by the Islands assembly from the governor-general of the White : _ .a) from the Cyprus Sea on 8 June 1849 (I.DH. 11188, round robin (mazbat Council, 17 B. 1265). Still I wish to insist on the prudence with which this hypothesis is to be taken: as is well known, the diplomatics of the buyruldı over the course of Ottoman history is extremely complex (Uzunçars¸ılı 1941; Kütükog˘ lu : 1994: 197–206). See I.DH. :17572, official letter (tah.rı-ra-t) from the governor-general of the Islands Es-seyyid Isma-‘ı-l Rah.mı- (19 Ẕa-. 1269 [24 August 1853]), acknowledging receipt of a ferma-n-na-me from the Grand Vizier. Or A.MKT 49/67, including a document titled ‘K.ıbrıs k.a-’im-mak.a-mına emirna-me-i sa-mı-’ (undated, place of issuance on the verso; 10 N. 1262 [1 September 1846]).

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71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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: I.DH. 17572, letter (tah.rı-ra-t) from the governor-general of the Islands : -official Es-seyyid Isma‘ıl Rah.mı- (19 Ẕa-. 1269 [24 August 1853]): ‘Sa-k.ız cezı-resinden h.areketle Midillü ve sa-’ir at.aları ges¸t ü güẕa-r’. It would appear that the k.u-ter referred to here is not the same as the ‘imperial steamship Lord of the Sea used for His Excellency the Marshall’s journeys’, which was no doubt of greater tonnage, and mentioned when a new governorgeneral of the Islands was appointed (A.MKT 183/4, teẕkire, 24 R. 1265 [19 March 1849]: ‘rüku-b-ı düstu-rı-lerine taẖs.-ıs. olunan Mı-r-i Bah.rı- na-m va-pu-r-ı hüma-yu-n’). The word re‘a-ya- shed its ‘classical’ meaning over the course of the nineteenth century, and is generally used to designate solely the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, as may be seen in the order by S¸erı-f Pas¸a quoted above. And so as of 1839 the term ‘teba‘a’ replaced that of ‘re‘a-ya-’ – even though here it is the very vague ‘aha-li’ (‘people’, ‘inhabitants’) which is in fact used. See Aymes 2010: 16– 18 and 54–56 for further discussion of these topics. One such example is that of the regulations promulgated on S.afer 13, 1275 (22 September 1858), enforcing the provisions of the 1856 imperial rescript in the provinces, and entitled ‘vüla-t-ı i’z.a-m ve mutas.arrıfı-n-i kira-m ile k.a-’im-mak.a-mlarıñ ve müdı-rleriñ vez.a-’ifini s¸a-mil ta‘lı-ma-t’: Düstu-r I/2 (Istanbul: Mat.ba‘a-ı ‘a-mire, AH 1289 [1872–73]), S ¸ 1279 [February 1862], pp.352–65. Transliterated by Çadırcı 1989: 255–57 (my transcription from the original text). : A few instances of this may be found in: I.MVL 1317, report (s¸uk.k.a) signed by the governor of Cyprus ‘Meh.med Mesru-r’ (7 B. 1261 [12 July 1845]); A. - _ signed by the governor of Cyprus ‘Abdüllat-ıf (11 C. MKT 204/77, report (‘arı . : za) 1265 [4 May 1849]); I.MVL 7270, official letter (tah.rı-ra-t) signed by: the special envoy to Cyprus ‘Alı- Sırrı (19 Ca-. 1267 [22 March 1851]). See too I.MVL 352, _ .iye tah.rı-ra-t signed by the governor of Cyprus Meh.med T.al‘at and the ‘zabt me’mu-rı’ Es-seyyid Mus.tafa (7 S.. 1257 [31 March 1841]), where this expression has been Turkified: ‘cür’et ve h.addımdan ẖa-ric’. CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.126 (Méchain, no.21, 12 May 1827). Ibid., f.126 vo (Méchain, no.21, 12 May 1827). CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.268 vo (letter no.13, 12 June 1821). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.191 vo (Darasse, no.10, 12 August 1859). Ibid., f.181 (Darasse, no.6, 13 June 1859). Ibid. Darasse would appear to be a past master in such eloquent yet obscure turns of phrase. See ibid., f.188 (Darasse, no.9, 19 July 1859): ‘the more pressing circumstances become, the more I appreciate how important it is to be prudent, without thereby retreating’. CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.187 (Darasse, no.9, 19 July 1859). CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.272 vo (Méchain, no.15, 4 July 1821). FO 78/135, f.36–57 vo (Cartwright to George Canning, 10 October 1825). FO 78/204, f.87–122 (appendix to the letter from Cartwright to Bidwell, no.2, 2 December 1831). FO 78/259, f.239–66 vo (Cartwright to Bidwell, no.31, 23 December 1835). FO 78/324, f.314 (internal minute of the Foreign Office, July 1835). FO 78/135, f.57 (Cartwright to George Canning, 10 October 1825). See FO 78/361, f.26 (Sarell to Palmerston, Constantinople, 15 February 1839): ‘The Consularship of Cyprus having become vacant by the death of Mr. Antonio Vondiziano [ … ]’. FO 78/324, f.318 vo (internal minutes of the Foreign Office about the consuls of Cyprus and Candia, 13 December 1837). The few documents signed by Vondiziano are to be found at the Public Record Office under the reference number: FO 329/1.

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80 FO 78/450, f.293–94 (Palmerston to Lilburn, draft no.1, 16 August 1841). 81 FO 78/286, f.37 (Backhouse to Cartwright, draft no.14, confidential, 9 December 1836) For information about the forwarding of this instruction to the other main consuls in the Levant, see FO 78/287, passim. 82 I have found the responses (many of which are somewhat hazy) from the following consuls: Cartwright in Istanbul (FO 78/411, f.35, Cartwright to Bidwell, no.2, 14 January 1840), John Kerr in Adrianople (id., f.378, letter no.8, 29 February 1840), N. Moore in Beirut (FO 78/412, f.144–48, 20 February 1840). 83 FO 78/427, f.158 (Backhouse to Ponsonby, no number, 31 March 1841). 84 FO 78/411, f.137 (copy of the letter from Paul Vondiziano to Cartwright, 2 April 1840). 85 Ibid., f.139–40 vo (minute attached to the letter from Cartwright to Bidwell, Péra, 24 June 1840). 86 FO 78/440, f.21 (Palmerston to Cartwright, draft no.9, 16 August 1841). 87 The same process of replacing a deceased Ionian with a consul of British nationality was applied in Crete following on from the death of the office holder in 1836. See FO 78/324, f.318 (minute of the Foreign Office about the consuls in Cyprus and Candia, 13 December 1837): ‘In December 1836, Lord Palmerston made the British Consulship in Candia an efficient one by appointing an intelligent English Merchant, conversant with the Usages and Languages of the Levant, to be the Successor of the old Greek, M. Capogrosso, who had been the Levant Company’s Consul in that Island’. 88 FO 78/802, f.243 vo–4 (Kerr to Palmerston, no.5, 15 April 1849). 89 Ibid., f.223–28 (Palmerston to Kerr, draft no.3, 17 November 1849). 90 Ibid., f.291–92 vo (Kerr to Palmerston, no.24, 19 December 1849). 91 Ibid., f.292. 92 Ibid., f.291 vo. For further information about Pierides, see Bonato 2000b: 99–118. 93 FO 78/802, f.224 (Palmerston to Kerr, draft no.3, 17 November 1849). 94 FO 78/324, f.314 (minute of the Foreign Office, July 1835): Vondiziano’s salary stood at 1,500 piastres, or about £150 in 1796, but barely over £15 forty years later. 95 Writing about Alexandria, Robert Ilbert has pointed out (1996: 81) that ‘as far as what one may call secondary powers are concerned, the direct link between consulate and trader lasted for a very long time’. It is a fine historical irony to thus conclude that in Cyprus England was for long a ‘secondary power’. 96 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.164 vo (Darasse, no.2, 9 April 1858). 97 Ibid., f.165. The man in question, as Darasse informs us elsewhere, was called Antonio Palma, a ‘native of Napolitan origins and lost nationality’; following on from his ‘destitution’ in August 1859, the government in London ‘determined to be represented in the Levant only by nationals’, ibid., f.192 vo (Darasse, no.10, 12 August 1859). The list of Consuls and British consular agents clearly shows that this resolution did on occasion waver, though admittedly only infrequently: see Aymes 2010: 355–58. 98 FO 78/167, f.56 (Elliott to Canning, Smyrna, 22 September 1827). 99 FO 78/155, f.75 (Canning to Dudley, no.11, Constantinople, 3 July 1827). 100 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.189–90 vo (‘Le Corps Consulaire de Chypre à S.E. Isaak Pacha, Gouverneur de Chypre’, copy, 6 July 1859). 101 Ibid., f.175 vo. 102 Some historians hence tend to view ‘conversion as [a cause of] diplomatic crisis’ (Deringil 2012: 67 et seq.). For other historiographical vantage points on conversion see Chapter Five below. 103 FO 97/413, unnumbered f. (Palmerston to Canning, draft no.227, 5 September 1851). : 104 I.HR. 3924, ‘translation of a dispatch from Lord Palmerston to H.E. Sir Stratford Canning, dated September 1851. No.227’ (appended to a memorandum to

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105

106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114

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the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi) dated 14 Ẕ. 1267 [10 October 1851]). The fragment between brackets and in italics is an added correction to the first draft. On the Pisani ‘dynasty of drogmans’ see S¸eni, 1997. : I.HR. 3924, draft of the ‘confidential instructions’ given to the translator of the Imperial Council destined for Stratford Canning (undated [Ẕ. 1267/September– _ -k. October 1851]): ‘va-k.ı‘a- mu‘tek.ada-t-ı dı-niyyede kimseniñ kimseyi icba-r ü tazyı _ -k. itmemesi la-zımeden’, ‘efka-r-ı dı-niyyeden t.olayı hic bir ẖıristiya-nıñ tekdı-r ü tazyı . olunmadıgı’. FO 195/102, f. 454 (Kerr to Canning, no.1, 4 June 1844). Ibid. (More on these ‘Greek Muslims’ will follow in Chapter Five below.) : I.HR. 3924, letter (copy) from Stratford Canning to Stephen Pisani (23 September 1851). FO 78/621, vol.2, f.87, Kerr to the Count of Aberdeen (letter no.6, 6 May 1845). On this affair see Schabel 2011–12. FO 78/621, vol.2, f.93 (Kerr to ‘Ettem Pasha’, unnumbered copy, 20 March 1845). Ibid., f.89 and 90 vo (Kerr to Canning, no.2, copy, 4 April 1845). Ibid., f.96 (Kerr to Canning, 5 May 1845, unnumbered excerpt). Ibid. (underlined in the original). FO 78/802, f. 308 vo–309: ‘Memoranda for the guidance of Her Majesty’s Vice Consul at Cyprus’ addressed to D. Pierides (27 December 1849) (appended to letter no.25 from Kerr to Palmerston, ibid., f.294–95 vo): §4 relating to the ‘protection of the Porte’s Christian subjects from religious persecution’. For discussion of the currency of ‘the “sick man” paradox’ in ‘official rhetoric’ about today’s Turkey, see Livanios 2006a (here 301).

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His Majesty forbids all his subjects to take lands and other objects leased out either by the Grand Seigneur or by Barbary princes or their subjects, or enter into any association with farmers, customs officers and others, on penalty of being sent back to France. (‘Ordinance of 3 March 1781, concerning consulates, residents, trade, and navigation in the merchant stations of the Levant and Barbary’, title II, 28. Quote taken from de Clercq and Vallat 1909: vol.2, 19) Nothing fills me with greater joy than seeing work going on in the countryside from spring until the end of autumn. (Bianchi 1839: 138; quote from a dialogue in simultaneous Ottoman Turkish and French versions about ‘Residing in the country’)

It is one thing to say, at the scale of local knowledge, that unfolding diplomatic events relating to the ‘Eastern Question’ are partially undermined by the style of the provincial archives, but it is quite another to thereby declare that ‘the piecemeal incorporation or integration of the Ottoman Empire into the European economic and political orbits’ (Doumani 1995: 3) counts for nothing from the perspective of Cyprus. Clearly, what attracts attention in the embassies differs from the concerns of a consular agent in T.uzla, and even more so from those of a shepherd in Mesaoria (Mesa-rya). But only let us turn our back on the sea and its steamships and roam the Cypriot countryside, following the anonymous pathways of Braudel’s Mediterranean, and a different sort of European ‘impact’ emerges. It is different because it is imprinted in the landscape of a singular territory, and associated with a European society that is ‘outside itself ’ (Smyrnelis 2005), far from the frameworks of national and imperial histories that have dominated patterns of thinking and teaching in Western Europe.1

‘Country affairs’ But it is far from easy to roam the Cypriot countryside. The geography of the island and its archives means we are dealing with uneven terrain marked by

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many chasms of silence and rugged outcrops. It is less a matter of roaming than rambling wherever chance discoveries and coincidences see fit to take us. From Larnaca to Limya-: the consul and the landowner October 1835: ‘Hadji Seÿd Mehemed, the Governor of Cyprus, has advanced the date of his customary tour of Larnaca and Famagouste this year. He arrived here on the 13th of the month.’2 One week later (on the 21st) the . same Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga (for it is with him that we are dealing) granted an audience to the French consul, Vasse de Saint Ouen, accompanied by his dragoman and by Simon Fortuné Michel, ‘Député de la Nation’. The conversation, transcribed in the archives of the French consulate in a manner imitating that of direct speech, turns on the claims of several French ‘nationals’, and includes this exchange: What is more, he [the governor] added, if Mr Michel has any claims to make against debtors who are inhabitants of this island, I will be delighted to find in his favour. – As it happens, Mr Michel said, individuals from Limia fell behind some time ago now, and I cannot manage to get paid. – Who are these individuals? I will clear this matter up on my way to Famagusta. – I do not have the titles on me, Mr Michel observed, but I will draw up a list soon as I get back and have it given to Y.E. [Your Excellency] – Very well! You can count on receiving full satisfaction.3 End of quotation: ‘Mr Michel’, though a député of the French nation, is otherwise virtually absent from the archives of the province. And as for his debtors, they remain nameless. But one place name is mentioned in passing, ‘Limia’. Where does this take us? According to the toponymic information available for this period, there were two villages in Cyprus called Limya-, one lying a dozen miles northeast of T.uzla, on the way to Lefk.os¸a, and the other . to the north of the town of Ma-gosa on the Famagusta Gulf. Thus in the texts . quoted here and later on, the reference to Famagusta/Ma-gosa removes any doubt, for it is clear we are dealing with the second Limya-. And a glance at the map reveals the distance between this village and the merchant station of Larnaca, the presumed place of residence of ‘Mr Michel’ and the other merchants from foreign ‘nations’. It is just as if in heading off for Limya- we were leaving behind the ‘extraterritoriality’ (Ilbert 1996: 81 et seq.) of consular society to discover its outshoots. But the road to Limya- would not lead anywhere were it not corroborated by other clues. The same year the case of a certain Thomas Perry crops up in the correspondence of the French consulate. We can read a copy of a complaint he filed with the French consul Vasse de Saint Ouen: In 1833 Georges Lapierre gave me on lease the Limia farmland, a lease supposed to last for three years. In 1834, the latter owner being on leave, I

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Europe absorbed: territorial imprints obtained from Mr. Jacques Mattei, Consul of Prussia and substitute for Lapierre father sons and co., the right to farm another property in the same village; this was a one-year lease which was supposed to expire in October 1835. In the month of August this substitute claimed that I had to pay him, without thinking that his contract was only obligatory upon me at the end of October, the time of year when cotton products are withdrawn. After being called two or three times before the magistrates’ court, I was sacrificed to the demands and caprices of Mr Mattei, and [ … ] condemned by the decision of the Consular tribunal, acting as a magistrate’s court, on a matter and in a cause where a magistrates’ court lacked competence and had no jurisdiction.4

To complete this picture Raybaud, Vasse de Saint Ouen’s successor, requested Perry provide a ‘memorandum’, which he sent to him in late 1836. It is specified that the first ‘property’5 leased to him by Lapierre and located at ‘Limnia’ is ‘called the small farmland’ and that the rent was fixed at 3,500 piastres.6 A copy of the contract agreed with Lapierre is appended as proof, . stipulating that ‘his small Giflig [çiftlik] in Limnia with all its adjoining parts and outbuildings, houses, stores, lands, etc’7 is leased to Perry. As for the ‘property’ leased by Mattei’s intermediary, it is ‘called the large farmland’ and its rent is fixed at 7,000 piastres,8 with the lease contract stipulating that: The Sirs Lapierre father sons and co. lease out [ … ] to Sir Th. Perry their large farmland in the village of Limnia with seven pairs of oxen, two flocks, and other capital to be found there, repaired buildings, tools, the requisite arable lands for seed plants and cotton only, seeds, and other items for use.9 These lists and the level of rent charged confirm that these are large farms producing far more than the level of mere subsistence agriculture. This brings to mind one possible meaning of the term çiftlik at the period, used in a fairly corrupt form in the contract between Perry and Lapierre: ‘large scale plantation-like landholdings, producing for the internal and/or external market’ (Faroqhi 1987: 19). One simply has to read the portrait of ‘Monsieur Lapierre’ as sketched by the French consul Méchain in 1829: Monsieur Lapierre, a rich landowner having two to three thousand acres of land cultivated in his name, exports more with his own products than the three other French establishments [in Larnaca]. Thanks to his financial means, his business, and his perfect knowledge of local languages, habits and resources, he buys up further produce and adds to his exports.10 To which may be added the acerbic portrait of the Cypriot cereal trade penned by the French consul Bottu in 1832, a champion of free trade:

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The Governor of Cyprus has recently granted several permits for the export of wheat. [ … ] This export would be very useful to the country were it open to all [ … ] but unfortunately it is the result of intrigue. The Governor long refused [to grant such permits]; he finally gave in to the tireless solicitations and especially perfidious advice of the Allaï Bey (military commander), one of the main landowners on the Island and whose interests are bound up with those of our rich European landowners. What was the result? Only the Europeans obtained permits; but they were careful not to export their own wheat. They took advantage of the position the peasants had been reduced to by the latest taxes on the island, and bought up everything they owned, luring them with attractive prices subsequently cut back down by the paid zeal of the public measurers. The market price for wheat immediately went up by 25% to 30%. The population has already started to suffer but, not yet daring to complain, are dreading the moment when only the stores of the wealthy will be full, thus enabling them to charge whatever price they see fit.11 The ‘large’ and ‘small’ farmlands of Limya- thus demonstrate that at least in certain areas of the Cypriot countryside there was a certain degree of ‘commercial agriculture’, if not outright ‘agrarian capitalism’.12 The little world of the Cypriot locality would once again seem to be bound up with the horizons of a ‘world-economy’ overseas. This is possibly the backdrop. But what matters here, however, is the mention added by Perry that: ‘Mr Jacques Mattei’ who leases out for Lapierre the ‘large farmland’ in Limya- to Thomas Perry, happens to be the ‘Consul of Prussia’. The French consul declares that the same individual was ‘owner of at least One Third of the Tillable land on the island’.13 And in 1862 reference is still being made to him in the French consular archives: ‘thirty years ago [Mattei] was one of the great leaders of the island. In agreement with several people from Constantinople he farmed Cyprus Turkish-style.’14 A ‘Turkishstyle’ consul? In Ottoman countries the expression is intriguing, being more frequently used when giving the time than to designate a way of running a farm.15 But it fleshes out links between the society of ‘nations’ of Larnaca and the Limya- countryside seen in passing in the comments of ‘Mr Michel’, as well as making these ties more complicated. For it is no longer a matter of unspecified debts contracted with some foreign merchant by ‘certain individuals in Limia’ for undetermined reasons, and instead relates to the direct involvement of the consul of a European state in the management of considerable landed properties and revenues in the distant Cypriot countryside. And this link takes on even greater consistency if it is remembered who the ‘owner’ of the lands leased out to Perry actually is – one Georges Lapierre (see Chapter Two above). Like ‘Mr Michel’ and ‘Jacques Mattei’, Lapierre belonged to consular society. He holds a prominent place in the ‘list of French people and French protégés established in Cyprus’ drawn up by Méchain in 1820,16 where he is referred to as ‘first dragoman’ and Chancellor

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of the French consulate, a position he occupied from 1816 to 1823. Subsequently his relationship with the French consular authorities would seem to have become more turbulent. Yet in the ‘rapid presentation of the situation of the French colony of the Island of Cyprus and its trade with France’ sent by Méchain to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 2 July 1829, the ‘four establishments whose heads have backers in Marseilles’ are said to be run by Vincent Rey, Simon Fortuné Michel, Jacques Tardieu – and Georges Lapierre.17 Thus in the same dispatch Méchain states that ‘the other Heads of French families run farms, increasing the amount we export’.18 Although this remark mentions no name and is made only in passing, it nevertheless reiterates what may now be deemed to be a reliable observation – however exceptional the case of Lapierre might be in terms of its prominence in the documents, it is not in itself abnormal. The possession, leasing out, and development of sizeable landed and agricultural properties by members of European ‘nations’ was standard practice in Cyprus at the time. Sifting through the straw: Ottoman census collectors go through the ‘countryside’ In 1832–33 (AH 1248), the year the contracts were drawn up to lease out Lapierre’s ‘farmland’ to Thomas Perry, the Ottoman authorities undertook a major survey of land ownership in Cyprus. The French consul Bottu summarized the task entrusted to the top Ottoman official sent to Cyprus for the occasion, Meh.med Es‘ad Beg, as follows: ‘an exact record of land and buildings, their value, and their revenue calculated using rents for houses and the number of ploughs used for tillage or the various crops sowed for land.’19 The results of this considerable undertaking, of which the previous known equivalent – the ‘registers of land ownership survey’ (t.apu tah.rı-r defterleri) – was drawn up several centuries earlier, runs to 1,357 pages in all, comprising _ four weighty ‘registers of landed properties and lands’ (defter-i emla-k ve ara-zi) in Cyprus.20 Thus if we are to pursue the line of enquiry opened up with Limya-, meticulous study is required in order to draw the portraits of certain individuals and families. And in fact the second register of this set contains fifteen or so pages devoted to the consuls and their ‘subjects’ (teba‘a).21 Let us consider the circumstances in which these records were drawn up, so as to determine how best to read them. A dispatch from the French consul states that Meh.med Es‘ad Beg requested the dragomans of each consulate to send him a ‘detailed note of possessions of their nationals in terms of houses, lands, flocks, etc’.22 Bottu also had the opportunity to talk with him in Lefk.os¸a, and senses that the specific situation of the society of ‘nations’ in T.uzla is of particular interest to him: A few observations he pretended to let slip about the inhabitants of Larnaca when informing me that he would soon be coming to this town, as

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well as certain of his replies I have been informed of to questions sent to him about Frankish fixed property, proved that he was fully aware of who he would be dealing with, and what blatant abuses he would encounter, and at the same time I discerned his positive intention to put an end to them.23 This places Bottu in an awkward situation: he is the first to recognize that many of the individuals concerned are ‘illegal property owners whose status is prejudicial to the country’ (we shall see further on why they are referred to in this way) and whom ‘it would be necessary to dispossess by force’.24 However, he states that he is reticent to give in to the ‘arbitrary nature’ of local authority, given his concern to safeguard the protection of people affiliated to the French ‘nation’.25 The goings-on of powerful local individuals, whose names Bottu prudently passes over in silence, fortunately dispense him of having to cut this Gordian knot: ‘In Nicosia the Hodja Kian [i.e. ẖa-cega-n, the title of Meh.med Es‘ad Beg] was surrounded by Aghas who rapidly got him to forget the benevolent instructions of the Porte, and in Larnaca a few Europeans took it upon themselves to perfect his new education.’26 And so in fact the aforementioned ‘illegal property owners’ were not dispossessed. But the land survey registers did not thereby neglect to refer to them, and their landed property was as scrupulously recorded as that of the other inhabitants of Cyprus. It is in fact possible to imagine all sorts of arrangements and irregularities in the recording of property, given the extent to which Bottu emphasizes that the survey was carried out ‘under the authority of people who are known for their system of oppression’.27 Whether or not local intrigues meant the sizes recorded in the registers were less than was truly the case, the amounts are still, as we shall see, sizeable. Strikingly enough, Meh.med Es‘ad Beg and his scribes adopted specific scriptural procedures when dealing with consular protégés: the information is recorded in a particular way, not village by village (as was the case for the rest of the survey) but ‘nation’ by ‘nation’. Hence for each individual the records list all of the properties of which he (or she) is the holder for all localities combined, whether the person resides in T.uzla or not. Should we consider that this specific form of recording the information may simply be put down to some putative practical necessity? I would rather posit that it is also due to the particular attention Meh.med Es‘ad accords to the inhabitants of T.uzla: if we are to believe a subsequent account, he oversaw the census of the district ‘in person’ (bi’n-nefs), whereas in the other districts of the island he relied on the assistant census officials who escorted him.28 This procedure thus implies that the society of ‘Europeans’ was assumed to be a singular case in Cyprus at large, suggesting a wish to establish a means of recording information which set out their presumed social geography in black and white – in short which set the ‘foreign’ territorial corps down on paper.

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Sketching out a space The survey data offers sufficiently precise and localized indications to sketch out a map of landed property owned or run by the ‘Europeans’ in Cyprus, over and above the specific case in Limya- glimpsed above. Only ‘farmlands’ have been used in drawing up the appended maps, and I make no mention or reference to landed property recorded in urban areas – and more specifically : in T.uzla and Iskele (the merchant station of Larnaca), and in Leymosu-n, Lefk.os¸a, and Girı-nye on occasions (cf. Aymes 2005a). Places have been situated using the map drawn up by researchers at the Directorate of Turkish Archives _ (Osmanlı Idaresinde Kıbrıs 2000) on the basis of data from the census carried out a few years earlier, in 1831. Symbols placed ‘off the map’ are for places whose exact location is unknown. Here is the picture that emerges. Two key variables have been privileged, the first relating to the total value of the property (emla-k) recorded as belonging to surveyed individuals. This aggregate includes various categories: houses, fields (of cotton, or cereals), orchards, livestock (sheep, mares), oxen and beasts of burden (donkeys, mules), olive trees, carob trees, mulberry trees, vines, springs, and water resources. The other variable taken into consideration is that of the total surface area recorded. In all cases the legend of the maps has been drawn up using quintiles, making it possible to take into consideration the data spread without the singularity of certain particular cases being glossed by arbitrary intervals. The first striking characteristic is the geographical spread of the property recorded. The extraterritoriality of the merchant ‘nations’ would in principle

Map 2 Property held by ‘Europeans’ in Cyprus (value in piastres)

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Map 3 Surface areas of ‘European’ holdings (in dönüms)

: suggest a ‘European’ presence clustered around the port of Iskele (Scala), near T.uzla. But whilst there is indeed a significant concentration of landed properties belonging to protégés in the surroundings of this merchant station, what emerges most clearly is that consular protégés have spread out across more than half of the island to the east. There is a broad swath about one hundred kilometres long and over twenty wide running from Leymosu-n in the southwest to Aya- T.ot.ro (Ayios Theodoros) in the northeast. It sketches out a Cyprus under the influence of Larnaca’s merchant society, the heart of which . was a triangle with T.uzla, Ma-gosa, and Da-lı- at its corners. Furthermore this wide span is not just a characteristic of the space taken as a whole, it is also found within each countryside and area. Some of the recorded properties are fields of over one thousand dönüms, or about 250 acres; others are flocks of several hundred head.29 What we are dealing with here is in effect a space, and a visible one: consular protégés do not only own small and highly valuable areas, but also vast expanses for arable and livestock farming. Is it possible to make out a distinctive dynamic presiding over the constitution of this zone of influence? A second observation is interesting here – the eastern plain of Mesaoria (Mesa-rya) – the region reputed to be the most fertile of the island and often described as the grain basket of Cyprus – predominates both in terms of the number and the value of the recorded properties. The most remarkable cases in this region are characterized by the prevalence of cotton as opposed to arable agriculture. Going north to south we find a ‘çiftlik’ in Trik.omo recorded in the name of the daughter of ‘Ya-k.ometto Ma-ddı-’, the consul of Prussia (the same ‘Jacques Mattei’ referred to earlier), with a total value of 45,585 piastres;30 in Limya- and its surrounding

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Europe absorbed: territorial imprints : : .- area (around the villages of Ipsoz and Istilloz), the çiftlik of ‘Yorg ı Lapiyer’ : (Georges Lapierre), a French protégé, for 62,520 piastres;31 in Istilloz that of ‘Bepo Sa-ndı-’ (Beppo Santi), the brother and protégé of the Dutch Consul, worth 26,200 piastres;32 and in Gügercinlik, the fields and flocks of an Austrian protégé, ‘Ya-nı- Ant.onyo Ma-ndova-nı-’ (Gian Antonio Mantovani), are estimated at 52,710 piastres.33 All these values represent sizeable sums of money at the local scale. In order to get an idea of the scale, the total value of property recorded for the district of Mesa-rya stood at 2,622,669 piastres.34 Or to use an alternative yardstick, twenty years later – and following on from a currency devaluation of about 50 per cent – the monthly wage of the governor of Cyprus was somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 piastres, depending upon his rank.35 And so these çiftliks amount to a veritable hinterland to the merchant station of T.uzla. For instance, Mantovani’s vast areas of rural: land would appear to be inseparable from his strong presence in the town of Iskele where he owned a ‘store on the shoreline’ in addition to an imposing residence and a ‘grocer’s store’.36 This would appear to lend weight to the idea that the role of the operations of Lapierre, Mattei, and others was to develop ‘commercial agriculture’.

The constitution of a territory But if we accord too much weight to similar cases, we run the risk of coming up with a stylized portrait ignoring the myriad ordinary occurrences. In comparison to the hefty presence of a few çiftliks, an equally or perhaps even more important characteristic of the countryside space controlled by ‘Europeans’ is the diversity of values and profiles.37 Any enquiry into the logic underpinning the constitution of this space must also account for this diversity. In order to do this let us look more carefully at the case of Mattei – or, to be more precise, the Matteis, for the name is not just that of a remarkable individual, Jacques/Giacometto, but also that of an entire family and the survey makes it possible to sketch out the full extent and details of their property portfolio. Let us place this mass of detail on a map and study it minutely. By comparing it to the maps studied previously, a hypothesis immediately jumps out: the dynamics of ‘European’ possessions are closely bound up with those of the Mattei family, and in fact there is an almost perfect fit between the two spaces. This is the case if we look at their external limits: the Matteis are, with a couple of exceptions (the extremities of Girı-nye and Leymosu-n), to be found in all those places where the Ottoman census indicates the presence of consular protégés. This also holds good for the internal architecture of the space, with the outlying points of the Mattei lands forming the same . T.uzla–Ma-gosa–Da-lı- triangle that makes up the backbone of the merchant hinterland. It is important to point out how specific this overlap is to the Mattei family, and this is something that comes out very clearly when the occurrences of other family names recorded in the census are mapped out:

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Map 4 Property held by the Mattei family members

‘Sa-ndı-’, ‘Ma-ndova-nı-’, ‘Bozovı-c’, ‘La-piyer’, ‘Yesu-n’, ‘Çavellı-’, and ‘S.ala-dovı-c’. Each of them occupies a singular space, but none have the same extent and density of possessions as the Matteis. Some names form a string of isolated . points on the map, such as ‘Ma-ndova-nı-’ straddling Ma-gosa and Leymosu-n, or ‘Lapiyer’ in a broken line running from T.uzla to Limya-. Sometimes they crystallize in dense, local configurations: ‘Bozovı-c’ and ‘Yesu-n’ at the beginning of the K . arpas peninsula, ‘Çavellı’ on the southeast bank of the Troodos massif, and ‘S.aladovıc’ around Girınye.38 Only the Santi family seem to occupy the space in a way that resembles, albeit in a minor mode, the Mat. teis: their name can be found at the three corners of the T.uzla–Ma-gosa–Da-lıtriangle, and around each of these corners their possessions verge on spatial continuity. Taking this analysis of the Mattei possessions a little further, it emerges that their diversity does not only reside in their geography but also in the sort of landed property or agriculture involved. In fact the name Mattei is not purely associated in the register with vast çiftliks to meet the needs of ‘commercial agriculture’, and is found just as frequently scattered in a multitude of less striking occurrences. ‘Ya-k.ometto Ma-ddı-’ might well be given as the owner of two other large çiftliks in Pera-sko (in the district of Mesa-rya) and Lı-va-dya (the T.uzla district), but these are followed by a plethora of more average-sized dwellings and lands, some of them owned in association with his brothers ‘Ba-ldo’ and ‘Ca-n Ant.on’.39 The latter, registered as Prussian protégés, also have a similar property portfolio with large-scale farms in two or three villages, and a discreet presence in several other areas.40 Finally there is an additional member of the family, ‘Cova-nı- Ma-dde’ı-’, the Spanish consul,

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Map 5 Locations of property held by other families

whose exact relationship with the three brothers is not specified. He only has scattered fields, none of which are comparable to the large- or medium-scale farms of the other Matteis.41 Thanks to these family links, a pattern of land ownership of great agricultural diversity is emerging before our eyes covering the whole spectrum of the rural Cypriot world. Ultimately, the singular case of the Matteis means we can conclude that a territorial dynamic was at work. Here I use this word with a precise meaning combining the key characteristics of the Mattei farmland in all its heterogeneity: spatial dispersal and continuity, agricultural intensity and diversity. In contrast to this, the possessions of Lapierre and Mantovani amount to an extensive but discreet presence, occupying certain places exclusively. In contrast yet again, those of other families are limited to circumscribed – or regional – areas, to be found in many different places. The space of the Mattei family may be referred to as a territory in that it combines and accumulates all of these properties: it is all of these spaces at once, and none of them in particular. It is made up of great arable fields destined for the merchant station of T.uzla and beyond, and modest subsistence plots with their many trees and farmed by the local peasantry. Impinging on this territory is another one: it consists of the ‘areas in which the Holy Monastery of Kykkos has lasting activities’ according to documents in Ottoman published by I. Theocharides for the period 1572–1839 (1993: 2205). Despite the vague title and the distorting prism of this documentary corpus, it may be assumed to include a good number of those villages with which the monastery was in continual contact, and where people worked for it. What is immediately striking is the symmetry this map displays with the

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Map 6 Kykkos Monastery: rural activities and dependencies (after Theocharides 1993: 2205)

previous ones: the zone of monastic activities forms a remarkably dense and wide crescent twining around the western and northwestern regions of the island, before petering out in the direction of Lefk.os¸a, leaving the southeast of the island – where the ‘European’ farmlands are – virtually untouched. It is just as if there was a powerful dividing line running through the Cypriot space from Leymosu-n to K . arpas. How are we to account for this spatial divide? An avowal of ignorance is better than a flurry of uncertain hypotheses: there was a world based around the monastery of Kykkos, the operation of which falls outside the remit of this study (cf. Hidiroglou 1973; Kokkinoftas 1997; Michael 2003; Theocharides 2004; Michael 2005a; Michael and Roudoumetof 2010). Without therefore venturing to exceed the scope of my investigations, I will content myself with a dual suggestion. On the one hand, the configuration of the countryside around Kykkos is clearly based on the network of ‘dependencies’ (μετóχια) built up on the island around the monastery (Theocharides 1993: 2207). On the other hand, however, their geography reveals a forcefield whose dynamics cannot be wholly explained by the presence of the monastery itself, and whose borders are determined by the influence of another territory – that of the men and sometimes the families claiming to be part of the European ‘nations’.

Here and elsewhere – an improper territory Do the spaces that can be seen on paper (in the records and on the maps) correspond to the way provincial society was divided up? What is at stake

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here is the very use of the concept of territory, since it implies that social relations or knowledge patterns define and express their differences in space. Indeed, the Ottoman space was shaped by multiple ‘territorializations of revenues’ (Dimitropoulos 2008: 248). In this regard the minute examination conducted by the Ottoman census takers reveals a set of differences that do need to be accounted for with special care. The criterion adopted by the census officials, viz. the fact of being the protégé – or more exactly the ‘subject’ (teba‘a) – of a consular authority, could well be partly irrelevant both in social and in spatial – and thus territorial – terms. Hence I may have been overly hasty in following and reproducing the contours of the ‘foreign’ territories revealed by the land survey registers. To be absolutely rigorous it would first be necessary to map all of the landholding information for all of the registers – an impossible task, for the recording of non-protégés village by village, together with the uncertainties relating to countless homonyms, wholly undermines any attempt to combine the reconstitution of significant landholding spaces with the profiles of families and individuals. Given this impossibility of testing the external frontiers of the ‘protégé’ space, let us turn our attention inwards, for within the consular ‘zone of influence’ we find a vast range of situations (from humble plots of land to what virtually amounts to plantations) and no doubt of motivations too (producing a few litres of table wine, or making one’s fortune in some vaster ‘world-economy’). The space thus mapped out does not correspond to any specific structuring of social relations: though characterized by the development of çiftlik agriculture it is not thereby reduced to some free zone in which the fertile farmlands of the island are relentlessly and systematically exploited. Nor does it correspond to the formation of a distinct social group, for apart from the shared characteristic of consular protection, the fortunes and statuses of the various individuals are multifarious. The space plotted on the map, then, is neither a free zone nor a sphere of privileged ‘Frankish’ interest.42 Rather it destabilizes the boundary drawn by the Ottoman census, thus undermining the territory as drawn on paper, enabling an alternative one to emerge and come to take its place. The hinterland of the society of ‘nations’ also corresponds to a different sort of territory. We will now turn our attention to its legal dimension and thus explore further the displacements of Ottoman provinciality. Beyond the limits of consular law – ‘established’ in the province Georges Lapierre, Giacometto Mattei, and others held consular office (for varying periods of time) as defined by the Capitulations accorded to European states by the Sublime Porte.43 But the extent of their landholdings in the Cypriot space suffices to show that their profile far exceeded the consular orbit as defined in strictly legal terms. Indeed there are several indications that the landholdings of certain protégés contravened consular prerogatives. Vasse de Saint Ouen clearly underlines that such landholding falls outside his jurisdiction:

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a Foreigner who acquires property here, with funds not his own, may not be dispossessed of it, whatever measures his creditors might take, seconded by the Consul of the Nation to which this Foreigner belongs. Such is flagrantly the case with Sir Vincent Rey, a ruined merchant who bought properties, obtained mortgages on those very estates, and refuses to pay his debts or to consent to sell the mortgaged estate through compulsory expropriation.44 Perry, as we have seen, points out that the consular tribunal has no jurisdiction in his dispute with Mattei over the lease of arable land: ‘I was condemned by the decision of the Consular tribunal, acting as a magistrates’ court, on a matter and in a cause where a magistrates’ court lacked competence and had no jurisdiction.’45 And in his ‘memorandum’ sent to Raybaud in late 1836, he points out (rather acidly) that Vasse de Saint Ouen delivered a judgement ‘in a language which was virtually foreign to him’, adding: Affairs relating to land do not fall under [ … ] the jurisdiction of Consuls and they cannot get involved in them for, if the law forbids the French from holding any land, and from getting involved in country affairs, estate farming and [word missing], a fortiori, the Consuls cannot rule or intervene in disputes relating to them, especially since the laws and local usages must settle them, and French laws and codes can never be applied in this matter.46 Here is the reason behind Bottu’s use of the expression ‘illegal landowners’ above. They exceed the limits of consular law on two accounts: firstly, as individuals placed under the protection of a ‘nation’ they indulge in ‘country affairs’ falling far outside the competence of the consul; but especially because they thereby contravene the conditions of their status, since they are in principle forbidden from such affairs: ‘the law forbids the French from holding any land.’ What we have here is an outgrowth of merchant society in Larnaca, a power grab (or here, land grab) in which this society exceeds its proper rights. But which legislator is Perry referring to here? A footnote to the quoted sentence refers to an authoritative legal text: ‘ordinance of 1781, title 2, art. 26’, the same text referred to by Vasse de Saint Ouen in his conclusion to the explanations relating to ‘Sr Vincent Rey’: ‘It is necessary to revive article 26 of Title 2 of the Ordinance of 3 March 1781 forbidding the French from acquiring Land or buildings in the Levant, on pain of being sent back to France.’47 In both instances it is important to determine the exact tenor of the text and thus the scope of the quotation. The Ordinance, enacted on 3 March 1781, relates to ‘consulates, residents, trade, navigation in the Merchant Stations in the Levant and Barbary’. Title II, ‘As to residence and trade of the French in the Merchant Stations in the Levant and Barbary’, stipulates in article 26:

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Europe absorbed: territorial imprints His Majesty forbids his subjects resident in the Merchant Stations in the Levant and Barbary to acquire any real estate and assets other than houses, cellars, shops, and other property for their accommodation and for their goods and merchandise on pain of being sent back to France. His Majesty commands those of his subjects who hold other landed property in the Levant or in Barbary to dispose of it within ten months. (As quoted in De Clercq and Vallat 1909: vol.2, 19; underlined in the original.)

The preamble to the 1781 text states its objective: ‘to assemble in one and the same Ordinance the ancient laws along with the new provisions [the king] deems opportune to add’ (ibid.: vol.2, 10). Thus the main purpose is not to introduce a new set of regulations but to reiterate the rules of ‘an administration based on principles relating to the government of the Grand Seigneur and Princes of Barbary, to the treaties concluded with these powers, and to the manners and customs of their subjects’ (ibid.). In other words it is a reminder of the exact nature of the Capitulations accorded by the Grand Seigneur. As a matter of fact the successive versions of the Capitulations do not concede to the French ‘nations’ any property-holding rights whatsoever; and given their nature any such omission counts as prohibition (see Noradounghian, 1897: vol.1, 83–102, 108–10, 136–45, and 277–300). There is hence a certain ambiguity in the Ordinance of 3 March 1781: the King both asserts and denies his sovereignty in one and the same movement – asserting it by proclaiming its limits. This ambiguity may be read as evidence of the fault line running through consular law in general between the ‘personal’ and ‘real’ statuses accorded to the French and protégés of France residing in Ottoman lands (De Clercq and Vallat 1868: vol.1, 341). And so the ‘property’ (title II, 26) and ‘farms in the country’ (II, 28) in fact doubly exceed the sphere of the French ‘nation’, both in fact and in law. They are excluded from the legal space of the Capitulations and from the socio-geographical space of the merchant station. Invoking the 1781 Ordinance, as both Perry and Vasse de Saint Ouen seek to do, amounts in fact to redesignating a national non-territory. Reminders of this extraterritorialization run throughout the nineteenthcentury provincial archives. The ‘memoranda for the guidance of Her Majesty’s Vice Consul at Cyprus’ that Niven Kerr addressed to Demetrios Pierides in late 1849, stipulates (in paragraph 5): Should any questions arise wherein British subjects are involved in disputes respecting household, landed, or other fixed Property, you will bear in mind that by Treaty they are not entitled to possess such property in Turkey; and that should they do so, all disputes in reference thereto must be decided by a Sentence of the Turkish Authorities.48

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Or then again, in the instructions from the Ottoman government to an official, ‘Alı- Sırrı Efendi, sent to Cyprus in 1850: ‘the possession of landed property [emla-k] by foreigners [eca-nib] counts among the things forbidden’.49 Yet such reminders point primarily to the existence of what they seek to prevent, indicating an infraction of the rules, as in the instructions to Sırrı Efendi: ‘if landed property is held by foreign subjects in Cyprus and other places, it is only due to mischievous intentions and negligence that occurred when the prohibitions on the matter were being fully implemented.’50 Here we are listening to a sovereign seeking to impose the rule of his law, so any breach can only be defined as non-compliance. But at the same time other voices put forward more complete accounts for such breaches. The clearest account is the memorandum addressed on 28 May 1859 to Napoleon III by the ‘French notables in Cyprus’. From the outset their objective is to defend rights ‘they have exercised from time immemorial’.51 They state: It is true that these rights did not result from the Capitulations or from the laws of the Empire. But beside a written law there is unwritten law, resulting from the uses and habits established among a people with the tacit consent of the legislator. Rights that have been overtly exercised for centuries and officially acknowledged by territorial authorities are no less respectable than those stemming from a law or treaty. And the Europeans established in Cyprus and especially the French have always enjoyed the right to possess landed property there in the same way as the Sultan’s subjects.52 The breaching of ‘laws’ and ‘treaties’ does not hence lead to illegality but to an alternative form of legality. Whilst ‘unwritten’ it consists of rules which have been ‘overtly’ practised and have ‘always’ enjoyed tacit and permanent renewal. The assertion of this form of legality presents two notable characteristics here: firstly, it gives prevalence to the argument of ‘uses and habits’ which clearly echoes the reference to ‘manners and customs’ in the preamble to the Ordinance of 1781; and secondly, the authors of the memorandum use the Napoleonic nomenclature of ‘territorial authorities’ as opposed to some central administration to convey their own understanding of the Ottoman province. A specific concept of territoriality emerges at the point of intersection between these two lines of argument, with the ‘Europeans established in Cyprus’ (where the word ‘established’ needs to be taken in the strongest sense of the term) clearly seeing themselves as embodying a provincial territoriality, as it were, opposed to ‘national’ non-territoriality. Improper property Let us investigate the features of this concept in greater detail, and examine the word property and its cognates. If I say ‘and its cognates’ it is because the well-defined limits of the term are not necessarily respected in the archives.

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Firstly there is a twofold lexical and semantic field in Ottoman legal parlance for matters of property: on the one hand it stipulates that any land in the ‘well-protected domains’ is mı-rı- by default, in other words its freehold is exclusively that of the Sultan, and it can only be granted to private owners on leasehold (tas.arruf) – another possibility (not relevant here) being the consecration of mı-rı- lands for a pious endowment (vak.f). Yet on the other hand it establishes the possibility of private freehold (mülk) and appropriation (temellük, temlı-k, istimla-k), though this only applies to urban buildings and certain types of agricultural land (orchards and gardens, vineyards, and small fields).53 It is thus not surprising that the same twofold structure applied to the understanding of the word property in the French Ordinance of 3 March 1781. If we return to the beginning of title II, article 26, we will find: His Majesty forbids his subjects resident in the Merchant Stations in the Levant and Barbary to acquire any real estate and assets other than houses, cellars, shops, and other property for their accommodation and for their goods and merchandise. [Défend, Sa Majesté, à ses sujets établis dans les Échelles du Levant et de Barbarie, d’y acquérir aucuns biens-fonds et immeubles autres que les maisons, caves, magasins et autres propriétés pour leur logement, et pour leurs effets et marchandises.] (As quoted in De Clercq and Vallat 1909: vol.2, 19; underlined in the original.) The phrasing carefully singles out from the vast ensemble of ‘real estate and assets’ those items which in French count as propriété. It clearly lays down the way to interpret its clauses: this counts as propriété, everything else is possession. But there is no such clear divide in the archives of the consuls and other ‘notables’ under consular protection. As we have seen, Méchain describes Georges Lapierre as a ‘wealthy landowner’ (propriétaire).54 Perry also describes him as the ‘owner’ of country ‘properties’.55 Elsewhere he also gives an account of an ‘altercation’ he had with a subject of the Grand Seigneur, ‘a man named Rossini, because of the excessive tax that, being himself the farmer of these dues, he wanted to impose on one of the lands which belongs to me’.56 Bottu, describing the objectives of Meh.med Es‘ad Beg’s mission, lumps together ‘fixed properties’, ‘houses’, and arable ‘lands’.57 There is a similar confusion when he declares that he feels it necessary that ‘illegal property owners [ … ] be dispossessed by force’.58 No distinction is made here between property and possession. May we consider that this failure to distinguish is due to a certain ‘informality’ to be found in his writings – in other words, due to the fact that he is having to deal with the situation on the ground rather than with the polished precepts of consular regulations and instructions? It is true that

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Perry’s letters are not hidebound by regulations, and the writing style of the consuls tends to be more concerned with politeness than legal exactitude. But it is not possible to explain why this failure to distinguish is also found in the most ‘formal’ writings – such as in the instructions addressed by Kerr to Pierides quoted earlier: Should any questions arise wherein British subjects are involved in disputes respecting household, landed, or other fixed Property, you will bear in mind that by Treaty they are not entitled to possess such property in Turkey.59 Nor can it be explained why there should be so many instances of discordant usage by Ottoman scribes of the term property in the survey carried in 1832–33 – the most formal of contexts. It is true that in many instances the registers conform closely to Ottoman land law. The phrasing of ‘goods and lands of which they [foreigners] have possession’60 is correct, the registering of certain urban houses in Larnaca as this or that consul’s ‘own property’ is also correct;61 as is the fact that the Spanish consul . alimerı’ is listed as .onyo K : ‘Ant 62 the ‘owner’ (malik) of a shop and store in Iskele. But other instances contain surprises: there is a list of the ‘goods and lands which are the property of the second consul of Spain ‘Cova-nı- Ma-dde’i’,63 and those ‘whose owner is Bedro Ya-k.omo Bozovı-c’, an Austrian protégé,64 even though they are primarily arable lands (tarla). And when the census scribes use the word ma-l (‘property’) instead of the consecrated term mülk, the same sort of fluctua: tions occur. That houses and a store in Iskele be given as ‘the properties of Pana-’ı-da-to’, a French protégé, fits in with the legal framework,65 as it does when the Dutch protégé ‘Hristoforo veled-i Arkı-ro’, an inhabitant of T.uzla, is said to have a mid-quality vineyard in the village of Para-mı-da-, in the district of Leymosu-n, as a ‘property’.66 But how are we meant to understand that a house, 600 goats, and a dönüm sowing field (ekı-n tarlası) in the village of Ormidya are listed to the vice-consul of Great Britain ‘Andoya Vondeçya-no’ as a ‘property’?67 Or that the ‘lands exploited in partnership by the brothers Ba-ldo and Ca-n Ant.on’, including two irrigated fields in the village of K . alopsı da, are recorded as ‘properties’?68 These discrepancies are too many to be safely treated as mere anomalies. And so it would be unwise to attribute the failure to distinguish properly to informality and nothing else. Besides, it is preferable to look for other possible lines of explanation, for references to ‘informality’ always ultimately come down to considering the form to be the privileged modus operandi of norms, whereby complying with the form amounts to complying with the norm. And so reciprocally any infraction necessarily implies informality. Any such assumption builds up what Fredrik Barth describes as: a description based on certain formal institutions alone. The patterns that compose them and the ideology and values these seem to embody are

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Europe absorbed: territorial imprints thereby elevated to the level of definitive structure, while discrepant data and everyday realities are relegated to the status of a subsidiary, ‘informal system’. This informal system is therefore robbed of its power to act back and influence its own structural preconditions. (Barth 1993: 121; italics in the original.)

Form identifies with structure, and informality is mere froth or epiphenomena. In the present case the distinction between property and possession would act as the conceptual underpinning of any issues relating to landed property in Ottoman lands – the ‘proper’ meaning of property. But if we are to account for the improprieties affecting the archives (whether ‘formally’ or not) we need rather to accept certain troubles arising from the ‘underdetermination of form’ (ibid.: 64), and so pay attention to linguistic shifts which push the proper meaning of property towards other structures and other concepts. Such troubles arise with the introduction of a third term, çiftlik, into the shifting Ottoman semantics of property. It may first be noted that in the 1832–33 survey some items registered as ‘properties’ are also referred to as çiftlik. This is explicitly the case for the ‘çiftlik in the village of Aya- T.ot.ro, in - 69 the district of K . arbas’ whose ‘owner’ is said to be Bedro Yak.omo Bozovıc. Elsewhere one can read about ‘Mandovanı’s property in the village of . Gügercinlik, in the district of Ma-gosa’,70 where its size (nearly 700 dönüms of fields and 225 sheep) and agricultural usage (predominantly for cotton) are strongly reminiscent of the çiftlik which has haunted the imagination of historians ever since Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. All this has to do with the ‘key properties of the term chiftlik’ as put forward by Bruce McGowan (1981: 122): the word refers to ‘a claim resembling ownership over the arable land constituting the chiftlik enjoyed by a person other than the cultivator, a claim distinct from that of the timarlı (i.e. the traditional prebendal cavalryman)’. Hülya Canbakal stressed a similar meaningful shift in documents from Ottoman ‘Aynta-b over the second half of the seventeenth century: ‘çiftliks in this period came into being largely through tax arrangements, as revenue claims gradually turned into property claims’ (2007: 104). One might say that these lines stake out the impropriety proper to çiftlik – and one which is well known, that of a word which originally meant ‘usage’ coming to mean an ‘estate’ appropriated by its owner. A term, in other words, whose meaning shifted from tas.arruf to mülk. And this is the very shift taking place in the provincial archives. When Perry refers to . Georges Lapierre as the ‘owner’ of a ‘small Giflig’ (sic),71 or when he declares (probably about the same çiftlik) that he is the ‘manager of a property in a distant village where he [Mattei] also has one’,72 the word property is not used as the equivalent of mülk or ma-l but as the counterpart to çiftlik. All in all, this word crystallizes the improprieties of a provincial property regime. It epitomizes a concept of territoriality which is embedded in the margins of

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error and anomalies of the legal vocabulary of the period, and invests these underdetermined forms with its own idiosyncrasies. Perhaps it is possible to take this idea a little further. If we return to the lines of Bruce McGowan, we may detect something strange: ‘a claim resembling ownership over the arable land constituting the chiftlik’ (1981: 122). The turn of phrase – resembling ownership – may sound like a matter of precaution, but it may also be seen to point to a supplementary meaning that takes McGowan’s argument further than we might at first suspect. For the word ‘ownership’ means at once property and possession. Added to this is the fact that we are here dealing with something ‘resembling’ this form of possession/ property, a sham of ownership. Not only, then, do the improprieties of the provincial property regime extend across the fields of Ottoman bureaucratic and legal knowledge, they can also crop up and taint the formalized patterns of scholarly history writing at any moment. An ‘unwritten law’? Another form of territoriality emerges here which sows confusion within the property regime on which knowledge of the province is based. In fact, echoing the invocation of an ‘unwritten law’ by the ‘French notables of Cyprus’, it obliges us to view writings relating to ‘country affairs’ as potentially problematic. We are in fact confronted with two difficulties. The first relates to the means of delimiting territories affected by ‘country affairs’. The expression ‘unwritten law’ forces us to imagine land titles without any written deeds, that is to say a way of materializing rights not based on writing. That would be surprising, since one only has to consult the provincial archives to see that even the slightest obligations and transactions were formally set down in writing, out of a more or less explicit desire for a legal norm. We can also recall the ‘titles’ of credit that Simon Fortuné Michel states he has in a conversation . with Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga: ‘I do not have the titles on me, Mr Michel observed, but I will draw up a list soon as I get back and have it given to Y.E.’73 Equally one only has to read the rest of the memorandum drawn up by the ‘French notables of Cyprus’, claiming to go back over the history of the landholdings on the island, to see the ‘unwritten law’ set down on paper: [The category of lands] known as timars were set up as military fiefs for the feudal cavalry of the spahis. These spahis acted both as suzerains and ministerial officers and conferred property on rayas, Turks, and Franks indiscriminately, in exchange for tithes paid to them. The purchasers could transmit their rights to whomsoever they wished before the same spahis, who sealed these titles with a bulla, that is to say transferred the property to the purchaser in a deed called a murafe[t], whilst that of urban buildings was transferred by cadis and by deeds known as huj[jet].

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If we are to believe this passage, for over a century there have been scores of papers known as ‘mouraffet’ to be found in the Cypriot countryside and which, like the better-known ‘hujjet’ (h.üccet), constitute legal deeds. Ioannis Theocharides (1992) provides documentary evidence proving that the Ottoman term ma‘rifet, primarily known as referring to an act of mediation, could at this period refer just as well to a written act drawn up by the sipa-hı- and conferring legal enjoyment of a tı-ma-r on its new holder. Theocharides also studies the notes in Greek that were on occasions added in the margin or else on the back of these deeds, and when the word ma‘rifet occurs it is ‘simply transcribed in the letters of the Greek alphabet as “marifedi”, “marifetti”, “morafet”, “morafettin”, “mourafedin”, or “mourafettin”’ (ibid.: 162). We can recognize here the term used by the ‘French notables of Cyprus’, occurring over the space of a few lines as both ‘murafet’ and ‘mouraffet’, and with a similar lack of precision. A supposedly ‘unwritten’ law is suddenly appearing on paper before our very eyes.75 And so there is no need to wait for the Sublime Porte to send out its census officials to Cyprus to find formal written traces of landholdings exerted by several of the ‘illegal landowners’ in provincial society. Are we to conclude that the phrase ‘next to written law, there is unwritten law’ is void of meaning and see it as a mere linguistic tic unrelated to the provisions actually in place? The existence of deeds such as the ma‘rifet means we need rather to reposition the boundary between the written and the unwritten, for the unwritten may be seen to inform questions of property ownership. During the ‘National Assembly’ of the French in Larnaca on 7 January 1832, we learn that the archives of the consular chancellery were ‘misplaced during the Egyptian war’, including the property titles to an abandoned Capuchin convent, now in ruins, whose land it was now a question of selling: At the request of the Consul if there will not be any difficulties in selling this land due to the absence of titles; it was answered that public knowledge would be sufficient to remove any such difficulties, but that this sale would not be particularly advantageous. Leasing it would probably be more profitable.76 As we may see, ‘public knowledge’ is not limited by rigorous forms of written proof and in fact largely exceeds them. And this no doubt means that we need to be even more careful in how we tackle ‘country affairs’ in Cyprus.

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Straw and paper And here we encounter a second difficulty, relating less to delimiting territories and more to how we can ascertain their fabric today. If we accept that ‘such notaries kept hardly any archives and the old mouraffets are difficult to find’, and if in addition to this any such written texts were supplemented by appeals to ‘public knowledge’ of which there is no written trace, then do the abundant written texts supposedly attesting to land rights in Ottoman Cyprus at the time actually amount to anything much? It is to be feared that the documents held by and for those involved in ‘country affairs’ and the vast body of writing required of census officials by the Porte amount to little more than presumed titles of ownership. Let us return to the instructions given by the Ottoman government to its envoy Sırrı Efendi in 1850. For this document reveals that the authorities in Istanbul were beginning in the middle of the century to contest the validity of current ‘titles’. Whereas the survey officials of 1832–33 had accepted to set down unwritten ownership agreements on paper, the reformulation here only recognizes ‘mischievous intentions’ and ‘negligence’. It is perhaps revealing, or simply mysterious, that the registers brought back to the Porte by Meh.med Es‘ad Beg are never referred to as a precedent in the orders given to Sırrı Efendi (or to other officials sent on some missions). The purpose here is to stamp the local idiom of excessively improper ‘property’ with the imprimatur of an administrative norm – and so establish what one may call a provincial relationship between the Istanbul bureaucracy and the Cypriot countryside.77 Thus for example the authors of the text are careful to speak of the ‘possession [tas.arruf] of landed property’ thus forcefully reintroducing the legal distinction between possession and full ownership (mülk). But even more significantly such a project provides us with a privileged opportunity to expose certain behind-the-scenes aspects of ‘country affairs’: the possession of landed property by foreigners being forbidden, the fact that landed property is held by foreign subjects in Cyprus and other places is only due to mischievous intentions and negligence that occurred when the prohibitions on this matter were being implemented in full; thus there is no explicit mention of foreigners in the deeds and titles [h.ucec ü temessüka-t] relating to these properties, all of which are registered in the name of subjects of the Sublime State.78 Let us pause for a moment and consider the end of this quotation. On its own it seems to simply reiterate the denunciation of the infraction noted in the previous lines, by affirming the primacy of a ‘written law’: the claims of foreigners are fraudulent since there is no deed or title to confirm them. But this takes on a very different meaning when placed in the context of the preceding passage. The silence of ‘deeds and titles’ relating to foreigners may be seen as being more than a mere void that can be easily papered over by the

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reassertion of written legality: it is rather a superabundance of implicit arrangements where each name can hide one or several others. So in the instructions to Sırrı Efendi we are not dealing with triumphant knowledge, but rather with a will to know caught up in the inextricable interplay of written and unwritten. Let us take this line of enquiry further. In 1834 Guillois tells how Governor . Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga sought to put an end to certain goings-on by Georges Lapierre: Having been informed that auxiliaries of Sir Lapierre were running through the countryside and forcing peasants to come and harvest his . farm crops, he [Meh.med Aga] sent out spies with orders to seize anybody molesting the Greeks: it had been decided to make an example of them so as to repress arbitrary deeds carried out in the countryside by European landowners and especially by Sir Lapierre. He had had most of his many fixed properties passed onto the heads of a few Turks. These precautions can only be explained by the fear he might be obliged to make considerable restitution, and a desire to avoid this.79 This makes clear the hint present in the instructions to Sırrı Efendi that Lapierre used numerous figureheads. Perhaps this was a solution of last resort given the governor’s sudden harshness, as Guillois suggests. But given that Lapierre would appear to be the perfect ‘example’, maybe this practice was less exceptional than the interim consul implies. Another such case is afforded by the example of Giacometto Mattei, described in a dispatch penned by Bottu in late 1832, as a ‘Farmer of the district, with a figurehead’ in the countryside around Trik.omo, north of Limya-.80 And Perry mentions a ‘Raya [ … ] employed in the fields and in service of Mr Mattei’, Sandro Rossini, who presents himself as the ‘farmer’ of rights on the cotton fields in Limya-.81 Clearly, it is not easy to establish a firm distinction between ‘figureheads’ and ‘employees’, and it would no doubt be in vain to seek to do so. What matters is to emphasize the following conclusion: whilst the purpose of Ottoman administrators and the ‘French notables of Cyprus’ is to assert their rights, neither can be absolutely sure of their case. The Ottomans would like to refer back to written deeds but find that any such documents are full of the names of figureheads. The French claim to have proper formal title, but the fact that the straw men systematically crop up reveals their underlying concern about their improper properties.

The Levantines – ‘European’ names, figures of Ottomanness These silent ‘affairs’ indicate that this territory is not just made of straw and paper, and they take our investigations beyond the issues of land appropriation and legal reappropriation. This territory, despite lying on the margins of a world come from overseas, is firmly placed at the heart of the Cypriot

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countryside, thus making it necessary to go beyond the assignation of identities and envisage the various ways in which they might be exceeded and circumvented. This territory, by eroding the limit between ‘Ottoman’ and ‘foreigner’, points to a provincial society that must now be tested if we are to continue working to the parameters of this study. An expression of the French consul Bottu provides a way into this: he speaks of ‘Europeans long since established in the country, from father to son, or who were constrained by the necessity of locality to become landowners’.82 Once again we find the keywords of territoriality applied by and beyond consular protection: ‘established’, ‘long since’, ‘landowners’. But we may also spot certain enigmatic sociabilities rising to the surface here: ‘the necessity of locality’. And perhaps something akin to the ambiguous genetics of belonging: ‘Europeans [ … ] from father to son’. The ‘necessity of locality’ What is this ‘necessity of locality’ referred to by Bottu? For a start the expression no doubt refers to a touchstone of the merchant classes, since the prosperity of a commercial ‘establishment’ in the Levant necessarily depends on ‘perfect knowledge of the languages, habits, and resources of the Country’ as Méchain observes in relation to Georges Lapierre.83 A prerequisite for trade is the setting up of an effective network of local intermediaries. And the impact of this prerequisite may be detected in the text of the Capitulations then applicable, since a 1740 addition (curiously interpolated in article 82 about repairing non-Muslim religious buildings) states: ‘when our tax-paying subjects and French come and go between each other’s houses to perform sales for purchases, and other affairs, they shall not be molested in contradiction with sacred law on account of their association’ (translated from the French edition of the original text given in Bianchi 1852: 284). Yet the tenor of these frequent meetings would appear to have soon gone beyond the boundaries of Levant trade: they also played a key role in building up networks of trust between the ‘foreigners’ and their countryside brokers. And here straw men (or women) come into the picture again. A letter from Méchain dated 16 November 1824 states that ‘the widow Rey admitted that many of the promissory notes standing in her name did not really concern her; she had lent her name to the Greeks’ (K.X. VII: 132; quoted by Hill 1972: 120 n.3). And referring to another member of the same family, Vincent Rey, Méchain states in 1829 that ‘he mainly carries out local business with native people to whom he has lent his name’.84 Just as Lapierre and Mattei made use of the services of a local agent to manage their landed ‘properties’, certain ‘native people’ sought the support of foreigners to safeguard their financial interests. This sort of mutual arrangement confirms that ‘country affairs’ need to be understood as ‘entangled by dozens of overlapping formal and informal networks’ running through local society (Doumani 1995: 80). On the ‘informal’ side, such networks ‘neither required official sanction nor depended on

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the coercive power of the state’ (ibid.). Elaborate as it may be, this notion of informality is similar to the definition put forward above and is just as debatable in terms of its implications (cf. Ursinus 2005: 248–49). Still it allows for a possible gloss on the ‘necessity of locality’ that Bottu alludes to, the meaning of which he in fact clarifies a few months later during Meh.med Es‘ad Beg’s visit to Larnaca: secret proceedings conducted with the Hodja Kian [ẖa-cega-n] by some of the principal European landowners, including the Consul of Prussia, [have convinced him] that he had been misled about the European landowners and he now recognized that those of them who own land only held it against their will as cover for the considerable sums owed to them by local people.85 Documents drawn up by the Ottomans in 1847 for a Commissioner called ‘Abdülvahha-b Efendi sent to investigate land issues (amongst others) tend to confirm this explanation: ‘the above-mentioned individual [ … ] shall establish the sums owed by those indebted to the müste’mins;86 which of their goods and lands have been mortgaged and given as security; and which, if any, are about to be mortgaged.’87 Here land appropriation is no longer justified (as was the case with the ‘French notables of Cyprus’) in reference to the concept of provincial territoriality, but instead simply by financial interdependence. And so following the opposite path to that which at the beginning of the chapter led from the debts due to ‘Mr Michel’ to Limya- and its surrounding ‘farmland’, what now emerges is the extent to which the landholdings of consular protégés are bound up with other debt streams and obligations.88 The ‘necessity of locality’ does not therefore merely relate to the ‘European landowners’ scattered across the rural spaces of the island, and is equally present in the Cypriot locality’s administrative functioning. Here for example is a set of probate accounts registered by Vasse de Saint Ouen in 1835: A sum of 79,000 Turkish P[ias]tres remains due to the late Mr. Calliméry, Consul of Naples, out of a sum of 112,000 P[ias]tres he lent in 1806 or 1807 to the Island’s administrators, who were at the time the Archbishop and the Bishops; the receipt, signed by Archbishop Cypriano in 1814 [ … ], is in their [the Calliméry heirs] hands. Given the difference in currency values and interests which has subsequently fallen due, this sum would today amount to over 1 million Turkish Piastres. Besides, the Calliméry heirs claim payment of 26 to 28 thousand Turkish piastres, matching four receipts for various amounts signed by the same Archbishop Cypriano in 1819. [ … ] This sum, according to the same reckoning, would today amount to over 300,000 Turkish piastres, as interest here stands at 12% p. a., and the value of the piastre has dropped to a quarter of what it then was.89

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What matters here is not so much figuring out what Vasse de Saint Ouen is driving at when he states members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy were the ‘Island’s administrators’ at that time, as noting the extent of the financial arrangements linking the ecclesiastics to a man who had become a notable in consular society. And whilst the traces of the debts owed to ‘Calliméry’ peter out in the archives at my disposal, a similar case confirms how extensively provincial administration was permeated by such arrangements, at least up until the middle of the nineteenth century. This time it is a matter of debts contracted to the vice-consul of Great Britain Antonio Vondiziano in the early 1820s, and which echoed through Ottoman official correspondence for several decades. An order sent to the Cyprus authorities in September 1847 states: Twenty-four years ago, during the Ru-m sedition, the Metropolitan and the bishops of the island of Cyprus had borrowed 87,492 piastres from the müste’min Ant.onyo Vondı- Çya-no, consul [sic] of England, to be spent on the country’s affairs. Yet the aforesaid consul having died before reimbursement, it is his son [sic] and heir Petro90 [illegible word] who is to receive and recover the aforementioned sum. It has been decided that this sum be paid within one year from the date of my present sacred order, in four instalments of one quarter : every -three months. You, aforementioned pas¸a [the Cyprus governor Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a], along with the Lefk.os¸a judge and müftı-, and the aforesaid others, once acquainted with the situation, shall see to it that the aforesaid sum be paid by the country before the end of the year; the debt shall be paid without exceeding the fixed terms by a single minute. And in so doing you shall show the utmost vigilance in avoiding any distraction or loss of time.91 On being received this order was discussed by the local then the tenor : council, of the discussion was summarized by Governor Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a: ‘it has been decided that the aforementioned sums shall be paid on a district by district basis, with Muslims and non-Muslims being held jointly responsible.’92 But one question was still pending – was it more appropriate to use ‘a specific assessment or a payment appended to the annual tax’?93 When consulted the High Council of Justice (Meclis-i va-la-) at the Sublime Porte unanimously issued the following recommendation: It has been ascertained that the aforesaid sum, borrowed at the time from the aforementioned consul, was spent on the country’s affairs, and consequently it is a debt contracted by the island’s inhabitants. [ … ] As a result [ … ] the High Council has debated and decided to inform the aforementioned Governor that the 87,000 or so piastres shall be levied and paid as an extraordinary supplement to the usual taxes in the aforesaid island.94

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The outstanding debt is so closely tied up with the ‘affairs of the country’ over the course of time that when it is finally reimbursed it is by activating the normal fiscal mechanisms of the province. The Vondiziano case makes it clear how closely the operations of the Ottoman provincial authorities were bound up with the landholding initiatives of the consular protégés, and so sheds further light on the ‘politics of the notables’ in Cyprus. The ‘necessity of locality’ becomes shorthand for the composite nature of local high society. We are dealing with a constellation of powerful figures whose portrait is eloquently sketched by Bottu when seeking to denounce those he considers to oppress the Cypriot population: ‘two or three Turkish Aghas, the Kodja Bachis and the Greek Bishops (the latter mainly because of their incompetence), and certain European Consuls and landowners, first among whom are the Consul of Prussia, his brother, and Mr. Lapierre, the former French dragoman.’95 Another document in the form of an accounts survey drawn up in 1839–40 by a high-ranking figure in Cyprus (whose exact identity cannot be ascertained), reinforces this colourful portrait of Cyprus high society: . In fifty-two [AH 1252, i.e. 1836–37], when Seyyid H . acı Meh.med Aga was Governor, the son of the ambassador [sic], having called in monies owed him by the country, received from the hegoumen of Cik.k.o [monastery] . the sum of 5950 [piastres] on the orders of the aforementioned aga and with the Archbishop being informed.96 If we accept that a modest vice-consul has here been inadvertently transformed into an ‘ambassador’,97 then it would appear likely that this payment relates again to the sums owed to vice-consul Vondiziano. And if we view it from a slightly different angle this kaleidoscopic affair throws up new protagonists. The significant yet discreet role played by Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med . Aga reveals once again the extent to which he is inserted in local high society, even though the glimpse afforded here does not greatly exceed the official role of a governor. The reference to the hegoumen of Kykkos monastery is more crucial here: it would seem that the frontier sketched out earlier in the Cypriot countryside between a monastic and a ‘protégé’ zone of influence could disappear, since here the monastery’s finances directly contributed to covering the ‘country’s debt’ to a family of consular protégés. And so the expression ‘necessity of locality’ means exactly what it says: Vondiziano, Lapierre, and the like are ‘notables’, not (only) due to some form of unquestioning European protection but primarily because they were able to blend in with the complex configuration of local powers. The best indication of this is the intrigue surrounding the succession of the former vice-consul of Naples, Antonio Callimeri, ‘the majority of which [ … ] consists in extensive lands the deceased owned in various places around the island, including in the district of Tricomo’.98 The archives of the French consul inform us that a by now familiar consul of Prussia sought to take possession of a certain plot

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adjacent to his own lands, and so started by securing the agreement of the ‘Bey’ sipa-hı- of the district to act as a mediator.99 Bottu thought he would ward this off by appealing to the new governor of the island, Es-seyyid . Meh.med Emı-n Aga who visited Larnaca in July 1832. He got an assurance from the governor that nothing would happen prior to the issuing of a ruling requested from the Sublime Porte.100 But, the period of the cotton harvest brought with it new worries, and this time the Consul of Prussia took up residence to oversee them in person. […] The opposition he encountered from the heirs’ agent, a Frenchman, relating to the farm labourers employed in the fields, and troubles arising from his competitors’ buying up harvests, convinced him of the need to be rid of it. He therefore approached a Greek priest to file a complaint against this agent, and when the priest refused to comply he had the Turkish judge of the district issue an Ilam (court declaration) to the effect that the heirs’ agent was sowing disorder in the country by committing all sorts of violence and imprisoning men, women, and children for supposed debts which were so old as to no longer be due. On receiving this declaration in Nicosia the Governor’s Kiaïa Bey summoned the Kawass (law enforcement official) affected to the heirs to call in the sums due, and the Governor wrote to me requesting that I punish the troublesome agent.101 What stands out here, in addition to his ties with the beg of the region, is Mattei’s perseverance in requesting assistance from the local authorities – mostly those of the district, then via their intermediary those in Lefk.os¸a. It is clear that he mastered the written formalities relating to legal procedure (such as the drawing up of an i‘la-m). And he knew how to deftly employ the rhetorical means best suited to provoking the desired reaction in the entourage of the governor. All of which may be detected in Bottu’s description of Mattei’s goings-on, and all essential components in the art of coping with the ‘necessity of locality’. ‘Europeans [ … ] established in the country from father to son’ Under these conditions it is essential to understand the word ‘European’ as used in provincial society. Until now this has been left aside, and what is at issue is the use (especially in the consular archives)102 of the term ‘European’ to refer to those enjoying the protection of a European state. Does the fact of being called a ‘European’ refer to belonging to specific groups? If so, in what terms? And how can one then be a ‘European’ and at the same time ‘established in the country from father to son’? The question relates firstly to ‘nationality’. Two distinct registers of interpretation come into play – the one relating to origins, and the other to posterity.

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Given the particular attention paid to him by Bottu, Giacometto Mattei can act as a stylized figure for thinking about the categories and forms of belonging at work within provincial society. What is the consul referring to when he states Mattei is one of the ‘European landowners’?103 There is no doubt that he enjoyed an official status acknowledged by a European state as part of his office, and he was the primus inter pares of the Prussian ‘nationals’. But above and beyond this ‘nationality’ as a trader – a purely legal attribute – does the word ‘European’ as used by Bottu in reference to Mattei bring with it some further patriotic or nation-state meaning of the word? Notwithstanding queries about ‘unfinished nation-building’, many a historian tends to basically consider nationality as a notion that came to a settlement during the nineteenth century.104 The quality of being a ‘national’ is assumed to have stabilized as a scheme of discourse, an element of collective sensibility, and a commonplace of social interaction – all of which massively exceeds the specialized technologies of consular law. The permeation of the term ‘homeland,’ ‘la patrie’, among the trade and consulate elites living in Cyprus during the early decades of the century confirms this interpretation.105 And yet in the vocabulary of the period there is a legal distinction between ‘nationality’ and ‘protection’.106 And Bottu’s denunciation of ‘European landowners’ suggests that ‘nationality’ is purely a matter of name: Nothing has been left out: real privileges extended as a result of misinterpretations, intrigue, nationality, honour and consideration for the European name [ … ]. Such is the slippery road our Cypriot Europeans have been led down, without being able to stop; they have rushed headfirst into all these speculations that our ordinances and regulations so wisely forbid, and in the process of which at least some of them have amassed large fortunes, while surpassing the Turks themselves in their cupidity and vexations. It is a positive fact, and one which any man having spent some time in the Levant will easily acknowledge, that the evils of Ottoman administration and the character of its officials have made it impossible for Europeans to remain confined within the sphere of justice and loyalty, as soon as there existed other interests to attend to than those prescribed by the wisdom of the Government.107 Whilst the ‘European name’ exceeds its proper ‘sphere’, the ‘positive fact’ of brute inventiveness rides roughshod over any carefully patrolled abstraction of national ‘loyalty’. It becomes a mere title, as when we learn in September 1832 that Georges Lapierre ‘renounced his title of Frenchman’.108 An expression of Bottu’s is an accurate description of the situation – for he writes of ‘Cypriot Europeans’ echoing the expression ‘native Europeans’ used by the signatories of the 1859 petition.109 This expression of scorn or disgust – though nowadays one of unexpected glory – leads to a shift in reading, for these men are better seen as Europeans of Cyprus than as Europeans in Cyprus.

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And so a convoluted form of belonging emerges which exceeds the word ‘European’. For if we read the provincial archives carefully then any attempt to pin down this form of belonging seems to take us around in Möebius strips: [T]he Europeans established in Cyprus and especially the French who have always enjoyed the right to possess fixed property there in the same way as the Sultan’s subjects.110 The Europeans unable to engage in trade lease farmlands and bother the farmers to pay the demanded dues; they may be said to be the subjects of the Grand Seigneur.111 In both of these quotations the beginning and the close of the sentence only fit together in virtue of an ‘as if ’: ‘in the same way as’, ‘they may be said’. In each case removing this as if would introduce alterity: ‘the Europeans established in Cyprus [ … ] the Sultan’s subjects’, ‘the Europeans [ … ] subjects of the Grand Seigneur’. The expression of belonging breaks down and reveals itself to be an oxymoron. And the first things to be affected by this semantic violence and slippage are the surnames of the ‘Europeans’. Take for instance the onomastic instability of the census register of 1832–33. On occasions and in accordance with Ottoman usage individuals are referred to by their first name, with the French - - - 112 and Jacques merchant Gabriel Bernard being referred to as ‘K . avrı’ilı’ 113 Tardieu as ‘Cak.’. Hence the slightest ambiguity can lead to further deformations, with Simon Fortuné Michel being called ‘Mu-s¸el’ probably due to the mixing up of his first name and surname.114 And the frequency with which any given name occurs in no way guarantees its uniformity: within the space of a few lines Georges Lapierre is referred to as ‘Hoca La-bya-r’ and then as ‘Yorgı- La-piyer’.115 Mattei is successively rendered as ‘Ma-dde’ı-’, ‘Ma-ddı-’, and ‘Ma-dtı-’.116 This instability in names is not a marginal phenomenon but something found throughout the archives of the province. In the affair of the sums owed to Vondiziano, the scribes at the Sublime Porte first refer to the deceased vice-consul as ‘Ant.onyo Donercya-k.o’;117 in the draft of another order sent out a few months later this first undergoes a variant appearing as ‘Ant.onyo T.onercya-k.o’, which was then struck out and corrected to ‘VondıÇya-no’.118 Any reading of the consular archives is open to the same risk. For instance, the dragoman-chancellor (and interim French consul) Guillois, when recounting a dispute between Georges Lapierre and a certain ‘Constantin Giorgadi’, only mentions the latter’s surname on one occasion, simply referring to him thereafter as ‘le Sieur Constantin’.119 Here then the scriptural norms of the French Chancery suddenly fall in with the Ottoman practice of referring to individuals solely by their first name. Variations in names from one alphabet to another symbolize the convolutedness of ‘European’ belonging. There are two ways, one ascending and one descending, to try to keep track. On the one hand the shortcomings of ‘nationality’ revealed in the consular archives are accompanied by a tenacious concern with origins. It is

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exactly as if, given that any ‘nationality’ is purely a matter of name, the word ‘European’ conferred by the protecting authorities should invoke thoroughly established antecedents. Proof of this is provided in the way Paul Darasse describes his fellow consuls in Larnaca in 1858: ‘natives, European descendants of uncertain nationalities’.120 This expression ‘uncertain nationality’ would seem to be virtually a commonplace in consular rhetoric, appearing in a dispatch from the consul in Smyrna in 1842 (quoted by Smyrnelis 1999: 129). Darasse’s statement, though, is a way of indicating that even if the nationality is uncertain, the ‘European’ lineage of these men is established. And here the Mattei family (now linked to the Santi family) once again acts as a revealing and delicate case thirty years after Bottu was consul. In 1859, as the Solferino battleground was still smouldering, the French consul Darasse declared he had accepted under French protection at their request ‘several Italians, de facto Austrian subjects’ who lived in Larnaca. Yet with regard to three of them, ‘Tolesfaro Santi Mattei’, ‘Adrien Santi Mattei’ and ‘Melle M. Santi Mattei’, the consul had to attach an explanatory note, riddled with embarrassment through and through: These three, currently the richest landowners on the Island, have not been able to ascertain which city or state the first of their ancestors to come to Cyprus originally hailed from. Whatever this initial nationality might have been, it was lost long ago, for the Santi Matteis have always acted, from father to son, as consul for various governments, without ever acquiring a new nationality or reserving any right to their initial nationality. By education and predisposition they are mostly French: their progeny is purely European and brought up in the Catholic faith. Their grandfather [Giacometto Mattei], as a Consul of Prussia, protected them during his lifetime, and left them temporarily without protection after he died; since many of the ‘Santis’ who live here are originally from Corsica, and the Santi Matteis are themselves Italians originally from Corsica or the Peninsula, I accepted them [ … ]. Naturally and given the absence of any proven or probable nationality, nobody found any grounds for complaint in my course of action [ … ].121 Determining their origin is clearly a way to make up for their undecidable ‘initial nationality’, where the repetition underlines just how essential this is. This contrasts with the instances of public renunciation of any ‘European’ origin which triggers a profound realignment in the forms of belonging. When in June 1832 Georges Lapierre decided to relinquish his ties with the French ‘nation’, thus arousing the consternation of the ‘Frankish population of his place of residence [Larnaca]’,122 he did so by publicly declaring that he originally came from ‘Syra’: Therefore he is considered a member of the class of Hellenes, and on that account he requested (and obtained, though I cannot certify it) the

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protection of the Consul of Holland, who is temporarily handling the affairs of Russia, until he [Lapierre] receives his license as a Neapolitan V. Consul which he is said to have been negotiating in Constantinople for quite some time now.123 Thus whilst Lapierre is far from renouncing the privileges of consular protection and the facilities accorded by his ‘uncertain nationalities’,124 he is now in the eyes of the consul a ‘Hellene’, and it would seem that the assertion of this origin is sufficient to deprive him of the name of ‘European’. And so in Darasse’s dispatch about the Santi Mattei family the spectral appearance of the grandfather who was once Prussian consul symbolizes the way questions of ascent and descent are closely interrelated in matters relating to nationality: it would appear that until his death Giacometto Mattei was able to use his status as a consul in favour of his descendants. This is already made clear in the land survey of 1832–33 in which the çiftlik of Trik.omo is registered in the name of his daughter.125 There is a still more explicit reference for the ‘çiftlik called K . ondeya’ in Mesaoria, which is included among the ‘goods that Lu’iza, wife of the merchant Yorgı- La-piyer, left [terk] to her daughter Mela-nı- and their son Emı-lyo Allesa-ndro’.126 These indications bring out the strategies for handing down land – either as part of an inheritance or else even during the lifetime of the ‘landowner’ – that gave concrete form to the way families of so-called European origin became established ‘in the country’. The case of the Lapierre family also reveals that the expression used by Bottu, ‘from father to son’, omits a link in the chain – wives. The Callimeri succession referred to above is revealing here: Sr Anto Calliméry [sic] [ … ] [leaves] as heirs a brother, a sister married to Mr Simon Michel, a French merchant, and the children of two other sisters, recently deceased, who had married Mr. Tardieu & Mr. Gabriel Bernard, also French merchants. The surviving brother, who is affected by insanity, is under the tutelage of his brother-in-law Gabriel Bernard.127 There are many similar instances in the consular archives showing that marriage is a key moment in the process whereby consular protégés throw off the non-territorial limits of their own ‘nation’. For title II, article 24 of the ordinance of 3 March 1781 obliges all French protégés to request via the intermediary of the consul the permission of the sovereign prior to marriage.128 Thus in 1833 a certain Bernard Laffon, a doctor who had practised for several years in the service of Meh.med ‘Alı- and who now wished to settle in Cyprus and become the doctor and surgeon to the French nation, requested authorization to marry Colomba Zirigovich, the daughter of an Austrian merchant from Larnaca;129 in 1841, ‘M. Paul Tardieu from Marseille, the head of a trading house in Cyprus and deputy of the national body’ requested the hand of ‘Miss Marie Thérèse Zirigovich’;130 in 1836 it was the consul

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himself, Vasse de Saint Ouen, who shortly before leaving Larnaca ‘resolved to marry the eldest daughter of an inhabitant of the island called Santy, the brother of the Vice Consul of Holland’.131 Whilst these references relate to unions between members of different ‘nations’, other instances suggest that matrimonial strategies were in no way limited to the circle of protégés. Proof of this is afforded by a dispatch sent in 1846–47 by the governor of Cyprus, summarized as follows at the Sublime Porte: in the merchant stations on the coast of the island of Cyprus, foreigners [müste’min] are forbidden from settling and acquiring properties and residences, from taking a wife or husband from among the re‘a-ya- of the Sublime State; this however is what they have the temerity to do.132 The fact that it is not just landowning but also marriage that is forbidden is no doubt an attempt to prevent rea-‘ya- (and thus their possessions) from being promoted into the orbit of consular protection. In particular it confirms that the frontiers meant to delimit and circumscribe the fact of belonging to socalled ‘European’ society did in fact shift. The most striking illustration of this is Youliani, the daughter of Antonio Vondiziano, and wife in the middle of the century to a man known as Çelebi Yanko Georgiadis (Koudounaris 1972: 14); this man, ‘the richest Greek in Cyprus’ according to Ludwig Ross (1852, as quoted in Cobham 1910: 24), we can recognize as the ‘head k.ocabas¸ı’ of the 1840s (see Chapter Three above). Such trajectories from father to son extend the line of analysis put forward above, and the convoluted forms of belonging we are dealing with are determined at the points of intersection between shifting consular statuses and the territorial strategies of families. The other name of Europe – Levantine Ottomanness In this game of local interactions the word ‘European’ undergoes shifts in meaning, and its pertinence for a provincial history therefore needs to be questioned. What other name can be given to the Europe ‘established’ in Cyprus, the Europe of Cyprus established there for so long that any ‘idea of return’ becomes impossible?133 Let us return to the expression used by Darasse in 1858 when talking of the consuls in Larnaca and read a little bit further: ‘natives, European descendants of uncertain nationalities, who are called Levantines’.134 The word ‘Levantine’ has a sarcastic ring to it here.135 Elsewhere it is used as a form of condemnation, and in 1846 Niven Kerr also stigmatizes his fellow consuls, underlining their ‘Levantine practices of bribery’.136 We have however on several occasions seen how a word or expression, above and beyond any element of consular scorn or pride, can become a tool for the conceiving of provincial history and society. G. Hill quotes the ‘diatribe’ of a consul against ‘Levantines who are Europeans only in name’ (1972: 202).137 Is this not the same phenomenon (in still more radical terms) as that observed above

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relating to the sociabilities and forms of belonging of the ‘Cypriot Europeans’? So I would argue that the word ‘Levantine’ makes it possible to ‘capture the fluidity of national attachment’ and thus generate a reading ‘not via national categories but by taking social strategies and opportunities into account’ (Ilbert 1996: 96). To that extent it is therefore a term – a precious one even – that can be applied to Cypriot provinciality. The word ‘Levantine’ refers to a society – better even a form of sociability – which though not unconcerned by the registers of distinction and separation (particularly given the signs and privileges of consular protection), is ultimately best defined by features of interaction and conjunction within the locally embedded spaces and fabrics.138 This sociability, far from being limited to a single ‘nation’ looking inwards at its distinctive signs, is based on its ‘knowledge of the languages, habits, and resources of the country’139 that shapes its structures of multidirectional belonging and interaction. Speaking in terms of ‘sociability’ (Agulhon 1986) here is a way of indicating the desire to take seriously the diverse relations, the impropriety which ceaselessly crosses frontiers and undermines names – instead of just reducing them to the anomaly of some form of ‘informality’ (see Smyrnelis 1997: 176). This approach takes up François Georgeon’s suggestion ‘that Ottoman society – which has for too long been analysed in terms of “statuses” – be studied from the angle of social and cultural practices; and that intercommunal relations are not separable from an overall study of “sociabilities” in the Ottoman Empire’ (Dumont and Georgeon 1997: 7; cf. Décobert 2000). Such issues are at the heart of the Ottoman provincial history being carried out here. And the Levantine sociability glimpsed in Cyprus formulates in its own (im)proper terms the question of Ottomanness we are studying here via the province. The individual and family profiles of French protégés residing in Smyrna in the nineteenth century, studied by Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis (1999 and 2005), provide a precious point of comparison. Smyrnelis points out how the ‘too frequently widespread vision of Ottoman society as highly compartmentalized is undermined by such an analysis’, making it necessary as she states to ‘enquire what should be included under the term Ottoman: the subjects of the Sultan (or only some of them), or more generally all the inhabitants of the Empire’ (1999: 130 and 119). Hence the Europe of Smyrna, of Cyprus, leads us back to the same question – what is an Ottoman? The answer it provides is clearly in different terms to those provided by Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote (1970: 11). Whereas this definition (already quoted above in Chapter Two) identified Ottomans with ‘those who qualified for first-class status’ within the sultanic political system, Smyrnelis envisages the possibility of applying the term to ‘all the inhabitants of the Empire’, to all the members of an ‘Ottoman society’. Whereas Itzkowitz and Mote underlined the way in which the ‘Ottomans were cut off from Europe by both a religious barrier and a physical frontier’, Smyrnelis explores the social trajectories which spill across or redraw these limits. However, this shift in perspective does not mean that Smyrnelis’ analysis does away with the ‘opposition between Europeans

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and Ottomans’ (1999: 130). It makes this opposition less rigid, it is true, to the point where ‘it is easy to confuse a simple inhabitant of the Empire for a subject of the Sultan’ (ibid.). But the opposition still holds, being assumed to be of practical value for the actors of the past, as well as conceptually valid for today’s disciplines (witness the concerns about the risk of ‘confusion’). And so Smyrnelis ends up declaring that the individuals whose profile she is sketching are ‘neither fully-fledged Ottomans nor Europeans in the full meaning of the term’ (ibid.: 120). A strange alternative which definitively reintroduces the dividing line we were seeking to go beyond.140 What is needed here is to question the terms in which we are addressing the issue when we ask exactly what an Ottoman is. Ultimately any such question logically results in the alternative put forward by Smyrnelis, namely attempting to establish whether an individual is or is not Ottoman. To be or not to be – the noun ‘Ottoman’ here remains a substantive, a concept functioning both as a category of analysis and a social substance. By using the word ‘Ottomanness’ instead and asking the question ‘what is Ottomanness?’ we can avoid running the risk of taking it as a substance. However irritating the ness suffix may be it is the surest means to prevent a conceptual category taking on any substantive life of its own. So that even though the word ‘Ottomanness’ appears to be saying the same thing as the word ‘Ottoman’ it in fact does so differently, as an epithet and not a substantive. It is no longer a question of a simple alternative, knowing whether or not an individual is an Ottoman. Instead it is an invitation to reflect on what is Ottoman about an individual’s profile, or in other words on hues of Ottomanness. This leads to a quadruple conclusion: the Levantines of Cyprus are not ‘Europeans in the full meaning of the term’ but nor are they Ottomans in the full meaning of the term. However they are ‘fully-fledged Ottomans’ and fully-fledged ‘Europeans’.

*** Here is Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the American consul in Larnaca from 1865 to 1875 who left his mark on the consular society of the period in Cyprus (McFadden 1971; Masson 1992). His work Cyprus. Its Ancient Cities, Tombs and Temples, in which he recounts his time and archaeological discoveries there, is teeming with the symbols of Orientalism which was then at its zenith – constant challenges to the authorities of the island, self-confident extraterritoriality, dominant archaeological knowledge, and so on. However there are a host of discrete clues suggesting just as clearly to what extent his discoveries are at least in part due to the Levantines of Cyprus. Convinced that there is a vast necropolis in the surroundings of the village of Dali, he ‘leased about thirty acres of this land, and in these arrangements was greatly assisted by Mr. Cosma, a notable of the place, and for many years dragoman of the Dutch Consulate in Cyprus’ (1877: 65). He also reminds his readers that the first digs in Dali were carried out by several Frenchmen ‘in company

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with a native called Cesare Mattei, of Larnaca’ (ibid.: 64). A few years later it was ‘M. Andrea Vondiziano, one of my consular employés, now Russian Consul in Cyprus’ who helped him carry out his digs on the site at Golgoi (ibid.: 118). And, if we remember the ‘property’ held by Antonio Vondiziano in Ormidya then it is revealing that the consul chose this village as his summer residence from 1873 to 1875: .

I soon came upon a small village called Ormidia, inhabited exclusively by Greek peasants. It was in a pretty little white cottage on the summit of a low hill near the outskirts of this village that I established in 1873 my summer residence, and this continued to be our summer resort as long as we remained in the island. (Ibid.: 179. Cf. n.67 above). And so in a way the collections of Cypriot antiquities now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are all down to the activation of a whole series of Levantine sociabilities. Hence the ‘European impact’ gets dissolved in the complicated territory of the locality. Hues of Europeanness and Ottomanness go together, and standard accounts of the ‘European impact’ prove unable to disentangle them. If one absolutely wishes to talk in terms of an impact, then it would be best to talk of its absorption.141

Notes 1 For earlier attempts to elaborate on the motifs of this chapter, see Aymes 2004b and 2009c. 2 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.393 (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.24, 31 October 1835). 3 Ibid., f.394 vo. 4 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.402 (appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, unnumbered, 18 November 1835). 5 The use of the word property raises important issues discussed later. The use of the inverted commas is intended here to act as a reminder of these problems. 6 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.442 (‘memorandum’ appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 December 1836). 7 Ibid., f.455 vo (Perry’s unusual way of writing the final ‘s’ means that it is not certain that these terms are in fact plurals). 8 Ibid., f.442 vo–443. 9 Ibid., f.456. 10 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.171 vo–172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). 11 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.112–13 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.13, 8 September 1832) (underlined in the original). 12 The distinction used is that put forward by Khoury: ‘The development of commercial agriculture in the province of Mosul did not develop into agrarian capitalism [ … ]’ (1991: 170); ‘By “commercial agricultural production”, I mean the production of cash crops for the market accompanied by a change in the relations, if not the factors, of production’ (ibid: 220 n.3). See also Canbakal’s assessment of change in the region of ‘Aynta-b, where ‘the term çiftlik began to assume its modern meaning of commercial farm in the course of the seventeenth century’ (2007: 103). Cf. Veinstein 2001.

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13 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.31 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.17, 26 February 1832) (underlined in the original). 14 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.268 vo (du Tour to de Moustier, ‘private’ letter, 2 February 1862) (underlined in the original). 15 Ibid., f.137 vo (‘Translation of a letter sent by the Pacha to the Manager of the French Consulate about the various fires of the house of Mr Laffon’, undated): ‘at about half past one in the morning Turkish-style’; f.138 vo (same document): ‘[t] he following day, Saturday, at four o’clock Turkish-style’ f.230 (Laffon to du Tour, 30 November 1860): ‘it was half past two Turkish-style’. It would seem that consul Édouard du Tour enjoyed improvising with the expression – on receiving a complaint about one of his servants, he stated he had replied ‘jocularly, with a Turkish-style letter’ (ibid., f.272 vo, du Tour to de Moustier, no.66, 8 March 1862); the letter, appended to this dispatch, adopts an ironic and condescending tone (f. 274 and vo). 16 CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.226–27 (appended to the letter from Méchain, no.2, 8 April 1820). 17 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.171–75 vo (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829), f.171. The same list is given in the report drawn up by Bottu in 1832: CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.46 vo (Bottu to Casimir-Périer, no.23, 6 April 1832). 18 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.172 and vo (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). 19 CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.294 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 4 January 1832). For a brief overview of the career of Meh.med Es‘ad Medh.-ı Beg (as his full name is), see Süreyya- 1995–98: vol.I, 327 (where there is in fact no reference to his mission in Cyprus). 20 ML.VRD.TMT 16152 to 16155. The Directorate of the Turkish Archives pub_ lished a survey of the Cyprus registers (Osmanlı Idaresinde Kıbrıs, 2000), but the way the statistics are aggregated means that all names have been removed; furthermore, the pages devoted to assets controlled by those in consular orbits are particularly succinct. I am grateful to Alp Yücel Kaya for directing my attention to the defter-i emla-k of Cyprus in the Bas¸bakanlık Archives, and helping me understand the difference with the temettü‘a-t defterleri that the Ottomans started compiling in the 1840s (see Kaya 2005: 297–300; cf. Aymes 2005a; Ayar and Balta 2012). Discussions of nineteenth-century Ottoman statistics are to be found : : in Kütükog˘ lu 1999a and b; Islamog˘ lu-Inan 2004; Kaya 2007 and 2012b. 21 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, pp.168–83. The Ottoman term for the latter phrase is ‘teba‘a’: see above Chapter Three, n.61 (and cf. Hathaway 1997: 21–24). 22 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.58 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832). 23 CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.294 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 4 January 1832) (underlined in the original). 24 Ibid., f.287 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 21 December 1831) (underlined in the original). 25 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.58 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832). 26 Ibid., f.59 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832). On local contestation and negotiation in cadastral proceedings see Kaya 2012b: 56–60. 27 CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.409 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.5, 10 June 1832). 28 Suppl. turc 1042, f.16 (facsimile in Theocharides and Andreev 1996: 138): ‘cezı-re-i . _ - ha- ve k.as.aba-t ve k.ura-larına t.ak.ım t.ak.ım bi’l-ittifa-k. mezbu-ruñ h.a-vı- oldıgı k.aza _ - sına bi’n-nefs mı-r-i mu-ma-ileyh k.ulları [Meh.med Es‘ad] muh.arrirlerle T.uzla k.aza çık.ub’. 29 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.170: in Ormidya, on the north coast and T.uzla Gulf, the ‘Consul’ (in fact Vice Consul) of England, Antonio Vondiziano, is credited with 600 sheep and goats (‘k.oyu-n ve keçi’). 30 Ibid., pp.177–78.

Europe absorbed: territorial imprints 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

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Ibid., p.182. Ibid., p.170. Ibid., p.174. Ibid., p.414. In general in these registers this sort of district total varies between one and five million piastres (see ML.VRD.TMT 16155, p.309). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.37: (letter from Tastu, 4 August 1850). ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.173: ‘Iskele’de bak.k.al dük.k.a-nı’, ‘sava-h.il-i derya-da . maga-za’. The first is estimated at 1,000 piastres and the second at 1,500 piastres. It is also worth noting that ‘[t]he size of a çiftlik differed from place to place according to its geographical layout’ (Nagata 2005: 281). Using ‘Aynta-b registers from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, Canbakal also stressed how the term çiflik itself came to lump together ‘a number of plots of various sizes, or plots of vastly variable productivity (measured in seed capacity)’ (2007: 104). In order not to attribute too much weight to this observation, it is worth recalling that only rural populations are indicated on the maps. Thus ‘Cova-nı- S.ala-dovı-c’ : owns a house in Iskele, as does the wife of ‘Bedro Ya-k.omo Bozovı-c’. Nevertheless, in these two cases it is possible that we are dealing with a particular pattern in the network of possessions: a space divided into two regions, rather than one polarized by the outlet at Larnaca. ML.VRD.TMT 16153, pp.176–78. Ibid., pp.178–79. Ibid., p.176. The word Frenk or Efrenc was used by Ottoman administrators to designate people of European origin. For instance, on the subject of landholding, see A. _ bulunan Frenkler’. It is MKT 104/3 (undated [1263/1846–47]): “uhdelerinde ara-zi however worth noting that the term is not used by Meh.med Es‘ad Beg and his assistants. The Capitulations recognized four different ‘statuses’: ambassadors, consuls, dragomans, etc.; merchants and craftsmen; captains and sailors; and bishops and clergy (see Bianchi’s edition, 1852). CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.396 (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.20, 31 October 1835). Ibid., f.402 (appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, unnumbered, 18 novembre 1835). Ibid., f.446 vo (‘memorandum’ appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 December 1836). Ibid., f.396 vo (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.20, 31 October 1835). Reference could also have been made to article 28 of the same title (quoted as an epigraph to this chapter) relating this time to ‘getting involved in country affairs’. FO 78/802, f.309, ‘Memoranda for the guidance of Her Majesty’s Vice Consul at Cyprus’, addressed to D. Pierides (27 December 1849) (appended to the letter no.25 from Kerr to Palmerston, ibid., f.294–95 vo). A.MKT.UM 6/62, instructions (ta‘lı-ma-t) to Sırrı Efendi (undated, dated on the back: 5 Ra-. 1266 [19 January 1850]): ‘eca-nibiñ emla-k tas.arruf itmesi memnu-‘a-tdan olarak. [ … ]’. Ibid.: ‘[ … ] memnu-‘a-tdan olarak. K . ıbrıs’da ve gerek mah.all-i sa’irede teba‘a-ı ecnebiyyeniñ ellerinde emla-k bulunması mücerred ol-ba-bda olan memnu-‘iyetiñ . . tama-miyet-i icra-sında vuk.u-‘a gelmis¸ olan agra-z_ ve tega-füldan ne’s¸et itmis¸ [ … ]’. CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.170 (memorandum from the ‘French notables in Cyprus’ to Napoleon III, 28 May 1859). Ibid. This twofold nature is not to be confused with that of ‘the Hanafi context of ownership, which distinguishes between ownership of the substance (rakabe) and ownership of the usufruct (tasarruf)’ (Minkov 2000: 71).

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54 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.171 vo–172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). 55 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.402 (appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, unnumbered, 18 November 1835). 56 Ibid., f.448 vo–449 (‘memorandum’ appended to the letter from de Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 December 1836) (italics added). 57 CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.294 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 4 January 1832). These ‘lands’ are clearly arable, since their value is to be estimated on the basis of ‘the number of ploughs for tillage or seeds sowed’. 58 Ibid., f.287 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 21 December 1831) (italics in the original). 59 FO 78/802, f.309, ‘Memoranda for the guidance of Her Majesty’s Vice Consul at Cyprus’ addressed to D. Pierides (27 December 1849) (appended to letter no.25 from Kerr to Palmerston, ibid., f.294–95 vo) (italics added). 60 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.182: ‘[müste’mina-n] mutas.arrıf olduk.ları emla-k ve ara-_ zileri’. 61 Ibid., p.168: ‘kendi mülki olarak.’. This expression seeks to distinguish such houses from others inhabited ‘on lease’ (ı-ca-r üzere) by consuls. 62 Ibid., p.176. : 63 Ibid.: ‘Ispa-nya’nıñ ikinci k.onsolosı Cova-nı- Ma-dde’i’niñ mülki olan emla-k ve _ arazileri’. . _ 64 Ibid., p.174: ‘Bedro Ya-k.omo Bozovı-c [ … ] ma-lik oldıgı emla-k ve ara-zileri’. : 65 Ibid., p.180: ‘Iskele’de Pana’ıdato’nuñ mali’. 66 Ibid., p.173: ‘T.uzla’da mük.-ım Hrıstoforo veled-i Arkı-ro emla-ki’, ‘Leymosu-n . _ - sına ta-bi‘ Para-mı-da- k.aryesinde olan [ … ] mersu-muñ ma-li evsat. bag’. k.aza _ sına tabi‘ Ormidya 67 Ibid., p.170: ‘Andoya Vondeçyano k.onsolosuñ Mesarya k.aza k.aryesinde olan ma-li’. Koudounaris (1972: 29) mentions the ‘agricultural property in Ormidya’ (αγρóκτημα της Оρμήδειας) given by Vondiziano to his nephew (and adoptive son) Nikolaos, still held by his offspring today. (It should be noted that the word κτήμα, ‘property’, has been preferred by Koudounaris to κατοχή, closer in meaning to ‘occupancy’ or ‘possession’.) 68 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.178: ‘Ya-k.ometto’nuñ bira-derleri Ba-ldo ve Ca-n Ant.on _ _ - sına ta-bi‘ ile müs¸terek mutas.arrıflar olan [sic] ara-ziler’, then ‘Mesa-rya k.aza K . alopsıda olan [sic] mali’. _ - sında Aya- T.otro k.aryesinde va-k.i‘ 69 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.174: ‘K . arbas k.aza çiftligi’. . _ - sına ta-bi‘ Gügercinlik k.aryesinde olan Ma-ndova-nı- ma-li’. 70 Ibid.: ‘Ma-gosa k.aza 71 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.455 vo (appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 décembre 1836). 72 Ibid., f.445 (‘memorandum’ appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 December 1836). 73 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.394 vo (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.24, 31 October 1835). 74 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.170 vo (memorandum from the ‘French notables of Cyprus’ to Napoleon III, 28 May 1859). 75 Several facsimiles of ma‘rifets (or ma‘rifet-na-mes) have been published, indicating how widespread the use was: Theocharides 1992: 170–75, as well as id. 1993 and 1999: passim. 76 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.12 (appended to the letter from Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 10 January 1832). 77 This way of formulating the problem follows directly from the analyses conducted by Martha Mundy on the application of the 1858 land law in Transjordan (1994: 62): ‘[they] sought to translate the plurality of local idioms for the description of land into uniform categories’. For other insights into the shifts observed here, see Aymes 2010: 87–104. For similar Ottoman initiatives on fiscal and commercial matters in mid-nineteenth-century Izmir cf. Kaya 2008 and 2012a.

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87

88 89 90

91

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A.MKT.UM 6/62, instructions (ta‘lı-ma-t) to Sırrı Efendi (undated, dated on the back: 5 Ra-. 1266 [19 January 1850]): ‘eca-nibiñ emla-k tas.arruf itmesi memnu-‘a-tdan olarak. K . ıbrıs’da ve gerek mah.all-i sa’irede teba‘a-ı ecnebiyyeniñ ellerinde emlak bulunması mücerred ol-babda olan memnu-‘iyetiñ tama-miyet-i . . icra-sında vuk.u-‘a gelmis¸ olan agra-z_ ve tega-füldan ne’s¸et itmis¸ olub s¸u k.adar ki bunlarıñ h.ucec ü temessükatı ecnebı s.ara-h.atıyla olmayub ka-ffeten teba‘a-ı . Devlet-i ‘aliyye ismine muh.arrer olundıgı’. o CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.302 v –303 (Guillois to de Rigny, no.27, 5 June 1834). Ibid., f.186 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.29, 18 December 1832). Ibid., f.448–49 (‘memorandum’ appended to the letter from Guillois to de Broglie, no.8, 5 December 1836). Ibid., f.1 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 10 January 1832). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). Ibid., f.156 vo (Méchain to Portalis, 2 July 1829). CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.59 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832). This word refers to the subject of a foreign state residing in Ottoman lands and accorded the Sultan’s protection (ama-n) (Veinstein 2006). Given the complexity of this notion it seems advisable to retain the word in the original. The closest equivalent would be foreigner, but it is preferable to reserve this for its exact equivalent in Ottoman usage of the period, ‘ecnebı-’. A.MKT 104/3, annotated draft of the instructions (ta‘lı-ma-t) for ‘Abdülvahha-b Efendi (undated [~ 1846–47]): ‘mu-ma-ileyh [ … ] müste’mina-na medyu-n bulu. _ istigla-l ü istirha-n t.arı-k.iyle nanlarıñ mik.da-r-ı deyinlerini ve emla-k ü ara-zilerinden . olanlarını ve der-dest-i istiglal bulunanları var ise anları [ … ] tah.k.-ık. [ … ] eyleye’. Another document, A.MKT 90/93 (draft of a teẕkire, 9 S¸. 1263 [23 July 1847]) makes it possible to date these instructions to ‘Abdülvahha-b Efendi to the summer of 1847. On the importance of such interrelations between fiscal powers and territorial organization see Veinstein 1975: 136–37; Thieck 1985; Nagata 1995: 120. CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.393 vo (Vasse de Saint Ouen to de Broglie, no.24, 31 October 1835) (underlined in the original). There is an almost word-for-word paraphrase of this excerpt in Hill 1972: 120 n.3. The only son Antonio Vondiziano had was his nephew Nikolaos, whom he adopted after the latter’s father died: see Koudounaris 1972: 14, 29. This ‘Petro’ is in fact another of his nephews, Petros Pavlos (ibid.: 21), who became interim British Vice Consul on Vondiziano’s death in 1840. This might account for the confusion in this document. A.DVN.MHM 4-A/57, draft of an order to the Cyprus authorities (eva-ẖır N. 1263 [2–11 September 1847]) (the document underwent several successive corrections which have been integrated in the text without the various additions and crossings-out being indicated here): ‘bundan yigirmi dört sene muk.addem Ru-m fesa-dı esna-sında K . ıbrıs cezıresi metrepolidi :ve pisk.oposları umur-ı memlekete s.arf olmak. üzere ol-vak.it cezı-re-i meẕku-rede Ingiltere k.onsolosı bulunan Ant.onyo Vondı- çya-no na-m müste’minden istida-ne itmis¸ olduk.ları seksen yedi biñ dört-yüz . . . t.ok.sa-n iki guru-s¸ k.able’l-istı-fa- k.onsolos-ı merk.u-m fevt olmus¸ oldıgı cihetle oglı . Petro [ … ] t.arafından bi’l-vera-set aẖẕ ü tah.s.-ıli la-zım gelmis¸ ve meblag-ı mezbu-r is¸bu emr-i s¸erı-fim ta-rı-ẖinden i‘tiba-ren bir sene tama-mına degin ya‘ni her üç ayda . bir rub‘ı virilmek üzere dört tak.sı-t. ile te’diye olunmasına k.ara-r virilmesi olmagla senki Pas¸a-yı müs¸arünileyh ve na’ib ve müftı ve sa’ir mumaileyhüm siz keyfiyet . ma‘lu-muñuz olduk.da meblag-ı mezbu-ruñ is¸bu ta-rı-ẖinden senesi tekmı-line degin dört tak.sıt. ile memleketce te’diyesi itdirilmesi ve tek.a-sı-t.-i mu‘ayyeneniñ h.ulu-lünde bir dak.-ık.a vak.it geçirilmeyerek -ıfa--yı deyn olunması ẖus.u-s.una ik.da-m ve dik.k.at . . _ - ‘a-ı vak.it ve ta‘allül vuk.u-‘ından ga-yetü’l-ga-ye tevak.k.i ü ve bu ba-bda bir gu-ne iza müba-‘adet eyleyesiz.’

132 92 93 94

95 96

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99 100 101 102

103 104 105

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: : I.MVL 2585, report (s¸uk.k.a) from the Cyprus k.a-’im-mak.a-m Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a (13 . _ - ca Ẕa. 1263 [23 October 1847]): ‘mebalig-i mezburı daẖı birlikde olmak. üzere k.aza eda-sına isla-m ve re‘a-ya- müte‘ahhid olub k.ara-r virilmis¸’. Ibid.: ‘ayrıca tevzı-‘i ve ya-ẖu-d virgü-yi senevı-ye idẖa-len te’diyesi’. _ .a) of the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances Ibid., round robin (mazbat . (Meclis-i va-la-) (23 Ẕ. 1263 [2 December 1847]): ‘meblag-ı mezbu-r ol-vak.it k.onsolos-ı mu-ma-ileyhden alınarak. umu-r-ı cezı-reye s.arf olunmus¸ ve bu s.u-retle aha-li-i . . cezı-reniñ borcları oldıgı añlas¸ılmıs¸ oldıgına [ … ] bina-’en [ … ] ẕikr olunan seksen . yedi-biñ bu k.adar gurus¸uñ cezıre-i merk.u-meniñ emva-l-i virgüsüne bir def‘aya maẖs.u-s. olmak. üzere ‘ila-veten s.u-ret-i istih.s.a-l ü i‘t.a-sı [ … ] ẖus.u-s.unuñ k.a-’immak.a-m-ı müs¸a-rünileyhe is¸‘a-rı Meclis-i va-la-’da teẕekkür k.ılınmıs¸’. This recommendation from the Meclis-i va-la- was approved by the Sultan: ibid., memorandum to the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi) (12 M. 1264 [20 December 1847]) and imperial order (ira-de) (14 M. 1264 [22 December 1847]). CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.2, f.124 vo–125 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.21, 24 : December 1832) (underlined in the original). I.MVL 352, undated and unsigned accounts survey (~ 1255 [1839–40]): ‘Elli . . iki ta-rı-ẖinde Seyyid H s.a-fı-riniñ [sic, . acı Meh.med Aga’nıñ muh.as.s.ıllıgı müddetinde . . . for sefır] oglı memleketden alacak. iddi‘asında olmagla aga-yı mu-ma-ileyhiñ . emri ve bas¸ pisk.oposuñ ma‘lu-mıyla Cik.k.o k.omenosunuñ mersu-ma virmis¸ oldıgı – 5 950’. Other documents show that the British Ambassador in Istanbul also brought pressure to bear on the Cypriot authorities via the intermediary of the Sublime Porte – which might help account for the confusion here. See A.DVN 3-A/99, order : to the authorities in Cyprus (eva-sit. Ca-. 1263 [27 April–6 May 1847]): ‘Ingiltere devlet-i faẖı-mesi sefa-reti t.arafından vuk.u-‘bulan iltima-s üzerine’. CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.28 vo (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.17, 26 February 1832). Here once again the use of the verb posséder (translated as own) is ambiguous and later in the document its equivalent as a noun oscillates between possession and propriété (for instance f.29: ‘he [Mattei] was in a hurry to take possession [possession] of the lands that suited him especially as they were adjacent to one of his properties [propriétés]’). Ibid., f.29. Ibid., f.186 (Bottu to de Broglie, no.29, 18 December 1832). Ibid., f.186–87. It is rare, to say the least, to see an individual or group referred to as ‘European’ (Avru-pa-lü) in the Ottoman archives. When the origin of a ‘foreigner’ is specified, the term Frenk or Efrenc (‘Frankish’) is used. The word ‘Europe’ has been primarily used since the early nineteenth century to refer to a class of nonMuslim Ottoman subjects involved in trade, the ‘traders of Europe’ (Avru-pa- tücca-rı) (Bag˘ ıs¸ 1983: 63–68). CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.59 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832). See for instance (to name but a few) Hobsbawm 1990; Thiesse 1999; Geary 2002. On the historiographical issue of ‘unvollendete Nationsbildung’ see Clewing 2001: 10. CCC, Larnaca, vol. 18, f. 178–85, ‘Extrait des registres’ from the consulate chancery, including Jacques Tardieu’s speech to the ‘assemblée nationale’ held on 26 November 1832. The verbatim text of this declaration shows how multifaceted the word patrie can be as used by merchants and consuls. For instance in ibid., f.49 (Bottu to Casimir-Périer, no.23, 6 April 1832): ‘Sr Gemini, his name appears on the list of protégés, asked me to accord him not only protection but also French nationality.’ Ibid., f.56–57 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.22, 27 April 1832).

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108 Ibid., f.114 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.13, 8 September 1832). 109 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.171 (memorandum from the ‘French notables of Cyprus’ to Napoleon III, 28 May 1859). 110 Ibid., f.170. 111 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.218 (Pillavoine, no.2, 12 June 1830). 112 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.180. 113 Ibid., p.181. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., pp.176–79. 117 A.DVN.MHM 3-A/99, order to the Cyprus authorities (eva-sit. Ca-. 1263 [27 April–6 May 1847]). 118 A.DVN.MHM 4-A/57, draft of an order to the Cyprus authorities, eva-ẖır N. 1263 (2–11 September 1847). 119 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.288–90 (Guillois to de Broglie, no.24, 20 April 1834). Cf. Grenet 2010: 439–40. 120 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.164 v. (Darasse, 9 April 1858). 121 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, fol. 183 vo–184 (Darasse, no.8, 26 June 1859). 122 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.94 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 18 June 1832). 123 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.94 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 18 June 1832). The lists of ‘French people and protégés of France established in Cyprus’ regularly drawn up by the French consuls of the period inform us that Lapierre was said to have been born in ‘Constantinople’ (CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.226–27, appended to his letter no.2, 8 April 1820). Other sources (see Chapter Two above) state that his family indeed came from Syros. 124 He thereby doubly renounces his French ‘nationality’ since ‘the Napoleonic Code states that any unauthorized acceptance of public office awarded by a foreign government results in the loss of French status’ (article 17, quoted in De Clercq and Vallat 1868: vol.1, 67). 125 ML.VRD.TMT 16153, p.177. 126 Ibid., p.181: ‘Yorgı- La-piyer ba-zirga-nıñ zevcesi Lu-‘iza- nas.raniyeniñ k.ızı Mela-nı- ve . ogulları Emı-lyo Allesa-ndro’ya terk eyledigi emla-k’, ‘K . ondeya ta‘bır olunur çiftlik’. The traveller John Turner, who visited Cyprus in 1815, recounts his excursions in the company of ‘M. and Madame La Pierre [sic]’, adding ‘the wife was born in Constantinople, and I knew her there’ (Turner 1820, here as quoted in Cobham 1908: 445). 127 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.28 vo (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.17, 26 February 1832). 128 Text quoted in De Clercq and Vallat (1909: 19): ‘His Majesty wishes that none of his subjects irrespective of their quality and state marry in the merchant stations of the Levant and Barbary without having obtained prior permission, which permission shall only be accorded on request made by the King’s ambassador in Constantinople and by the Consuls and Vice Consuls in the other merchant stations.’ 129 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.209 and vo (Bottu to de Broglie, unnumbered, 7 February 1833). The Minister sent the Royal authorization by his letter (draft no.13) of 31 May 1833 (f. 224). 130 CCC, Larnaca, vol.19, f.187 (Fourcade, 22 January 1841), quoted by Bonato 2003: 281. However solidly rooted the Zirigovich family might have been in consular society, there is no reference to it in the Ottoman land survey. 131 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.421 vo (Raybaud to de Broglie, no.1, 12 May 1836). 132 A.MKT 58/5 (undated [~ 1262/1846–47]): ‘K . ıbrıs cezıresi sevah.ilinde vak.i‘ iskelelerde müste’min t.a-’ifesiniñ istimla-k-ı emla-k ve mena-zil ile tavat.t.un itmeleri ve re‘a-ya--yı devlet-‘aliyyeden k.ız alub virmeleri memnu-‘ iken t.a-’ife-i meẕku-reniñ ẖus.u-s.a-t-ı muh.arrereye cür’et itmekde olduk.ları [ … ]’. The use of the plural

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Europe absorbed: territorial imprints ‘stations’ suggests the presence of protégés in ports other than T.uzla, such as Leymosu-n for example. By contrast, French consular law stipulated that the only form of ‘establishment’ allowed to French nationals was for trade. Hence ‘any establishment for reasons other than trade in a foreign country without any idea of return’ is sufficient cause to ‘lose French status’ (De Clercq and Vallat 1868: vol.1, 365). CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.164 v. (Darasse, 9 April 1858). On the cliché-ridden and negative ‘Orientalization’ of Levantines in ‘European discourse’, see Schmitt 2005: 61–86. Compare Grenet’s take (2012a: 44) on ‘the Levantine mètis’ and the ‘moral defaults’ ascribed to it in eighteenth-century commercial literature. And for a discussion of ‘the haphazard and gradual articulation of the category “Levantini” in the Venetian commercial sphere’ in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, see Rothman 2011b: 211–47 (here 212). FO 195/102, f.582 vo (Kerr to Wellesley, no.15, 22 November 1846). Hill does not quote the source he used here. According to his indications it would appear that the author of this expression is the consul Saintine. In S¸eni’s terms (1997: 161): ‘Si on ne peut définir le groupe des Levantins de l’extérieur c’est qu’il s’agit d’un pur produit de mélanges’. Cf. Schmitt 2005. CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.171 vo–172 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 juillet 1829). In some respects, Mathieu Grenet’s investigation of other such European– Ottoman profiles may be similarly puzzling, for instance with the conclusion that they remain ‘double-faced’ and ‘marginal’ (2010: 329). This expression is borrowed (though I do not follow the same line of analysis) from Thomas Philipp’s study, speaking of ‘Absorbing Europe in Acre’ (2002: 87).

5

A departing world?

Ethnic violence demands our attention because it is appalling, not because it is ubiquitous. (Brubaker and Laitin 1998: 424)

Let us endeavour to gauge the provincial Ottoman space and take its pulse in another way. Still working from the provincial point of view, let us try to conceive of the movements of people giving this space material form, bringing it to life, as well as establishing its boundaries and sometimes shifting and spilling across them. The inhabitants of Cyprus (or some of them at least) travelled outside the island. In what places did they speak of the affairs and events of their country of origin, carrying a bit of Cyprus with them, at least as a memory? Where did the little world of provincial Cyprus go when they left?1

Fugitive subjects: outline of a provincial theory of demographic upheaval Let us take our cue from one word which crops up frequently in the Ottoman documents: fira-r, meaning flight – although we might need to return to this translation later on. It indicates the existence of one sort of population movement I am looking for, sketching out a space that draws individuals and groups over the horizons of the local. But flight is also evasion, disappearing, slipping away: it is even harder to quantify these movements, both for us and the authorities of the period, than it is to establish overall demographic data for Cyprus or the Ottoman Empire in its entirety at that period. It is only possible to apprehend these elusive movements indirectly and surreptitiously. Disappearing over the horizon Let us start by noting the various occurrences of the term. Be they agents of the Ottoman authorities or private individuals, it is by ‘taking flight’ (fira-ren) that some go to Istanbul to present their grievances, complain about an

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injustice, plead their case, or denounce prevarication by the local authorities. In the affair concerning Acı- Kirgekı- and Abeydo (see Chapter Three), ‘the Treasurer, the customs official, and others went to the Felicitous Porte by taking flight, so as to complain about the above-mentioned k.ocabas¸ı’.2 Others who were not moved by a desire to submit a request to the sovereign did not go as far as the capital of the Empire and chose to flee somewhere closer to home. Thus a certain Acı- K . onst.ant.ı complains that his brother and associate, . - - Durmus¸ og:lı Acı Pandelı, ‘employed a stratagem to flee from Cyprus to the : district of Iç ili [nowadays’ Içel]’ in order to block the examination of their business accounts.3 Elsewhere, the minutes of the Lefk.os¸a Council emphasize how Cypriot villages tend to leave their island on the large number of ships and boats found along the coast and head off for nearby Anatolia or the ‘Land of Damascus’ (Berriyetü’s¸-S¸a-m).4 Let us use this document to add to our Ottoman lexicon of flight and fleeing. It is stated that these fugitives choose, literally, to abandon the country, ‘terk-i diya-r’. I say ‘literally’ primarily to lend the suggested translation greater weight, but even more than elsewhere this translation is necessarily incomplete, and one could also translate it as ‘abandon [their] houses’ (since diya-r is a plural of da-r). Not to mention the fact that the word was also used at the period with the same meaning as in modern Turkish, to designate a region of the world or even an entire continent. A possible translation combining all these variations of scale would be ‘country’. Thus an inventory of the various fiscal farms of Cyprus records the revenues from diverse goods (cheese, flour, beans, vetches, sesame, olive oil, carob, pitch, and timber) as ‘going to other countries’ without any further detail.5 But when just after being appointed as governor of Cyprus the ‘Young Ottoman’ Z.iya- Beg chose to go into exile in Paris, his desertion was once again referred to in the same terms, as ‘the departure of Z.iya- Beg for another continent’.6 It may also be noted that amongst Z.iya- Beg’s companions in exile, there is mention of the _ - m, a certain ‘Kema-l Beg’ – none assistant (mu‘a-vin) to the governor of Erzuru other than Na-mık. Kema-l. It is written that he too has ‘fled’ (fira-r). Whether to the nearest or furthest destination, to escape from the Sultan’s law or else to come and request justice, there are many different lines disappearing over the horizon. But if we judge them by Ottoman vocabulary, are we to conclude that they all amount to the same thing, as one or two expressions would appear to be sufficient to cover all cases? The impression of non-differentiation afforded by this brief overview requires examination. The ‘ongoing Greek emigration’ – a harbinger of another period? For in fact not all flights are equivalent. Above and beyond individual anecdotal cases are collective flights whose consequences are more serious. This amounts to a leitmotif in the archives of the French consuls in Cyprus in the 1820s and 1830s. Writing on 27 September 1821, Méchain states: ‘There was considerable emigration of Greeks to Italy’.7 Pillavoine, on 23 June 1831,

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writes that: ‘the Greek emigration is adding to the island’s woes’,8 and on 29 July: ‘There is still much emigration from Cyprus. [ … ] The women do not emigrate, they do not have enough to feed their children.’9 Lastly Bottu, writing on 11 January 1832, observes that ‘the local Government has had to keep a very close watch on vessels coming to land at night due to the ongoing Greek emigration, and on several occasions this has resulted in quarrels between the Turkish guards and European sailors’.10 What exactly is going on? We are dealing here with a phenomenon that any history of Cyprus must be able to account for. Let us seek to investigate its ins and outs. The first thing that needs to be established is the scale of this ‘emigration’. Work carried out by various researchers collating demographic data reveals the low point of a genuine dip in numbers over this period (Papadopoullos : 1965; Kolodny 1971: 16–18; Erdog˘ ru 1987; Bergia 1997: 421–87; Inalcık 1997; cf. Quataert 1994: 777–97; Forsén 2008: 192–94). Whilst there is a considerable margin of uncertainty significantly as to the overall scale of the phenomenon, there is a clear drop in the Cypriot population in the second half of the 1820s of between 10,000 and 25,000 people.11 And in the absence of any other notable cause, only the ‘migratory’ movement observed by the consuls would appear to be able to account fully for this drop in numbers. It thus appears that we are dealing here with a phenomenon of mass flight, even though it is all but imperceptible in the documents of the Ottoman administrators. This raises two main questions, whose implications are worthy of consideration. Where did the émigrés go? A dispatch sent by Méchain dated 2 July 1829 offers a possible panorama of their destinations: In Egypt [where the consul stayed after the breaking off of Franco-Ottoman relations and the closing of the French consular post after the battle of Navarino] I saw 4,000 Cypriot refugees. They can find work there and live freely and tranquilly. There are at least as many in the Pashalik of Acre; in Adana, in Caramania; in Smyrna; in Magnesia and other places under Turkish domination. There are only a few hundred in Sira and Morea, because these countries do not yet offer poor foreigners sufficient security or fairly paid work.12 Coastlines nearest to the island predominate, towards which it is easier to cross without venturing far out to sea. Exactly the same thing may be found in the minutes of the local council quoted earlier, written fifteen or so years previously, which state that ‘there [being] many vessels and boats near [the island’s] coastline belonging to fishermen and sponge fishers’, certain islanders easily managed to go to nearby Anatolia and Syria.13 However, Méchain’s dispatch shows that people also emigrated to places further afield. Whether from the Syrian and Anatolian coasts or else directly from Cyprus, some people followed the main Eastern Mediterranean trading routes to Egypt, Smyrna, and Thessaly. One such case was that of the Cypriot involved in a

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case of apostasy who the acting consul in Larnaca managed to ‘get secretly aboard a Greek vessel departing for Smyrna’.14 As we have seen, Méchain also referred to Italy in 1821. Mention is also made of Marseilles, where several dignitaries from Cyprus (especially churchmen) were reputed to be residing in the early 1820s.15 Who were the émigrés? With the exception of a few individuals such as the Marseilles émigrés, they remain anonymous. The consuls, however, appeared to attach particular importance to the fact that they were ‘Greek’. The question ‘who were the émigrés?’ thus leads on to a different question, namely why did they leave? What we might be picking up on here is a resonance between the demographic phenomenon and the context of the Greek War of Independence, i.e. the reason the ‘Greeks’ fled was because of repression in Cyprus in 1821, following on from the uprising of Greek rebels and rumours (of uncertain origin) of a seditious movement amongst the Cypriots, as a result of which Governor Küçük Meh.med Pas¸a had several Christian dignitaries on the island executed and their assets expropriated.16 This episode has been comparatively little studied, and what accounts there are tend to be heavily coloured by nationalist rewritings. If we are to avoid being influenced by these then it is best to accept that any detailed understanding of this episode remains (for now) unretraceable. Scarce documentary traces only attest to the fact that the Sultan’s Christian subjects were obliged to go into exile and become what the French consuls of the period referred to as ‘proscribed Greeks’.17 And although the overall number of ‘proscribed’ Greeks (which is hard to assess) would not appear to be commensurate with the phenomenon of emigration at its height, there is nevertheless a certain degree of coincidence: the beginnings of this phenomenon occurred at the same time as the affirmation of a Greek ‘national sentiment’ and its repression by the Ottomans. It is as though the abrupt demographic drop in Cyprus was a repercussion of the distant shockwave of the Greek insurrection in Morea. This comparison has been put forward for other provinces in the Empire. Let us look for example at the analysis Thomas Philipp puts forward of the demographic traces left in the town of Acre by the 1821 shock: In Acre anti-dhimmı- politics [various symptoms of which Philipp identifies in the preceding year] were intensified in 1821. After Greek nationalists had started their uprising in the Morea in March, the sultan sent orders to all provinces to fortify the coastal towns and to disarm the Christians. ‘Abdalla-h Pasha [the local Governor] not only obeyed this order but also evicted most Christians from Acre. Christians were also paid to convert to Islam and young boys were trained to become Mamluks. These measures were not applied very vigorously, but the mood had changed. Where once the Christians had constituted at least half the population, if not the majority, by 1829 they constituted perhaps only one fifth. (Philipp 2002: 91–92)

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This piece of historical reasoning would appear to apply to Cyprus very well too. In both places it is a question of the persecution of Christians (although the extent and vigour of the phenomenon are uncertain) and a simultaneous profound demographic upheaval. Might we not also declare that ‘the mood had changed’ in Cyprus too? Is this indeed ‘the first instance of changing times’? On such an account the mass emigration of Cypriots in the 1820s would acquire the status of a symbol. It would signify the advent of another time in which ‘Ottomanness’ as conceived above would begin to unravel. On such an account the Cypriot émigrés carried off an entire world with them as they went, the ‘shared world’ of a Mediterranean that ‘had a dynamic all of its own, one that is not adequately conveyed by a focus on the struggle – or absence of one – between Christianity and Islam’, a world marked ‘not by a crystallization of religiously defined communities but rather by an instability in religious identity’ (Greene 2000: 4–5).18 This world, it is argued, gave way to one of clear-cut borders and antagonisms, a prelude to ‘the era of nationalism’ (Anagnostopoulou 1998: 146). In contrast to ‘the survival of a polyglot subject population through several relatively orderly centuries’, in the midnineteenth century ‘intercommunal relations began to be marked by violence’ (Peirce 2010: 79). Yet is this what happened in Cyprus in the first decades of the nineteenth century?

Coming and going – yet staying put Let us look in a bit more detail at the traces left in the provincial archives of Cyprus by ‘flights’ (fira-r). This also makes it possible to ascertain the style used by the Ottoman administrators, document after document, in their accounts of such instances, something our reading needs to account for. The question actually contains the answer In the early 1850s the Ottoman authorities sent an agent named ‘Alı- Sırrı Efendi to Cyprus to conduct a land survey (tah.rı-r-i emla-k me’mu-rı).19 In one of his many reports he lists a series of questions he says the inhabitants of the island have asked him about the way the land survey was to be carried out, to which he has appended the answers he envisages. One of these questions is as follows: If fields still need to be recorded when held by someone who has fled and is unknown, or by someone who embarked on a military career and has been reported missing for more than five or ten years; and in the event where certain villagers farm these fields, under what name should the harvests be registered?20 It is not uncommon for Ottoman tax inspectors to encounter the question of the status of abandoned land. Earlier in the mid-1840s the Lefk.os¸a Council

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had voiced concerns about people ‘abandoning their plot of land and field they choose to leave the country’.21 One particularity of ‘Alı- Sırrı Efendi’s report is that, unlike the best-known cases (of peasants leaving the farm unit they depend on), it is concerned here with the disappearance of the ‘landholder’ of fields still farmed by the ‘people of the village’.22 Nevertheless, by removing the question from its specific context the facts motivating it disappear from view, as does any exact idea of the number of people to have fled.23 The questions discussed in Sırrı Efendi’s report have been addressed to him ‘from certain places’, he writes, without it being deemed necessary to go into any further detail.24 Let us now turn to the suggested answer to the matter in hand, for it is no less revealing. Here it is: ‘Let the above-mentioned fields be recorded in the name of their original holders, and the harvests registered as the revenue of the man cultivating them.’25 Without seeking to exhaust all the possible interpretations of such a recommendation, what matters here is the underlying common sense: if someone has fled, or if a soldier is reported missing, that implies that they will come back one day. Otherwise why bother carry on registering land as held by the old names still on everyone’s lips (though for how much longer)? Unless it be held that the Ottoman survey officials were simply indulging a nostalgia for vernacular place names, the most probable hypothesis is that the ‘original landholder’ would turn up again one day and be reassigned to his place on the page under his name. Which brings us back to the word ‘fira-r’, and the meaning attributed to it by the Ottoman administrators. If the hypothesis being put forward here is accepted, then it is a temporary voyage, an accidental meandering. Rather than disappearing or fleeing, the fugitives have merely absented themselves. There is no shortage of illustrations of the reversible nature of flight. In the cases where the fugitives have gone to Istanbul to put forward a claim or make a complaint, the idea of returning to the country of origin is virtually automatic. Once the sovereign has delivered his decision on the case, it is understood that the protagonists will return home. In the request quoted above the circumstances are different but the result is the same: Acı- K . onst.ant.ı is clearly counting on the fact that his fugitive brother could be brought back : to Cyprus, since he requests . that- an order be sent to the governor of Içil demanding that Durmus¸ oglı Acı- Pa-ndelı- be sent back.26 Here is another order, this time sent to the governor (mutas.arrıf) of Cyprus in February 1857: . The individuals named Ya-nk.o and Yorgon [sic], inhabitants of the island of Cyprus, have for certain reasons furtively fled to the Felicitous Porte. This was stated in the minutes of the council of the above-mentioned island, which also discussed the question of their being sent back [mah.aline i‘a-de]. [ … ] [G]iven this information it was deemed important that the above-mentioned individuals be sent there [to Cyprus] and that they be sent back in such a way as to preclude any flight [ … ].27

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Let us complete the string of quotations with the following part of a document mentioned above, drawn up by the Lefk.os¸a Council in 1845: The island [of Cyprus] being surrounded by sea on all sides and also particularly close to the domains of Anatolia and the Country of Damascus, there are many vessels and boats near its coastline belonging to fishermen and sponge fishers; furthermore, certain inhabitants of the . villages are inconsequent [sebük-magz]. They therefore choose to abandon their plot of land and their fields, and leave the country, villainously doing evil to their fellows and to their astounded families.28 These quotations, together with Sırrı Efendi’s above-quoted reaction to the question of fields abandoned by their holders, help bring out more clearly the inflections of Ottoman discourse about flight. It would appear to be indissociable from its obverse and its reversal – i‘a-de, the return to a prior state, the putting back in place, the rendering conform with the precedent of habitual usage. This is another way of saying that all flight is a movement shorn of consequences, an inconsequent movement bound to be reversed and rendered null and void. Firstly from an empirical point of view, since the Ottoman agents see to it that all fugitives be sent back to their point of departure, and secondly from a symbolical point of view, as the purpose is to redefine flight as in fact staying put, of abolishing it as an event. Flight is without consequence, and also without reason. Hence the motives . for the flight of ‘Ya-nk.o and Yorgon [sic]’ are not mentioned in the above document and covered by a vague ‘for certain reasons’. Of course it could be objected that this ellipsis indicates not that they are insignificant but precisely the opposite, and maybe even that the reasons are so serious that they needed to be suppressed. Literally speaking, though, the result remains the same: on paper, flight appears devoid of any valid reasons. The same holds true in the minutes of the Lefk.os¸a Council, for priority is given to ‘inconsequence’ in explaining why the peasants departed. Everything that emerges in this discourse appears to point towards the fact that flight does not really take place (the fugitives are mere runaways who will return to their proper place at one stage or another), and nor should it take place (the reasons for fleeing are never serious). This enables the Ottoman authorities to deny that flight is in anyway important, to circumscribe the problem it poses by considering that its solution is known in advance. The question already contained the answer, in fact. Conceiving of emigration and making it possible to return – a matter of ‘poor administration’ This might also explain the difficulty to distinguish between various words for flight in Ottoman usage. All the various reasons and justifications do not ultimately matter as in all cases the departure is deemed null and void,

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thereby reducing it to the standard pattern of flight. And so consequently even if, as we have observed, not all instances of flight are equivalent in the eyes of the Ottoman administrators, they are – as a matter of principle – of no great import. An equivalent presumption of reversibility would thus appear to apply to the flight of certain individuals and to a movement such as that called the ‘Greek emigration’ by the French consuls. From 1830 onwards certain occurrences suggest that the Ottoman authorities sought to have those Cypriots who had been forced into exile at the moment of the Greek insurrection brought back to the island. For example, in December 1831 the French consul relays rumours being spread by an agent of the Porte about a ferma-n apparently ‘relating to summoning back proscribed individuals and the restitution of their goods to those who exist’.29 Are we to see this as a decision to grant political amnesty, with the purpose of erasing the departure of the ‘proscribed individuals’ (cf. Reinkowski 2005a: 214–25)? What I wish to show rather is that this attempt to invert the mass emigratory trend does not arise primarily from a political reading of the situation. The reason behind the emigration, in the eyes of many contemporaries, is less the tensions caused by the Morea uprising and the assertion of a ‘Hellenic’ national sentiment, and more the miserable lot of the Cypriots. Let us look at greater length at an excerpt from Méchain’s correspondence in 1829 quoted above, in which he emphasizes: the misery of the inhabitants, whose sufferings force them to flee and go and look in other parts of the Ottoman Empire for secure conditions in which to exist and for the bread to eat that they are no longer allowed to earn in their mother country. In Egypt I saw 4,000 Cypriot refugees. They can find work there and live freely and tranquilly. There are at least as many in the Pashalik of Acre; in Adana, in Caramania; in Smyrna; in Magnesia and other places under Turkish domination. There are only a few hundreds in Sira and Morea, because these countries do not yet offer poor foreigners sufficient security or fairly paid work. It is calculated that the poor administration of Cyprus has forced between 20,000 and 25,000 of its inhabitants into exile over the past five years. [ … ] The Turkish population is no less subject to humiliations than the Christians are. The noteworthy point, Monseigneur, is the spoliations; the tortures on collecting customs duties; the hangings; the disrupting of European trade in Larnaca, are advised, provoked, and carried out by Greeks and renegade Greeks. The greatest harm is done by subaltern agents. Men who are well-informed about the affairs of this Country assure me that farmers and inhabitants pay avanies [improper dues] and collection costs to Greek collectors, or the Kawas accompanying them, amounting to an additional two-thirds of the sums going to the Coffers of the Governor. Lastly this island which has always been faithful to the Grand Seigneur and whose position has protected it from events is

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now as ruined and depopulated as those which have undergone War and fire.30 If I have quoted at length here (with only one ellipsis), it is to give a better feeling for Méchain’s underlying argument. It comes to the surface in the last sentence of this quotation, but runs throughout the passage. An approximate paraphrase of the main points runs as follows: the émigrés go to find ‘security’ and ‘bread’ as much as to live ‘freely and tranquilly’; they do not thereby seek to flee ‘Turkish domination’ (and are thus not acting out of any Hellenic sentiment); in Cyprus itself the abuses causing emigration are carried out by ‘Greeks’ who are ‘subaltern agents’ (hence intermediaries and not the representatives of the Ottoman authorities). The portrait presented here is a conscious and determined refusal to establish a link between the destiny of Cypriots and the ‘events’ of the Greek insurrection. It might be objected that on several occasions in his correspondence Méchain reveals his lack of sympathy for the ‘Greeks’, and that the passage quoted above is merely a logical extension of this. Indeed he underlines how ‘having resided for twenty-five years amongst the Greeks’ has rid him of ‘all [his] classical illusions’,31 and that ‘it would be safer to entrust our women and children to the religious generosity of the Turks than to expose them to the risk of falling into the hands of the Greeks’.32 The consul’s sympathies and antipathies should not be glossed over, but they are not the only possible interpretation for the passage quoted above. It may also be seen as conveying a specifically consular (as opposed to diplomatic) point of view, in accordance with the provincial trials and tribulations of the ‘Eastern Question’ examined above (Chapter Three). From this point of view this passage does not only tell us about the personal sympathies of the consul, it also confirms that we need to venture through provincial archives with precaution. The backdrop of the Greek insurrection and the comings and goings of Cypriots are not necessarily seen as related, especially not from a ‘provincial’ point of view such as the consul’s. Here we can see the point where the implicit causal link between the Hellenic national movement on the one hand, and the demographic drop in Cyprus on the other, starts to unravel. And what we can detect in Méchain’s writing also helps us apprehend indirectly the terms in which the local Ottoman authorities conceived of the situation. Here is a passage from the imperial order sent to the Cyprus authorities on 17 August 1839 (in fact reiterating an instruction issued one year previously): Due to their inability to pay their taxes, and on the pretext of penury and the high cost of living, the number of 200 people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, living on the island have fled to Ant.a-lya. It is necessary that they be made to return [irca-‘] to their former homes, and that favourable conditions be established for their well-being and tranquillity. Consequently [it has been ordered] that the Muslim and non-Muslims

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The representatives of the Ottoman State consider like Méchain that Cypriot emigration is a response to ‘poor administration’, which may always be put right, and not some ineluctable political fate. Reversing the trend thus simply requires the application of ad hoc administrative measures such as tax exemptions and debt rescheduling. The ‘well-being’ and ‘tranquillity’ of the subjects – the stated goal of these measures – is couched in routine phraseology, for the ‘refa-h ve ra-h.at’ is with multiple trills and variances a commonplace of the formulaic idiom of Ottoman administrators34 – an idiom which the consuls also used extensively, for that matter.35 It may also be observed that the Ottomans do not consider emigration as specific to the Christians or ‘Greeks’. All these clues bear out the idea that the phenomenon is interpreted in accordance with administrative categories, not political ones. Inverting the migratory flow, and the very idea even that such a thing is possible, is a matter of applying tried and tested recipes in accordance with mechanisms with which the Ottoman administrators are wholly familiar. No room is made for any political and diplomatic unknowns arising from ‘changing times’. That is why, notwithstanding the fait accompli of Greek independence, the return of Cypriot émigrés is something the Sultan’s men view as entirely possible. The (perhaps utopian) horizon of such a point of view is the idea that the return of the fugitives might always ultimately amount to them having never truly fled – having stayed put in fact. Irrespective of its scope, flight is an accident in the eyes of the provincial administrators, an unfortunate yet reversible disruption to the order of things, the temporary symptom of a problem it is always possible to remedy, and hence which will be so remedied forthwith. As such it symbolizes the perpetual here-and-now, an ahistorical immobility, a return to the status quo and a denial of difference which may appear to be one of the essential conceptual and practical categories the administrators of the province worked with. In a related vein, Maurus Reinkowski has also highlighted that a similar topos of eternal return permeated the Ottoman provincial administration of the nineteenth century (2005a and b). As I have suggested above (Chapter Three) and now further elaborate

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upon, these categories are crucial to the provincial style at work in the Ottoman archives.

Point of no return – veiled terms and memories The implicit, or unsaid, also plays a certain role here, perhaps indicative of a mental blind spot or area of repressed thought. In certain archives we encounter such opacity wherein words become silenced, and things elude the categories of what is declared possible and conceivable. We have a nagging impression that this province cannot simply be a world that returns to its point of departure even after having fled. If we are to avoid freezing it into a state of immobility and thereby banishing all historicity, then we need to enquire into some of the movements which could indeed carry this world forward past a point of no return. Even if they were blanked out, and even if they had to be, such movements push the provincial style to breaking point, enabling us to return to a question left to one side earlier on: are we studying the end of a world? The ‘Ru-m event’ under erasure Let us return to the Hellenic uprising and the role it played in the demographic drop affecting Cyprus at the period. As observed, it would frequently appear to have had no impact on the way the Ottoman administrators conceived of the ‘flight’ of the Cypriots, nor on the explanation of the ‘Greek emigration’ put forward by the consuls. What matters, rather, are administrative malpractices needing to be put right. Yet beneath the smooth surface of this argument are some highly turbulent eddies. When Meh.med Es‘ad Medh.-ı Beg, a high-ranking official with the Imperial Chancellery, was sent to Cyprus in August 1831 (see Chapter Four), the order appointing him specifies that in addition to the survey of landed property belonging to the inhabitants, he was also to implement a fairer way of taxing the island’s population.36 This order is based upon the following observation: It has been brought to my Sultanic knowledge that whilst originally the taxes incumbent on inhabitants of the island of Cyprus were paid in one third by the Muslims and two thirds by the non-Muslims, since the date of [12]39 [AD 1823–24] the contribution from Muslims has been fixed at one fifth and then one eighth [of the sum], and that the non-Muslims _ - t which have been have had to pay all the rest. And because of the ‘ava-rıza going on for some while, the non-Muslims are in a state of disarray and, according to the totals in the survey registers which have reached me at my Felicitous Porte,37 it would even appear that the number of Muslims of the above-mentioned island is more than half that of the nonMuslim population. Consequently, since in the current situation the non-Muslims present [on the island] will not be in a position to pay such

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At first sight the argument here appears to correspond very closely to the canonical provincial style, with it being a matter of the trouble certain malpractices of the tax authorities in Cyprus had caused among the people. Were it not for the fear of ‘dispersal’ (clearly stated by the word ‘müteferrik.’ and also suggested by ‘perı-s¸a-n’ which can mean both material dispersal and moral concern), the allusion to the declining non-Muslim population of the island (in comparison to the number of Muslims) would be virtually silenced under the veil of sibylline terms such as ‘in the current situation the non-Muslims present’. And so for a reader unaware of the demographic situation at this period, the fact of mass emigration would pass all but unnoticed. The interest of this document, however, does not lie only in the fact that it offers in condensed form the Ottoman provincial administrators’ way of thinking and speaking about the ‘flight’ of the Cypriots.39 It also bears the _ - t, which is so equivocal as to traces of something else, with the word ‘ava-rıza render any translation problematic. Given the general drift of the order, it is initially tempting to opt for the administrative meaning of the term, as it appears in the Ottoman financial archives: ‘ava-rız_ is used there in the sense of a tax levied on an extraordinary basis, particularly in time of war (Barkan _ - t which ‘have been going on for some 1949; cf. Demirci 2009). The ‘ava-rıza time’ could then refer to certain exceptional taxes to cover the heavy military expenses in the Ottoman budget of the 1820s and 1830s. The addition of the second plural suffix -a-t could indicate some kind of pejorative intent, underlining (in the same vein as the classic Sultanic ‘ada-letna-mes) that the increasing number of taxes has gone beyond the limits of what is just and fair. However, the word could also be endowed with another meaning closer to its Arabic etymology than to usual Ottoman bureaucratic usage. It is the _ a term meaning a flaw, a distraction, an unevenness (as in plural of ‘a-rıza, _ is itself a feminine of verbal noun ‘a-rız_ – namely uneven terrain). And ‘a-rıza what has happened, what occurs, an event (Redhouse 1890: 1276). In which case one of the following translations would be preferable: ‘the current incidents’, ‘the current events’. All of this points to a sudden wavering of the provincial style, a disquiet which goes beyond questions of good or poor administration. It may be objected that such an interpretation presumes that the scribes of the Sublime Porte were acutely sensitive to linguistic niceties. Were they even _ Doubtless not all of them were, and it aware that ava-rız_ is the plural of ‘a-rıza? is perhaps for this very reason that the term was chosen, as we shall see. It is therefore better not to overestimate the linguistic prescience of the Ottoman secretaries. Nonetheless, another archive happens to contain a rough version of the order sent to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg and the Cyprus authorities.40 It

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_ - t’ has been extensively crossed out reveals that the passage about the “ava-rıza and rewritten. It reads as follows (words crossed out in the original are reproduced struck through here, and those which were added are placed between curly brackets): Now due to the Ru-m event {the annoyance in Morea} because of the _ - t that have been going on for some time now}, non-Muslims are {‘ava-rıza in a state of disarray, and most of the non-Muslims’ possessions have furthermore passed into the possession of Muslims, and according to the totals [ … ].41 It is worth pointing out that the successive editions in the first part of the sentence are written above the crossed-out text. They are thus more likely to be corrections made after the order had been fully drafted, not changes of mind made as it was being written. Let us try to further disentangle all these various overlayings. Clearly the person (or persons) correcting the text has started by striking out ‘the Ru-m event’, and instead put ‘the annoyance in Morea’.42 And then this expression, as well as the ‘due to’ hitherto retained from the original, were also struck out and replaced by the expression _ - t that have been going on for some time now’, the ‘because of the ‘ava-rıza wording which was finally retained. What we may read behind the crossings-outs suffices to remove any _ - t. What uncertainty as to the meaning to ascribe to the occurrence of ‘ava-rıza this word is indirectly referring to are the troubles caused by the Greek insurrection. The first draft of the text refers to the ‘Ru-m vak.‘ası’. In keeping - rıza _ - rıza/‘ava _ _ - t, I have chosen to translate ‘vak.‘a’ as with the logic of ‘a-rız/‘a event. But it needs to be stressed that the Ottoman Turkish term brings with it the idea of an episode of importance worth remembering and relating (see Redhouse 1890: 2145).43 The suppression of the Janissary corps on 16 June 1826 has gone down in history as the ‘auspicious event’ (vak.‘a-ı ẖayriyye). The official historiographers of the Empire bear the title of vak.‘a-nüvı-s, ‘he who writes down events’. The series of crossings-out and substitutions undergone by the expression ‘Ru-m vak.‘ası’ may thus point to a work of suppression and repression being carried out on several different fronts. Firstly, the correctors replaced the historical event with a simple ‘annoyance’. Then _ - t’, no doubt due to the ambiguity of the term, where they opted for ‘ava-rıza the term is best translated by incidents. And at the same time, the generality of the ‘Ru-m’ epithet was geographically circumscribed by specifying ‘in Morea’, thereby avoiding the stigmatization of all of the Sultan’s Greekspeaking subjects.44 The subsequent suppression of this location may of course be interpreted as a spilling out over the geographical limits thereby established, but that is not the key point. Deprived of its epithet, and pecu_ - t, what liarly weakened and shorn of singularity by the vague plural ‘ava-rıza started out as an ‘event’ is relegated to the level of imperturbable banality, and cloaked in irreversible anonymity.

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Paper trails We must not be overhasty in deducing too much from these various substitutions. It is not being suggested that the Greek insurrection and independence were doggedly and systematically repressed by the Ottoman administrators. On the contrary, several other documents from their correspondence reveal just how present the ‘event’ was in the working memory of Ottoman provincial archives, and there are several unveiled references to the ‘Ru-m sedition’ (Ru-m fesa-dı), which we will now proceed to trace. On occasions it is referred to as a context or reminder shedding light on the present situation. Such is the case with reference to the debts contracted by the Cyprus Church to Antonio Vondiziano, when the governor of : Orthodox Cyprus, Isma-’ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a, notes that they are still unpaid a quarter of a century later: ‘During the Ru-m sedition, the Metropolitans and bishops to the inhabitants of the island of Cyprus borrowed a total of 87,400 piastres from the English Consul to be allocated to the business of their country.’45 The consuls themselves sometimes used the troubles of the Greek War of Independence as a privileged point of reference. This would appear to be especially the case for the question of ‘apostates’. These individuals – who as we have seen (Chapter Three) are central to a singularly provincial version of the ‘Eastern Question’ – are invariably defined with reference to the events of the 1820s. As the British consul Niven Kerr observes, they were ‘compelled, during the Greek Revolution, to renounce Christianity in order to save their lives’.46 The French agent Théodore Goëpp recounts how during a trip to Nicosia ‘several Turkish families, though of Maronite extraction, told me [ … ] that during the Greek Revolution they were obliged to adopt Islamism to save their lives’.47 The event thus became a ‘landmark’, acting as an immediately identifiable temporal marker over the course of the following decades. Not only did it act as a marker, it could also serve as something to be exploited and put to use, whereby referring to it amounted to a solicitation, a way of rereading the past so as to understand the present. And so, moving beyond the question of context, this leads us to enquire into the existence of the traces of one (or several) working memories of the event circulating within the province during the nineteenth century. For instance in the way the French consul Darasse writes of the arrival in Cyprus of the above-mentioned ‘Mehemet Pacha’ in 1859: The Ottoman Government has sent to Cyprus a certain Mehemet Pacha, a renegade, apparently with instructions to extract as much money as he can from the inhabitants [ … ]. Naturally, the Christians in particular are the victims of Mehemet Pacha and these poor people, without any support, are starting to go so far as to flee, as they did after the 1821 massacres.48 An affirmation that he reiterated in almost identical terms a few weeks later: ‘they are emigrating, as they did after the 1821 massacres’.49 It is as though

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the memory of the 1821 aftermath served as a matrix for interpreting and formulating the situation in 1859 in which oppression automatically causes emigration. It is, furthermore, not unworthy of interest that it is a consul who is voicing this memory, a fact that leads us to enquire into what such a memory was rooted, and how it was transmitted. By profession a consul is necessarily someone who passes briefly through in comparison to the Cyprus timeframe. As regards Paul Darasse, he was consul in Cyprus from April 1857 to October 1860.50 If we suppose (and given the absence of documentary evidence we can do nothing else) that he was familiar with the Levant, like certain of his colleagues of the period,51 then his memories of 1821 could simply be part of a diffuse memory across the entire Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, a certain number of clues suggest that the origin of this memory is more specifically his contact with certain local circles – those I suggested above be referred to as the Levantines. For instance, the memorandum sent on 28 May 1859 to Napoleon III by the ‘French notables of Cyprus’ states that: ‘the atrocious and impolitic massacres of 1821 resulted in the emigration en masse of the Greek population.’52 This document was signed, amongst others, by Tardieu, Bernard, Saint-Amand, Lapierre, Béraud, Rey, Michel – a fair share of the fifteen signatories thus belonged to families of ‘Europeans long since established in the country, from father to son’, who were present in Cyprus before and during the Greek War of Independence.53 The memories of 1821, as they transpire in the correspondence of Darasse, thus derive substantively from the collective memory of the merchant dynasties affiliated to the French ‘nation’ in Larnaca. And so this form of collective memory is as much based on Levantine sociabilities running through local society as it is on stories of the past told right across the Mediterranean. If we turn to other archives we find other traces left behind by the event, and other working memories. In certain missives sent by the Ottoman administrators, the Greek War of Independence is referred to as a touchstone asserting the loyalty of a servant to the Sultan, or on the contrary indicating his bent for treachery. In the spring of 1840, a certain La-zara-kı-, employed ‘as . an interpreter for the Imperial Fleet’ (Donanma--yı hüma-yu-n tercüma-nlıgı),54 sent an entreaty to the Sublime Porte to obtain a monthly wage (ma-hiye). Here is the paraphrase of it in a note submitted by the Grand Vizier to the Sultan on 12 May: In the offices of the Sublime Sultanate in which he has hitherto worked he has given full satisfaction due to his righteousness and honesty; in particular he took part with the retinue of your humble servant in the sieges and combats of Melnik and Ibs.a-ra during the Ru-m troubles.55 Let us underline that this is how the secretaries of the Grand Vizier paraphrased La-zara-kı-’s entreaty, for this shapes how we read it. First, we do not read what the interested party actually wrote, and experience shows that

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in those instances where we do have the original of this sort of document, it tends to be far removed from its note form.56 Yet secondly, we do not read something produced entirely by the offices of the Ottoman government, for its general paraphrases are not elaborations or improvisations, but a condensed form of the original. It is thus probable that La-zara-kı- did refer to the ‘Ru-m troubles’ as evidence of his good conduct, though the exact form and terms he used are unknown. It is no doubt not without relevance that he was, as his name indicates, a Greek-speaking subject of the Sultan – i.e. a ‘Ru-m’ in traditional terminological usage. His reference to his martial exploits thus comes across as a way of asserting his loyalty (I may well be Ru-m, but that does not make me a rebel), and even to cleverly underline the strength of this loyalty (despite being Ru-m, I have remained a loyal servant of His Majesty the Sultan). But the ‘Ru-m event’ is precisely the tipping point where loyalty can pass over into rebellion. That is why references to it can also indicate a propensity for betrayal. One man in Cyprus, a certain Ya-nk.o, the principal k.ocabas¸ı on the island, is clearly a symbol of this in the eyes of several Ottoman administrators of the early 1840s. Studying two complimentary yet ultimately contrasting portraits of him, penned at the period by various military and civil agents of the Sultan, can teach us a lot about the way the memory of the Greek uprising could be used amongst provincial officials. The first is the report by ‘Ömer Pas¸a, a General (mı-rlı-va-) sent from Beirut to Cyprus at the head of a battalion (t.a-bu-r) in 1841. The point here is to examine the reasons for which Ya-nk.o (amongst others, yet him in particular) apparently opposed certain fiscal reforms decided upon by the Ottoman government: The k.ocabas¸ı called Ya-nk.o, in addition to the fact that he would be deprived of his [traditional] advantages, once saw his father, the dragoman of Cyprus at the time, executed at the Sublime Porte, and consequently nurtures long-standing rancour and enmity against the Sublime Sultanate.57 Let us also look at a passage from a lengthy dispatch dated 31 March 1841 drawn up by the governor of the time, Meh.med T.al‘at Efendi, and signed both by him and by the Colonel (mı-ra-la-y) in charge of maintaining public _ .iye) on the island, Mus.t.afa Beg:58 order (zabt Ya-nk.o is the son of the former dragoman of Cyprus who was executed at the Threshold of Felicity during the Ru-m event; he is extremely seditious and, [together with others] is one of those who whilst apparently seeking [to further] the good and the interest of the subjects [re‘a-ya-], actually work to further their own interests.59 The parallel between the two arguments put forward here is clear to see. Both documents were probably largely written in consultation between their

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respective signatories. The three same people also placed their seal (together with other members of the Cyprus Council) on a short minute of proceedings drawn up at the same period,60 a fact which confirms the understanding between them and gives it concrete form.61 But whilst these two passages deal with the same material, they develop clearly dissimilar arguments. Three semantic elements are present: 1) personal interests to be defended; 2) the execution of his father; 3) seditious hostility to the Sultan’s authority. But they appear in a significantly different order in the two texts:62 1-2-3 in the first passage, but 2-3-1 in the second. And we may also detect a difference in the subjacent causal links: according to ‘Ömer Pas¸a, 1 and especially 2 produce the consequence, 3; T.al‘at Efendi lists these three elements rather than establishing a causal pattern, but ultimately accords primacy to 1 as opposed to 3, whilst 2 would appear only to be mentioned as a genealogical reminder. So whilst it is true that these administrators’ arguments draw on a shared set of references, the way they are put forward accords significant freedom of scope to each individual proposition. As above in Chapter Three, the repertoire of provincial administration allows for a fair degree of improvisation. What we are dealing with here is a simultaneous process of overlapping and subtle differentiation. This equivocal repertoire makes the ‘Ru-m event’ even harder to interpret, and makes its memory elusive and unstable. The memory of this event does not play the role one might expect in the two passages quoted. Does T.al‘at Efendi really mention it to add weight to the portrait of Ya-nk.o as an ‘extremely seditious’ man (as initially suggested)? As we have seen, his argument does not really develop any such implicit causality, instead pointing the finger more at Ya-nk.o’s egotism than at his felony. By contrast, it is the denunciation of his felony which clearly determines the ordering of the portrait provided by ‘Ömer Pas¸a. He too notes that Ya-nk.o’s father was executed on the orders of the Sultan, but then endows this episode with far greater importance by emphasising that it caused ‘long-standing rancour and enmity’ towards the Porte. And so what ‘Ömer Pas¸a is providing is a portrait of sedition personified, as it transpires in the person of Ya-nk.o. Yet there is no explicit reference to the ‘Ru-m event’ here. The very thing which we were about to inscribe in capital letters at the top of the list of the Ottoman repertoire of disloyalty has suddenly disappeared. We thought we were advancing in known territory, solidly supported by some shared memory of the provincial administrators. But suddenly the ground has given way beneath our feet.

Recalling and repressing – concurrent timelines The question emerging here is a variation on the theme of the province, of its specific style and the events which disturb it. The correspondence and links between different forms of local knowledge – the knowledge of the Ottoman administrators on the one hand, and that operative within provincial

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sociabilities on the other – cannot automatically be taken for granted. Instead the two are shot through – either entirely or in part – with reciprocal strangeness and foreignness. On occasions even this is deliberately maintained.

Remembering and forgetting This idea comes to mind when reading a document relating, once again, to the mission of the survey agent Meh.med Es‘ad Beg in Cyprus. This time it contains instructions (ta‘lı-m-na-me) given before he left Istanbul, and they start as follows: In the past, during the Ru-m sedition, the goods and lands of non-Muslims of the island of Cyprus who had fled, or who had been executed, were seized by the Imperial Treasury; as the taxes incumbent on them were levied on other non-Muslim individuals, this situation caused them to be thrown into a state of disarray [perı-s¸a-n].63 After this preamble, the text takes up the themes highlighted above in the order sent conjointly to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg, Halı-l Efendi, and the notables of Cyprus, to wit the growing fiscal inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the need to rectify this. The main difference between the two documents resides in the little introductory ‘historical reminder’ in the one quoted here. In the order sent not just to Meh.med Es‘ad but also to the authorities of Cyprus, this is replaced by reference to ‘incidents that have been going on for _ - t-ı h.a-liyye), an expression which we now know to some time now’ (‘ava-rıza result from various crossings-out and overwritings. Thus on the one hand we have an instruction given exclusively to a special envoy for his departure including an explicit, detailed reminder of the context of the ‘Ru-m sedition’, and on the other an order sent conjointly to all of the notables of Cyprus in which such a historical reminder was apparently not deemed to be fitting, and hence carefully erased. It is as though the memory of the ‘Ru-m event’ had to be confined to the highest levels of the Ottoman chancelleries – and carefully expunged from the memory of provincial society. When we read and compare the archive documents relating to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg’s mission in Cyprus a patient process of partition may be seen to be under way, not only distinguishing those things worthy of being recalled, but also establishing who is worthy of remembering them, thereby consigning everyone else to a state of forgetfulness. Whilst the officials of the Sublime Porte were to cultivate their memory tenaciously, erasure and forgetting were to be the lot of the provincials (be they administrators or mere subjects of the Sultan). The past was thus divided up, and especially the uses of this past in the present. To the administrators befell the duration from the past into the present, and to the administered the present instant shorn of any chronological depth.

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But does that mean to say that we may conclude time was partitioned off in this way in general, throughout the archives of the province? This is far from certain. It may be objected that other orders sent to the Cyprus authorities as a whole do explicitly mention the ‘Ru-m sedition’. For instance, this order sent to all the Lefk.os¸a authorities in September 1847 relating to arrears on the debt contracted towards the late Antonio Vondiziano: Twenty-four years ago, during the Ru-m sedition, the Metropolitan and bishops of the island of Cyprus had borrowed from müste’min Ant.onyo Vondı- Çya-no, the English consul [sic], eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and ninety-two piastres, for the affairs of the country [umu-r-ı memleket]. However, the said consul died before recovering the debt, and it is thus his son [sic] and heir Petro [illegible word] who shall receive and cash the said sum. It has been decided that this shall be paid in one year from the date of this my present sacred order, in four payments of one quarter every : three -months. You the above-mentioned pas¸a [the Governor of Cyprus Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a], as well as the judge and müftı- [of Lefk.os¸a] and other above-mentioned people shall, as soon as you are aware of this situation, apply your perseverance and attention to see to it that within one year from this date the said sum be paid by the country. And that the debt be recovered without tolerating the slightest minute’s delay on the fixed date of payment. In so doing, you shall employ yourself to the utmost to avoid any distraction or loss of time.64 This is all the more significant an example as once again it is a draft, overwritten with many corrections.65 In particular it is remarkable that the words ‘during the Ru-m sedition’ should appear in the paraphrase of this order given by the governor of Cyprus when acknowledging its receipt in October 1847,66 indicating that the reminder of the event had not been obliterated. Be that as it may, in addition to the fact that this document (as compared to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg’s mission in Cyprus) is significantly posterior to the ‘Ru-m event’, other indications confirm how precautions were taken with memories of this event. Orhan Kolog˘ lu’s study of the official Ottoman gazette, the Calendar of Events (Tak.vı-m-i Vak.a-yi‘), published from 1831 on, gives rise to a significant observation here. In this gazette, he remarks that: there is absolutely no discussion of the events which caused the accession of Greece to independence, nor of their echoes within the Ottoman world. They are only referred to when the international situation makes it necessary to redraw borders. And if these events are mentioned for some other reason, it is merely stated ‘before the Ru-m sedition’, or else ‘the sedition previously arising as a matter of fate’ [ … ]. (Kolog˘ lu 1981: 94–95)

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Once again we encounter references to the event strictly limited to narrowly historiographical ends, to a vak.‘a-nüvı-s register. And in the final instance quoted by Kolog˘ lu, there is a comparable rubbing out of the epithet ‘Ru-m’ to that observed earlier. But what clearly dominates is silence – all measures appear to be taken to ensure that the ‘sedition previously arising’ lingers as briefly as possible in the readers’ memories, and that it occupies no place in the public eye. There are several indications that, during the 1830s, the recent past of the Greek insurrection was buried in secrecy in the depths of the Imperial Dı-va-n or of the Sublime Porte. And this phenomenon could well go : some way to explaining the apparent Ottoman incapacity, as observed by Ilber Ortaylı, to view the ‘Ru-m event’ as having political significance: During these years, it would be hard to claim that the Ottoman political mind could evaluate the essence of Greek nationalism. Nationalist movements and the activity of bands are usually cited as es¸kiya and eterya es¸kiyası [ … ]. Both official documents and Ottoman historiography contain little knowledge of the political background and character of this movement and their contacts or position towards other Balkan nationalisms. (Ortaylı 1994: 91; cf. Davison 1977) A large number of the documents studied above, once written up in their definitive form, confirm Ortaylı’s argument. But once you turn to their rough drafts then immediately there is room for doubt. As we have seen, important Ottoman officials were sometimes reluctant to call events by their name, especially when giving orders that would circulate beyond the restricted circles of authorized spheres in the capital. They ordered that the words ‘bandits’ or ‘incidents’ be used, but that did not mean they were taken at face value. And on other occasions, especially in the case of instructions to a high-ranking administrator, the name of an event would be pronounced loud and clear, as is the case in the ta‘lı-m-na-me given to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg. Further evidence of this may be found in the draft version of the instructions sent during the summer of 1851 to Halı-l Pas¸a, the new governor-general of the White Sea . _ fa-sid) of the ‘Greeks’ Islands, denouncing the ‘seditious goals’ (garaz-ı (Yunanıler), said to give rise to claims to ‘Hellenism’ (Yu-na-nı-lik) by certain Ottoman subjects.67 (And let us note the care with which all possible confusion is avoided with the term Ru-m.) And so – supposing that we choose to thus designate what is expressed here, sometimes openly, sometimes covertly – there was indeed an ‘Ottoman political mind [that] could evaluate the essence of Greek nationalism’. However, this political understanding often remains in the background, out of reach. Or else censorship comes and strikes it out – and this is a stroke of good fortune for us, as the crossing-out remains, an indelible trace waiting to be deciphered.68

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This mark of censorship, this withdrawal into the unsaid throws up a difficulty which all readers of the Ottoman provincial archives need to be aware of. The province emerges as the privileged locus for a partition of memories and timelines, and our comparison of exclusive and public instructions has revealed how significant this phenomenon is. This carefully orchestrated partition into concurrent timelines is a variation on the theme of what I have called the provincial style (see Chapter Three), with the men of the province (be they subjects or administrators) being assigned to a discursive register strictly limited to the immediate present, in which everything ultimately returns to its initial state, thereby excluding any place for memory, or any form of historicity. Going against the flow of time The provincial style running through the archives of Ottoman Cyprus obviously does not exhaust the possible narratives it seeks to silence. Everything does not return to its initial state, or amount to the same thing, and the Ottoman Empire in general is endowed with historicity, as indeed is its province. In Cyprus alone, attempts to reform the local administration, first implemented in 1830 and then taken up again in 1838 (in comparable vein to the particular status granted to Samos in 1832), reveal the extent to which any return to normality after the ‘Ru-m event’ could not, in the eyes of highranking Ottoman administrators, simply be a return to the initial state of affairs (Hill 1972: 153–55, 170–73, 204–5; see Dionyssiou 1995: 12–14, discussed by Ursinus 2002: 295; cf. Louis 2002). Whenever catastrophic events occur, they seldom fail to leave traces behind (Grivaud 1998). And amongst those who suffered displacement from the late Ottoman Empire onwards, ideas of ‘return’ tend to run deep (Hirschon 1989; Loizos 1999: 257–58). Still, the provincial style is not merely some historical superfluity, an artificial adjunct that merely has to be stripped away to reveal ‘what truly happened’. The provincial style took place in the same way as the Ottoman political mindset did. There is not some ‘true’ history ‘underlying’ the immobility of the eternal provincial cycle of return and imperturbably following the rhythm of changing times as one world departs and another arrives. As was the case for the events of the ‘Eastern Question’, we need, mutatis mutandis, to give due importance to the dissonances created by the provincial perspective within the overarching historical narrative. For the suspended time of the provincial style means we need to conceive of: modes of connection that we may to all intents and purposes call anachronia: events, notions, and meanings which go against the flow of time, which circulate meaning in a way which eludes the contemporary context, precluding all identity of time with ‘itself ’. An anachronia is a word, an event, a meaningful sequence removed from ‘its’ time and hence

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In this instance, the contemporary context perturbing the provincial style is that of the ‘age of nationalisms’ – supposedly ushered in by the clean break of 1821 enjoining a world to depart, authoritatively dismissing it into the past in the name of a new time, of a future summoned forth to assert its presence. But here, on the contrary, the provincial take on events leads to the hypothesis of a non-concordance of time, as put forward by Robert Ilbert with regard to Alexandria: privileging [ … ] different temporalities, drawing on the basic reflex of people living through a ‘historic moment’ who still carry on shopping at the market, until the day they are told it is now shut. The rise of nationalisms did not spell the end of pluralism in Alexandria, any more than imperialist domination brought about the total disappearance of the Ottoman system. (Ilbert 1996: xxx) This means we can now envisage the idea of ‘concurrent timelines’ in the province in another way. No longer as a running parallel – as a duality that separates and confines – but instead as a converging, a criss-crossing, an overlapping of heterogeneous lines of temporality, without ever being able to ascertain if they in fact meet up and fully concord. As we have just read, amongst these recalcitrant temporalities we can detect traces of a ‘pluralism’ that nationalisms fail to extinguish. And an additional dimension to these multiple timelines is that they follow the rhythms of a Mediterranean unravelling any scripted divisions into ‘imagined communities’. In the light of this form of temporal multiplicity, I wish to return to some of the issues brought to the fore by ‘Cypriot’ history and re-examine the word millet, which is so unstable in meaning and so awkward when used in historiography. I identified earlier (see Chapter One) two sets of presuppositions revealed by the way millet and nation are sometimes surreptitiously linked together. Firstly, that there really was a principle of social organization in the late Ottoman world called the millet, based equally on ‘ethnic’ and religious criteria. Secondly, that these same criteria were the kernel around which emerging national identities crystallized in the nineteenth century. The thrust of my earlier enquiry was directed at the second of these presuppositions and the positioning of the millet at the heart of diachronic continuity. Let us now look at the first of these propositions. To what extent does the word millet capture and express a structural principle of cohesion running through social relations in Ottoman Cyprus at the period? In brief, is it fitting to relate the repertoire of millet to a ‘substantialist idiom of bounded groups’ (Brubaker 2004: 3)?

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This ties in with another line of enquiry examined earlier. For if the date 1821 is often considered in the history of the Ottoman Empire as marking a clean break – and the point at which a world departed, fira-r – it is precisely because it is thought of as the official date of birth of a new world and an unprecedented political society. In this new world dividing lines were drawn exclusively according to the criteria of denominational ‘communities’, i.e. along ‘ethnic’ and religious lines (and soon national ones). In this new world the traditions of knowledge and ways of living which had been so thoroughly intertwined over such a long period of time suddenly became the touchstones for dissociated identities and sociabilities. It is the existence of just such a point of no return which, since the beginning of this chapter, I have been seeking to test and probe in various ways, with regard to the ‘Greek emigration’ and the place of the ‘Ru-m event’ in its memory. The part played by communities It is customary for studies of any particular given Ottoman province to start with a sort of identikit portrait specifying the part played by each of the respective religious ‘communities’ within the local population. Given the abundance and diversity of sources offering indications on the subject in the nineteenth century, such a categorization may provide a good starting point – or useful counterpoint – for analysis (as above for the demographic dip in the 1820s). Nevertheless, it merits strong criticism. One ought indeed to stress ‘the relatively anachronic character of the notion of “community” ’, with a view to ‘denaturaliz[ing] communal phenomena’ (Grenet 2010: 4, emphasis in the original).69 In the case of Cyprus the categorization into ‘Muslims’ and ‘nonMuslims’ often points back to the terms ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkish’, which are too ‘nationalized’ to be pertinent here. More importantly still, it reifies another distinction which, though denominational rather than national, is of equally dubious pertinence. In fact it merely echoes the separation established in Ottoman terminology of the period between ‘people of Islam’ (ehl-i isla-m) and ‘re‘a-ya-’ – which by this period tends to become synonymous with ‘nonMuslim’ (ẕimmı-). This separation is doubtless revelatory of the established fiscal, judicial, and religious statuses recognized and legitimated by the Ottoman authorities. No doubt it fashions the cultural categories informing a vast swath of social identities. Yet it is equally important not to conflate ‘confessional ambiguity’ and ‘administrative pragmatism’ (Winter 2010: 7). Such statuses are shot through with a life which exceeds, suspends, and modifies them. And ‘in their practical projects and social arrangements, informed by the received meanings of persons and things, people submit these cultural categories to empirical risks’ (Sahlins 1985: ix). This axiom applies well to the world of Mediterranean ‘communities’, without it being necessary to focus on striking ‘moments of truth’ (Grenet 2010: 398 et seq.; cf. Chateauraynaud 2011). For ‘empirical risks’ may arise without there being any need to invoke a disruption to the grand historical narratives or a politics

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of a new era. Thus in his minute study of Greek-speaking ‘communities’ being ‘put to the test’, Mathieu Grenet takes care to heed minor disputes as well as the major upheaval of the Greek War of Independence (2010: 320–462). Any step to the contrary would involve reducing provinciality to provincialism (see above Chapter Three). Let us rather envisage that it is provinciality itself which is characterized by risk-taking. In May 1842, a few months after arriving in Cyprus, the British consul James Lilburn sent a detailed report to the Foreign Office. It is a new sort of document, a consequence of the process of bureaucratization affecting British consular correspondence and indicative of Lilburn’s diligence in conforming to the orders received from his superiors on taking up his post: ‘it will be your duty to avail yourself of every favourable opportunity for collecting and transmitting to me any further useful or interesting information which you may be able to obtain.’70 This is one of the useful or interesting pieces of information about the inhabitants of Cyprus that the consul deemed worthy of reporting: Among those who are registered as Turks are many who in reality are Christians, who at different times, and from different Persecutions have conformed to the rites of Mahometanism, yet, although they live in the same Villages and associate with the Turks, are never known to intermarry with them. These people frequent the Mosque in public, and the Greek Church in private, and in short conform to all the ceremonies and contributions of both religions.71 Any distinction between ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’ immediately becomes blurred. And whilst Lilburn apparently has not heard or noted the name given to such individuals, his successor Niven Kerr gives it to us – they are called the ‘Linobambaca’ (sic), from the Greek λινοβάμβακοι, literally the ‘linen–cottons’. He too deems it appropriate to explore the singular nature of these populations. As he explains in his dispatch to Canning of 3 August 1844, they were initially Roman Catholics who had converted to Islam during the ‘Famagusta wars’, during the ‘invasion of the Turks’ in 1570–71. But according to his information many of them are also ‘Greek’ descendants who converted at various periods. They are found across the entire island and comprise a population of between 2,000 and 2,500 individuals. They intermarry (first in a private ceremony with an Orthodox priest and then publicly ‘in accordance with Turkish law’), have their children baptized but also circumcised ‘at the appropriate age’, meet for mass at night in churches, eat pork, drink wine, and so forth.72 These two descriptions provide a sort of typical portrait of the ‘linen–cottons’ in just a few lines, with the same commonplaces cropping up in both – their conversion lost in the history of time, their social and geographical discretion, the folklore of duplicity. Here as elsewhere there is good reason to enquire into the local sources of consular knowledge. Lilburn and Kerr do not

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provide any indication of where they learnt this. The consul of the United States, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, hints at one in his account of his time in Cyprus. He explains how he visited the village of ‘Leo-Petro’ (Gr. Λιοπέτρι), about thirty kilometres east of Larnaca, and emphasizes that its inhabitants are ‘linen–cottons’: ‘[They] are very poor, and eke out a scanty living by trafficking in poultry, which they buy in the mountain villages of Carpass and sell in the bazaars of Nicosia and Larnaca’ (Di Cesnola 1877: 185). This improvised trade also leads the inhabitants of ‘Leo-Petro’ to frequent the places familiar to consular high society, especially in Larnaca. However, there is no mention of any visible sign in terms of their clothing or other attribute which would have rendered them immediately recognizable. It can only be supposed therefore that certain intermediaries made the consuls aware of the existence of the ‘linen–cottons’ and that it was not merely the result of chance encounters at the bazaar. These intermediaries are invisible, but they are there all the same. And might not this place – this there – where the consuls ran into the linobambakoi, also act as the place that informs and fashions what they write about them? Or is there some other style primarily at work in what they write, blotting out the words of local sources of information? It will be recalled here that Kerr’s correspondence in particular is full of ‘apostasy’ cases (see Chapter Three). Is the consuls’ writing thus not overshadowed by a dramatization of the dividing line between Muslims and Christians? It would be injudicious to view Kerr’s interest in the linobambakoi as being unrelated to this dramatization. On the contrary, the dispatch to Canning dated 3 August 1844 closes on a question which makes this link clear: in the probability of any of this sect [the linobambakoi] evincing a desire to avail of the concession lately obtained by Your Excellency, I should be glad to know if Your Excellency considers them in the light of the apostates from Islamism to whom the benefit extends?73 The consul’s description of the linobambakoi would appear to have a trope in common with the figure of the ‘apostates’, as both are said to have undergone forced conversion. This brings us back to the question of the memories informing local knowledge. As pointed out above, memories of the forced conversions of 1821 lasted a long while in the writings of the consuls and merchants, and were associated with affairs of ‘apostasy’. It was also suggested that this summoning forth of the past was related to the style of local Levantine sociability, which was ceaselessly renewed and reformulated with the arrival and departure of the consuls. But if we suppose that the ‘linen– cottons’ were part of this local knowledge, then we have to recognize that they fail to fit in with memories of 1821: While to outward appearance they are Turks, and are so recognised by the local authorities, in reality they are Christians whose ancestors, at the

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Here as in Kerr’s account it is the Ottoman conquest which is presented as the prime historical background for the conversion of the linobambakoi. Lilburn’s observations are vaguer, amounting almost to a lapse of memory, as for him the change in their rites took place ‘at different times, and from different Persecutions’. What matters here is that he does not expressly refer to the date of 1821 any more than Kerr or Cesnola do. To this extent the case of the ‘linen–cottons’ not only reveals a local knowledge following a different tune to that laid down in the capitals of the Empire, it also reveals a supplement to this knowledge, adding another layer to the living working memory of the ‘Greek revolution’ under the effect of an even more immemorial past. This additional layer complexifies the prose of ‘changing times’, as it enables us to make out the traces of a ‘shared world’ we thought had disappeared. These traces are discernible in an annotation to Kerr’s dispatch to Canning dated 3 August 1844. In the margin next to the statement quoted above another hand has written in pencil: ‘These people on declaring publicly that they were Christians would evidently be in the situation of born Musulmans justifying Christianity.’74 To all appearances this note resumes Canning’s reply to Kerr’s question. Nothing allows us to be certain that any reply was actually sent out, that the consul received it, and knew what the position was, meaning no, the ‘linen–cottons’ were not to be confused with ‘apostates’ enjoying the concession obtained by Canning. In a way that is reminiscent of other similar circumstances (see Chapter Three above), Kerr thus appears to have drawn on the repertoire of forced conversion and ‘apostasy’ in a manner not befitting his superiors’ ideas. To Canning, linobambakoi and ‘apostates’ ought not to be conflated. What is more, the gist of Kerr’s dispatch itself (his above improvisation notwithstanding) actually corroborates this clear-cut distinction: there is nothing in his description of the ‘sect’ of the linobambakoi to indicate that he found anything odd or scandalous about their course of action (and nor is there in the descriptions of Lilburn and Cesnola). They are simply described as heterodox, nothing more. It is as though there were no need to plot a frontier separating Islam and Christianity that it would be inconceivable to cross. As if Kerr had known, prior even to asking Canning his question, that the ‘apostasy’ style did not match the situation of the ‘linen–cottons’. Both to him and to the Islamic scholar Charles F. Beckingham in the mid-1950s, ‘it seems [ … ] rash to take the Linobambakoi seriously as a sect’: rather, they ought to be described as a ‘so-called sect’ or, better still, a ‘strange community, if it deserves the name’ (1957a: 173). Indeed, Beckingham continues, the phenomenon they present is one common in many parts of the Ottoman empire. [ … ] To many people of the eastern Mediterranean

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where Christianity and Islam were practised in the same or in adjacent villages, these religions did not present themselves as two mutually exclusive systems of belief, but rather as two ways of conciliating supernatural forces. (Ibid.) Strikingly, Beckingham’s ‘strange community’ bears more than a passing resemblance to the ‘typical Cypriot patterns’ linguists have been studying of late, which mix Turkish and Greek structures without being an extension of either, and so must be approached ‘as a separate entity, rather than in terms of [their] similarities to the participating languages’ (Kurtböke 2003–4: 178; cf. Dursteler 2012). In a similar vein one may note how some of the ‘TurkishCypriot folk poets (poetarides) who write in the Greek dialect of the island’ also happen to be linobambakoi (Yas¸ın 2000: 6 and 20 n.10). The point here is not to argue for the cognitive coincidence of religious and linguistic practices. But these hints might well help us to move on from the idea of ‘going against the flow of time’ and so conceive of other notions of ‘community’ within the Ottoman province. The community part To what extent are the linobambakoi fitting protagonists in our search for an alternative understanding of the ‘community’ detectable in the Ottoman Mediterranean? As above in Chapter Two, clearly my argument owes its rationale to Eduardo Grendi’s suggestion that not only could an exemplar appear exceptional in itself, ‘the exceptional document could well turn out to be exceptionally “normal” precisely on account of what it reveals’ (1977: 512). Its ‘marginal dimension’ notwithstanding, one needs to ‘account for [the] complexity’ it unleashes (Eldem 2009: 30). As it turns out, the linobambakoi convey a sense of elusiveness setting them apart from the frameworks of ‘conversion’ and ‘apostasy’ that took root in Ottoman policies – and in subsequent historiography – from the 1850s onwards (Deringil 2012: 111–55).75 Such frameworks, mindful though they may be of the possibility of ‘crossing boundaries’, still continue to function with a presupposed arch-category of ‘boundary’ to begin with.76 As Markus Dressler pointed out with regard to Mehmet F. Köprülü’s historiography, one may see how such conceptualizations remain ‘based on modern assumptions about cultural and religious essences, linear historical trajectories, and clear boundaries between cultural entities (including religions)’ (2010: 242).77 What is more, they imply an overarching system of equivalence between religious partitions and other presumed binaries of agency (e.g. the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, the ‘formal’ and the ‘informal’), all pointing to a curious bipolarity of the revealed and the concealed. Theories of ‘crypto-identity’, one may add, do not fundamentally move us beyond this conundrum. As Maurus Reinkowski has highlighted, ‘in the case of crypto-Jews and crypto-Christians we are

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faced with a double formal conversion’ which, its ‘blurring of boundaries between the religions’ notwithstanding, entangles ‘conversion and apostasy’ to an even greater degree (Reinkowski 2003: 17).78 Even though borders are now declared open to circulation, guards and patrols are still on duty. In the last resort compartmentalization rules. Rather than reducing them to ‘crypto-Christianity’, our glimpses of the linobambakoi bring about a radical disturbance of any such entrenched dualities, for under the ‘half humorous and contemptuous term’ that names them (Beckingham 1957a: 173), ‘linen–cottons’ poke fun at religious partitions. In their eyes the difference such partitions make is not the end of the world after all. And so not only do they ‘transgress boundaries’, they also deny in thought and word whatever happens to create them.79 Shedding light on this elusive group of people thus helps corroborate Michel Balivet’s suggestion that: the Ottoman sphere [ … ] at its height was more frequently a place of integration and unifying popular schematization than a zone divided into separate ethno-religious compartments and exclusive, competing cultural identities. It is possible in that sense to speak of a ‘melting pot’ and even to refer to an ‘ottoman [sic] way of life’ from a cultural perspective, which as a result of the long period of cohabitation bringing communities together ended up creating an awareness of political unity and the emergence of a genuinely Ottoman civic mindset. People thereby found themselves in a supra-denominational and supra-ethnic situation, before the nationalist and denominational reaction of the nineteenth century put an end to the prior period of cosmopolitanism. (Balivet 1994: 194) In many regards, studies on late Byzantine and early Ottoman history may help put the notion of an ‘Ottoman way of life’ into a longue durée perspective, since they can illustrate how ‘the social roots of the Ottomans are thus to be sought in a highly cosmopolitan milieu’ (Adanır 2003: 56; cf. Kafadar 1995, Balivet 1996, Ducellier 1998, Lowry 2003 and Barkey 2008: 28–65). Still one cannot but notice, in the second half of Balivet’s quotation, his concession to the prose of ‘changing times’. And as a matter of fact our interpretation of the linobambakoi in Cyprus may encounter a stumbling block here: are the traces left by the linobambakoi ultimately anything more than a vestige, a phantom from another age, the deep-buried archive of a memory now lost? Be it as it may, as late as 1957, C. F. Beckingham could not fail to notice these ‘people addicted to a practice which was once widespread and which has not wholly disappeared yet’, although he decreed it to be ‘now vanishing rapidly’ (1957a: 173). It would thus seem that their eccentricities outlived the upheavals of recent Cypriot history after all (cf. Kolodny 1971: 14–15; Constantinou 2012). In any event, one may conclude from what precedes that the nineteenth-century figure of the ‘apostate’ failed to erase the

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‘linen–cotton’ challenge from the working memory of the provincial archives. Thus, however justified the concession to ‘changing times’ may sound, it does not avoid the additional complexity referred to above, and in fact makes it more acute even. I will now attempt to elaborate upon this by extending the argument beyond the exceptionality of the linobambakoi, to see how the persona of the ‘apostate’ can blend in with another, more specific (yet at the same time blurrier) figure: that of the ‘renegade’. Such is the case in the affair reported by the French consular agent Théodore Goëpp in late May 1846 (the curly brackets indicating a term added to the initial text by the author of the dispatch): A Greek Raya woman, Hélène Constantinidi, had been obliged to turn Turk during the war of independence: she has since married a {renegade} Turk, and three daughters born of this marriage passed themselves off as Turks throughout the country even though they had been secretly baptized.80 Goëpp goes on to explain that he ensured that she managed to ‘leave Cyprus to go and join her brother who has an honourable position in Athens’.81 He says that this was ‘a delicate business that I had to deal with here and one which appears to be over’. But if we turn this quotation back against itself, I would argue rather that this document is itself a delicate one to know how to read, and that our reading may never be over. What exactly is going on? Reference is made on three occasions to becoming a ‘Turk’, each time in a different way. By force – ‘obliged to turn Turk’; by abjuration – ‘a {renegade} Turk’; and by pretence – ‘passed themselves off as Turks’. As soon as we read it, however, this triad starts to disintegrate and the terms overlap and run into one another, especially under the effect of the word ‘renegade’ which, having been added to the initial text, acts virtually as a chemical reagent. ‘Renegade’ – could this mean that like his wife the man was converted by force ‘during the war of independence’ and therefore corresponds to the profile of the ‘apostates from Islamism’ for whom Canning has obtained protection? Or else that he too – who knows? – passed himself off as Muslim without having totally abandoned the practices of his abjured religion? However, there is equally nothing to exclude the possibility that his conversion to Islam was a chosen and definitive one. The ‘renegade’ is as reversible and undecidable a figure as those found on playing cards – both potential ‘apostate’, and irrevocable convert with no secrets to hide.82 When the time of the ‘apostates’ runs into that of the renegades, this brings forth (as was already the case with linobambakoi) ‘a word, an event, a meaningful sequence removed from “its” time and hence endowed with a capacity to establish unprecedented temporal switches, jumping from and connecting up one line of temporality with another’ (Rancière 1996: 67–68). And so this conjunction of discrepant timelines opens up a breach which does not simply affect the traces of consular memories, but also profoundly affects the social trajectories subsumed

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elsewhere under the heading of provinciality. Even more than the spectre of the linobambakoi, the ‘renegades’ foreclose the clear-cut dividing lines of the time of the ‘apostates’. If I say foreclose, it is precisely because they adhere to the contours it is endangering in one and the same movement. Renegades are just like ‘converts’ or ‘apostates’ insofar as they display strong adhesion to a creed. Yet all at once they markedly differ, for they revel in the ambiguity of denial, always potentially in breach both of their declared faith and of their presumed ‘crypto-identity’.83 Méchain’s observation in his letter of summer 1829 comes to mind here: ‘The noteworthy point, Monseigneur, is the spoliations; the tortures on collecting customs duties; the hangings; the troubling of European trade in Larnaca, are advised, of course, or carried out by Greeks and renegade Greeks.’84 This explains why, when trying to account for the agency of ‘renegades’, schemes of trans-action may appear to be at play, as ‘ways in which subjects regularly mobilized their roots “elsewhere” to foreground specific knowledge, privileges, or commitments to further their current interests’ (Rothman 2011b: 11–12). For this to appear in fuller detail, let us take as our starting point a conversation between the American missionary Lorenzo Warriner Pease and . local dignitary Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga in 1838 (quoted in Severis 2002: 877): ‘The Aga says that Hadji Georgaki the dragoman, was a very great zealot for his faith and was greatly opposed by the Turks. He even opposed [sic] whenever he had opportunity and thus subjected himself to their hatred’. And Pease continues with his paraphrase: ‘when the Greek Revolution broke out, the Sultan became like a wild beast, furious and gave orders for the destruction of the Greeks.’ But what exactly do we know about this man who when approached by the American missionary, keeps alive the memory of presumed religious antagonism along with that of the Greek uprising? ‘The Christian name of the Aga is Aνδρέας Σολομωνίδης and his Turkish name is Mehmet Xourous.’ With his brother Markos he was one of those who ‘played before 1821 a predominant part in the function of the “secretarial system” of the Church [of Cyprus] which was closely co-operating with the Ottoman régime, in fact formed its backbone, for conducting public affairs, especially the financial ones’ (Kyrris 1973: 172, quoting registers XIII (1811) and XV (1818) of the Archbishopric of Cyprus). From 1804 on or thereabouts Andreas is also referred to in local sources in Greek as the ‘Palace Registrar’ (γραμματικóς του Σεραγίου) (ibid.). This title indicates that he was in close contact with the ‘dragoman’ of this Palace (up until 1809), Hadjigeorgakis Kornessios, whom he describes to Pease thirty years later (see Rizopoulou-Egoumenidou 2010). On the evidence of the Archbishopric’s registers, grammatikos also means that Solomonides is responsible for tax collection. The grammatikoi are placed under the joint authority of the Archbishop and the Palace dragoman – and then from 1809 onwards solely that of the Archbishop – and, under the supervision of the governor of the island, are the agents in charge of collecting taxes once the amount has been determined and recorded in the registers

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of the church administration (according to Dionyssiou 1995: 8). In the present case it is possible that ‘Palace Registrar’ is the title of a higher ranking clerk than the other grammatiki and appointed to supervise their work. Moreover, according to other sources Andreas Solomonides was also on occasions referred to as the ‘k.ocabas¸ı of Cyprus’ (κοτζάπασης Κύπρου) (Koudounaris 1984–87: 463, unfortunately without a precise source reference). Whichever his exact title, duties, and prestige may have been, Andreas Solomonides counted among the laypeople who ‘due to their position in the Ottoman public order, demanded that the church hierarchy share its power over the Orthodox Greeks’ (Anagnostopoulou 2002: 281). Hence he symbolizes the locus of ‘interaction between the Ottoman public order and the ecclesiastical order’ (ibid.: 283).85 Then the Morea uprising took place, the beginning of the time of the ‘apostates’: Andreas Solomonides, ‘formerly a Greek, became a Turk, in 1821, to save his life’ (Severis 2002: 542). He and his brother were among those who ‘became Muslims in order to avoid execution’ (Kyrris 1973: 172).86 In the archives of the French consulate from the 1830s the account becomes more complicated. ‘Khurchid-aga’ became a ‘renegade Greek who was said to be responsible for the death of the Archbishop and three bishops in 1821’.87 However flimsy and impossible to disprove this may be, given the fragmentary clues available, this allegation – with its ‘it is said that’ – is nevertheless revelatory of the shift that the figure of the ‘renegade’ brings about. And so: Still even after their conversion, both Andreas–Hürs¸id [sic] and Markos– Ahmed [ … ] continued to play a leading part in the secretarial system, and Hürs¸id even gained in importance since he seems to have become the personal delegate of the Turkish Governor in his give-and-take relations with the ‘Rayahs’ Community’ [Κοινóν Ρεαγιάδων]. (Kyrris 1973: 172, with reference to the Archbishopric’s registers XV (1823), XVIII (1826), XIX (1827), XX (1828–29) and XXI (1827)) The expression ‘Κοινóν Ρεαγιάδων’ calls for comment. Kyrris is clearly quoting here from a note in the Archbishopric’s registers, even though it is not possible to deduce exactly what this occurrence is referring to. I would suggest that at the very least the expression refers primarily to a mode of fiscal or administrative organization (such as the ‘commune’ in Asdrachas 1991 or the ‘communal corporation’ in Gara 1998) rather than an overall principle structuring society. As above with the terms re‘a-ya- and ehl-i isla-m, my preference for an administrative meaning arises from my reticence to suddenly establish nouns as principles constitutive of ‘communities’. . And that is not all for, concomitantly, Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga emerges as a lynchpin in the ‘monopoly over all the products of the Isle’ established by a few people in Cyprus in the mid-1820s.88 Perhaps he was the same person as the ‘Renegade

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Customs Officer’ referred to by Méchain in 1829.89 Be that as it may, twentyodd years later a register of the Archbishopric of Cyprus (fragments of which are quoted by C. Kyrris) provides evidence of the various prerogatives enjoyed . by Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga in his oversight over the resources and revenues of Cyprus. The title of the register is: ‘Account of everything paid by the Defunct - - . [ = Xαπαλαμπής] to H . . Hursıt aga and paid for the iltizam, as well as [the money] from the Wheat placed in various storehouses by diverse Turks [sic] and re‘a-ya- to transform it into rusk [παξιμάδι, or peksima-d in Turkish].’ A section of register includes the ‘records of the καμβιέλων [cambiò] paid by merchants and that was paid afterwards on 1263 March 1847’, with the following note: ‘The two above-mentioned portions of the καμβιέλων are - - . granted to H . . Hursıt aga for October Nov[ … ] 1264’ (Kyrris 1973: 173, quoting Archbishopric register XXV, 1847). All in all, what we have here is the portrait of a man who was clearly involved in the fiscal and financial practices, as well as the circuits to control supplies, which are both characteristics of an Ottoman ‘political economy’ in the provinces.90 Let us return to the ‘monopoly’ established in the 1820s, as it is interesting to note who the main authors of this lucrative control over trade were. There was a certain Prussian consul, Giacometto Mattei; one Georges Lapierre; and lastly the governor of Cyprus himself – which, if my dates are correct, is . Es-seyyid el-h.a-c Meh.med Aga. This association of leading figures is surely . indicative of the lasting and heightened integration of Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga within local power networks, but above all it provides a snapshot of these networks which reveals their anamorphoses. Alongside Andreas–Hu-rs¸-ıd we find the polysemous figure of a provincial Ottoman whose Islamic piety we have already seen to be emblematic (Chapter Two), as well as two paradigmatic figures embodying the entire battery of consular protections and the network of Levantine sociabilities (Chapter Four) – the ‘renegade’, the seyyid, and two ‘miscreants’. I am deliberately exaggerating the religious dividing lines so as to better bring out the necessary conclusion: these divisions are not hard-and-fast but, under the influence of the various powers criss-crossing the province, are on the contrary porous and pervious. But as it stands this conclusion raises more difficulties than it resolves. This comes out clearly in the account provided by Costas Kyrris: ‘The pattern of solidarity between muslimized and hellenized noble families or branches of such families did steadily reappear and points to the conventional character of muslimization down to the very last days of Ottoman rule’ (1973: 168). It may immediately be noticed, echoing the discussion earlier (in Chapter One), the extent to which these lines partake in the writing of a powerfully national form of history. How otherwise would it be possible to set up a dyad based on the terms ‘muslimized’ and ‘hellenized’, and make the one so curiously complementary to the other?91 And why point out the superficiality of Cypriot Islam to such an extent? When Kyrris writes ‘muslimized and hellenized’, he clearly intends to indicate a dichotomy between two separate social and cultural universes. Thus in the above quotation, it is exactly as if the

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inter-family relations under discussion are to be understood as in some way exceptional and a challenge to a familiar, clear-cut separation. The men Kyrris is speaking of are ‘go-betweens’ and ‘mediators’. Simultaneously, however, his observation implies a paradox that, with a slight shift in perspective, could lead it to take on a wholly different meaning and escape from the orbit of his thought. What if the ‘and’ in ‘muslimized and hellenized’ was not taken as a slender and exceptional link between two worlds, but rather as a broad and undefined zone of intersection – an overlap, that is, rather than a border line? This move enables us to take the idea of the ‘conventional’ aspect of religious belonging and extend it beyond the narrow circle of national historiography. This is exactly what is needed to overcome the difficulty such a circle causes for understanding the trajectory of the ‘renegades’. Let us . return to the case of Andreas Solomonides–Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga. It is impossible to establish whether he was a ‘conventional’ Muslim or not (as indeed it would to establish exactly what such a label might mean). It is certainly the case that he was ‘hellenized’ and remained so irrespective of his conversion – but one of those ‘Hellenes’ referred to in the Ottoman language of the period as Ru-ms, in an attempt to distinguish them from ‘Greeks’ in the national sense, the Yu-na-nı-s. But the real issue lies elsewhere. Is such a ‘renegade’ a ‘go-between’ positioned between two worlds, or does he belong solely to one?92 Is he someone who circulates between the imagined communities of a ‘millet system’, or a key figure within a single community that would, on account of its having been treated with indifference, ‘not [have] left much of a paper . trail’?93 In other words, maybe Andreas Solomonides–Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga does bear some resemblance to ‘the men employed as dragomans on islands such as Sakız: (Chios) and Crete, and port cities such as Selanik (Thessaloniki) and Izmir (Smyrna)’ at the turn of the nineteenth century, as analysed by Christine Philliou: [They] did not think in categories, be they national, religious, or what we would today consider ‘ideological’. Their thinking enabled them to engage in a wide range of activities in order to survive the upheavals of their era [ … ]. For us, their world serves as a point of departure for investigating larger issues of authority and social change in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century. (Philliou 2001: 104) Admittedly my comments differ slightly from Philliou’s: whereas for her ‘they did not think in categories’, my suggestion is that they did not think only in categories. For, one also needs to consider how ‘people submit [their] cultural categories to empirical risks’ (Sahlins 1985: ix). Yet all in all what distinguishes my approach is speaking in terms of how a community, in the singular, may indeed also be imagined – and may have been so. This community can be called Mediterranean, Ottomanness, or even Alexandria,94

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as one prefers. With regard to the present study, I would suggest it be seen in terms of provinciality. This confirms the potential this concept has to ‘continuously submit the received categories to worldly risks’ (ibid.: xiii). Earlier we have seen how it injects the law of the Ottoman ‘centre’ with ambivalence, and how it can open up breaches in the continuous dividing lines between denominational ‘communities’. The excedentary nature of this concept complicates any past historical accounts in striking and ultimately uncontrollable ways. It is a source of anxiety, in the same way as Niven Kerr is anxious about the affair placed before him in autumn 1845 of a renegade-cum-apostate, quoted here by way of a summary: His Excellency Sir Edmund Lyons, Her Majesty’s Minister at Athens, has written me a letter dated nineteenth ultimo, imposing a duty which causes me some degree of anxiety. The subject of His Excellency’s letter was recommended to him by Mr Mavrocordato, and is in behalf of a certain Theodore Achilles, a native of Cyprus. His father, who was one of the most influent persons in the Island at the commencement of the Greek Revolution, was obliged to renounce his faith. He was lately at the point of death, and his son wishing to come here to inherit the property on his own account, and that of his younger brothers, who are Christians, but fearing to do so without a strong letter of recommendation to the British Consul, lest the Turks should insist on his renouncing the Christian Religion [ … ]. It will be with great difficulty that I shall be able to afford the desired protection to this lad, his father having been employed at the Serail, and his uncle (who was also forced to embrace Islamism) being dragoman to the Mufti, and as he was born after his father’s change of religion, and is consequently, by the Turkish law, a Mussulman, it will require the greatest caution to elude his falling into the hands of the Turks, a misfortune which I am taking every precaution to avoid.95 This extract alone would require long and patient analysis, yet it thwarts any such attempt. We look on helplessly (given that no other document throws any further light on the case of Theodore Achilles) as the consul endeavours to sift through the multiple ambiguities of the situation – an impossible task, and one in which the ambiguities immediately form ever tighter knots. Who is Theodore Achilles? He might be supposed to be Muslim since he is the son and nephew of ‘renegades’ with a virtually identical profile to that of Hu-rs¸-ıd . Aga, born after his father’s conversion, and with two brothers clearly stated to be Christians. But how can they be Christians if they are the younger brothers of Theodore, and clearly born of the same father since they share his inheritance? Unless he is a Christian who has reverted to Islam, since the ‘Turks [might] insist on his renouncing the Christian Religion’. Perhaps he is an

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‘apostate’, then. But Kerr does not use this word here,96 any more than he does that of ‘renegade’. The ‘anxiety’ this case causes the consul probably derives ultimately from the following fact: Theodore Achilles personifies the nameless community of provinciality – one for which there is no single term.

*** 14 July 1974. On attending a wedding in the village church of Vatili, French geographer Pierre-Yves Péchoux was unsurprised to notice the participation of Turkish Cypriots from the region in the religious ceremony. He states that ‘[t]he observance of such forms of civility were [ … ] widespread in Cyprus, without there being any need to view these manifestations of sociability as associated to the various religious syncretisms which could be seen elsewhere’ (Péchoux 1985: 201 fn.9). And he goes on to point out that: Vatili was thus and for a few more days a doubly mixed village, inhabited both by Greeks and Turks, some living primarily from arable farming whilst others specialized in sheep rearing. And, to tell the truth, the differences based on linguistic and religious attachment were significantly less marked than those rooted in the daily use of different techniques and distinct spaces. (Ibid.: 189–90) A matter of infrastructure taking precedence over superstructure, perhaps? The important point here, though, is to pick up on the telltale flickering of a nameless community, where the dotted lines of ‘linguistic and religious attachment’ emerge before then disappearing again, plotting out courses which suddenly run counter to these lines or else ignore them.97 And so this provincial community no doubt underwent departures due to the ‘Ru-m event’ that meant things could never return to how they once were, crossings-out that nothing could ever erase, irremediable divisions in the framing of time and society. But does that mean to say that it is the end of a world, a change of era? That would perhaps be an overly hasty attempt to curb the temporal discordances of the province, based on taking named communities too seriously. For the anxiety of the archives enables the risks of non-concordance to transpire, the risks of renegement – taking us to a place where timelines converge in the brief emergence of a fleeting community. The labour of life goes on. This departing world still stands before our eyes in the summer of 1974. ‘For a few more days’ perhaps.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter’s first sections has appeared in French: see Aymes 2008a. : _ .a) signed by Es-seyyid ‘Osma-n Nu-rı- et alii 2 I.MVL 139, round robin (mazbat (undated [~ 1840]): ‘s.andık. emı-ni ve gümrükçi ve sa-’irler mersu-ma-n k.ocabas¸ıları _ is¸tika- zımnında fira-ren Dersa’a-det’e ‘azı-met eylemis¸lerdir’.

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- _ . a-l) signed ‘K 3 A.DVN 24/95, petition (‘arzuh . ıbrıslı Acı K . onst.ant.ı’ (undated, annotations in the margin by the Dıvan-ı Hümayun dated 29 R. and: 3 Ca- 1263 [16 _ - sında and 19 April 1847]): ‘mersu-m h.-ılesinden na-s¸-ı K . ıbrıs’dan firar ederek Iç ili k.aza idügi’. : _ .a) of the Lefk.os¸a Council (11 M. 1261 [20 4 I.MVL 1203, round robin (mazbat January 1845]): ‘Ana-t.oli ve Berriyetü’s¸-S¸a-m mema-ligi daẖı- ca-nibinden k.arı-b olarak. her bir vak.itde et.ra-f seva-h.ilinde sefı-ne ve sünger ve balık. k.a-yık.ları eksik olmamak . [ … ] cihetiyle [ … ] terk-i diyarı iẖtiyar eyledikleri’. : _ .a) dated 11 5 I.DH. 1871, register entry (defter) appended to a round robin (mazbat Ra-. 1257 [3 May 1841]: for example, ‘T.uzla iskelesinden diya-r-ı a-ẖara giden helim ve : beynir ‘ava‘idi’. 6 I.MMS 1414 (22 M. 1284 [26 May 1867]): ‘Z.iya- Beg’iñ diya-r-ı a-ẖara ‘azı-meti’. Cf. Davison 1963: 209. 7 CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.280 (Méchain, no.18, 27 September 1821). 8 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.263 (Pillavoine to Sebastiani, no.26, 23 June 1831). 9 Ibid., f.268 (Pillavoine to Sebastiani, no.29, 29 July 1831). 10 CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.13 vo (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.10, 11 January 1832). 11 These figures amount to between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of the total population estimates, which the above-mentioned authors put at around 80,000 inhabitants in 1825, and 100,000 at the following census in 1831. According to the documentation used by these scholars the population of the island underwent a period of relative stagnation over the first two decades of the century, followed by a decline in 1820–30 (although this is not equally attested to by all sources), then virtually doubled between 1830 and 1860. 12 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.173 vo (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). : _ .a) of the Lefk.os¸a Council (11 M. 1261 [20 13 I.MVL 1203, round robin (mazbat January 1845]): ‘et.ra-f-ı seva-h.ilinde sefı-ne ve sünger ve balık. k.a-yık.ları eksik olmamak.’. 14 CPC, Turquie, La Canée, vol.1, f.236 vo–237 (Goëpp to Guizot, no.5, 30 May 1846). The person in question was called Hélène Constantinidi (see Chapter Five below). 15 See for example FO 78/119, f.184 et seq.: letters from ‘the Exarch of Cyprus’ Ioannikios, received on 6 June 1823. See also CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.11 and vo (Méchain, 26 January 1825). For further information about the activity of these exiled dignitaries, consult Koumoulides 1973. 16 CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.269 vo (Méchain, no.14, 18 June 1821), f.275 (Méchain, no.16, 27 July 1821). See Hill 1972: 125 et seq.; Papadopoullos 1971; Theocharides 1980 and 1995. 17 See for instance CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.294 (Méchain, no.24, 18 May 1822); CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.11 (minutes of the Assembly of the French nation, 7 January 1832; appended to letter no.9 from Bottu to Sebastiani, 10 January 1832). Cf. Grenet 2010: 408–9, 430 and 439–45. 18 I have taken it upon myself to displace Greene’s suggestion by two centuries, taking as my inspiration some of Philliou’s insightful remarks (2001). Strikingly, some scholars recently argued for a similar temporal displacement in reverse, i.e. ‘a gradual shift over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from an essentially juridical-commercial discourse of difference to a predominantly ethnolinguistic and religious one’ (Rothman 2011b: 21). 19 On Sırrı Efendi being sent to Cyprus: A.MKT.MVL 25/80 (15 Ca-. 1266 [29 March 1850]); C.ML 4001 (20 Ca-. 1266 [3 April 1850]). See above, Chapter Four. : 20 I.MVL 7270, report (la-yih.a) from Sırrı Efendi (undated [~ spring 1851]): ‘s.a-h.ibi fira-r idüb na- ma‘lu-m olan ve ya-ẖu-d bes¸ on seneden müteca-viz silk-i ‘askerı-de mefk.u-d _ kimesne bulunan tarlalarıñ ne-vechle k.ayd olunması ve k.aryesi aha-lisinden ba‘zı zira-‘at eyledigi s.u-retde h.a-s.ıla-tı kimiñ üzerine k.ayd olunmak. la-zım-gelecegi’.

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: _ .a) of the Lefk.os¸a Council (11 M. 1261 [20 I.MVL 1203, round robin (mazbat January 1845]), :quoted above: ‘çift ve tarlasını bırak.arak. terk-i diya-rı iẖtiya-r eyledikleri’. Cf. Inalcık 1990:4; Veinstein 1989b: 324; Singer 1994: 99–101 and 125–26; Faroqhi 2005: 310–11. It would appear more judicious to translate s.a-h.ib as ‘landholder’ than as ‘landowner’ (even if the second of these two terms is closer to the modern Turkish meaning today). And this (although the hypothesis is far from certain) could appear as yet another instance of the improper uses of ‘property’ discussed in Chapter Four. In any case, as Veinstein has noted about the sixteenth century, _ means ‘master of the land’, it can refer indiswhilst the expression ‘s.a-h.ib-i ‘arz’ criminately to ‘the Sultan himself in the case of a Crown domain, the holder of a prebend, or the administrator of a religious foundation’ (1989a: 211–12). The expression appears for that matter in a ‘land deed’ (t.a-pu--na-me) of 1661, clearly referring to the usufructuary of a piece of land, who has to pay a t.a-pu- tax on taking possession of it: ‘it is necessary and important that [she] be given a document making [her] an owner of the land’ (yedine s.a-h.ib-i ‘arz_ eden na-mesi la-zım ve mühimm) (document without reference number held in the Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius National Library in Sofia, quoted and translated by Minkov 2000: 96–97). Cf. Peirce 2005: 123. This removal of specifics is deliberate, the : explicit aim being to establish this format as a ‘solid principle and rule’. I.MVL 7270, la-yih.a from Sırrı Efendi (undated [~ spring 1851]): ‘bir k.avı- us.u-l ü niz.a-m olarak.’. For an analysis of this terminology see Aymes 2010: 30–34. : _ mah.allerden su’a-l olunmus¸’. I.MVL 7270, loc. cit.: ‘ba‘zı Ibid., la-yih.a from Sırrı Efendi (undated [~ Spring 1851]): ‘meẕku-r tarlalar as.ıl es.h.a-bı üzerine tah.rı-r olunub zira-‘at iden adamıñ üzerine h.a-s.ıla-tı temettü‘ k.ayd olunması’. - A.DVN 24/95, petition (‘arzuh _ . a-l) signed ‘K . ıbrıslı Acı K . onst.ant.ı’ (undated, annotations in the margin by the Dıvan-ı hümayun dated 29 R. And 3 Ca- 1263 _ - rıyla K [16 and 19 April 1847]): ‘mersu-muñ K . ıbrıs meclisine irsal ü ih.za . ıbrıs’da aẖẕ ü i‘t.a-mıza: va-k.ıf tücca-r ma‘rifetini ve meclis ma‘rifetiyle ih.k.a-k.-ı h.ak.k. olun. mak. beya-nda Iç sanca-gı k.a-’im-mak.a-mı efendi bendelerine ẖita-ben bir k.ıt.‘a emir_ na-me-i sa-mı- h.azret-i veka-let-pena-hı-ñ i‘t.a- ü ih.sa-n buyrulmak. niya-zı’. AD Vilâyât Giden no.594, p.95 (26 C. 1273 [21 February 1857]): ‘K . ıbrıs cezıresi _ sebebden t.ola-yı Dersa‘a-det’e s.avus¸mus¸ olan Ya-nk.o ve aha-lisinden olub ba‘zı . Yorgon na-m kimesneleriñ mah.aline i‘a-desi h.ak.k.ında cezı-re-i merk.u-me meclisiniñ _ .ası üzerine [ … ] siya-k.-ı is¸‘a-ra naz.aren merk.u-ma-nıñ ol-t.arafa tevarüd iden mazbat . . gönderilmesinde ehemmiyet oldıgı añlas¸ıldıgından bunlarıñ fira-r idemeyecek s.uretle mah.aline i‘adesi [ … ]’. A rough copy of this order may be found in A.MKT.NZD 214/41. : _ .a) of the Lefk.os¸a Council (11 M. 1261 [20 I.MVL 1203, round robin (mazbat January 1845]): ‘cezı-re-i mezbu-re ise et.ra-fı bah.r ile muh.a-t. ve bi-taẖs.-ıs. Ana-t.oli ve Berriyetü’s¸-S¸a-m mema-ligi daẖı- ca-nibinden k.arı-b olarak. her bir vak.itde et.ra-f-ı seva-h.ilinde sefı-ne ve sünger ve balık. k.a-yık.ları eksik olmamak. ve cezı-re-i mez. _ k.ura- aha-lisi daẖı- sebük-magz olmak. cihetiyle digeriñ yek-digerine ve bu-rede ba‘zı . dil-a-sı-ma- [sic] evla-d ü ‘ıya-line edna- mertebe igbira-rıyla bera-ber çift ü tarlasını bırak.arak. terk-i diyarı iẖtiyar eyledikleri’. CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.286 vo (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.6, 21 December 1831) (underlined in the original). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.173–74 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.363 (Méchain, no.62, 24 January 1825, erroneously dated 1824). CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.149 (Méchain to the Comte de Damas, no.38, 17 November 1827).

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33 KS¸S 38, p.44, 5 C. 1255 [17 August 1839]: ‘cezı-re-i mezbu-re aha-lisinden olub . teklı-fa-ta ta-b-a-ver olamadık.larından k.ah.t. ü gala- vesı-lesiyle Ant.a-lya’ya fira-r itmis¸ olan ikiyüz nefer mik.da-rı isla-m ve re‘a-ya-nıñ me’va--yı k.adı-mlerine irca-‘larıyla . istih.s.a-l-ı esba-b-ı refa-h ü ra-h.atları müstelzem bulunmus¸ oldıgından cezı-re-i mezbu-reden gerek Ant.a-lya’ya gitmis¸ ve gerek a-ẖa-r memlekete s.avıs¸mıs¸ ne-k.adar isla-m ve re‘a-ya-dan fira-rı- var ise bulunduk.ları mah.allerden memleketlerine irca-‘larıyla cezı-re-i mezbu-reden te’diye olunacak. emva-lden üç seneye k.adar bunlara h.is.s.e t.arh. ve tevzı-‘ olunmayub fak.at. onlardan ehl-i isla-mı ‘uhdelerine terettüb iden nüzül ve ‘ava-rız_ ma-llerini ve re‘a-ya-sı-daẖı- cizye emva-lini te‘diye ederek müddet-i mezbu-reye k.adar emva-l-i mertebe-i merk.u-me sa-’ir aha-li beynlerinde bi-t-ta‘dı-l tevzı-‘ ile mah.allerine te’diye ve tavs.-ıl olunmak. ve fira-rı--i merk.u-mlarıñ . et.rafa olan düyu-nları daẖı- sa-bık.da vuk.u-‘buldıgı misillü tek.a-sı-t.-i müna-sibeye rabt. ile üç seneye k.adar te’diye ve itmam eylemelerine mehil virilmek’. 34 A few significant occurrences may be found at: MD 248, no.426 (eva-’il R. 1247 [9–18 September 1831]): ‘refa-h ve ra-h.at’ (noting that in the rough draft of this order held at C.ML 134 these words were preferred to the expression ‘ẖayr ü menfa‘at’, which has been crossed out). See too MD 257, no.487 (eva-ẖır R. 1265 _-r ü [15–24 March 1849]): ‘istikma-l-i asa-yis¸ ve istira-h.at-ı h.a-l ve istih.s.a-l-i h.uzu : refa-h’. See also I.DH 11188, oral instructions of S.afvetı- Pas¸a to the local councils of the Islands (undated [~ May–June 1849]): ‘asa-yis¸ ve istira-h.at ve kema-l-i emniyet ü ma‘mu-riyet’. In the context of mid-nineteenth-century Egypt, the expression ‘asa-yis¸ ve rah.a-t’ may be read as shorthand for ‘the Ottoman–Egyptian concept of law, order, and prosperity’ (Toledano 1990: 221). 35 See CCC, Larnaca, vol.16, f.330 (Méchain, no.34, 6 February 1823): ‘public tranquillity has not yet been disturbed’; FO 78/497, f.172 (Lilburn to the Count of Aberdeen, no.2, 5 January 1842): ‘I found the Island in a state of great tranquillity’; CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.204 vo (Darasse, no.14, 3 June 1860): ‘maintain the general tranquillity’. 36 MD 248, no.426, order to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg, to the Governor of Cyprus Halı-l Efendi, et alii. (eva-’il R. 1247 [9–18 September 1831]). A copy of this order (based on the original copy given to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg) appears in Suppl. turc 1042, f.16 vo and 17 (facsimile in Theocharides and Andreev 1996: 142–46). 37 This is no doubt a reference to the demographic census completed in 1831, published by Karal 1943. 38 MD 248, no.426 (eva-’il R. 1247 [9–18 September 1831]): ‘Fı--l-as.l K . ıbrıs cezıresi aha-lisi üzerlerine va-ride olan teka-lifiñ sülüsi ehl-i isla-m ve sülüsa-nı re‘a-ya- t.araflarından te’diye olunur iken ot.uz dok.uz ta-rı-ẖinden berü tekalı-f-i va-rideniñ ẖums ve s.oñraları sümün h.is.s.esi ehl-i isla-ma t.arh. ile ma-‘ada-sı bütün bütün re‘a-ya-ya . tah.mı-l olunmak.da oldıgı bi’l-iẖba-r tah.k.-ık.-gerde-i pa-dis¸a-ha-nem olub h.a-lbuki _ - t-ı h.a-liyye sebebiyle re‘a-ya-ya perı-s¸a-nlık. gelmis¸ ve biraz ayyamdan-berü ‘ava-rıza h.atta bundan ak.dem Dersa‘a-detim’e vüru-d iden tah.rı-r defterleri yeku-nına naz.aren cezı-re-i meẕku-reniñ ehl-i isla-mı re‘a-ya-nın nıs.fından ziya-de gibi görünmüs¸ idügüne bina-’en el-h.a-letü ha-ẕihi mevcu-d olan re‘a-ya- bu k.adar teka-lif eda-sına bir vechile ta-b-a-ver olamayacak.larından bir müddet-daẖı- böylece gider ise cümlesi . müteferrik. ve perı-s¸a-n olacak.ları emr-i gayr-i mübhem.’ 39 I wish to thank Gilles Veinstein and all those who took part in the seminar held on 4 April 2007 at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), during which this document was presented and discussed. 40 C.ML 134, a rough version of the order to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg, to the Governor of Cyprus Halı-l Efendi, et alii. (eva-’il R. 1247 [9–18 September 1831]). 41 Ibid.: ‘h.a-lbuki Ru-m vak.‘a {Mora ma‘arre} sından t.olayı {bira-z ayya-mdan-berü _ ‘ava-rızât-ı h.a-liyye sebebiyle} re‘a-ya-ya perı-s¸a-nlık. gelmis¸ ve ekser-i re‘a-ya- emla-ki. daẖı- ehl-i isla-m yedlerine geçmis¸ oldıgına ve h.atta [ … ]’.

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42 The translation of the word ‘ma‘arre’ by annoyance is somewhat lacking in rigour, but seeks to reconcile as far as possible the various connotations the term has. See Redhouse’s definition (1890: 1908): ‘ma‘arre – 1. An itch or mange-spot (in a camel etc.). 2. Any point that gives cause for reviling; a fault, failing. 3. Anything that vexes or annoys one; a nuisance. 4. Any unauthorised annoyance by troops. 5. A fine, bloodwit, damages; any similar compulsory payment. 6. Name of the portion of the sky between the Milky Way and the Pole Star, or of some undefined star in that space.’ 43 One may therefore remain sceptical about Reinkowski’s suggestion (2005a: 262) that ‘die Beamten unterscheiden zwischen kleineren Problemen und Zwischenfällen (h.a-dise/keyfiyyet/vak.‘a) und kaum mehr handhabbaren, langanhaltenden Schwierigkeiten, gefasst unter den Begriffen mes’ele oder ma-dde’. For insightful reflections on the Greek War of Independence as an ‘event’ see Grenet 2010: 398–401. 44 This general meaning of the word Ru-m justifies its not being translated either as Hellenic or (a fortiori) as Greek, both of which were taken over by the national independence movement, for neither of these two terms sufficiently cover its range of possible meanings. Current-day Cyprus, where Greek Cypriots are habitually referred to in Turkish as ‘Rum’, provides a useful reminder of how polysemous the term is. Cf. Hirschon 1989: 257 n.2; Kechriotis 2003; Eldem 2009: 37–38; Grenet 2012b. : : 45 I.MVL 2585, report (s¸uk.k.a) from the governor (k.a-’im-mak.a-m) of Cyprus, Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a (13 Ẕa. 1263 [23 October 1847]): ‘K . ıbrıs cezıresi ahalisiniñ Rum fesadı sında metropolıd ve pisk.oposlarınıñ umur-ı memleketlerine s.arf itmek üzere esna : Ingiltere k.onsolosı t.arafından istı-da-ne [sic] itmis¸ olduk.ları seksen yedi-biñ dört. yüz bu k.adar guru-s¸’. 46 FO 78/621, vol.2, f.90 vo (Kerr to Canning, no.2, copy, 4 April 1845). 47 CPC, Turquie, La Canée, vol.1, f.216 (Goëpp to Guizot, no.2, 22 December 1845). 48 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.185–86 (Darasse, no.9, 19 July 1859). 49 Ibid., f.196 (Darasse, no.12, 1 September 1859). 50 See the table of French consular agents in Cyprus in Aymes 2010: 355–56. 51 Alphonse Bottu, the French Consul in Cyprus from 1831–33, had resided in Salonica for several years with his father (CPC, Turquie, Consulats divers, vol.1, f.378, Bottu to Casimir-Périer, no.19, 10 April 1832). D’Antoine Vasse de Saint Ouen, who was appointed to Larnaca from 1834–36, observes that ‘Turkey’ is a ‘country where [he] lived for a long while’ (CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.296, unnumbered letter at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 5 May 1834). And, according to the traveller Ludwig Ross, Niven Kerr was ‘employed at Constantinople at the time [of the 1840 war in Syria] in his father’s business’ (1852, here quoted from the English version of the text in Cobham 1910: 66). 52 CPC, Turquie, Larnaca, vol.1, f.171. 53 Quote taken from CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.1 (Bottu to Sebastiani, no.9, 10 January: 1832). See Chapter Four above. Cf. Pouradier Duteil 1989: passim. _ . a-l) signed ‘La-zara-kı-’ (undated [~ autumn 1845]). 54 Cf. I.MVL 1350, petition (‘arzuh For further indications about the nature of his duties, see Aymes 2004a: 241–75; id. : 2010, chapter 5. 55 I.HR. 201, memorandum to the Palace (‘arz_ teẕkiresi) (10 Ra-. 1256 [12 May . 1840]): ‘bu a-na k.adar bulundıgı ẖidema-t-ı salt.anat-ı seniyyede s.ıdk. ü istik.a-metle isba-t-ı müdde‘a- itmis¸ ve ẖus.u-s.ıyla Ru-m fitretinde ma‘iyet-i sena-verı- ile Melnik ve . Ibs.a-ra muh.a-s.ara ve muh.a-rebelerinde bulunmus¸ oldıgı’. Cf. Mostras 1873: 1–2 (‘Ipsara’) and 170–71 (‘Menlik’). 56 See for example file A.MKT 141/79, the text of which is transcribed and translated in the appendix of Aymes 2004a: 262–70.

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: I.MVL 352, report from the commander (mı-r-liva-) ‘Ömer Pas¸a (undated [~ 1841–42]): ‘Ya-nk.o na-m k.ocabas¸ınıñ menfa‘at-ı meẕku-reden mah.ru-m . olacagından bas¸k.a babası K . ıbrıs tercümanı iken muk.addema. Der-‘aliyye’de . k.atl olundıgından dolayı t.araf-ı salt.anat-ı seniyyeye k.adım gayz. ü ‘ada-veti . oldıgı’. _ signed by the Governor of Cyprus ‘Meh.med T.al’at’ and by ‘EsIbid., ‘arı-za seyyid Mus.t.afa’, the Colonel in charge of maintaining the peace in Cyprus (7 S.. 1257 [31 March 1841]). Despite the fact that it is signed by the two men, the speaker in the document is clearly only T.al’at Efendi. The text is written in the first-person singular (‘vüru-d-ı kem-tera-nemden berüdür’) by an individual referring to the Governors who preceded him in Cyprus (‘sa-’ir muh.as.s.ıllardan ziya-de’). In what follows I will therefore not refer back to the fact that Mus.t.afa Beg is meant to have approved its content. Ibid.: ‘esbak. K . ıbrıs. tercümanı olub Rum vak.‘asında Dersa‘adet’de k.atl olunmus¸ . olan Yorga-kı-’niñ oglı Ya-nk.o ve Leymosu-n k.ocabas¸ısı sa-bık. Ya-nı- Helı-l ve sa-bık. . s.a-ndık. emı-ni Pala-va-kı- ga-yet fetta-n ve s.u-ret-i z.a-hirde re‘a-ya-nıñ ẖayr ü menfa‘atını arar ve sıret-i ah.valde kendü menfa‘atlarını istih.s.a-l ider mak.u-leden bulunduk.ları’. _ .a) of the Cyprus Council (27 S.. 1257 [20 April 1841]). Ibid., round robin (mazbat And so even though the report by ‘Ömer Pas¸a is not dated, it may be assumed to be chronologically very close to that of T.al’at Efendi and Mus.t.afa Beg. The translations put forward here carefully follow the order of the original texts. BnF, Suppl. turc no.1042, f.19 vo: copy of the tal‘ -ım-na-me given to Meh.med Es‘ad Beg, undated (1831) (quoted by Theocharides and Andreev 1996: 152 et - seq.): ‘Muk.addema- Ru-m fesa-dı esna-sında K . ıbrıs cezıresi re‘ayasından firar iden _ _ . olunmak. ve k.atlen ha-lik olan re‘a-ya-nıñ emla-k ve ara-zileri ca-nib-i mı-rı-den zabt cihetle bunlarıñ teka-lı-f-i va-k.i‘eleri sa-’ir efra-d-ı re‘a-ya-ya tah.mı-l olunarak. bu keyfiyet perı-s¸a-n ah.va-llerini mu-ceb olmus¸’. A.DVN.MHM 4-A/57, draft of an order to the Cyprus authorities (eva-ẖır N. 1263 [2–11 September 1847]) (quoted and slightly differently translated above, Chapter Four). These have not been indicated in the preceding quotation, as the additions and crossings-out only affect the style rather than the content. They are not the result of : a process of textual criticism or censorship similar to that seen above. : I.MVL 2585, report (s¸uk.k.a) from the governor (k.a-’im-mak.a-m) of Cyprus Isma-‘ı-l ‘Adil Pas¸a (13 Ẕa-. 1263 [23 October 1847]) (excerpt quoted and translated above): ‘K . ıbrıs cezıresi ahalisiniñ Rum fesadı esna : sında metropolıd ve pisk.oposlarınıñ umu-r-ı memleketlerine s.arf itmek üzere Ingiltere k.onsolosı t.arafından istı-da-ne . [sic] itmis¸ olduk.ları seksen yedi-biñ dört-yüz bu k.adar guru-s¸’. : I.DH. 14406, draft instructions (ta‘lımat müsveddesi) to Halı-l Pas¸a (undated; according to an appended document written a few days after 21–22 L. 1267 [19– _ es¸ẖa-s. Yuna-nı-lik iddi‘a-sına 20 August 1851]): ‘teba‘a-ı Devlet-i ‘aliyye’den ba‘zı tes¸ebbüs iderek [ … ]’. For discussion of the concept of ‘Hellenism’ in Modern Greek see Sigalas 2001 as well as Livanios 2006b. Some related issues are discussed further in Aymes 2010: 181–82. A similar enterprise was also outlined in Aymes 2005b (portions of which have been revivified in this chapter). For a further (and important) contribution to this debate, see Ozil 2012. FO 78/450, f.293–94 (Palmerston to Lilburn, draft no.1, 16 August 1841). For the full quotation and indications about the bureaucratization of British consular services, see Chapter Three above. FO 78/497, f.204 vo (Lilburn, ‘Report on the Produce and Trade of the Island of Cyprus’, 26 May 1842). FO 195/102, f.460 vo–461 (Kerr to Canning, no.3, 3 August 1844).

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73 Ibid., f.461. 74 Ibid. 75 Political and scholarly concern with these issues actually span a much wider time range, so that one may consider the 1850s a mere ‘revival’: cf. Foa and Scaraffia 1996; García-Arenal 2001; Shankland 2004, vol.2; Baer 2007; Albera and Couroucli 2009; Valtchinova 2010; Grivaud and Popovic 2011; Krstic´ 2011; Rothman 2011a; Dursteler 2011b. 76 E.g. in Linda Darling’s work (2006: 188): ‘Both the Muslims’ resistance to assimilation and the Europeans’ insistence on homogeneity may have their origin in the meeting of the two societies in the fluid conditions of the borderland, where crossing boundaries was so easy that it had to be made artificially difficult.’ Cf. Heyberger and Verdeil 2009; Ortega 2009; Bertrand and Planas 2011; Martin : 2011; Inal 2011. On the ‘lack of language with which to discourse on this extremely important development’ called (by default) ‘border crossing’ see Thompson et al. 2004: 290–91. 77 E. Natalie Rothman’s work provides an inspiring discussion of ‘alternative ways for thinking about mediation, against the tendency to presuppose a priori clearly demarcated cultural units’ (2011b: 5). One may point out, though, that this approach by no means rids itself of the category of ‘boundary’: indeed, not unlike much earlier studies on ‘boundary depictions’ (Kreiser 1976), it aims to understand ‘how [its] subjects articulated the actual location of sociocultural boundaries, the prototypical centers of different categories, and the meaning of their own “in-betweenness”’ (Rothman 2011b: 13, italics added). 78 I take the quotation from the revised English version of this essay (Reinkowski 2007: 414). Cf. Ricci 2007 and Baer 2009. 79 This draws on Arendt’s piece on ‘Lying in Politics’ (1972: 5), which focuses on ‘our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case’. 80 CPC, Turquie, La Canée, vol.1, f.236 (Goëpp to Guizot, no.5, 30 May 1846). See too FO 195/102, f.559 and vo (Kerr to Canning, 7 June 1846): Hélène Constantinidi had initially approached the British consul who refused to help her. 81 CPC, Turquie, La Canée, vol.1, f.236vo (Goëpp to Guizot, no.5, 30 May 1846). 82 The landmark study by Bartolomé and Lucile Bennassar (1989) manages to encapsulate this difficulty which is inherent to the ‘singular histories’ of renegades (e.g. 20, 473–74). Oualdi (2011: 26–30, 61) provides insightful pages on ‘renegades’ as seen through the lens of European writing in the 1830–60s. See also Scaraffia 1993, Bono 1998. 83 This departs from generic definitions whereby renegades have been lumped together with ‘apostates’ and ‘converts’ – e.g. Dursteler’s: ‘In the languages of the age, renegade referred to an individual who “rebelled against the faith”. The label was almost always applied to Christian conversions to Islam but was also used occasionally in other religious and political contexts. I have taken liberties with the term and have expanded it to encompass not only women who converted from Christianity to Islam but all women who transgressed boundaries of any sort—political, religious, gender, social—and in any geographical, ideological, or theological direction’ (2011a: ix, italics added). One may wonder whether such an ‘expansion’ of meaning, which amounts to an amalgamation, is not one of the main reasons why scholarship on renegades in the Mediterranean has remained an ‘historiographical desert’ (Bennassar 1988: 1364 n.1). 84 CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.173 vo–174 (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829). 85 This dichotomy of two ‘orders’ is only relevant from an analytical point of view, and needs to be taken with caution. Given the issues touched upon above (with regard to boundary as a category) it is moreover revealing that in the same article

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93

94 95 96 97

A departing world? Anagnostopoulou seeks to define and ‘Ottomanorthodox [sic] order’ to account for what she is describing. Cf. Stathi 2005. Kyrris adds: ‘Andreas possibly for other personal reasons too: to marry the fiancée of Nicolas Theseus, Aικατερίνα Χάββα, which he did, his first wife and two daughters having left Cyprus’ (as stated in K.Χ. II, 1924, p.40). CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.345 (‘extraits du registre de la correspondance officielle du Consul de France en Chypre’, Vasse de Saint Ouen, piece A, 19 March 1835). Ibid., f.326 vo (Vasse de Saint Ouen, no.2, 13 November 1834) for the quotation. This ‘monopoly’ is only ever referred to elliptically, and so its exact nature is uncertain. See CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.156 (French Minister of Foreign Affairs to Méchain, draft no.25, 3 December 1827); CCC, Larnaca, vol.18, f.345 (‘extraits du registre de la correspondance officielle du Consul de France en Chypre’, Vasse de Saint Ouen, piece A, 19 March 1835); and Hill 1972: 138. CCC, Larnaca, vol.17, f.171–75 vo (Méchain to Portalis, no.2, 2 July 1829), here f.174 vo. This idea of a ‘political economy’ is borrowed from the work of Mehmet Genç (1990: 18), who puts forward a definition of the ‘fundamental reference system guiding and controlling the Ottoman political economy’, based on three principles: the control of supplies, tradition, and fiscalism. Kyrris for that matter equates ‘hellenized’ with ‘Greek Orthodox’, as he speaks of ‘hellenized or Greek Christian members of surviving noble families’ (1973: 165, italics added). The course of Bennassar and Bennassar’s argument (1989) is exemplary in this respect. Starting (p.15) with the ‘reminder’ that ‘for centuries a permanent struggle opposed Christians to Muslims in the Mediterranean and Central European regions’, it quite logically leads to the conclusion (p.475) that ‘voluntarily or not “renegades” acted as intermediaries between two civilizations and between two cultures’. For a snappy (if curt) case against ‘an understanding of the societies in question as having been fundamentally defined and determined by the separate, alien and self-contained traditions of Christianity versus Islam’ see Berktay 1998: here 313. This notion of ‘indifference’ could indeed become a means to a ‘denationalization of history’ while accounting for ‘failed groupness’ (Zahra 2010: here 106, 94 and 96, italics in the original; I am grateful to Xavier Bougarel for having brought this work to my attention). On oral history as an alternative to the lack of a ‘paper trail’ see Protopapa 2002, and Schabel 2011–12. In tribute to Robert Ilbert’s masterful Alexandrie 1830–1930 (1996). FO 195/102, f. 531 and vo (Kerr to Canning, no.11, 2 November 1845). And this despite the fact that the first part of his letter was about the case of a certain ‘Mariu’, clearly designated as a case of ‘apostasy’ in his correspondence (see Chapter Three above). Another geographer performing fieldwork in Cyprus at the same period (Kolodny 1971) reached contrasting yet in many regards similar views. See also Karatsioli 2009.

Conclusion Provincial empire

From the vantage point of Cyprus we can detect several rhythms which could partake in a provincial history. And so voyaging into the province entails following the movement of multiple people, goods, and utterances very closely.1 Whilst the number of different horizons studied in the previous chapters might seem alarming, it is also intriguing. Provincial history necessarily brings into question the unity of what we designate as ‘Ottoman’, and involves going beyond monographic univocality. Such a history must perforce be polygraphic. And here, it is as if the territories and trajectories of the province defied all homogenous and univocal categorizations, in the same way as the key figures . . of Meh.med Aga, Giacometto Mattei, and Hu-rs¸-ıd Aga do. It is no doubt always possible to identify the substrate of a certain ‘mentality’ (cf. Dankoff 2006): something like ‘“the Ottoman way” – the distinct set of norms and methods that represents the empire’s rule in all realms of life’ (Ze’evi 1996: 5) – or else the precipitate of ‘the Ottoman-Muslim world view which considered the Ottomans the legitimate rulers of the realm and obedience to them the only legitimate political behavior’ (Philipp 2002: 86). And thus one may argue that ‘dependency upon the Ottoman State, fostering personal and collective identification with the Ottoman cause, more often than not coinciding with a supra-communal perspective – these I propose are distinguishing characteristics of the homo ottomanicus’ (Ursinus 1999: 25). But such attempts to unify and reduce to a common denominator, however justified they may be, are problematic in two distinct ways. First, they postulate that it is possible to ‘think of an entity called a society or culture, spread over many centuries and a large part of the world, but having a unity which in the end could be defined in terms of a single factor’ (Hourani 1981: xvi). And secondly, does not any such approach implicitly smuggle the ‘framework of the national state’ back in? For, [a]lthough on a theoretical level we are quite aware of the difference, in practice we persistently and insidiously slip back into judgments and

178

Conclusion – provincial empire interpretations which make sense only within the framework of a centralized bureaucratic state. (Faroqhi and Fleischer in Abou-El-Haj 1991: x)

Yet if there is such a thing as an ‘Ottoman model’, it is characterized as much by the ‘incoherencies of the judicial system’ as it is by its ‘multiple layers of belonging’ (Ilbert 1996: 97). It concomitantly gives rise to various predicates, and whilst Muslim is no doubt one of them, Mediterranean, European, and Levantine are all equally valid too.2 And so it can be defined in rather slippery terms as ‘a sort of commonwealth’ (Laurens 1993: 34–35), a ‘melting-pot’ (Balivet 1994: 194; Zachariadou 2002: xiv), ‘a Janus of many faces’ (Berktay 1998: 314). It both incorporates and defies national and communal histories in one and the same movement.

*** I would suggest that if we are to succeed in fully taking these issues into account, then we need to think in terms of an Ottoman provincial world – a notion which, like those discussed above, leads to certain working hypotheses. The term ‘world’ suggests that there is a certain degree of coherence and community within the Ottoman entity – and this is intentional. But only a certain degree, for what is at stake here is the ability to conceive this entity ‘without imposing on the history of the Empire a greater degree of artificial order than is involved in our thinking about it at all’ (Hourani 1957: 92). In short, the ‘world’ in no way excludes the possibility of considerable disorder, and it may be affected by diversity, variability, irregularity, and discontinuity, either openly or in more concealed ways.3 And so: despite the apparent grandeur and sophistication of the institutions of the central part of the [Ottoman] empire, the empire remained a congeries of groupings, ways of life, and methods of economic and political organization, forming a unit only in their distinction from other outside bodies. The empire was never a state and less a nation. (Polk and Chambers 1968: 2) Behind this rather forceful statement lies a warning, and it is important to appreciate its full extent, though perhaps in slightly more nuanced terms: And so over the course of the centuries an Ottoman space was built up which was not Turkish but multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multidenominational. The Balkan and Arab countries were distinct from the ‘central’ provinces and retained their own strong identities. But community life, the movement of populations and individuals, in particular the spread of the dervish brotherhoods, along with exchanges of all sorts were instrumental in lending a certain unity to the whole, or at least a family resemblance.

Conclusion – provincial empire

179

[ … ] And so there was indeed a world that we may call ‘Ottoman’, defined by a dynasty but also by its laws, customs, and civilization. This should not lead us to deny the existence of great disparities and contradictions. (Vatin 2001: 54–55) World therefore supposes a certain community of life, but not necessarily regularity and coherence: it is irreducibly equivocal, be it in the chambers of power reverberating with sultanic authority, or within the everyday social relations between its inhabitants. And so it is clear that when speaking of the ‘Ottoman Empire’, the word empire needs to be understood in the widest possible acceptation.4 As Jens Hanssen et al. have suggested, it makes up ‘a whole empire metaphorically as well as literally – of signs, cultural expressions and societal articulations that gave meaning to the unfolding transformations’ (2002: 4). Admittedly this empire cannot be separated from the ‘Sublime State’ which forms its tutelary substrate. Yet when viewed through the lens of the province, the Ottoman ‘Empire’ is also a matter of other forms of shared experience. Studying the provincial loopings and meanderings of Ottomanness as we have done here cannot be wholly subject to the concept of the state or to its implied ‘centeredness’. Provincial history frees Ottomanness from the house of Osman and takes it far away from the pomp and fortifications of the capital, exposing it to the risks of the province, so that ‘locality [should be] taken into consideration in terms of its influence on the political culture of the state itself ’, as Karen Barkey puts it (2008: 85). Does this amount to deferring to some form of ‘hub-and-spoke network pattern’ (ibid.: 1, 9–10, 17, 29, 45, 193)? One may argue to the contrary, since such a framework remains curiously embedded in the very dichotomies whose historicity this study has sought to question, such as state/society, and centre/periphery.5 Provinciality by contrast obliges us to accept a proliferation of frameworks, with a view to grappling with such problematic notions as ‘assimilation’, thereby highlighting the ambiguity of an ‘interactive process of localization and Ottomanization’ (Toledano 1997: 148, italics in the original; cf. Hanssen et al. 2002: 12; Lellouch 2006: 110–26; Canbakal 2007: 61 et seq; Hadjianastasis 2009). An impressionistic sketch of this experience has been provided by Karl Barbir with regard to eighteenth-century Damascus: In that era, people of diverse backgrounds moved easily from one part of the Middle East to another – and felt ‘at home’ wherever they went. Some were travelers, others merchants, itinerant scholars, Sufis, and soldiers. Then too, there were bandits, tribesmen, and gypsies. There was an outflow of Ottoman culture from Istanbul to the provinces and a complementary ingathering from the provinces to Istanbul. Within the limits of a vast empire, there was a constant movement of men and ideas. (Barbir 1979–80: 68)

180

Conclusion – provincial empire

And in addition to men and ideas why not also add clothing, languages, colours, sounds, spices, and seasonings?6 Why for that matter limit the ‘ingathering’ of which Barbir speaks to the capital of the Empire, and the outflow to the province(s)? Why should we limit our scope to studying the ‘provincial people’s receptivity to things imperial’ (Canbakal 2007: 89)?7 Is it not selfdefeating only to ‘explore how the people in provincial societies relate and respond to the action of the imperial government’ (Forsén and Salmeri 2008: 4)? On the contrary, it is just as conceivable that a province act as the crucible for its own specific cultural syntheses (between elements not necessarily originating there), and that when transferred to the capital these syntheses are in fact impoverished in some way.8 Rather than thinking in terms of ‘receptivity’, thus endorsing a definition of ‘juridical and social categories in relation to a presumably stable metropolitan self ’ (Rothman 2011b: 11), our task is to continually imagine provinciality as a complex web of forces, riches, and codes circulating throughout the Ottoman world – thus making for a provincial eclecticism (Yenis¸ehirliog˘ lu 2005: 332). Besides, while these dealings often occur within a host of officialized forms of ‘local knowledge’, it is important not to see them as the preserve of an established cultural elite for they can also take the more roundabout routes of an untitled Ottomanness. And so the province acts as a locus in which Ottomanness becomes entangled and is reworked in a profusion of wayward forms, whereby the official canons can undergo a process of decentring and rejigging. Conceiving of the Ottoman world is therefore a prime instance of conceiving of a provincial empire.

*** As should be clear, the hypothesis being developed here is based on the ideas developed in the previous chapters. Moving beyond the idea of dividing lines that have subsequently been imposed, I have sought to examine Cyprus in terms of provincial Ottoman life rather than seeking to detect therein the matrix of some nation-state-to-be. Equally this work has drawn on criticism of the centre/periphery binary, and seen how the rhythms of the Ottoman world, rather than marching to the tune of some unique ‘centre’, give rise to repeated shifts in underlying patterns, necessitating continual adjustments in scale. It is worth also pointing out the main implications this hypothesis has for the study of the many transformations the Ottoman realms underwent over the course of the ‘long’ nineteenth century. It is not unusual for these to be interpreted as arising from the increasing influence of the ‘Powers’ on the affairs of the Empire – an interpretation which clearly leads on to the paradigm of the ‘Eastern Question’. This is particularly the case for the ‘reforms’ (Tanz.-ıma-t) carried out by the Ottoman authorities in the middle of the century, and which have never been far from the surface of the present work.9 : Thus studies such those by Ilber Ortaylı, which have been influential in the history of this period, tend to opt for an approach along the lines of ‘The

Conclusion – provincial empire

181

Tanzimat and the French model: mimeticism or adaptation?’ (Ortaylı and Akıllıog˘ lu 1986). The argument put forward by Abdüllatif S¸ener is no different: ‘The Tanz.-ıma-t differ from previous initiatives in that they fundamentally made a decision to westernize ring out right across all the institutions of the Ottoman State’ (1990: 21). This concern with mimeticism haunts all the historiography of the Ottoman nineteenth century. Beyond the specificities of the various notions (‘westernization’ or ‘modernization’, ‘world-economy’ or ‘development’, the ‘sick man of Europe’ or ‘politicization’) and the supposed lapsing of paradigms, the primal scene of the Ottoman – and thereby of the Ottomanist historian – is that of modernity received after the event, a sort of re-run or repeat as it were. Seen from this perspective, the history of the nineteenth century in what is known as the ‘Eastern’ Mediterranean is bound up with a narrative scheme that is only tangentially related to any Ottoman world. For at the heart of this account lies the presupposition that the Ottoman socio-political system is based on an ineluctable estrangement. It is exactly as if the transformations occurring at the time marked the advent of the West in the East. Such a narrative scheme deserves relentless interrogation. We need to recognize the influence exerted here by ‘a certain idea which Western Europe has had about the world’ (Hourani 1957: 89) – and in particular examine the uses historians have tended to make of this idea: We propose [ … ] to ask [ … ] how far what happened in the nineteenth century was simply the injection of something new, or the further development of movements already generated in the very heart of Near Eastern society, and now given new strength or a new turn by the insertion into them of the increased influence of Europe. (Ibid.: 90–91) These lines were no doubt influenced by the specific context of their writing: Hourani’s position was intended as a criticism of H. Gibb’s and H. Bowen’s Islamic Society and the West (1950–57), a ‘monumental (and monumentally misguided) study of the transformation of Islamic society under the influence of the West’ (Heywood 1988: 341). Such questions might well seem less incisive in the wake of the impact Edward Said (1978) has had on the field of ‘Middle Eastern studies’ (cf. Murphey 1999; Goffman and Stroop 2004; Hamadeh 2004; Anastassiadis and Clayer 2011; Avcıog˘ lu 2011; Örnek 2012: 943–46). Other scholars have subsequently issued further warnings encouraging us to move away from a ‘mimetic’ reading of the Ottoman nineteenth century: ‘the Tanzimat was not an imitation of Europe: it was Ottoman participation in an Age of Reform when Europe itself lacked stability’, Ezel K. Shaw argues (1991: 208); ‘the Ottoman experience represents a case of imperial adjustment to the challenges of the times, comparable in varying degrees to that seen in other multi-ethnic legitimist systems’, Selim Deringil posits (1998: 166). These attempts seek to resituate the late nineteenth-century

182

Conclusion – provincial empire

Ottoman amongst his contemporaries. In a similar move, Dina R. Khoury and Dane Kennedy have argued for placing the nineteenth-century Ottoman domains and British Raj ‘within the same historical and analytical space, acknowledging their commensurability’ (Khoury and Kennedy 2007: 233). And so it would appear that the master concepts of triumphant ‘Orientalism’ no longer hold sway: ‘the once common terms “modernization” and “Westernization” have largely been replaced by the more neutral “development” and “transformation”’ (Pappé 1997: 164).10 But does this substitution ensure that what has so far been persistently considered non-contemporaneous will be viewed as contemporaneous from now on? Arguably such notions as ‘development’, ‘transformation’ or ‘transfer’ are in many ways also part of a historicist paradigm (Chakrabarty 2000: 29–46; Müçen 2009; Emrence 2011: 15–33). Besides, the (presumed) neutralization of the terms in which the problem is discussed should not blind us to the risk that their underlying grammar might still be applied, thereby depriving the Ottomans’ trajectory of its synchronicity with contemporaneous polities: an idea which no longer has power to move our actions can still live on as a historical category. [ … ] Even if we no longer believe that the ‘westernization’ of Asia will proceed to its completion, we may still take it for granted that what has been happening in the last hundred years has been ‘westernization’. (Hourani 1957: 90, italics in the original) Several decades on and the agenda has remained virtually unchanged: ‘Our science or discipline (whatever you want to call it) [ … ] is still profoundly stamped with Eurocentrist epistemologies, chronologies, classifications and divisions of labour’ (Berktay 1998: 313–14). Our ‘need for externalities to explain change’ (Canbakal 2007: 185) still calls for critical exploration. Some assign local or regional history the role of acting as an antidote to the integrating account of the ‘world-economy’ (Doumani 1995; Panzac 1996; Pamuk 2010); others consider that an approach based on ‘multiple contexts’ will remedy the commonplace historicism of Ottoman ‘decline’ (Murphey 1989: 252). Maybe the provinciality of the Ottoman world, when carefully distinguished from provincialism in disguise, could fulfil a similar function as well, by enabling us to move beyond the Eurocentric ‘civilizing process’ and leave behind the ‘denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983: 31) underpinning it. As opposed to asynchronous history – which analyses the diffusion and circulation of practices, instruments, norms, and forms of knowledge as a stage occurring subsequently to their localized production, – a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire therefore strives to study symbolic and technical tools that are synchronically produced and reproduced by the very fact of changing hands. Instead of assuming that there are elements which are allegedly specific (not to say essential) to the localities, ‘areas’ or ‘communities’ concerned, questioning the province as a site of ‘trans-action’ entails

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being attentive to the semiotic and sociological processes that produce the fabric from which historicity is made. Travelling around the Ottoman world may therefore help complicate the accounts that rule, be they national or imperial – and so also enable us to bring to light the non-congruent temporalities and territorialities which form the tangled skein of the provincial Mediterranean.

Notes 1 In a vein similar to the current work, Antonis Hadjikyriacou’s study of the economic and social history of Cyprus in the eighteenth century is concerned with ‘situating Cyprus in different and overlapping spatial contexts’ (2011: 13). 2 Irene Bierman underlines ‘the role of the cami institution [ … ] in providing the conduit for acculturation into the Ottoman world’ (1991: 64). While B. Doumani stresses that ‘the regions of Greater Syria, including Jabal Nablus, had a great deal in common with the rest of the Mediterranean world’ (1995: 8), P. Brummett provides a challenging discussion of how ‘a series of historical visions of the Mediterranean [ … ] may or may not jibe with contemporary historiographic models’ (2007: 12; cf. Heywood 2008, Greene 2010: 110–37). In the 1870s a member of the Mandovani family, a ‘military doctor in Nicosia’ who was seeking remuneration from the Ottoman government, declared that his sons were studying in Italy (letter from D. Pierides to Melchior de Vogüé, the French Ambassador in Istanbul, 1873: quoted in Bonato 2000b: 116). 3 My discussion here is influenced by the idea of ‘pattern in plurality’ used by Fredrik Barth in Balinese Worlds (1993: 310) – from which I have also taken the expression ‘considerable disorder’ (ibid.: 102). 4 On the links between Ottoman history and ‘imperial studies’, see Mikhail and Philliou 2012; Aymes 2013. 5 For further discussion with regard to conceptual historicities see Lefort 1978; Reinhard 1999; Laborier and Trom 2003. 6 On ‘material culture’ as a means of shaking history-writing out of its established dichotomies see Faroqhi 2009. 7 Canbakal’s case against ‘the center-periphery / state-society dichotomy’ turns out to be something of a caveat emptor, since she curiously concludes that ‘power relations in Ottoman societies were as much a part of their political culture as center-periphery relations’ (2007: 184–85, italics in the original). 8 Thus in J. Hathaway and K. Barbir’s terms: ‘a broad cultural synthesis emerged that we might call not simply Ottoman-Arab but Ottoman provincial, so as not to preclude comparison and exchange with the Ottoman Empire’s non-Arab – that is, Anatolian and Balkan – provinces’ (2008: 7, italics added). 9 For an attempt to analyse these ‘reforms’ from a provincial point of view, see Aymes 2010. 10 Conspicuously enough still, the ‘impact of the West’ resurfaced in the title of Roderic H. Davison’s collection of articles published as late as 1990.

Sources

Unpublished archives The tables below recapitulate the document series I have consulted – with varying degrees of thoroughness – along with a reminder of the time span covered by each. A more detailed list of archival collections relating to Cyprus is available in Aymes and Michael 2009. For reasons of space I have here adopted a simplified conversion from the Hegirian calendar to the year in the Gregorian calendar with the largest number of corresponding months. For example, since A.H. 1256 runs from 5 March 1840 to 22 February 1841, it has been assimilated to 1840. Table 1 Cyprus KS¸S

1571________________________________________________________

Table 2 France, Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères (Paris) Correspondance consulaire et commerciale Larnaca 16 (1814–24)

17 (1825–31)

18 (1832–36)

19 (1837–44)

20 (1845–55)

21 (1856–61) 22 (1862–76) 23 (1877–83)

Correspondance politique Turquie 244 (janvier–juin 1826) 245 (juillet–décembre 1826) 249 (janvier–décembre 1827) 257 (1826–27) 258 (1828–31) 259 (1829–30) Correspondance politique des consuls Turquie Consulats divers 1 (1830–1832) 2 (juillet 1832–décembre 1833) 4 (1834–juin 1835) 11 (janvier–août 1840) 12 (août–décembre 1840) La Canée 1 (1841–47) Larnaca 1 (1848–63) 2 (1864–79) Affaires diverses politiques 1815–1896 Turquie 16 (1875–79)

Sources

185

Table 3 Turkey, Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office (Istanbul) AD A.DVN A.DVN.MHM A.MKT A.MKT.DA A.MKT.DV A.MKT.UM A.MKT.MHM A.MKT.MVL A.MKT.NZD A.MKT.S¸D CAD C.DH C.ML DVE HAT HR.MKT : I: .DH I: .HR I: .MSM I: .MVL I: .MMS I.S¸D MD ML.VRD.TMT 16152–5 MMD TS¸R.KB.THR TS¸R.KB.NZD YEE

1812___________________1892 1840___1861 1840___1861 1840__1849 1868__1879 1842__1870 1850_________1892 1840___1859 1840_____1867 1850_________1892 1868____1892 1746_______________________1891 1603________________________1880 1558____________________________1888 1567_____________________________________1913 1698______________________1880 1838______1855 1839_____________1892 1839_____________1892 1839____1849 1839________1867 1854____ 1892 1867_________1892 1554_____________________________________1905 1832__33 1427______________________________________1926 1843______________1881 1850__________ 1878 1858____________1917

186

Sources

Table 4 United Kingdom, The National Archives, Public Record Office (Kew) FO 78 Consular correspondence

FO 84

FO 195 FO 352 Correspondence Stratford from Cyprus Canning Papers 12B (1826), 16A (1827), 7A (1827), 19A (1827), 19B (1827), 20A (1828)

Miscellanea

FO 329/1–14 [1784–1878]

102 (1831–46) 450 (1841), 497 (1842), 647 (1846), 539 (1843), 580 (1844), 691 (1847) 621 (1845), 661A (1846), 715 (1847), 754 (1848), 802 (1849) 370 (1851–53), 446 (1854–55), 525 (1856–57), 582 (1858), 609 (1858–60) 1534 (1860), 1608 (1861), 1690 (1862), 1767 (1863), 1792 (1859–63), 1824 (1864), 1880 (1865), 1937 (1866), 2047 (1868), 2090 (1869), 2194 (1871), 2246 (1872), 2293 (1873), 2354 (1874), 2418 (1875), 2513 (1876), 2615 (1877), 2647 (1877), 2850 (1878), 2871 (1878)

1354 (1872)

FO 198/13 [1854–58]

813 (1864–68), 1011 (1872– 75), 1213 (1878–79)

FO 881/3661 [1877, report, trade of Cyprus], 3472* [Report on Cyprus, capt. E. Collen, May 18, 1878]

Sources

187

Published documents Abdülaziz Bey (2000) Osmanlı Âdet, Merasim ve Tabirleri [Ottoman Customs, Ceremonies and Expressions], K. Arısan and D. Arısan Günay (eds), Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt yayınları [1st ed. 1995]. Akgör, O. (1994) ‘Kıbrıs’ın 18 numaralı S¸eriyye Sicili (transkripsiyon ve deg˘ erlendirme), H. 1251–62/M. 1836–45’ [Cyprus court record #18 (transcription and appreciation)], Ankara: Ankara Gazi Üniversitesi, unpubl. Yüksek Lisans tezi. Archivio del consolato Veneto à Cipro (fine sec.XVII – inizio XIX). Inventario e Regesti (1993) G. Migliardi O’Riordan (ed.) (with D. Desaive), Venice: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Archivio di Stato di Venezia. Bianchi, T.-X. (1839) Le Guide de la conversation en français et en turc. Suivi du texte turc et de la traduction du traité de commerce du 25 novembre 1838 entre la France et la Turquie, Paris: A. Everat et Cie, 1839. ——(1843–46) Dictionnaire français-turc à l’usage des agents diplomatiques et consulaires, des commerçants, des navigateurs et autres voyageurs dans le Levant, Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 2 vols. ——(1852) Le Nouveau Guide de la conversation en français et en turc à l’usage des voyageurs français dans le Levant et des Turcs qui viennent en France ; Suivi de la collection complète des Capitulations ou Traités de paix entre laa France et la Porte Ottomane, depuis 1535 jusques et compris la dernière Convention de Constantinople du 25 novembre 1838, et du Khaththi cherif ou Acte constitutif de Gulkhanè, du 3 novembre 1839, accompagné de notes, commentaires, etc., Paris: Dondey-Dupré. Bonato, L. (1998) ‘Chypre dans les archives de Melchior de Vogüé: à l’origine de la mission de 1862’, CCEC, 28: 103–12. ——(1999) ‘Chypre dans les archives de Melchior de Vogüé, II. Correspondance de la “mission Vogüé” reçue au cours de l’année 1862’, CCEC, 29: 141–66. ——(2000a) ‘Chypre dans les archives de Melchior de Vogüé, III. Impressions de Famagouste et de Bellapaïs’, CCEC, 30: 95–97. ——(2000b) ‘Chypre dans les archives de Melchior de Vogüé, IV. La correspondance de Dimitri Piérides’, CCEC, 30: 99–118. ——(2000c) (ed.) ‘Mémoire sur l’état présent de l’île de Chypre, 1844 par Dagobert Fourcade’, CCEC, 30: 127–218. ——(2001) ‘Melchior de Vogüé et alii and Cyprus’, in V. Tatton-Brown (ed.), Cyprus in the 19th century AD. Fact, fancy and fiction, Oxford: Oxbow. ——(2003) ‘Le consulat de France à Larnaca à la fin de la Monarchie de Juillet. Correspondance de Dagobert Fourcade et Théodore Goepp (1840–49). I – L’organisation de l’institution consulaire. La représentation du gouvernement français’, CCEC, 33: 273–303. ——(2005) ‘Le consulat de France à Larnaca à la fin de la Monarchie de Juillet. Correspondance de Dagobert Fourcade et Théodore Goepp (1840 – 1849). II – L’aide au commerce’, CCEC, 35: 169–90. ——(2006) ‘Le consulat de France à Larnaca à la fin de la Monarchie de Juillet. Correspondance de Dagobert Fourcade et Théodore Goepp (1840–49). III – La protection de la France’, CCEC, 36: 143–94. ——(2008) ‘Le consulat de France à Larnaca à la fin de la Monarchie de Juillet. Correspondance de Dagobert Fourcade et Théodore Goepp (1840 – 1849). IV – La justice – les affaires du sieur Diab’, CCEC, 38: 159–94.

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Index

accent 14, 16–17, 38; see also local administration 37–40, 50–52, 106; central 11, 107; dissipation of 52; ecclesiastical 30, 165; efficient 77; local 155; poor 141–46; provincial 11, 39, 51, 117, 144, 151 . aga-turned-efendi see notables anachronism 155–57; and achronism 24; see also temporality Anagnostopoulou, A. 27–28, 30–31, 139, 165 apostates 65, 81–84, 148, 159–60, 162–65, 168–69; see also renegades Arbel, B. 8, 39 archives 8–10, 15–17, 36, 112; consular 37, 61, 73–76; provincial an-archives 10–15; top-down and bottom-up 16; see also crossings-out, drafts, petitions, registers, secretary ‘ava-rız_ see extraordinary taxes; see also events Balivet, M. 162, 178 Barbir, K. 30, 33, 44, 46, 51, 179–80, 183n8 Barth, F. 16, 20n24, 30, 109–10, 183n3 Beckingham, C. 25, 160–62 Bianchi, T.-X. 4, 14, 92, 115; see also dictionaries borders 103, 139, 162, 167; crossing 175n76 boundaries 6, 42, 71, 135, 161, 175n77 Braude, B. 25, 29, 31 Braudel, F. 41, 53n24, 92, 110 Brubaker, R. 53n22, 135, 156 buyruldı see orders

Canbakal, H. 46, 110, 180, 182, 183n7 centre 11, 13–14, 43, 51–52, 168; centralization 1, 11, 13, 77, 178; centredness 42; and periphery 12–13, 40–42, 81, 179–80 Di Cesnola, L. Palma 64, 126–27, 159–60 church 27–28, 30, 148, 158, 164–65 Çiçek, K. 8, 22–23 çiftlik see landholding cizye see head tax De Clercq, A. 75, 92, 106, 108 community: administrative meaning 165; anachronic character of the notion 157; denominational 26, 28, 157, 168; ethnic 25, 31; imagined 26, 29, 156, 167; nameless 169; and national identity 25–29; religious 25, 28, 139, 157; sectarian 26; strange 160–61; see also confession, linen-cottons concepts: historical 20n25, 161; legal 26; master 182; plurivocal nature of 14, 168; territorial 104, 107, 110, 126; working on 3, 5, 38, 126 concern: none of their 71–72, 74; schedule of concerns 43, 77; see also subjects confession 25, 27, 29, 157; confessionalism 28; see also community context 3–4, 7, 13, 19n19, 21, 27, 38–39, 58, 138, 140, 148, 155–56, 182 continuity: historical 24–29, 31, 156; spatial 102; see also temporality, territory Corbin, A. 5–7 cosmopolitanism 32, 162

Index crossings-out 147, 152, 154, 169; see also drafts Cypriology 2–3, 17; see also local knowledge Davison, R. 11, 81, 183n10 decentredness see centre Deringil, S. 90n102, 161, 181 Derrida, J. 11, 19n20, 23 descendants 121–24, 158; from the Prophet 48 dictionaries 4, 14–15; see also Bianchi, Larousse, Redhouse Dionyssiou, G. 8, 165 discontinuity: affecting the Ottoman world 178; archival 11, 13–15, 34; see also temporality distinction: aporia of 23; between ‘Muslims’ and ‘non-Muslims’ 157–58; heuristic of 28, 30, 56n70; Paris and the province 5; ‘property’ and ‘possession’ 108, 110, 113 Doumani, B. 37–39, 41, 53n23, 58, 60, 115 drafts 82, 121, 147, 153–54, 174n65; see also crossings-out, paraphrase dragoman see translation ecnebı- see foreigners emigration 136–39, 141–46, 149; see also flight, return empire 11, 39–40, 49–52, 177–80; comparing empires 182; see also imperialism, Ottomanness es¸ra-f see descendants from the Prophet ethnicity 25–26, 29–31, 53n22, 60, 156–57; see also community, identity Europe 42, 59, 65, 125–26, 132n102; centred designs of ‘modernity’ 17, 181; Christian 81–82; Europeans of Cyprus 120; European name 119–23; impact of 58, 60, 92, 127; sick man of 57, 60, 85, 181; see also Levantines, Ottomanness, westernization events 7, 62, 68, 78–79, 81, 84–85, 142–43, 155; abolished 141; Calendar of 32n10, 153; homothetic account of 59, 72; memories of the Ru-m 145–54; provincial take on 155–56; textual 15 Faroqhi, S. 20n26, 94, 177–78 flight 135–36, 140–41, 144; see also emigration, return

217

foreign 18n2, 97, 104, 152; foreigners 70, 105, 107, 113, 115, 124, 131n86, 132n102, 137, 142; see also natives form 109–11; of belonging 120–22, 124–25; of history 24, 32n4, 85, 166; of knowledge 2, 16, 22, 40, 73, 151, 180, 182; of legality 107, 112, 119; see also impropriety, informality Geertz, C. 3, 14, 16 grammatikos see secretary Grenet, M. 65, 134n140, 157–58 Guilhaumou, J. 15–16 h.add see boundaries Hanssen, J. 41, 43, 50, 60, 179 ẖa-ric-i vaz.-ıfe see concern Hathaway, J. 13, 46, 49, 183n8 headman 66, 124, 136, 150, 165; see also notables Hill, G. 8, 45, 46, 50, 124 hinterland 53n23, 100, 104 homeland 23–24, 120; see also nation Hourani, A. 16, 43, 51, 177–78, 181–82 i‘a-de see return to one’s proper place identity 3, 21, 24, 25–26, 28, 30, 139; crypto-161, 164; see also community Ilbert, R. 75, 85, 90n95, 93, 125, : 156, 178 Inalcık, H. 23–24 imperialism 60, 81, 85, 92, 156; see also empire impropriety 110, 113–14, 125, 142, 171n22; see also informality, strangeness improvisation 8, 16, 81–85, 150, 151; see also repertoire, style informality 36, 108–10, 115–16, 125, 161; see also form intercommunality 22, 25, 125, 139; see also community Itzkowitz, N. 42, 125 Karpat, K. 25–26, 30 Khoury, D. 20n22, 54n27, 127n12, 182 k.ocabas¸ı see headman Kyrris, C. 9, 164–67

218

Index

land: abandoned 136, 139–41; deed 111–12, 171n22; law 109, 130n77; survey 96–104, 130n77, 139, 145 landholding 8, 45, 92–108, 110–11, 113–16, 123; see also leasehold, ownership, property languages 4–5, 9, 23, 42, 50, 70, 76, 78, 105, 161; see also performative, translation Larousse, P. 3–4; see also dictionaries Laurens, H. 58–59, 178 law 42–43; concept of 172n34; consular 104–6, 120; customary 75; Turkish 158, 168; written and unwritten 107, 111–13 leasehold 108; see also possession Levant 4, 65, 75, 77, 90n87, 105–6, 120, 149; Company 75; trade 34–36, 73, 115 Levantines 78, 124–27, 149, 159, 166, 178; see also Europe, notables, Ottomanness Lewis, B. 25, 29 linen-cottons 158–64; see also community linobambakoi see linen-cottons local 16, 18n3, 31, 38–40, 43, 44–47, 57, 59, 68, 81, 84, 149, 179; history 6, 33–34, 71, 182; knowledge 2–3, 16–17, 38, 40, 73, 94, 113, 151, 158–60, 180; localization 55n48, 179; necessity of locality 12, 115–19; see also natives, province ma-l see property Mardin, S¸. 32n10, 41–42 ma’rifet see land deed Masters, B. 26–27, 30 McGowan, B. 110–11 Meeker, M. 13, 44, 45, 51 Michael, M. 8–9, 21 millet see community, confession, nation minority 26; see also community modernity 17, 54n27, 56n71, 181; modernization 1, 181–82 Mote, M. 42, 125 mülk see property müste’min see foreigners names 29, 113–15, 121, 140, 154, 164; onomastic instability 87n41, 121 nation 21–32; fluidity of national attachment 125; state 22, 26, 177, 178,

180; traders under consular protection 29; unfinished nation-building 120; see also community nationalism 92, 154, 162; era of 27, 139, 156; erudite language of 22–24, 166–67; and pluralism 156; see also continuity, Cypriology, temporality nationality 50, 58, 79; shortcomings of 78, 120–23 natives 2, 18n3, 49, 78–79, 115, 120, 122; see also descendants, foreigners, local newspapers 65–67 notables 48–51, 66, 80, 107–8, 111–14, 126, 152; politics of 43–44, 117–18; see also empire, Levantines, province nüzu-l see extraordinary taxes orders 12, 70–71, 121, 145–47, 152, 154 Orientalism : 17, 26, 85, 126, 182 Ortaylı, I. 1, 22, 154, 180–81 Ottomanness 40, 42–43, 51–52, 125–27, 167, 179–80; see also empire ownership 110–11, 113, 129n53; see also possession, property Papadopoullos, T. 2, 8, 40 Pappé, I. 24, 48, 182 paraphrase 69, 71, 149–50, 153 performative 23, 84; also see languages periphery see centre; peripheralization 37 petitions 12, 13 Philipp, T. 41, 138, 177 Philliou, C. 49, 50, 167, 170n18 political economy 37, 166 polygraphy 7–8, 14–15, 17, 177–78; see also archives possession 96, 108–11, 113, 130n67, 132n98; see also distinction, property property 94, 97, 105–13, 121, 127, 171n22; private freehold 108–10, 113 province 3–8, 16–17, 31, 33, 41, 49, 52, 113, 155, 178, 183n8; anarchic place 11–12; concept of territoriality 107; configuration of archives 10–14; eclecticism 180; heteronomy 81; manners of 3, 4; provincial style 73, 143–46, 155–56; provincialism 68, 70–72, 158, 182; provinciality 40, 49, 125, 158, 164, 168–69, 179–80; provincialization 17, 85, 182; see also improvisation, local, notables

Index Rancière, J. 22, 155–56, 163 re‘a-ya- see subjects Redhouse, J. 18n2, 19n19, 71, 146–47, 173n42 reforms 10–11, 13, 38, 71, 77, 150, 155, 180–81 registers see land survey, tax registers Reinkowski, M. 142, 144, 161–62, 173n43 renegades 142, 148, 163–69, 175n83; see also apostates repertoire 72, 84, 151, 156, 160; see also improvisation, style return: to one’s former faith 83; home 140–44; idea of 124, 155; point of no 145, 157, 169; to one’s proper place 140–41, 155; topos of eternal 144 Revel, J. 6–7, 15 rhythm see tempo Ross, L. 124, 173n51 Rothman, N. 164, 170n18, 175n77, 180 Sahlins, M. 157, 167 Salzmann, A. 13, 49, 51, 70n56 secretary: Eastern 78; Grand Vizier’s 19n15; Palace Registrar 164–65 seyyids see descendants from the Prophet Shaw, S. 10–11, 71 Singer, A. 38–40, 43 slaves 43, 71 Smyrnelis, M.-C. 92, 122, 125–26 sociability 125, 159, 169 state 10, 39, 42–43; 49–52, 53n20, 54n27, 60, 116, 177–79; affairs of 69–72; and society 13, 179, 183n7; see also nation state

219

strangeness 15, 152, 160–61, 181; see also impropriety, province style see province; see also repertoire subjects 71, 76, 89n61, 96, 104, 121, 125–26; see also concern tanz.-ıma-t see reforms t.a-pu- see land deed t.as¸ra see province tas.arruf see leasehold, ownership tax 45, 51, 95, 117, 143–46; arrears 67, 80; collection 44, 164; extraordinary 55n53, 144, 146–47; farms 35–36, 45, 95, 136; head 144; registers 12; regulations 8; status 42, 48 teba‘a see subjects tempo 7, 57, 60–61, 155–56, 177, 180; see also events, improvisation temporality 24, 31; heterogeneous lines 57, 156, 163, 169, 170n18, 182–83; see also anachronism, continuity, discontinuity territory 102–4, 107, 110, 114–15, 183 Theocharides, I. 8–9, 102–3, 112 tradition 2, 24, 46, 71, 176n90 trans-action 164, 182 translation 4–5, 24, 25, 65, 71–72, 80, 81–82, 136, 146–47; translators 50, 65, 82, 93, 95, 96, 126, 150, 164, 167, 168 vak.‘a see events Vallat, C. 75, 92, 106, 108 vatan see homeland vaz.-ıfe see concern Veinstein, G. 8, 39, 71, 171n22, 172n39 westernization 1, 181–82; see also Europe